Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So, they launch in 2010. Before they launched, they had raised a Series A from Khosla Ventures in 2009. But they launched and basically they just grew like wildfire. I mean, we’ve talked about all the reasons why this was a complete game changer for small merchants and people that didn’t even accept payments at all before. Launched in 2010, there is a Series B from Sequoia from Roelof Botha who was some partner at Sequoia and had been the CFO of Paypal in 2011. Then a couple months later in 2011, they raise $100 million Series C from Kleiner. 2012, there is another $200 million from Chris Sacca and Rizvi Traverse. Chris had used that vehicle to buy up a lot of secondary shares in Twitter, famously, and then he used the same vehicle to invest in Square. And then simultaneously, well, right after that, then they do this enormous deal with Starbucks in late 2012 and this was such a huge announcement at the time. So Starbucks invested, as part of this round, into Square and committed to moving all of their payments at all Starbucks-owned stores in the US on to Square technology. And up into this time Square was for the customer we’ve been talking about, the sort of small merchants. But the idea that a Fortune 500 retailer would move everything on to Square was just pretty shocking at the time. And I actually didn’t dug that much into this deal but to me, it’s shocking that Square was anywhere close enough to feature complete, to make this deal make sense. I mean, I think there’s a lot of discussion we’ll do about this deal, of the financials of it. But from a product perspective, I remember shocked to that like, was Starbucks going to contribute to. I guess Square probably had to do a ton of sort of custom development effort and it probably forced them to enable a lot of the functionality in the Square register that they have today. Yeah. And we talked about this a little bit in the Starbucks episode with Dan. But I think a couple of things. One, Square wasn’t ready; this was a really bad deal. And I joked earlier that the end of the fun story in this episode for Square, at least until the very end of this episode, but this was the beginning of the end of the fun. But I read a lot of things written by Jack and interviews with him looking back on this in preparing for the episode and, you know, he does say and he’s probably right that what this deal forced Square to do was become enterprise class in terms of payments and fintech and security really quickly. They basically had no choice.…

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