Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet.
It was July 15th 2006, when Jack Dorsey launched Twitter (although his first tweet was in March) with the now infamous 140 characters, designed by the way, so that mobile users could easily text, tweets.
He was working in San Fran at that time when he approached a podcasting Software company Odeo and whilst he was obsessed with..... Trains...and Taxis. In fact he wrote software to co-ordinate Taxi locations.
The name was inspired by Flickr and it was first used as an internal service within Odeo.
7 years later, 200 million active users (over 500m registered users though), tweet 400 million times a day. 60% of tweets are from mobiles.
Now, in advance of the impending IPO, it has a value of between 10 and 15 billion us dollars. It had revenues last year of 250 million usd although that's likely to double this year.
Over time, Dorsey was moved out of the company in 2008 and following equity calls, had his stake diluted to just over 3% and he started to develop payments company, Square. That's worth over 3 billion us dollars today.
Twitter is now one of the 10 most visited websites and Justin Bieber the most popular on Twitter with over 44m followers. Obama is the highest politician and FC Barcelona, the highest followed sports club.
Dorsey was born in 1976 in St. Louis, raised a Catholic and Forbes put his net worth at over a billion usd. With a forearm length tattoo and a drop out of New York University, he originally thought he wanted to be an artist.
Very interested in politics, there's been talk about him running as Mayor of New York. Real talk.
But all in all, it's a fairly admirable story. Unlikely that Jack Dorsey will make a complete fortune from the Twitter IPO given his stake, he will always be seen as the founder of Twitter.
And if you're not on it, get there.
It's absolutely an obsession.
Oh, it's @stuartfogarty btw.
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