Dhanji R. Prasanna: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay, talk more about that. What does that mean? What does that look like? Why is that so important? Absolutely. So when we were in our mature phase, so when Square was working quite well, it was a very large business, and then we had started Cash App and that also followed suit. We had spun them out almost as what we call a GM structure. So they were effectively run as a portfolio of independent companies and they had their own CEOs who all reported to Jack and it was still one single executive team, but they had separate engineering practices, they had separate design teams. They were kind of separate in almost every way except for some shared resources like our foundational resources like legal and some platforms and things like that. So I think that that was very useful for us for the stage of company that we were in, but when you really want to go deep in technology, when you really want to connect with these things that are industry changing events that are happening, you need a singular focus, and we changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team now, all designers report into one single team and there's single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera. And so that was the big transformation that we made, and that meant we could really drive forward AI, we could drive forward platform and just technical depth generally. For companies that are struggling with this potentially or trying to figure out how to do this, two things I'm hearing here is start to see yourself as a technology company. It doesn't necessarily apply to every company, but seems like an important element is like we're building technology, we're not a financial company, we're not a real estate company, we're not a technology company. And then two is organize the team such that say engineers report up to an engineering leader versus a GM who maybe doesn't understand engineering as well or doesn't take it as seriously as they should.…

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