Jack Dorsey stepped down from being the CEO of Twitter, the social network he founded in 2006 with Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass, on Monday. His departure, scheduled for May 2022, when he will leave the board of directors, marks the end of an era for one of Silicon Valley’s most famous executives. Dorsey lived an unlikely journey in San Francisco that began with a young programmer who listened to punk and anti-capitalist ideas who built a company of 38,000 million dollars (33,600 million euros) that forever changed the way we communicate on the Internet.
In an email to his team, the executive explained Monday that he does not believe that founders should run the companies they create, which he called “severely limiting” and “a reason for failure.” “I have worked hard to ensure that this company can break with its foundation and its founders,” he said in the text, naming his successor, Parag Agrawal, a Stanford graduate programmer who had been chief technology officer for a decade.
The exit marks the end of the pulse that Dorsey, 45, has maintained with Elliott Management, a fund that owned 4% of the social network and that tried to remove him from the position on the grounds that he did not dedicate the necessary time to Twitter. The complaint was enough for the CEO to cancel a multi-month trip to Africa to explore the possibility of cryptocurrency growth on the continent.
It was not the first time someone had passed the message to him. In 2008, Fred Wilson, a member of the board of directors, called him incapable of running the company, prompting Dorsey to resign. The relief was taken by Williams, another of the founders of the social network and the blogger message platform, who had four times more shares than his friend, with whom he had distanced himself during his tenure to the point of becoming his adversary.
After that outing, details of Dorsey’s leadership style emerged, who used to leave the offices at six in the afternoon to go to drawing, yoga or fashion design classes. “You can be a couturier or the chief executive of Twitter, but not both,” Williams told him one day, according to journalist Nick Bilton in his book Hatching Twitter, where he documents the rise of the company. Williams, who they called Ev, complained that the curriculum schedule distracted him from the technical problems of the platform, which presented many crashes, and the slow growth of users.
That sentence, made 13 years ago, continues to weigh on Twitter. Although it became a more stable social network, its growth stalled and it is a witness more than a participant in the buoyant moment that applications such as Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook are going through, which is pressing its move to the metaverse. Shares of Twitter have suffered from this inertia: their current value is only 80% higher than in 2013. By contrast, those of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company, have risen 788% since 2012.
Dorsey wrote the first ever tweet in 2006: “making adjustments to my twttr.” He returned as CEO of the company in 2015. He did so despite the fact that the directors had tailor-made a message for him. “The committee will only consider board-recommended candidates who are in a position to commit all of their time to Twitter,” a June 2015 statement reported. The second chance, however, came because investors were desperate for the very poor. Increase in users under Dick Costolo’s command.
There were no fewer distractions, but more. In his time away from Twitter, Dorsey launched Foursquare, an application that gave visibility to businesses, and Square, a service that facilitated electronic payments with a small cube that connects to mobile phones. Square, which Dorsey continues to lead, doubles Twitter in value today with a capitalization of $ 98 billion. After his return, he was in charge of ending the 140-character limit for messages and changed the chronology of the timeline of the application, which had been considered by many points untouchable.
Dorsey, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, was always uncomfortable in his business suit. On his right leg he has a tattoo of a black and orange star, an anarchist symbol. The young man, who arrived on the West Coast in 2004, sat long afternoons in a San Francisco coffee shop writing code while listening to punk on headphones. He had vociferous opinions against capitalism and big corporations, very important positions for the hackers of Odeo, the Noah Glass podcast platform that was the seed of Twitter.
The Dorsey legend started with a Silicon Valley platitude: the young man who drops out of college and is lucky. But this one did not come soon. She worked as a masseur and applied to fill a vacancy at the Camper shoe company. He also designed a ticketing program for tourists visiting Alcatraz. His boss on that project almost fired him for the ring he wore on his nose, which remains one of his most distinctive marks.
The countercurrent spirit marked his rise in the Silicon Valley world. At the top, his lifestyle became famous, in addition to wearing a long beard. Their days begin with an icy bath and a glass of water with Himalayan salt and lemon. A couple of years ago, he stated on author and nutritionist Ben Greenfield’s podcast that he only eats once a day, at dinner time, and that he fasts on weekends from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon.
In 2018 he took a meditation retreat in Myanmar, a discipline he has practiced for two hours a day for 20 years. And when it works, it does so with an infrared light turned on nearby that supposedly causes cell regeneration. Things like this brought him hundreds of followers inside and outside the company. A sympathy that could never arouse in the members of the council.
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