The Journey of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

Twitter just turned 10. The CEO says he’s got a plan to get it to 20.

- Felix Gillette and Sarah Frier

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Twitter, was staring at a puddle. It was shaped like Greenland and stretched across a busy sidewalk in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Some employees at a nearby ad agency had noticed the puddle and for some reason decided to broadcast a live video stream of the minor havoc it was causing pedestrians. They did so using a smartphone stuck to a window and a free mobile app called Periscope, which is owned by Twitter.

Thousands of miles away, at his home in San Francisco, Dorsey sat watching passers-by confront the puddle. Some simply walked through it. Others made a running leap. A few circumnavigated it, lunging at a railing for balance. As word of the live puddle coverage spread online, an audience of 20,000 gathered on Periscope. Soon, the people of Newcastle were in on it. Someone arrived at the puddle with a surfboard. A pizza was delivered to it. And thousands of people took to Twitter to consider the puddle.

That was in January. In mid-March, Dorsey still has the puddle on his mind. “It wasn’t that we were watching a puddle,” he says at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco. “It was that we were watching a puddle together.

“I was connected to the audience, and I could actually talk with them,” he says. “I could say, ‘Isn’t this ridiculous? We’re watching a puddle.’ And then, ‘Oh, is that woman going to walk around it? Is she going to get wet? Like, what’s going to happen?’ And it was just so cool to see how this little tiny thing became an event. But that’s been our history for 10 years.”