Nearly two years ago, Vanity Fair interviewed Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey.
The article described how, as a boy, he was “mesmerized by locomotives, police cars, and taxis,” “taught himself programming to learn how to make little dots — representing trains and buses — scoot around the maps,” and “spent hours listening to police and ambulance radio frequencies, then plotted the emergency vehicles as they moved toward an accident or a hospital.”
Why? “I wanted to play with how the city worked, so I could see it,” Dorsey said in the interview. In 2006, he worked for a struggling startup called Odeo. He pitched an idea to “create a service that would allow anyone to write a line or two about himself, using a cellphone’s keypad, and then send that message to anyone who wanted to receive it” because it would “add a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.”
Twitter was born. In 2008, he was slightly ousted for a time from the company. He talked with his friend Jim McKelvey, who told him about one of his customers who couldn’t make a purchase because he didn’t have a way to accept an American Express card for payment.
“I was struck with the irony,” said McKelvey according to the Vanity Fair article. “I’m talking to my business partner on this device that has all the technology I need to solve the problem I just had.” He proposed they build a way for people to make and accept credit card payments on smartphones.
“I’m like, ‘Wow — this is pretty interesting,’” Dorsey said. “This is actually another dot that is more activity on the map.”
Square was born. Have you seen those small devices attached to iPads or iPhones that allow businesses to accept credit or debit card payments? That’s Square. He’s a billionaire because of these two innovations. Why is he making headlines now, when Square launched in 2010? Because he’s interested in one day becoming New York City’s mayor.
The Vanity Fair article reported that “although he currently lives in San Francisco, his ultimate aspiration is to become mayor of New York. He’s even spoken to Michael Bloomberg about it. (According to Dorsey, the current mayor’s advice was to make a lot of money first. Dorsey’s personal wealth exceeds $300 million.)”
We think it’s a kind of crazy leap to go from Internet superstar to mayor of basically any city, let alone New York City.
However, we think that could be a really smart choice for New York. Hear us out: If Dorsey decides to run, he would progress New York to be more connected and more in touch with itself.
We hope he does decide to run and that all of you decide to read that Vanity Fair article because it’s damn interesting. We could all use a dose of inspiration.
