ST. LOUIS — One night in mid-September, a man named Jack
Dorsey stood on the pitcher’s mound at Busch Stadium, clutching a baseball in
his left hand, about to realize a childhood dream.
The Cardinals were playing the Cubs. And he was there to
toss out the first pitch.
What a sight it was, as 46,000 fans shrugged and asked each
other: “Who’s Jack Dorsey?”
Hard to blame them. After all, Dorsey isn’t among the best
known tech celebrities. But it’s difficult these days not to know about
Twitter, the social networking phenomenon he helped create. Dorsey may very
well be the most important St. Louis native you’ve never heard of.
And considering the power of Twitter, where millions of
people communicate in short bursts, one has to assume that Dorsey’s anonymity
is by choice: “He could build himself into an idol, 140 characters at a
time if he wanted to,” said Matt Carlson, assistant professor of
communications at St. Louis University.
Fortunately for Dorsey, he’s quite well known in tech
circles — a must, given his current push to start a new company using Twitter’s
technology. He won’t offer details, but says the venture will deal with the
health care and financial service sectors, and will involve St. Louis.
While men like Apple founder Steve Jobs seek the limelight,
Dorsey has always kept to the quiet edges of life. He’s stylish, without being
flashy. He loves to sail and enjoys driving. But he has neither boat nor car.
He’s never owned a television.
He maintains apartments in San Francisco and New York, but
shies away from material possessions — saying he’d rather not waste brain power
worrying about them. His most prized possession? A tote bag he bought 10 years
ago for $89.
If they made a movie about his life, you get the distinct
feeling he’d be played by John Cusack, an actor who’s made a career of playing
quirky characters.
It’s always been like this for Dorsey, who has never really
been the typical anything.
His uncle Dan Dorsey, a Catholic priest in Cincinnati,
remembers a visit some 22 years ago, when his nephew proudly handed over a
business card. It read, simply: Jack P. Dorsey, consultant.
“How many 10-year-olds have that? He’s always seen life
a little differently,” his uncle said.
Jack Dorsey remembers the card. But he has no idea what,
exactly, he was planning to offer his advice upon. He just knew he was ready
for something.
“I was eager to grow up and get started,” Dorsey
said. “I knew I’d be working and working very hard some day.”
While Dorsey hasn’t lived in St. Louis since 2003, he
returns several times a year to visit friends and family — his parents and two
brothers still live here.
It was the September visit that gave the city a chance to
claim him as one of its own.
There was the trip to Webster University, where he was named
the 2009 Person of the Year. He spent time with Mayor Francis Slay, who gave
him a key to the city. And there was the ceremonial first pitch.
His parents, who still live in Compton Heights, were there
every step of the way.
“I was nervous for him. But I was really happy with the
whole weekend,” said Marcia Dorsey, his mother. “It was like St.
Louis acknowledged him.”
Indeed, it would be hard to top the praise lavished on
Dorsey by Webster’s Benjamin Ola Akande, dean of the communications school, who
compared him to revolutionary inventors Johannes Gutenberg and Alexander Graham
Bell. “In every generation, we produce individuals who come along and make
life better for those around them,” Akande said.
But does Dorsey really fit in the history books alongside a
man like Gutenberg, whose printing press brought the written word to the
masses? That’s a tough one to answer when you consider Twitter has been around
fewer than four years.
Some communication experts stop well short of putting Dorsey
and his partners on such a lofty shelf, saying they simply found a new way to
use existing technology. Twitter allows users to post brief — 140-character
maximum — missives or “tweets” that essentially say: This is what’s
on my mind right now.
“None of this is as revolutionary as the printing
press,” said Steve Jones, professor of communication at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. “It’s evolutionary. I’d say it’s probably more
analogous to the invention of the Post-it note.”
It’s not even certain, yet, that the company — which doesn’t
produce any revenue — could survive without being propped up by venture
capitalists, who have pumped more than $150 million into the firm. The latest
round of funding valued the company at $1 billion, according to The Wall Street
Journal.
Dorsey, who resigned last year as Twitter’s chief executive
and took the role of chairman, routinely faces questions about the company’s
financial prospects. And he routinely deflects them with comparisons to Google,
another company that focused first on building a strong network before worrying
about profits.
But even if Dorsey isn’t the next Gutenberg, there’s no
denying he has played a major role in reshaping today’s social landscape.
Nearly 19 million people used Twitter at some point last month, according to
data from the Nielsen Company. Among them were celebrities, politicians and
corporations all looking for new ways to reach people.
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Aside from a six-year stint in Colorado, Dorsey spent most
of his younger years in St. Louis. It was after he moved back to St. Louis, and
into Compton Heights, that he developed what he recalls as his first true love.
It was 1991. He was a freshman at Bishop DuBourg High
School. He remembers walking about the city, falling in love with the way
everything moved.
That love would later spawn a fascination with the
coordinated movements of taxi cabs, couriers and emergency vehicles throughout
a city. Their constant need to provide location updates formed the foundation
for Twitter.
Old friends remember Dorsey as a quiet kid, with a love of
music, whose eyes lit up when talking about computers and something called the
Internet. He was, in the words of his good friend Tim Brouk, one of “the
more popular unpopular guys in our class.”
He shows up on three pages in his senior year book. One
identifies him as Jack Dempsey. Another lists one of his defining moments — the
day he dressed up as Ed Haessig, the school’s religion and tennis instructor.
“That was kind of a big high school moment for him in
terms of status,” said Brouk, a newspaper reporter in Indiana.
Funny thing is, Haessig was at a loss when word began
spreading around campus that a former DuBourg student was behind Twitter.
“I had to go back to an old yearbook to jolt any memory of him,”
Haessig said.
It’s a theme that carried over into the two-plus years he
spent at the University of Missouri at Rolla, where he started work on a still
unfinished degree in computer science. The school’s public relations staff
recently asked Dorsey to name a couple of professors — in case anyone came
along trying to learn more about his past. Neither of the two he selected could
remember him.
“The name rings a bell, but I can’t bring a face to
mind,” said Arlan Dekock, the former dean of the school of management and
information systems.
The same cannot be said for Dorsey’s first employer, Jim
McKelvey, president of Mira Digital Publishing in St. Louis. Dorsey was still
in high school, but McKelvey said he quickly realized the teen had a lot to offer
with his programming skills and understanding of the Internet.
Despite his inexperience, Dorsey was soon supervising
full-time workers. Projects were designed for him.
“I was the president of the company and he was the
summer intern. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I wasn’t the one running
errands,” said McKelvey, who recently agreed to join Dorsey’s new venture.
Life for Dorsey has become complicated and demanding.
He travels from coast to coast, lining up investors as he
works to get his new company off the ground. Gone is the nose ring. It’s been
replaced by worries about how he’s perceived by the world around him.
It’s a transition that’s going well, said Fred Wilson of
Union Square Ventures in New York, one of the original investors in Twitter and
a member of its board.
Wilson uses terms like “craftsmanlike” when
describing Dorsey’s attention to detail in the way he presents himself in
social and professional settings. He suggests the rather anonymous version of
Dorsey could soon be a thing of the past.
“I think you’ll see Jack being a little bit more out
there in the future,” Wilson said. “He’s built a lot of confidence
with Twitter.”
Maybe that’s why Dorsey spent nearly three hours the night
before that Cardinals game, practicing his pitches with a couple friends at a
small lighted baseball field in Clayton. His mind was a jumble of memories and
worries — not the least of which was his fear that he’d put the pitch in the
dirt.
He remembered summer nights spent with his grandmother,
listening to Cardinals games on the radio and dreaming of what it would be like
to play on a big league field. He thought of his family. And the thousands of
strangers watching him represent his company.
“It all just kind of boiled up into that one
moment,” said Dorsey, who ended up putting the pitch high and outside.
“It could have been better. But I was happy.”
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
