Jack Dorsey’s Mentor Greg Kidd and His Connection to ‘The Deep State’, Payments, and White Papers

Robert Gregory Kidd aka R. Gregory Kidd or Greg Kidd, was an American-born banking consultant with previous experience at Booz Allen Hamilton when he was living in New Zealand in the 1980s. There, he was introduced to a local named Linda Jenkinson in 1987 while working on an engagement for several of the nation’s big banks. In a formative experience for Kidd that would later be characterized broadly as dispatch, Kidd spent time working on the highly refined system of moving physical paper checks between banks during a narrow 7-hour window so that they would be cleared the next day. The knowledge of how well it worked in New Zealand got him thinking about courier systems at large and so in 1991 he acquired a stake in one such firm there named Kiwi Corp.

At Kiwi, Kidd was joined by a local New Zealand native named Erik Westra, who did all the programming, and one who’s skills would be instrumental in carrying out a much bigger plan. Soon he teamed up with Jenkinson formally when they formed Dispatch Management Services together in 1994. This company like others in New Zealand relied on a Windows-OS-based application called free call.

“Instead of having a dispatcher assign a job to a particular courier, as has long been the custom in the U.S., free call has the dispatcher radio a job to all couriers, who contact the dispatcher if they want the job,” The WSJ reported at the time. Kidd’s acquisition strategy eventually snowballed into a sprawling behemoth that spanned multiple countries. By 1997, it had combined 38 messenger services in 18 major US markets, London, and Wellington, NZ.

The company went public in 1998 under the name Dispatch Management Services Corp, where Kidd remained Chairman. As the company began to buckle under the stress of trying to turn local and regional corporate courier services into a nationally-run corporate operation, however, Kidd received a strange unauthorized email from a 22-year-old college student living in St. Louis, MO named Jack Dorsey. According to the story, which has become part of Dorsey lore, Dorsey hacked into DMSC’s systems in order to ask Kidd for a job at the firm, which somehow led to the result he wanted. Dorsey immediately moved to New York City to become a programmer at DMSC.

Pretty soon Kidd was on his way out the door and asked Dorsey to go with him when he moved to California. The two founded Dnet via despatchNet.com in 1998. The earliest iteration of the website available actually describes it as a being a “free, open source, web based system and service, available for use by any and all.”

The business model, if there was one, was more about settling payments. “despatchNet makes it easy for any user (worker or customer) to simply log on and start entering or receiving jobs,” the site said. “The goal is to minimize middleman clutter between a customer’s desire to get items, individuals, or information from A to B, and a worker-in-the-field’s ability to make it happen on demand. Once A to B happens, despatchNet handles the financial settlements to ensure that the monies involved end up in the correct bank accounts for all concerned parties.”

This financial component matches Dorsey’s later description of the objective except in his telling the parties would get paid over the web without a bank account. “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,” he said.

When the company began using the domain Dnet.com as well, Dorsey added his [email protected] to his digital business card. And in March 2000, when the company formally transitioned to using dnet.com for good, it added a Whitepapers section, which were mostly a collection of articles about Greg Kidd and his dispatch philosophies and experiences.

Though almost none of the content was digitized, the Whitepapers listed were:

• Shareholder Value in the Local Delivery Industry
• E-Commerce and the Local Delivery Industry
• Open Source and the Dispatch Industry
• Zero Billion Dollar Opportunity – or Why Software Wants to Be Free.
• The Search for Best Practices
• Harvard Case Study: Dispatch Management Services: (Read full here)

Dnet rapidly transformed from its vision of being an open-source dispatch and payment system into a corporate operation. It announced many new executive hires in early 2000, for example. It also developed its software strictly for Windows. Some time between March and June 2000, Dorsey removed the Dnet email from his digital business card. A WSJ article would state that he left the company in 2001 and The Verge said it happened in 2002. It’s unclear which of the three timelines is the most accurate but Greg Kidd also stepped back, going to work for the Federal Reserve Board as a Senior Analyst in 2002. An archived dev log shows that Erik Westra from his New Zealand IP had taken over most of the development work.

Meanwhile, Kidd’s work at the Federal Reserve was characterized as “Focusing on check and ACH clearing systems as well as private sector money transfer systems,” according to his LinkedIn.

As Dorsey pursued other interests, like becoming a massage therapist that would teach people how to code, he ran out of money in 2004 and actually moved in with Greg Kidd.

“In 2005, after Jack had spent a week at Burning Man, traipsing through Black Rock City, and dancing inebriated until sunrise to techno music, he had shown up on Kidd’s doorstep in Berkeley, jobless and essentially homeless,” according to the Twitter tell-all book Hatching Twitter. “Kidd had taken him in and let him stay in the guesthouse in the backyard. He also gave him a job as a nanny for his newborn baby.”

Straight away, Dorsey was brought back on to Dnet, which still continued on in development mostly by Kidd and Westra. That’s known because a link to Dorsey’s own dev log was added to the Dnet homepage as a link and so was something else, a new link to “White Papers.” There was only one article, a subject familiar to Kidd because it’s how he ended up in the dispatch business in the first place, couriering checks.

“Today, almost half of the 42 billion checks written annually in the United States must be moved from the bank of deposit back to the bank of the person or business who wrote the check,” the article states. “The future, however, could be entirely different.”

At the same time, Dnet had been working on a peer-to-peer networking system for its dispatch software. A June 2004 dev log says that Dnet had “reached an initial milestone with the peer-to-peer network: it is now possible to broadcast messages to all nodes on a test network. The system passed a torture test by opening up 500 (!) network connections in a simulated network and successfully broadcasting a message to all 500 nodes.”

While Dorsey left the Dnet project to go work on Odeo which subsequently became Twitter, Westra continued working on Dnet until July 2008. He tweeted near-daily updates about it until July 10th and then goes completely dark with no tweets at all for 9 months.

Satoshi Nakamoto, meanwhile, released his famous Bitcoin White Paper on October 31, 2008, except he didn’t actually call it a White Paper. In his emails with Adam Back in 2008, he called it a paper. Same went for his email to Wei Dai and likewise his announcement on the cryptography mailing list. In fact, nobody on the cryptography list called it that. In January 2009 it was called the research paper on the official Sourceforge page and subsequently as the Design Paper a year later. It was initially called a Paper on bitcoin.org and then later the technical paper.

When Westra finally returned to Twitter on March 31, 2009, it was for another project entirely, something called 3taps. Greg Kidd was the CEO and he curiously attributed the idea for the company to Dorsey. Kidd authored a White Paper for it on September 16, 2010, titled “White Paper: A Data Commons in the Exchange Space.”

Greg Kidd also became an angel investor in Coinbase in September 2012 and a year later became the 10th employee of Ripple. In a 2024 onstage interview he said of it, “I did go from working for the Federal Reserve, which was the Deep State, to a poker game with other deep state players like from Google and Visa and they talked about this new company. There was no Bitcoin company but there was a company called Ripple. Google actually invested in it. And it was like the Bitcoin ledger but with two extra columns in the spreadsheet, one for the issuer and one for the currency. And thank you to Arthur Britto and David Schwarz for educating me about what the future looks like and I got to go from history world at the Federal Reserve to the whole new universe that XRP and Ripple brought, taking something which was an innovation to Bitcoin and making it something that could apply to every form of value in the world.”