13 Deep Thoughts From Jack Dorsey - Circles Tech

Ahead of Twitter's looming IPO, the business and media worlds have a newfound fascination with Twitter founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey. In the space of a few weeks, he’s been the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile, a new book by New York Times technology reporter Nick Bilton and countless blog posts questioning his actual role in the creation of Twitter.

Perhaps it's Dorsey's reserved, seemingly stoic nature that is turning him into something of an enigma. Whereas Apple founder Steve Jobs' explosive personality was the stuff of legends, Dorsey is, in person, almost unreadable — and on paper, a sort of unfinished sketch. The New Yorker's 10,000-word-plus profile of the 36-year-old billionaire entrepreneur offers some insight, but is also filled with Dorsey’s own endearing aphorisms, bits of wisdom and observations that could go over well in the board room or at dinner parties.

I've collected my favorites from the New Yorker profile below, illustrated by some of Jack own tweets.

“Twitter has this unique ability to bring you closer to whatever you care about the most.”

“I keep my [e-mail] address pretty private,” he says. “That keeps it down, because it’s such a burden.”

“Twitter is about moving words. Square is about moving money.”

“The best camera is the one you carry with you.”

He also, apparently, feels the same way about notebooks:

“I like technology that is unbiased.”

“Some of those small details of life — here’s a beautiful sunset — make everything feel a lot smaller, and more human.”

“There’s an approach of going really deep or going really broad. I’m always looking for the one thing for me, rather than tasting everything I can. If you have a table in a consistent space, you can actually notice more things within it.”

“I’m perfectly happy being by myself, walking and thinking, and going to movies by myself ... A lot of people are not comfortable doing things completely alone, but I am.”

“I definitely feel the most fundamental issue is economic equality.”

“When you’re doing something and you’re doing it wrong, you usually either stop it or try to fix it … I did a bit of both.”

“When something interests me, I don’t just read about it ... I do it. I go all in.”

“I believe fundamentally that the next Gloria Steinem, the next Gandhi, the next Martin Luther King—they’re out there and they’re actually using Twitter today. And our job is to insure that people find them.”

“I’m at a point in my life when I want to go deeper.”