Jack Patrick Dorsey / b. 1976 / Missouri, USA / Computer Programmer, Entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Twitter
Bitcoin
For me Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. What I’m drawn to the most about it is the ethos, is what it represents, are the conditions that created it, which are so rare and so special and so precious. I don’t think there’s anything more important in my lifetime to work on and I don’t think there’s anything more enabling for people around the world.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
Whatever I can do, whatever my companies can do to make Bitcoin accessible to everyone is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. If I were not at Square or Twitter, I’d be working on Bitcoin. If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for Bitcoin. But I believe both companies have a role to play and I think anything we can do as companies to help find the right intersection between a corporate narrative and a community open narrative is for the best.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
. . . we don’t need the banks anymore.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
My belief in bitcoin is that it’s an amazing asset, but my belief is that the internet needs a native currency, and we need to be able to transact with this every single day. And everyone around the world needs to transact with it every single day. So the only reason Square got into Bitcoin is to that end. It’s not just to be an exchange. And that’s why we don’t deal with any other “currencies” or “coins” because we’re so focused on making bitcoin the native currency for the internet.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
Again, the conditions that created Bitcoin—everything that went into it from the proof-of-work model to the development model—no single points of failure—everything about it is why we’re into it. There’s nothing else that compares to it. And we have no interest other than making sure that we are building a native currency for the internet and helping in every way that we can. So all the other coins to me don’t factor in at all.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
. . . I think Bitcoin benefits the entire world. That’s what makes it incredible. Is that every single person in the world will benefit and get value from utilizing this. And the more accessible we can make it — just that realization that we finally have a currency that can be traded to any single point on the planet — is pretty incredible and what that enables going forward is mind-blowing. And I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that happens.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
Censorship
. . . we have been bad at communication, we haven’t been as forthright as we need to, we certainly haven’t been as transparent. We do care deeply. But we need to do it in scalable ways. this work doesn’t happen overnight.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Dorsey on Dorsey
I am a citizen in this world. I feel the weight of how our tool is used in society and how it’s been used for good and how it’s used for stuff I’m not proud of.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
We can only show that we care through how we change our product and fix things. Nothing I say is going to do that. And, look, I have a lot of people who care about the world and society and our impacts reading my tweets, a lot of shareholders reading my tweets. But I also have a lot of entrepreneurs reading my tweets. And my mom reading my tweets. I don’t want to model a behavior where I’m up 20 hours a day working nonstop to fix something, ’cause I don’t think it’s long-term healthy. Like, it’s delusional.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
I know who I am. The people around me know who I am. I was not taken aback by the focus on meditation versus Myanmar. I was taken aback by people being upset that I did a meditation in the first place. Or saw it as bragging. Yeah, I’m trying to learn. I’m upset by that because I think it shuts off something for pople in that they won’t try it themselves. I wanted to share my experience, it’s going to resonate with some, because what else do we do?
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
I loved drawing. I loved making music. I loved creating. It was more in that angle. I didn’t really love business. I didn’t want to be a CEO. I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to create stuff.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Yeah, I had a [speech] impediment. I couldn’t pronounce any of my words. I went to speech therapy for two years. It made me shy. I didn’t want to talk with anyone, even my family. Then I had this speech therapy, and they fixed most of it. I still am very mindful of it—in this conversation, I mispronounced at least four words.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
I love Twitter. I was always willing to do whatever it took to make it reach its potential. As long as I’m useful to the company, then I’ll be there. If I become irrelevant, and at some point I will, then hopefully I’ve built other choices for the company in people.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Fear of Big Tech
There’s a lot of distrust. There’s a lot of fear. It’s fear of companies like ours. It’s fear of power, and it’s completely, 100 percent natural. People are afraid of what technology has become and what it can do. . . . If we can’t be transparent about our intentions and what our technology is doing, we’re feeding into that fear of irrelevance. We need to communicate in a way that is understandable to people, which today we’re not.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Impact of Internet and Social Media
This vision to stream money to people that you care about, in a way that the government cannot stop . . . well guess what, it’s coming, and nobody can stop it.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.
Expression is messy. It has unpredicted outcomes. It has so many people coming in and adding their voice. The song just keeps going on and on. Looking back, 50 years in the future when it’s still here and I’m gone, my impact will be nothing compared to the impact that people using the platform in those 50 years will have on it. We all have time to add to the song. Then we depart, and it continues to go on.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Musk
[Elon Musk[ is ridiculous. You have to be. You have to be to think that big. I love him. I love what he’s trying to do, and I want to help in whatever way. . . . I understand what he wants to do, and I want to help. That’s the role of any toolmaker. We’re making tools.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Programming
Programming is an amazing field. I like painting, I like drawing, and I like programming because those are the arts where you literally start from absolutely nothing and suddenly something can emerge.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
. . . the thing that pushed me away wasn’t an interest in massage therapy or botanical illustration or fashion. It was that programming is so abstract. I got lost in it constantly because you were so much in your head all the time. It affects your dreams. You start programming in your dreams. You can actually control your dreams. At least that was my experience. It’s so abstract, and nothing feels real. Every time I wanted to do something different, I wanted to do something with my hands.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
Public Square
People see Twitter as a public square, and therefore they have expectations that they would have of a public square. Washing Square Park, for instance—I just had an hour and a half there, today. I sat, and I did my phone calls, and I watched people, filmmakers, musicians, street hustlers, weed dealers, chess players. And there’s people talking out in the open. The park itself is completely neutral to whatever happens on top of it. But if you stop there, you don’t realize what I believe the park actually is. It does come with certain expectations of freedom of expression, but everyone is watching one another.
Interview with Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, January 23, 2019.
I know that there’s a lot of you out there who disagree with a lot of actions that Twitter has taken. I know there’s a lot of you out there who disagree with our policies and the way we have evolved them. I appreciate that and recognize it. I also recognize the fact that there is an incentive and a corporate incentive and a business incentive that is different than what might be needed for global communication and for a public conversation. And my goal in my life in this moment is to remove as much as I can the corporateness of our companies and find better intersections with the open-source community.
Interview with Alex Gladstein, Bitcoinmagazine.com, June 4, 2021.