Jack Dorsey:Turned down for a job at a shoe store shortly before Twitter.Credit:Flickr/Jack Dorsey
But what stuck out to me about Dorsey,amid the parallels to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg,was that his is a more quintessential Silicon Valley rags-to-riches story than either of theirs. And it's a quintessentially millennial story at that. Jobs was out of Reed College just a couple of years before founding Apple at age 21. Zuckerberg founded Facebook from a Harvard dorm room at age 19.
Dorsey,on the other hand"was a 29-year-old New York University drop-out who sometimes wore a T-shirt with his phone number on the front and a nose ring",writes Bilton."After a three-month stint writing code for an Alcatraz boat-tour outfit,he was living in a tiny San Francisco apartment. He had recently been turned down for a job at Camper,the shoe store."
Then Evan Williams,the Blogger co-founder and then chief executive of Odeo,the start-up that would become Twitter,walked into the coffee shop where Dorsey was blaring punk rock on his laptop headphones.
"Dorsey,who was shy after battling a speech impediment as a child,was reluctant to introduce himself personally. Instead,he opened his resume on his computer,deleted any signs of his desire to work for Camper shoes,found Williams'email address online and sent a message to see if Odeo was hiring. Williams,whose investment in Odeo had turned him into the company's CEO,soon called him in for an interview. He and[co-founder Noah] Glass,both college drop-outs themselves,preferred rabble-rousers to Stanford grad students and Dorsey,with his nose ring and dishevelled hair,seemed like a perfect fit."
Dorsey was hired,worked with Glass to develop Twitter,brutally betrayed Glass,and eventually remade himself as the dashing public face of the hottest social-media start-up since Facebook. He's now Twitter's chairman and the CEO of Square,the mobile-payments company. When he tweets that he's in New York,Michael Bloomberg tweets "Welcome back!"
Good thing he didn't get that gig at Camper shoes.
Hatching Twitter:A True Story of Money,Power,Friendship,and Betrayal is out on November 5.