Jack Dorsey: I'll do whatever it takes to ensure Twitter outlives me

Twitter is being blasted for fake users and terror-aiding, and its co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is under attack for two-jobbing — running his payments start-up Square alongside the huge social network. But a jetlagged Dorsey, in London to launch Square in the UK, (and so knackered he talks about “nickels and dimes” before correcting himself to “pounds and pennies”) says he’s sticking around in both roles — and is adamant tech doesn’t have to be transient.

“I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure both companies are immensely successful, and outlive me,” a bearded Dorsey declares after a morning meeting the owner of a Soho piano bar, a Norbury florist and a City coffee shop owner. He’s a long way from wooing international corporations’ ad budgets for Twitter. The three companies have been trialling Square: Dorsey, the big-business entrepreneur whose net worth is reckoned at $1.4 billion by Forbes, has turned to small firms to make his next fortune.

Square, already big in the US where it’s valued at more than $6 billion on the New York Stock Exchange, has created a device that plugs into smartphones and tablets so firms can accept credit card and other payments anytime, anywhere. With Britons now carrying less than £25 in cash on average, the UK’s small businesses need to accept plastic; Dorsey has all 5.4 million of them in his sights.

And so the 40-year-old tattooed billionaire is too diplomatic to respond to whether it’s nice to leave Trump-land to do business abroad, but he likes being in the capital. Slipping into California-chat (Square is based in San Francisco), Dorsey says, “there’s a ton of really good energy in London, a lot of entrepreneurship, and good talent, especially around artificial intelligence. It’s a really interesting place for new companies to emerge.”

The self-taught computer coder, who dropped out of uni and became a certified masseur before co-founding Twitter in 2006, now claims Silicon Valley and US firms “don’t see London as a competitor. Most companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley want to reach global audiences, and the same spirit is true in London.”

But the capital is feeling suspicious towards tech giants: it’s here that 300 brands began boycotting Google after their YouTube ads appeared next to hateful videos. And Twitter too is under pressure to do more to stop groups such as Islamic State from using its platform. Won’t Dorsey’s Twitter background taint would-be users’ trust for his new venture?

He’s gambling on Britons being more pragmatic. “Square has always benefited from being a very trusted brand — I don’t think our sellers consider Square to be bad because everything else in tech is going badly,” he says. “It’s more like, ‘is this tool helping us do our job?’”

Dorsey is positively evangelical about Square — despite just selling $6 million-worth of its stock. “It’s like a utility — it’s democratising, our purpose is economic empowerment.” He sees no irony in the fact that he’s making a lot of money by “democratising payments”. Dorsey has learned from Twitter’s famous failure to come up with a revenue-raising strategy from its inception; Square is charging this country’s entrepreneurs £39 for a payments device, then taking a 1.75 per cent fee for in-person payments, and 2.5 per cent for online or phone sales.

And freed, too, from his social network’s 140-character limit, Dorsey is verbose in his claim that he’s just helping the little guy. “Our base is the underserved and the underbanked, enabling anyone to be able to make a sale and have the tech that the largest retailers in the world have access to — it’s really empowering.”