@Jack is back.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was appointed CEO of the social network on September 30, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing released Monday. The move ends three months of confusion at the socially influential but slow-growing company. It also marks a round trip for Dorsey, who was fired from Twitter's top job seven years ago but was handed the reins as interim CEO following the resignation in June of then-CEO Dick Costolo.
Dorsey, who is 38, will still serve on the board but no longer as chairman. He will not receive a salary, according to the filing.
The San Francisco-based company also named Adam Bain as chief operating officer. Bain, 42, had reportedly been one of the lead candidates for the top job. Twitter also said Costolo resigned from the board last week.
Dorsey isn't a typical big-company executive. A one-time masseuse who wrote computer code as a hobby, he has cultivated the image of a genius-hipster-artist. He's now seen as a visionary and innovative thinker, similar to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk.
We are naming @adambain COO of Twitter, we're working to change the composition of our Board, and I will serve as CEO of Twitter and Square!
-- Jack (@jack) October 5, 2015
That eclectic background may be just what Twitter needs as it looks for new ways to attract users. For the past eight years Dorsey has been at the center of two big Internet trends. Twitter is one of the world's largest social networking companies. Square, a company he co-founded, is jump-starting the mobile payments industry.
"My focus is to build teams that move fast and learn faster," Dorsey said in a tweet. "In the past three months we have increased our speed and urgency at both companies."
Manning the helm of Twitter will make Dorsey one of Silicon Valley's busiest executives. In addition to running Twitter, he will remain CEO of Square, which reportedly has filed for an initial public offering. Perhaps the biggest question now is how he will split his time. Twitter needs a strategy for expanding its adoption and profits, while Square will have to navigate life as a newly public company. Dorsey also sits on the board of the media giant Walt Disney.
Twitter rose to fame on a simple concept: 140-character messages, almost like digital bumper stickers, sent from laptops or cell phones. The service gave people who might otherwise be silent a voice. It has played a pivotal role in global movements, including the Arab Spring and the protests that followed a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.
Despite its political and cultural influence, Twitter still hasn't approached the popularity or profitability of social media peer Facebook. Twitter's share price is stuck near its 2013 IPO and it's not attracting enough new users. Dorsey himself called Twitter's anemic three percent user growth rate "unacceptable" during a conference call in July.
The company has 316 million people who log in at least once a month, compared with Facebook's nearly 1.5 billion.
"Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily!" Dorsey tweeted.
From college dropout
Dorsey's rise to the top of two high-profile tech companies comes from inauspicious beginnings. Theeldest of three boys, Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where his father worked in a factory that made scientific equipment, according to an October 2013 profile in The New Yorker. Dorsey became interested in programming after his father gave him his first computer, an IBM PC Jr., when he was 8 years old. He received a Macintosh three years later.
In 1995, Dorsey enrolled in the University of Missouri-Rolla (now called the Missouri University of Science and Technology) to study computer science and math.
While a junior, he hacked into the computer system of Dispatch Management Services, a New York bicycle messenger service. Dorsey dropped out of college after the company offered him a job developing software, the magazine profile said. He later enrolled in New York University, but dropped out again, just one semester short of graduating.
For a while, Dorsey bounced around. He moved to San Francisco to start his own dispatch company but was later fired by the company's directors. He was also a massage therapist and a babysitter.
Harboring ambitions of designing clothes, he took fashion classes. Even today, his hair and beard styles are constantly changing, from crew cut to lumberjack.
Dorsey met Ev Williams in 2005 and began working for his podcast company, Odeo. A year later, the pair, along with Biz Stone and Noah Glass, formed Twitter.
Dorsey sent the company's first official tweet in March 21, 2006: "just setting up my twttr."
In May 2007, Dorsey became Twitter's first CEO, but was fired 16 months later for a string of site outages and poor management, according to the book "Hatching Twitter." Dorsey told Vanity Fair his removal was "like being punched in the stomach."
In 2009 Dorsey co-founded Square, the San Francisco company that makes it easy for mom-and-pop businesses to accept credit card payments through mobile phones. Since then, Dorsey has overseen the financial services business, which also offers point-of-sale software, money transfers via email and business financing.
When Dorsey became Twitter's interim CEO in July, analysts described him as more confident and mature than he was seven years ago, in large part because of his experience at Square. Now it's up to Dorsey to show if his success at one company can help him produce a much-needed turnaround at another.
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