Twitter is getting a new CEO after 6 years.
Long term Twitter CEO and employee Jack Dorsey announced that he would be stepping down on Nov. 29. Dorsey was the co-founder of Twitter, which began in 2006. Replacing him as CEO is Parag Argawal. Argawal has been the CEO of Twitter since 2011.
In the 16 years that Dorsey has been with Twitter, he has been in various positions. Dorsey was responsible for the text-based messaging platform that is Twitter’s current posting system. He started out as a software engineer in the company and posted the very first tweet in March 2006 which read, “just setting up my twttr.” This was the beginning of Twitter.
In April of 2007, Dorsey became the CEO of Twitter. This started his successful career. However, in late 2008, Dorsey was replaced by Evan Williams as CEO. The reason for this action was due to the failure of its servers that Twitter had over the past years during Dorsey’s CEO position. During that time, Twitter was constantly crashing and had various glitches throughout its user interface.
Jack Dorsey’s background in technology started with his interest in coding during high school. When he was 15 years old, Dorsey developed a dispatch software for a taxi company according to Biography.com. Dorsey dropped out of college and his invention of dispatch software for taxis led him to come up with the idea to allow people to update their status, activities, or daily routine to be shared with family and friends using instant messages.
In 2008, after Dorsey was dismissed from his position of CEO, he was transitioned to become the Chairman of Board for Twitter. During this time, Dorsey created a small company called Square, which gave small businesses the ability to use their credit cards with electronic payments through smartphones. In 2011, at a Twitter town hall, Dorsey interviewed President Obama about the economy of the country at that time. The Twitter town hall was a type of question and answer forum for its online users. On October 5, 2015, Dorsey was repositioned as the CEO of Twitter. After that, he was there for approximately six years up until he stepped down.
The departure of Dorsey shocked the world. The unexpected resignation was not a foreseeable predicament for the public eye. Dorsey wrote a public letter with explanations about the details of his decision to leave Twitter. He emphasized that his leaving the company as one of the co-founders of Twitter was the best move for the future success of the company. In one of his statements, Dorsey said, “I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”
Dorsey laid out three primary reasons for his resignation in the company. The first reason was because he believed that it was time to let Parag Argawal become the CEO of Twitter. He specified that he had trust in Argawal to lead the company in the right direction. Dorsey explained that Argawal had done a lot for Twitter throughout the years, saying, “Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around.”
The second reason was because the committee chose to appoint a new chair board member on Twitter, Bret Taylor. Dorsey explained that Taylor understood a lot of things about entrepreneurship, taking risks, and leadership. The letter specified that Dorsey really knew that Taylor was dedicated to the company and his profession involved a full knowledge of technology as an engineer. Therefore, he had the potential to be a great chair board for the company.
Dorsey’s final reason was that he strongly believed that it would be for the best to leave because he would like for others to succeed in the company that he co-founded for years. He pointed out that those who had been under him are great successors, and with him out of the way, he truly believed that others should keep growing through the hierarchy of the company.