Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
20 published records
01 / uncertainty
“How they did all this and they launched pretty quickly after they were founded, I don’t know.”
02 / belief
“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.”
03 / commitment
“I mean, well, one thing that I will say and this might not be a tech theme, but it is incredible facing that tough period that they went through – a good amount of attrition, a CEO splitting his time while being another CEO, massively botched Starbucks deal.”
04 / belief
“The interesting data point around this is, both PayPal and I think Verifone was the other one that basically weren’t doing the underwriting in the way that Square does and they were taking huge losses.”
05 / belief
“I mean, I think there’s a lot of discussion we’ll do about this deal, of the financials of it.”
06 / belief
“” Like, Square is a payments company. Square is a small business company and I think that’s got a lot of power to it.”
07 / belief
“I need to. But I think at one point they shut off his email account. So he’s all in on Square at this point.”
08 / belief
“Highlights what I think Jack in particular is really, really great at, like what his super power is – and we’ll talk about this more in the episode.”
09 / belief
“I think the difference is subtle and I mean it’s best simplified as going from iPhone to going to iPad.”
10 / uncertainty
“Like I don’t know the Square management team personally but I seriously doubt they were actively trying to screw their employees.”
11 / evaluation
“We did our survey and we had a tremendous amount of feedback that said “It seems like you guys just kind of do whatever you want to do” and we hope that you guys like that because that is indeed how this works.”
12 / evaluation
“Like it is one of these things where you often get focused in your own niche or your own work and you read the things that are related specifically to your job, but you don’t think about of like the macro implications of what we’re all doing and it’s a really interesting book where he sort of argues that we’re moving past a world where capital is the expensive and scarce thing and that capital is cheaper than ever and it’s less meaningful than ever before and that knowledge– He talks about attention a little bit but really focuses on knowledge as being the scarce resource, and what does that mean in a world where knowledge is a scarce resource and he talks a lot about AI, machine learning. And if that stuff’s your jam and you like to be a futurist a little bit and have a little bit of sociology bent to it, go check it out.”
13 / evaluation
“The other magic to this whole thing is this is the sort of business that also has zero churn because for Square, on a per cohort basis, so for folks that aren’t familiar, a cohort is like a whole bunch of people who are becoming new customers in the same time frame.”
14 / evaluation
“It’s much more like it gets pushed down if there’s a narrative out there that wants to push it down. And so, I think depending on the story that's told when you’re IPO-ing, you can really get burned by that and that's what sort of Square was realizing, was uh-oh, we are not going to be able to IPO it at $6 billion or it's looking like we’re not going to be able to.”
15 / recommendation
“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.”
16 / evaluation
“Basically everything you would need if you’re a business to manage and run your business. And I think that all really happened or started because of this Starbucks deal.”
17 / evaluation
“It was this huge barrier to doing so and entering the industry. And what Square was able to do and it also I think was technology innovation, but it was on the backend, they were able to let so many people like you and me, Ben, consumers into this world of accepting payments because they got really, really good at fraud prevention.”
18 / evaluation
“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.”
19 / evaluation
“Like it’s not necessarily bad or wrong to create these founding methodologies because that part of how you communicate to your potential customer base, what the company does to the employee base.”
20 / evaluation
“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.”