Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…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. Right. And it really speaks to Jack as a product visionary too. I mean, when people referred to him as Jobs-like, I think in the way that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive and those folks could conceive of something and then release it perfectly into market the first time. Square has iterated quite a bit in a very Apple way of small interactions over time and small iterations over time. But amazing how good it was at first. 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.…

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