The Innovator: Jack Dorsey

The following script is from "The Innovator" which aired on March 17, 2013, and was rebroadcast on Sept. 1, 2013. Lara Logan is the correspondent. Tom Anderson, producer.

Jack Dorsey is one of the biggest and most ambitious innovators of our time. His name doesn't resonate like Jobs or Bezos or Zuckerberg, but his innovations do. And his low profile may have a lot to do with his personality.

Dorsey describes himself as extraordinarily reserved and shy, which is ironic considering he's the man who created Twitter and changed the way people communicate around the world.

Then he created a company called Square, which is helping to transform the way we pay for things.

When we first told you about Jack Dorsey last spring, Square was a start-up. Now it's an international company, but Jack Dorsey already had his eye on the next job he wants -- mayor of New York City -- an unlikely role for a man who calls himself a loner and spends a lot of time dreaming and thinking.

Lara Logan: Forbes Magazine said you're more of a nerd than Steve Jobs.

Jack Dorsey: Which I found insulting. I'm more of a nerd than Steve Jobs. I think the reference was because I was a programmer. So if that is the nerdy way, then guilty. I'm a nerd.

Many believe Jack Dorsey is the intellectual successor to Jobs. He created the code for Twitter, with messages that -- unlike e-mails - can be read by anyone in the world.

Lara Logan: Twitter is so instant. It's that moment.

Jack Dorsey: Yeah, it's so instant. And now I get to see the entire world and how they're thinking and how they're feeling and what they're doing and what they care about and where they're going.

When he created Twitter seven years ago, Jack Dorsey had no idea how big it would become - that 200 million people would be sending more than a billion tweets every three days. That young revolutionaries would use it to help communicate the strategies that fueled the Arab Spring. That it would force a congressman to resign. Twitter has become a marketing tool for Hollywood and big business. We use it at 60 Minutes. The president tweets. Benedict XVI tweeted his final message as pope.

Lara Logan: What are you most proud of with Twitter?

Jack Dorsey: I'm most proud of how quickly people came to it and used it in a million different ways. They're all over the world. And Twitter enables them to take a $5 cell phone and, wherever they are, communicate with the world for free.

It was a revolutionary new way for people to connect --- something Dorsey admits he's not very good at in person.

Lara Logan: What do you think your weaknesses are?

Jack Dorsey: I do have a tendency to really think about things by myself and decide things.

Lara Logan: Over-think things.

Jack Dorsey: Come out with a decision. I think I can be-- I can be silent at some times which unsettles people a bit, because they don't know what I'm thinking. The biggest thing I've learned is that I need to communicate more. I need to be more vocal.

Not communicating well created problems for him at Twitter. And Jack Dorsey, like Steve Jobs, was forced out of running the company he helped found.

Lara Logan: Were you angry?

Jack Dorsey: Yeah. I was angry. I was angry at-- you know, the board. I was angry at my co-founders. I was angry at myself.

Lara Logan: You once described it as being like a punch in the guts.

Jack Dorsey: Yeah.

Logan: No grudges? You don't hold any grudges?

Jack Dorsey: I'm stubborn but I don't necessarily hold grudges.

Two and a half years later, new management at Twitter invited him back to help run the company. And Dorsey accepted. Suddenly he had two jobs. By then he had dreamed up a new company, Square, that he believes can also change the world. And he says he runs it differently than Twitter. Decisions made behind closed doors are sent out immediately on the company's mass email system including sensitive information on company goals and profits. Dorsey roams around the office, available to talk to anyone.

Lara Logan: Do you have an office here?

Jack Dorsey: I don't. I don't have an office. I don't have a desk.

Lara Logan: You don't have a desk at all, even, like--

Jack Dorsey: I don't have a desk. I have my iPad.

While Twitter is about messages, Square is about money. It permits anyone with a smart phone to become a merchant. The concept grew out of a brainstorming session with a friend named Jim McKelvey, who was both a software ace and a frustrated artist.

Jack Dorsey: He was at an art fair and he couldn't sell a piece of glass because he couldn't accept a credit card. So, that was, you know, $2,000 lost. And he just got fed up with that. And he came out to San Francisco that next week and we spent the week trying to figure out why no one has done this before.

Lara Logan: And this, at that moment, was what?

Jack Dorsey: Well, we didn't know what it was. It was a way to accept credit cards on your phone. That's all we knew.

The software is simple and it's fast -- two qualities that are most important to Dorsey. To take a payment, you swipe a customer's credit card through a white square that plugs into the earphone jack.

Jack Dorsey: So you just take the card, you swipe it through...

The customer signs a receipt electronically. Department stores don't use it yet, but millions of small business people do.

Jack Dorsey: People who are using it to sell things on Craigslist to holding garage sales - campaigns -- the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign both used Square to raise funds.

Dorsey says merchants like Square because the fee is less than some credit cards charge. And business at Square is booming...accelerating in four years from zero to $15 billion in annual transactions.

Jack Dorsey started thinking about the software he's built in Silicon Valley nearly 30 years ago when he was growing up in St. Louis. He had a speech impediment as a kid and spent a lot of time alone at home, playing with computers when he was eight. He taught himself how to build computer programs before he was a teenager. Dorsey was fascinated by trains and maps and he used to spend hours down at these train yards.

Lara Logan: Most kids would have pictures of football players and girls on their walls or their favorite bands.

Jack Dorsey: Right.

Lara Logan: And you've got maps.

Jack Dorsey: I have maps.

Lara Logan: And trains.

Jack Dorsey: Yeah.

Studying trains was the beginning of his life-long obsession to learn how things work in the real world and translating that into the virtual world. Young Jack was intrigued by the messages he heard coming out of the St. Louis emergency dispatch center. At home he listened to it all on a police scanner. And he was struck by the fact that everyone talked in short bursts of sound - a system of communication that later inspired him to invent Twitter.

Jack Dorsey: They're always talking about where they're going, what they're doing and where they currently are. And that is where the idea for Twitter came was now we all have these cell phones. We had text messaging. And suddenly we could update where I was, what I'm doing, where I'm going, how I feel. And then it would go out to the entire world.

As a teenager, he created software that tracked the movement of emergency vehicles on a map. Then he tried to get a job with a large dispatch company in New York but there was no contact information on their website.

Jack Dorsey: I found a way into the website. I found a hole. I found a security hole.

Lara Logan: Is that-- are you-- is that the same thing as hacking?

Jack Dorsey: It's-- ha-- yes. Hacking-- hacking is-- hacking is-- is--

Lara Logan: A crime.

Jack Dorsey: Well, no. Criminal hacking is a crime. Hacking is actually a--

Lara Logan: Hacking for a job application is not a crime?

Jack Dorsey: No, no, no, no, no. No, not a crime at all. And I emailed them and I said, "You have a security hole. Here's how to fix it. And I write dispatch software." And--

Lara Logan: And they hired you.

Jack Dorsey: And they hired me a week later. And it was a dream come true, which is a weird dream for a kid.

Now the kid who ventured to New York when he was 19 has a new dream -- to expand Square globally. He's moved into Canada and Japan and opened an Internet shopping site. Dorsey knows he'll have some stiff competition.

Lara Logan: PayPal is a competitor of yours. It has a similar system. Google, Walmart and Target are developing their own systems. What prevents the competition from putting you out of business?

Jack Dorsey: Well, you know, our take on this is you can worry about the competition, you can constantly look in your rearview mirror and you can constantly look around and really not notice the road ahead of you. Or you can focus on what's ahead of you and drive, and drive fast, right? And drive within the speed limit, of course, but drive fast.

Lara Logan: But hopefully faster than everyone else.

Jack Dorsey: Faster than everyone else.

To keep his employees motivated and thinking, you won't be surprised to learn that Jack Dorsey is a bit unconventional. Instead of a company picnic or softball game, he took them to a place in San Francisco called Land's End. He wanted to make them think about the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lara Logan: Why?

Jack Dorsey: Why? Because we see the bridge as like this perfect intersection between art and engineering. It has pure utility, in that people commute on it every single day.

Dorsey's point to his colleagues is that when people look at the bridge, they don't think about the commuters or how it functions. They admire its simplicity and beauty. He thinks good software should work the same way.

Jack Dorsey: When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It's them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.

Lara Logan: And that, to you, is functionality and beauty.

Jack Dorsey: Yeah. It disappears. It disappears because it's so intuitive. It just works.

That's the thinking behind a Dorsey invention called Square Wallet, which radically changes the way we pay for things.

Lara Logan: Is this your favorite place to go for coffee?

Jack Dorsey: Yeah, it is one of my favorite places.

To show us how it works, Dorsey invited us to visit a cafe just around the corner from his office.

Jack Dorsey: What would you like?

Lara Logan: I will have a latte please.

Waitress: Is whole milk okay?

Lara Logan: No.

With the help of GPS, the barista's iPad knows Dorsey and his smart phone are in the house, and his face shows up on the tablet's screen before he even orders.

Lara Logan: So all your customers, I mean who have this app, they just appear.

Waitress: Yeah, yeah, it appears.

It's like a virtual credit card.

Lara Logan: You don't take your wallet out, you don't even take your phone out of your pocket.

Jack Dorsey: I could.

Lara Logan: It just pops up on the screen.

Jack Dorsey: Yeah.

The receipt shows up in an email. It's seamless and simple. But like his other invention, Twitter, Jack Dorsey thinks Square fundamentally changes how people interact. And how they feel.

Jack Dorsey: Money touches every single person on this planet. And at one point in their life they feel bad about it. It feels dirty sometimes. It never feels great. But it does feel great when it disappears. It feels like you're taken care of. It feels like the world is just working.

Everything seems to be working for Jack Dorsey. The Wall Street Journal Magazine named him Technology Innovator of the Year. Accepting that award brought him back to New York, a city he fell in love with when he worked for the dispatch company he hacked into. Dorsey may spend most of his life in the virtual world, but he's still fascinated by real world systems and Manhattan, with its subways, is the biggest system on earth. It may seem like an unrealistic ambition for such a reserved person, but Dorsey not only wants to move here someday, he wants to run for mayor.

Jack Dorsey: What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away. I mean just look at us in this station. There's just people walking everywhere and everyone.

Lara Logan: Chaos?

Jack Dorsey: It's chaos. It's kinda like being in a car in the middle of a thunderstorm, right. Everything is raging around you, but you're safe inside that car. So New York feels very much to me like that.

Jack Dorsey knows it helps to be a billionaire if you run for mayor in New York. It's worked before. But if he's serious about running, and he says he is, it will be interesting to see just how he communicates with the voters.

Lara Logan: Do you find it easier to communicate with people via Twitter or face-to-face?

Jack Dorsey: I guess my natural state would be through mediation of letters or through texts, all those mediums, I definitely find ease with. But do I appreciate as much as face-to-face communication? No. Do I feel like I'm an expert in having a normal conversation face-to-face? Absolutely not. That's just not my natural state. I would rather be walking Land's End and thinking about things.

Lara Logan: And tweeting.

Jack Dorsey: And tweeting.