WATERLOO - He co-founded the hugely popular social media platform Twitter and now Jack Dorsey wants to open an office in Waterloo Region for his newest creation.

Dorsey, who came to the area Thursday to speak to students at the University of Waterloo, announced after his speech that his latest company, Square, plans to open an office in the region in 2014.

A mobile payments company, Square plans to hire about 30 engineers and designers from this area to staff the office, which will be its first in Canada, Dorsey told reporters.

The company quietly opened a small office in the Breithaupt Block in Kitchener in the spring but will need larger quarters once it starts hiring, said Square spokesperson Lindsay Wiese.

Launched in 2009, Square has more than 600 employees at its head office in San Francisco and other offices in New York, Atlanta and Japan.

Dorsey, who currently serves as chair of Twitter, said he chose Waterloo for Square's Canadian head office because of the tech ecosystem here.

"The engineering discipline and all the technology-thinking and support and mentorship happening in the community make it a very easy choice," he said.

"We've seen this in a lot of other college towns around America. This one (Waterloo) is quite special."

Square allows merchants and shoppers to make debit and credit card payments by attaching a small device called a Square reader to their smartphones and tablets. It was rolled out in Canada last year.

The company already processes $15 billion in payments annually, and Dorsey's net worth, thanks to Twitter and Square, has been estimated at $1.3 billion.

During a 55-minute speech to 500 students and entrepreneurs at UW's Hagey Hall, the 36-year-old Dorsey stuck mostly to the topic of Square and entrepreneurship.

But he did share some insights on the launch of Twitter, which began in 2006 when he joined Odeo, a small San Francisco startup involved in podcasting.

For some years he had been interested in text messaging.

Text messaging had been available in Canada and Japan since 1996, but was slow to get going in the U.S. because until that time carriers such as Cingular and Verizon were using different technologies, he said.

"It was rough around the edges, it barely worked," he said.

He became interested in text messaging in 2000 and was one of the first people in his circle to carry a BlackBerry 850, said Dorsey, who strode back and forth across the stage, speaking without notes, but using pictures on a large screen to prompt him.

He brought the idea of a better text-messaging system to Odeo, and a small group of employees - including co-founder Noah Glass - sat down and hammered out Twitter during a two-week marathon session, he said.

"In two weeks we built pretty much everything you see today," said Dorsey, a St. Louis native.

Other improvements such as hash tags, user names and retweets were essentially created by the users, he said. "The company learned from the people who use it."

The lesson he learned from the creation of Twitter is that "when you have a passion and you want to see it in the world, you'll do anything to make it exist."

Square, on the other hand, was started when a friend who made glass art couldn't make a sale because he had no way of accepting a customer's credit card, Dorsey said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Bank fees and slow, cumbersome delivery systems convinced him there had to be a better way, he said.

Square's other innovations include technology that sends cash by email and analytics software that indicates busiest days and top-selling items for merchants.

Dorsey said he has always had a fascination for how cities work. Before launching Twitter, he built software to map bike couriers in San Francisco and fixed holes in servers for a large dispatching company in New York City called DMS.