Jack Dorsey Takes Over Product Again At Twitter As Executive Chairman

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Jack Dorsey is back at Twitter in a big way. He just tweeted that he is now taking on the lead product role at Twitter, the company he co-founded and where he’s remained as chairman. To reflect his new operating role, his title will now be executive chairman. Dorsey will remain CEO of Square.

News that Dorsey was negotiating with Twitter for an expanded role came out last week. There was some speculation that he might even take the CEO spot, but it is very difficult to be the CEO of two technology companies at the same time and Dorsey is “200%” committed to Square. All you have to do is watch this video to see how much he cares about building great products. And now he will be doing that at both Twitter and Square, while leaving the business side of Twitter to CEO Dick Costolo.

Dorsey stepped down from the CEO spot at Twitter in 2008, when he was replaced by Evan Williams. Williams subsequently handed over the CEO title to Dick Costolo, ostensibly so that he could focus on the product. But Williams supposedly hasn’t been around that much. When Williams stepped down, that opened the door for Dorsey to expand his role (there was some bad blood between the two), which is what’s happening now.

Twitter is now five years old. Dorsey recently put out some nostalgic Tweets about how the product got started. Today, Twitter is a different beast with more than 200 million users and an array of products (Web, mobile, tablets) that must be best-of-breed. Twitter began much more simply by providing the underlying service and encouraging other developers to build clients and features. The relationship with outside developers is now strained. Will Dorsey work to repair and reinvigorate those ties or focus more on making Twitter’s own products the only ones people need?

Jack Dorsey is the creator, co-founder, and Chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack’s early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work, Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it...

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Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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Company: Square
Website: squareup.com
Launch Date: February 2009
Funding: $341M

Square is making commerce easy for everyone. Starting with a free credit card reader for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, Square Reader allows anyone to accept credit cards anywhere, anytime, for a low transaction rate of 2.75 percent per swipe, with no hidden fees. Square Register serves as a full point-of-sale system for businesses to accept payments, manage items, and share menu and location information. Square Wallet, available in the US, is the most seamless way to pay,...

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