Jack's goodbye tweet

Hi everyone, it’s Ellen in San Francisco. Jack Dorsey resigned from Twitter on Monday, but first…Today’s top tech news: Amazon warehouse wor [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi everyone, it’s Ellen in San Francisco. Jack Dorsey resigned from Twitter on Monday, but first… Today’s top tech news: - Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama will get a [second union election]( - Three former Google workers [claim wrongful firing]( after they challenged a plan to collaborate with the Trump administration - Bitcoin has been a bad hedge against [Omicron market volatility]( The cult of @jack When Jack Dorsey said on Monday that he was [immediately stepping down]( as Twitter Inc. chief executive officer, a few lines of his resignation letter (which he tweeted, of course) seemed intended to raise eyebrows. “There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” he wrote. “Ultimately, I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure.” Dorsey was touching on a sensitive and high-stakes debate in Silicon Valley. Back in the early days of today’s top companies, the prevailing attitude was that starry-eyed founders had great ideas but couldn’t lead. As a company matured, so should its C-suite, and before long, a seasoned, suited CEO would be hired to take over. About a decade ago, the script flipped. Inspired by the triumphant return of Steve Jobs to Apple Inc. after being booted by his board, venture capital firms raced to position themselves as “founder friendly”—promising founders that they would never be shunted aside for some parachuting interloper. Founders had passion, dedication and insight that no one else could provide, the thinking went. The evidence was the soaring share prices of companies led by executives like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Over the years, startup leaders and their investors achieved a kind of symbiosis: VC firms that established themselves as pro-founder got more and better deals, and successful founders gained greater influence over their companies as their net worths ballooned. That’s why it’s so surprising—and a bit rich—that Dorsey is throwing shade at the cult of Silicon Valley founders. He’s one of the people who has benefited the most from their lionization. After helping to start Twitter in 2006, Dorsey was booted from the company because he was [distracted]( and scattered—seemingly more interested in hot yoga classes and studying fashion design than being CEO. Then, after a series of leadership shuffles at the company and a drawn-out, suspenseful search for a replacement, the board turned back to Dorsey, who has been at the helm ever since. He also kept his role as CEO of the payments company he co-founded, Square Inc., now worth $100 billion. Over the years, Dorsey leaned into the role of the quirky, obsessive, unconventional tech founder. He ate [one meal a day](; regularly shivered in [ice baths]( and celebrated his 42nd birthday with a 10-day [vipassana silent meditation retreat](; he walked to work every day to clear his head; he went through a phase of regularly wearing $400 [Dior Homme reverse-collar shirts](. Lately, he’s been more on a tie-dye kick, with a long, rectangular beard to accompany his long-standing nose ring hoop. As a young man, he wrote [moody poetry]( online. Now his Twitter bio is simply “#bitcoin.” In his resignation letter, Dorsey declared, “I believe it’s critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder’s influence or direction.” He is still founder-CEO of Square, for what it’s worth, but he’s making an astute observation. Dorsey’s kind could be on the decline. Over the past few years, startup founders once held up as indispensable visionaries, like WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, have been ousted and replaced by more sober personalities. Less dramatically, venerated founders like Larry Page and Jeff Bezos also resigned their CEO jobs. A recent analysis of studies suggest that founder-led companies still outperform CEO-led ones, but as Dorsey’s well aware, Silicon Valley is easily swept up in fads. If founder-led companies are on the way out, better to be early to the trend than late. —[Ellen Huet](mailto:ehuet4@bloomberg.net) If you read one thing A ragtag team of crypto vigilantes is trying to weed out fraudsters in a fast-moving, [entirely unregulated market](. Here’s what you need to know Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes testified at her trial that her boyfriend at the time [abused her](. Lululemon fires back at Peloton with its own [patent lawsuit](. Omicron could send investors into the arms of [big tech stocks](. Elon Musk plans to [make an appearance]( at Tesla’s next earnings call, after signaling he would no longer be a regular. Meet Twitter’s [new boss](. 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