HIGHLIGHTS: Jack Dorsey - CEO of Block

0:09Hi everybody, I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sohund Wealth Fund. And today, it's an honor to welcome Jack Dorsey, one of the most visionary entrepreneurs in the world. Jack is the co-founder and CEO of Block and also the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. So, Jack, you really put the stamp on the world. Welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you. If we go back and kick off with Twitter, who is now, of course, renamed X, where did the idea come from? Well, it was a long time in the making. When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by how cities worked, just how these things that were so large to me at the time actually, like, functioned.

0:53And I got into maps. And that led me to programming, because my dad brought home a computer one time, and I wanted to draw a map on the screen so that I could start playing with it. And I taught myself how to do that. I figured it out. And little by little, I worked my way to a field called dispatch. So dispatching taxi cabs and ambulances and police cars. And it was a way to put information on the map, information about the city. And I eventually ended up working at the largest firm in New York. I had this very rich map of everything happening in New York City. But it was missing one thing, which were the people and what they were doing, where they were.

1:42And that's really the question that started Twitter was if I could see and visualize what the people were doing and what they were thinking or where they were going. It would help me understand the city a little bit more. When did you realize that it was really taking off? When Obama was elected 100 days after he took office, he got up in front of the country and did the State of the Union 100 days after. And we had a number of senators and congresspeople on Twitter already. And I was watching the speech and the camera panned around and there were people on their phones. and in that moment I got a tweet my pocket buzzed I pulled out my phone I got a tweet from my senator from Missouri I'm from Missouri and she was tweeting about Barack Obama giving his first address donation I was like whoa like fast I'm watching this thing unfold in front of me and I'm feeling it physically in my pocket and it just really shortened the distance between something that can be very abstract and feel far away, which is how our government operates and works, to it now being in my hand.

3:07And having this sense of like, wow, this tangible humanity. Someone typed this out, it buzzed my phone, and now I'm reading it and I saw it, and they're thousands of miles away. Now, two years ago, Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X. Anything you regret not doing with Twitter before it became X? I mean, there's a lot of things I would do differently in retrospect. Such as? I think we became, I wasn't there at the time running the company, but we raced to monetization way too quickly. and we force-fitted a monetization path that created a bunch of issues for us, which was advertising. Google had an advertising business at scale.

4:00Facebook had one that was growing. Twitter's goal at that point was to grow and go public. Being public meant you had revenue. So we copied the model of the day, model of the internet, which was advertising. And that just set up a bunch of issues in terms of growth, in terms of competition, in terms of how we were valued. It didn't really express Twitter's true value, that model. And I wish we took a little bit more time to figure out a better model or that we had multiple at once. You are still a large owner in X. What do you think they should do with X now? Experiment as much as possible. I mean, keep pulling the thread on what people want to use it for.

5:04I'm a big believer in... I think it's less about free speech. I think it's more about do we get to choose how the algorithms are programming us because the algorithms are definitively programming us. And it's very, very hard to tell what an algorithm is going to do and predict what it's going to do. And that's where the danger comes in. But if I can choose what algorithm filters my tweets and what I get to see, and I have instead of like an app store, an algorithm store, where I get to put these on my timeline, then I have a lot more agency in the content and the experience. And I think it ends up creating a much healthier relationship with the technology.

5:53Let's talk about Bitcoin. You started something called Block. Tell us, what is Block? Block is focused on economic empowerment, building tools to empower people into the economy. We started with sellers, so enabling sellers to accept credit cards was our beginning. And then we added another business called Cash App, which allows people to easily move money between two people or businesses with their mobile phone instantly. That is becoming more and more a bank in the form of an app. And today we have two massive ecosystems at scale, Square and Cash App, that serve sellers and individuals and give them very simple financial tools to do things that they want to do in the economy.

6:46So what needs to happen for Bitcoin to function more effectively? I think it's happening right now. More and more people see that it's valuable. every time that number goes up, people get more interested in it. Bitcoin is over close to 16 years old right now. It's never gone down. It's never had a security issue. It has no leader. It has a completely open roadmap, and it's determined by a consensus development model. These are all really incredible ways to trust it as a currency. so as it becomes more understood and it feels like it's going to last i think people will trust it more and more as like oh this is the way i'm moving money to my family now and this is the way i'm buying coffee now and this is the way i'm buying computers or whatever it's a deflationary currency so it doesn't encourage spending it does encourage savings but i think it has a really interesting path and provides a lot of interesting business models for the internet if bitcoin existed before we started twitter we'd be in a much different state and i think we'd be in a much better state and we wouldn't have all the issues that you see with social media today because it's not a tax on the system.

8:18What do entrepreneurs have in common?

8:23I think, like, if I think about that word and the concept, it's my experience, my path. I never wanted to be a CEO. I never wanted to build a company. I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I could care less about it. I wanted to build. I wanted to build and I wanted to use what I built. and I wanted other people to use what I built. And I realized somewhere along the way that in order to sustain the thing that I built, I needed money. And that's where building a business came in. So I had to learn about building a business and running a business and being a CEO. But the spirit of all that is you do whatever it takes to make it work.

9:02I learned how to program because I needed to understand how to build things on my computer in front of me. I needed to learn how to be a CEO. I needed to learn how to raise money. I needed to learn how to hire people, how to fire people, how to build cultural frameworks, how to build systems, investment frameworks, feedback mechanisms. All these things that I had no desire to do or to build, I had to do and learn because it was the only way to take the idea to the next step. is the only way to enable more and more people to use the thing that I wanted them to use and to mature it. What is your advice to young people?

9:46Observe. Observe everything. Take everything in. Love information. Love receiving information. Don't worry about reacting to it. Don't worry about memorizing it. Don't worry about doing anything with it at all. Just be open. And when you need to do something with it, it'll come. Thank you.