Jack Dorsey is in demand these days. The inventor of Twitter is now back as head of product, while still acting as CEO of his other startup, Square. Tonight, Dorsey and I will guest lecture together at Rachel Sterne’s Columbia Business School course on Social Media And Entrepreneurship. Sterne is also New York City’s chief digital officer, so it should be a social media extravaganza. We’ll be streaming the talk right here on TechCrunch starting around 6PM ET tonight.
It’s really more of an interview, with questions from the students and the audience at large. If you have a question for Dorsey, leave one in comments below or Tweet them at me during the event @erickschonfeld. I’ll be asking Dorsey about his new role at Twitter, where the product needs to go from here, how he will balance that with his role at Square, and how he thinks about designing social products in general.
The theme of the lecture is “Social Disruption.” Both Twitter and Square are disruptive startups in the media/communications and payments industries, respectively. We’ll get into how each company disrupts the current order of things and creates new value in the process. Square lets anyone accept credit cards, lowering the barriers to creating a business. Twitter lowers the barrier to communication, opening up a whole new way to consume information. I want to know what lessons he’s learned from both experiences, and how the early rough days of Twitter helped him launch Square with so far hardly a hiccup. I also want to know what he thinks about larger players like Intuit rushing in after Square.
Got more questions? Add them below. Until then, your homework assignment is to watch this video on how Jack thinks about product design: