Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…We basically talked about the content of the narrative section here but it’s like a tale of two stories, a tale of two companies here. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. If you listened to the press around the time of the Square IPO, and I remember lots of investors sort of talking too and chattering them, it was like this is the worst of times, like this is the death knell for all these unicorn companies and Square is like prime example of super overvalued and it turns out that their actual business which is payments is a super crappy business, really low margin, if any margin. And example #1 of that is look at this Starbucks deal, like it sucks. Square is losing so much money on it and that means they’ll never be able to serve large margins. So this company is doomed, right? Like that was the narrative that was so dominating the press cycle and the investor cycle but I think the lesson here is like in any kind of situation like that, you really got to dig into the company’s fundamentals whether the narrative is like this company can do no wrong or whether this company is doomed. And Square’s narrative through the whole thing, you read the IPO or you read the S1, they actually say in the S1 like “we serve small business merchants. We make commerce easy. We make it accessible to everyone, like we’re not a payments company. We’re about helping merchants increase their business.” And because of these flywheel effects, that is good for us too. Yup. And boy, it's funny. Not to talk about Rich Barton in every episode now but when you hear him talk and he talks about the name Expedia and the name Zillow, like picking an empty vessel and then you get to fill it with your marketing and you get to fill it with your product and your brand that the value prop to customers, like Square was not a payment word. It’s something that they can choose to fill with whatever they want to be. In the way that Snap is a camera company and we all said, “Oh, Snap is a camera company. ” Like, Square is a payments company. Square is a small business company and I think that’s got a lot of power to it. There’s a great interview which Jack, he talks about, and he’s asked sort of like, what is Square? And he’s like, well, there are three things that every business needs. And he says whether you’re Facebook or Twitter or whether you’re a coffee shop, you need access to capital, and capital can be raising money but it can also be sales from your customers, like we were talking about earlier. If you can’t access the capital from the sales you’re making to customers because you’re not going to get for 30-45 days, that's a huge problem. So you need access to capital to build and grow your business. You need to acquire customers and then you need to retain customers and build loyalty. Like what Square has done I think, or at least what Jack would say Square is trying to do, is to help small business, well, businesses of all types, physical businesses do all three of those things better.…

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