Square Stormed the Gates of the Credit Card Industry by Challenging Every Assumption
The co-founder of the payments company on how taking on an unsolved problem forced them to innovate
I met Jack Dorsey when he was 15 years old and hired him as a summer intern at my St. Louis software company, Mira, back in 1993. Jack tells people that I was his second boss (after his mother). Sixteen years later, he would become my first.
In the winter of 2008, Jack was out of Twitter and came home to St. Louis, where he and I reconnected and decided to start a new company. At the time, I was mostly out of the technology game and was working as a glass artist in St. Louis. I told Jack about the endless frustrations I’d had with credit cards while selling my work and had been wondering why my iPhone, which could do so many things, couldn’t also process credit cards.
Jack and I knew nothing about the world of payments but decided to dive in.
We soon discovered that established credit card processing companies made the fattest margins off small merchants. There were 5.2 million small merchants who were getting hosed by the current system and desperately needed help. But we also knew there were even more small merchants who had been kept out of the system entirely.
