On July 15, 2008 Twitter announced its acquisition of Summize, a feat made possible by its capital raise the month earlier.
“After the company had signed the paperwork with Summize and divvied up Twitter stock as part of the sale, Jack got on the phone with Greg Pass, the engineer who had been running the tech side of Summize,” according to the Twitter biography Hatching Twitter, where he asked him to oversee both engineering and operations for all of Twitter. It would be a pivotal moment toward Jack being pushed out of the company. Not only was Pass shocked by the request, but Jack had not run the decision by his co-founders or the Board. That sparked a swift investigation into Jack’s competence at the company by two new investing members of the Board, Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson. Secretly, Evan (Ev) Williams saw this as a possible path to him taking over the CEO position from Jack, something he had wanted for a while.
“Jack didn’t work hard enough. Wasn’t in the office enough. Was distracted by his hobbies,” according to an account given in the book. In early August, Ev informed Jack that he wanted his CEO position but avoided telling him that the board had effectively already decided to remove Jack regardless. Jack, in a challenge to Ev, asked Ev to get on immediately with making his move. Sabet, however, told Ev not to act so hastily in taking Jack up on this challenge and to hold off.
On August 12th, Sabet and Wilson flew into San Francisco for a Twitter board meeting and employees were pulled one-by-one to inquire about Jack’s fitness as CEO. The most senior of the bunch were told that Jack was going to be fired, that is until co-founder Biz Stone intervened.
“I’m serious. If you fire Jack, I’ll quit,” Biz said.
Unwilling to let Biz walk out the door, Sabet and Wilson sat Jack down and gave him an ultimatum, “you’ve got three months,” they told him. “Three months to fix things and take control of the company.”
When the two investors got back home on the 14th they exchanged emails about their next step. Unfortunately for Sabet, he accidentally added Jack to an email meant only for Wilson about the plan to replace Jack with Ev and give Jack a “passive” chairman role.
Four days later, on August 18th, Jack Dorsey tweeted “Sifting through proposals.” It’s unclear what that was in reference to. That date, however, would later become famous as the date that a pseudonymous identity registered the domain name bitcoin.org. Two days later, on August 20th, Fred Wilson, one of the investors looking to oust Jack, was celebrating his birthday.
“Happy Birthday, @fredwilson!” Jack Tweeted.
“thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday on twitter today!” Wilson shared.
And on that very same day someone named Satoshi Nakamoto sent his inaugural email to the creator of Hashcash, Adam Back. “I’m getting ready to release a paper that references your Hashcash paper and I wanted to make sure I have the citation right,” Satoshi wrote.
Satoshi emailed Wei Dai two days later on August 22nd. “I was very interested to read your b-money page. I’m getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system,” Satoshi wrote.
On August 27th, Jack revealed that he had been aware of what had been in the works for a while. “Biz has recently taken on the responsibility of making sure everyone knows everything. So now you know,” he wrote.
On September 3rd, Sabet and Wilson returned to Twitter and became further convinced it was necessary to remove Jack quickly.
“Confident because I have a plan in my back pocket,” Jack tweeted ominously on September 8th.
“Excited.” Jack tweeted on the 10th. On that very date Satoshi Nakamoto would etch the pre-release Bitcoin genesis block into existence with a unix timestamp of 1221069728. This wouldn’t be known, however, until November when it would be placed in some people’s hands to assess for themselves.
“The plan is taking form. Exciting.” Jack tweeted on the 15th.
On October 5th, Satoshi registered an account on SourceForge.
On October 12th, Jack moved into a new apartment at 2 Mint Plaza in San Francisco, right next to the US Mint, a location that he would embed into his personality. On October 15th he was fired from Twitter. According to Hatching Twitter, Jack called his mentor and former partner at Dnet, Greg Kidd, for advice on what to do about it. While the book recounts an emotional exchange between them, left unstated by the author is that their little company Dnet, which purportedly failed in 2001, had still been in active development until July of 2008. Jack had previously said of Dnet that “We wanted to do a Web-centric dispatch system that would essentially provide an ATM for couriers, most of whom don’t have bank accounts, so they could easily draw their commissions through the Web.”
On June 23rd, 2004, for example, a dev log on the project said that Dnet had “started implementing the ‘peer-to-peer’ networking system which will be used by the 2.x system for communicating between computers.”
In March 2005, it was revealed that Jack Dorsey was still linked to Dnet when his own Weblog appeared on the homepage. Further, Dnet added a White Papers section at that time, which only linked to an article about the coming revolution of digitizing electronic checks. Kidd, who started working on transaction processing as far back as 1984 also worked for the Federal Reserve from 2002 – 2004. Later on in 2012 he’d become a seed round investor in Coinbase and in 2013 he would be hired as the 10th employee of Ripple and onboarded as its Chief Risk Officer. Jack and Kidd were close enough that Jack had previously lived at Kidd’s home in 2005 and was a personal nanny to his baby. This is whom Jack is said to have called immediately after his firing at Twitter.
On October 20th, Jack tweeted: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”
On October 30th, Jack took his personal website that he’d been running since 2001 (gu.st) permanently offline.
On October 31st, Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled his Bitcoin White Paper.
“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi wrote. “The paper is available at: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf“