Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…How they did all this and they launched pretty quickly after they were founded, I don’t know. I mean, that would be a great story of building all this, like this is not easy stuff. Okay, so at Pioneer Square Labs we work with these startups and we’ve started 60 and we sort of killed a lot of them along the way and we spun out 6. Every single one whether it's a successful thing that actually launches or an early project you’re working on, like it is so hacked together and the customer experience is so like almost there at the start. You’re just trying to prove that your one insight is true. And I remember when I found out about Square like the first press release, you go to the website and it’s like one of the best designed websites I had ever seen because it’s like a huge tenet for the company and a principle that Jack believes in. In fact, like I was doing web design at that time and web development, and people would just keep pointing back to Square, like, “Oh, make it look like that.” And every iteration for years was like the gold standard of beautiful designed website. And when my Square reader arrived, it was beautiful. The packaging was Apple caliber, like the messaging was all perfect. Like, there was nothing about this company at least as a customer that felt like scrappy or new or at experiment. It’s like it was birthed as a perfectly formed product. Yeah, it will be great. It would be super fun to have somebody if you’re out there who was there in the early days with Square, come on and do a follow-up with us. Like, how did you build all this stuff in 12 months or less? It would be cool. In 2009 and 2010, no less, when it was definitely not as easy as now to build all this stuff.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.