Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder and a billionaire worth 2.3 billion USD, started his business career relatively late. In 2005, Dorsey was 29, had just dropped out of New York University, and often wore a T-shirt with his phone number printed on the front and a nose ring. After three months writing software for a small company, he moved into a small apartment in San Francisco. Even a shoe shop called Camper refused to hire him.
Seize opportunities
His chance to become a billionaire came one morning at Caffe Centro on South Park. As Dorsey listened to music on his laptop, he saw Evan Williams enter. Williams, 33, was a somewhat prominent figure in San Francisco's technology scene. A few years earlier, he had sold his Blogger journaling service to Google for several million dollars. He was now investing that money in a new podcast company called Odeo.
Odeo grew strongly, but things became complicated when Apple announced it would add podcasts to iTunes, a move that made Odeo redundant. By late 2005, Williams and Glass began disagreeing about the company’s future. Williams was indecisive and wanted to close it, while Glass often encouraged Odeo employees to propose new ideas to find a solution.
The idea of turning Odeo into Twitter emerged after a night of drunken discussion between Dorsey and Glass. The next morning, they presented it to the team and began building Twitter. Glass led the project, wrote the scenario, and listed the website's features. Stone handled design, while Dorsey and another programmer, Florian Weber, wrote the code.
Undercurrents
In the months that followed, Twitter grew continuously, and its internal undercurrents never stopped. First, Dorsey did everything he could to make Williams decide to remove Glass. Glass then bitterly left Twitter, the company he had co-founded. After Glass departed, Dorsey replaced him as CEO.
However, before long, William himself wanted Dorsey to relinquish the CEO role. Events moved quickly: William became CEO and Dorsey was appointed chairman. In reality, Twitter had fired Dorsey without anyone knowing, because he remained chairman in name. He had no voting power over company decisions, however.
