Jack Dorsey: The Future Has Already Arrived

[Music] thank you well thank you all for having me this is a an amazing honor and I want to use this time to share a few ideas that I like to think about and that have helped guide me throughout my career and have gotten me out of out of school into into building companies but also I want to get as quickly as possible to questions because I believe that the best sort of invention the best sort of conversation happens in this in this dialogue so I'm excited to hear not only questions but also ideas that we can share together so my name is Jack and I never grew up wanting to be an entrepreneur it's not something I woke up and you know the middle of the morning middle of the night saying I really need to be an entrepreneur it's something that I never really never entered into my vocabulary at all and I've never thought about building companies never thought about becoming a CEO never thought about becoming a leader when I was a kid I wanted to do some pretty simple things which I thought were simple at the time which was I wanted to be a sailor I wanted to sail around the world by the time I was 21 I completely failed in that ambition I want to sail by myself and have a cat as well again failed with that ambition as well I wanted to be a sailor because I wanted to explore the world I've always had a curiosity about how the world works and I want to see the world I've always wanted to see every aspect of it and really be wherever wherever I thought was most interesting and and that was the sailing aspect for me I wanted to be a tailor and and this is it not a picture of the water this is actually a picture of denim what was interesting about tailoring was the aspect of craft building something with your hands that someone else would delight from and not being delighted just in the end product not being proud of just the end product but all the work going forward into it right the actual craft of building something of kin acting something like denim and I was always fascinated by denim because it's this natural journal that you wear as you wear jeans if you put your phone in your back pocket all the time it's going to actually make an imprint so you can look at someone's jeans you can actually see how they live how they move and what they do with their life and I thought there was just an amazing amazing concept and and wit really well crafted and I wanted to be a surrealist painter and this was a the one that my parents never really understood all that well in many ways I didn't either but I've learned so much from artists I've learned that you can see the world in the completely different way in fact you can make up how the world should look and then you can build it and you can paint it and you can actually share with people and that actually inspires action inspires people to move inspires people to think in a very very different way and I thought that was just an amazing amazing idea and if I could explore the world if I could craft something and really learn how to build and and how to build a vision of what I wanted to see in the world I could do amazing things always and and that was the concept that I've realized over time is the most important thing for me to do is to see a picture of where I want to go see a picture of what I want to do in the world and then figure out how to work backwards from that and to make sure that every single detail of working backwards from that I'm proud of something that I love to do I love the work not just the end product not just the end picture but every step along the way and in that sense also be able to explore the world and I found this great quote by William Gibson anyone know who William Gibson is just by show hands unfortunately too few sir William Gibson is a science fiction author and he coined the term cyberspace he coined the term cyberpunk in a novel called Neuromancer and he is this great quote which I think really captures everything that we're trying to do in this world as entrepreneurs as founders as builders of companies and products and ideas in that the future has already arrived it's just not evenly distributed yet which is an amazing thing to think about and this is exactly how we run our companies as well we get before the company and say an idea that can change the course of the company can happen anywhere in the company the future is already in all of your heads and your work everything that you have to do in your life is to distribute it it's to make sure that other people can see it it's sharing it with other people so that it resonates in a way that speaks to them and then they want to build it as well right and over the course of of doing that of realizing that picture and making sure that I am distributing my idea distributing my picture to folks I realize that's the most important thing it's to have that strong vision to have that sense of what you want to do in the world to be selfish to build something for yourself and then be able to convince others to do the same and by showing them what to do we talk a lot in the valley we talk a lot in technology about one word and that word is disruption and this is disruption disruption is moving things around moving things scattering it around has no purpose has no vision has no values no leadership this is not what I want to do in the world this is not what I want to see more of in the world I want something with purpose I want something with direction I want something with thoughtfulness so instead of constantly talking about disruption I believe that we should talk and focus more on things like revolution revolution actually has shared purpose revolution has an idea it has values it has leadership at house direction it has something that people can see it has an end state that actually has a positive impact but most importantly it's a cohesive and and experience that people can really get behind and join and sometimes revolution changes ever thing and it's loud and it's violent sometimes revolution is silent and it moves just as much and move can move the entire world and just one image one action so revolution can also take on the power of you know the individual there was a someone I looked to all the time lived a very complicated life did a lot of great things but also did a lot of poor things but a very simple action of collecting salt created a revolution in the country that actually brought India back inspired people to take their own steps inspired people to think in their own way and to really question everything that was going on around them we talk a lot about disruption we don't talk enough about revolution we don't talk enough about values and purpose we talk a lot about founders we talk a lot about founding moments we put so much emphasis on the founding moment of a company the founding moment of an organization the founding moment of an idea and these are the rockstars and the organization's this is what everyone wants to be and I think that's actually not reality the great companies don't have just one founding moment they have multiple founding moments and just to show an example of this we would look at the United States this is one of my favorite paintings because it shows that these guys had a good idea but their best idea is captured in the phrase a more perfect union a more perfect union we did not get everything right today we're not going to get everything right right now others will come and they will finish the painting others will come and actually finish the organization in a way that we just can't predict we can't project right now in in fact they did weed people like Lincoln who completely changed how everyone thought about living in a union everyone thought about living in a United States of America had a significant impact and I would consider him a founding father of our nation of our ideas we had not just individuals but also movements like the woman suffrage completely questioning every single thing that we took for granted before having another founding moment that set the tone for the rest of the country and how the country would move forward JFK not only doing it in this country but also pushing us to explore outside of our planet itself and pushing ourselves to make sure that we're taking on significant engineering challenges we're really going beyond what we consider possible and that is what we always want to strive for in our companies is that we have multiple founding moments we don't have just one right a lot of people look at biz and F and myself and this Greendeer is the the founders of Twitter and then just stop but the thing is Twitter has had multiple founding moments throughout its history we had one spark in 2006 we built and rebuilt sand built sand then we listened we listened to the people using the service and in fact a lot of what you see in Twitter today the app symbol the hashtag the retweet the the word tweet came from the people using the service there was not something that was invented by the company it's not something that was invented by any these guys up here we just made it easier because we were really good listeners we built a simple utility that anyone could come to and build their own social products on top of it and then use it in a way that made sense to them on a daily basis tweet by tweet by tweet and with every single thing that they did we were able to make that a little bit easier and make that with less friction and that increased the usage increased the conception of all the people who were going to use a service and going to use a system so the world certainly places a lot of attention on these founding moments but in fact you don't really need to start a company to have founding moments you don't need to start a company to actually take the company in a completely different direction and a lot of emphasis is also placed on the word entrepreneur someone who is thought to start something new but if you look at the definition of entreprenuer it's actually someone who just takes significant financial risk in order to create something in the world it doesn't say you need to start a company it doesn't say you need to be a CEO it doesn't say that you need to build a business says you need to take significant risk to build something new and the quote that kind of captures the way that I've always thought about building that picture that I want to see in the world is by Steve McQueen this is him in San Francisco he only had one really good quote that's worth remembering or or mentioning but is when I believe in something I fight like hell for it it's when I believe in something I fight like hell for it and that has been my life I've had a picture of what I wanted to see in the world and I did whatever it took to make sure that it succeeded to make sure that it thrived in both company and in the case of both companies Twitter started because I had this fascination with cities I had this obsession with what was happening around the street corners in st. Louis Missouri that I wasn't present at and I had this obsession because my parents had always lived in the city they had a police scanner I could hear the police cars and the fire trucks and the ambulances roam around my city and my parents bought a Macintosh in 1984 when I was 8 years old and I was blown away by that and I decided that if I really wanted to see what was happening in the city I needed to make these maps that I was obsessed with move around and I could do that with the computer so therefore I had to learn how to program I never wanted to be a programmer I never wanted to be an engineer I just had to do it to see this idea or got in 14 I actually learned how to do enough where I could draw the map on the screen and I could draw some dots and I can move the dots around and I figured out how to constrain it within the streets which was a great day for me and then I would listen to these ambulances and there would be I'm at fifth and Broadway I'm going to st. John's mercy I have a patient and cardiac arrest I would type that into my program I could see the dot move and that would be an ambulance move in my city of Santos Missouri so suddenly I had this picture of the city was doing and I had added more and more data sources I figured out how to get into some databases that I could actually see some of these things myself and then I could put him in my program and then one day I realized that 16 that there's a whole industry around this it's called dispatch so I should find the biggest dispatch firm in the world and I should go work there because then I can see the entire city and I found one it was called dispatch Management Services in New York City they just got on public and I could not figure out how to contact them so I was by this time pretty good with computers very curious curious kid and I figured out that they had a hole in their system and I got into their system and I found their email address list for the entire corporation and I got the email for the CEO and I got the email for the chairman and I sent them in the amount said I'm a I'm jack you have a hole in your system here's how to fix it and by the way I write dispatch software and a week later I was hired and that was my resume so I moved out to New York City I dropped out of school for the first time I went to NYU I started working on the system I was loving it because I could see the entire city now we had taxi cabs we had black cars we had couriers we had emergency I could see swarms of taxi cabs going to the Met for an event it was just an amazing amazing thing somewhere along the line after that I then dropped out of NYU so I'm a double dropout which I don't think anyone else can claim in that in the dropout League I dropped out of NYU I went to San Francisco and we started a web-based dispatch firm the company was a complete and utter failure but the one thing that I did realize during my time there was I had all these verticals I could actually see the city in a very very interesting way but I was missing one key element and those were the people where were the people what were they doing and where were they what are they thinking and that's where the idea for Twitter came from 2001 I tried to build a system with my roommate 50 which was a little snub nose pager email pager I spent a weekend I wrote a simple program so could email it it would send an email out to all my friends that I listed out and I went out to Golden Gate Park I said I'm at the Bison paddock in Golden Gate Park typed in an email I went out to the service and I quickly learned two things first no one cared no one cared that I was at the Bison paddock and then second no one else had a blackberry so it was the completely wrong time and the wrong technology for this I put the idea on the Shelf in 2006 2005 2006 SMS got really big in this country because you could send a message from Verizon to singular which is the first time you could cross carriers because singular was GSM which was what SMS was built off of and then Verizon was CDMA and they had no way to talk to each other but in 2006 she actually could so it just became huge even though the rest of the world had it for 10 years and was using it very effectively for 10 years I just fell in love with the technology this is a technology that barely works but it's on every single device and once I saw that technology I said this is the time I was working at a the first company I they'd actually write a resume for which was oh do a podcasting company and I had not a care in the world about podcasting when I joined the company I also learned that no one else cared about podcasting at the company so the company had no direction it had no passion for what it was doing but had an amazing group of people including my two co-founders and they had started bloggers before and they had a sense of what text mediums could do so I could bring up this idea as a very simple idea and said can I have two weeks to work on it and they said yes and we built Twitter in two weeks and the first human written tweet is inviting co-workers which was inviting all my co-workers of the system and then two weeks after that we invited friends and then invite invite invite and I just has taken off ever since but a lot of what you see today hasn't really changed from those initial two weeks it's stayed fairly consistent but it's gotten better and better and better and more refined as we've learned from how people are using it and what they're doing in in 2008 at the end of 2008 I departed the company I switched roles with my co-founder of he was chairman Iowa CEO he became CEO I became chairman and I reconnected with my roots I reconnected with with where I'm from which is st. Louis Missouri and I met reconnected with my friend Jim McKelvey who was my first boss when I was 15 years old he was actually my second boss my first boss was my mother when I was 14 years old at her coffee store making cappuccinos for people who didn't know what really a cap chena was saying Santos was not that sophisticated at the time and I would make cappuccinos and I hated coffee and I would serve a cappuccino and give to someone they would say this is the best cappuccino I've ever had and I said really that's the first one I've ever made so I knew the bar was very low and I could only go up from there but Jim came in to my mother's coffee store and said you know anyone who loves computers works with computers and I said I did and I worked at his office that night and we just developed this great friendship I went back to st. Louis in 2008 for Christmas and we wanted to work together we wanted to do something together we didn't really know what we didn't know what to do together so he had an idea of like let's build an electronic car I said okay I have no idea how to do that but I'd really love to work with you on figuring it out and then we kept coming up with ideas and nothing was really sticking and then he called me in frustration when dang saying Jack I he's a glass artist Jack I just lost a sale because they couldn't accept a credit card and you know we both had these phones next to hers he's I phones and super computers that could do anything right next to our ears and we wondered like why was that so difficult why was it so difficult for Jim to accept a credit card and we took a month and we figured that one and that month was the answer to that question why and that month was the beginning of square since then we've realized what we're actually doing well actually building and it's all around making commerce easy so with Twitter we made communication easy we simplified it down to its base essence we're square we want to make commerce just as easy and the interesting thing about communication and commerce is I don't really see a very large difference between the two we were actually trading goods as a civilization before we're using language to speak with one another commerce actually was occurring before communication was occurring and communication has always been worked on to be more efficient and more free and more frictionless and easier simpler and you see that with Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and in vine today but commerce for whatever reason became more complicated and more abstract and more expensive and it departed from communication but when you really think about what commerce is it's not payments it's a simple activity between buyer and seller it's a simple exchange of value exchange of value is just communication so our mission at square is to make commerce as free as communication to make sure that it goes back to its natural state to make sure it goes back to something social something that is conversational and the way we started is we looked at the system and we realized that hey everyone in the world is paying with plastic now everyone is paying with credit cards are not paying with cash anymore they're not carrying their checkbooks around so you have all these people using these cards but you barely have anyone who can accept them no one can accept them for whatever reason we didn't really know what the reasons were but we found out we saw that people were not only charged for the hardware they were charged monthly they were charged a PCI fee they were charged a fee for the transaction they were charged a percentage fee which is called the interchange which is just this giant guessing game of things that you have to do and it took anywhere from a week to four weeks to even start accepting credit cards right so if the economy is moving to plastic and you can't participate as a small business as a medium-sized business or even as large business then how do you build your business up how do you remain relevant the answer is you can't so that's the problem that we wanted to solve immediately because Jim had that problem because we wanted him to be able to accept credit cards that was the picture initially and it was something that we could achieve we decided that we wanted to get it down to such simplicity that someone could download an app and then under a minute start accepting credit cards download an app put in their name put in their mailing address we would send them a free credit card reader and they were in business so this is square you plug it into the phone and it's very simple and we actually were able to do that we actually were able to build the hardware girls a build the software and we did that in one month and this was the best company to pitch and demo in the world because I would go around to all my friends and to all these investors and say do you want to see my new product and they would say yes I would say well give me your credit card and they would say no and I would say well I'll show someone else then I would say ok and I would take anywhere from five dollars to $500 depending on who it was some people would give me a black Amex and you know exactly what I would do with that so we ate very very well in the early days of the company but the thing is like when people saw that when people saw that swipe they said Wow and the second time they said wow was when they signed on the screen with her finger and it seems very simple now it seems very obvious now but at the time it was seen as the superpower you just took money off my card I said yeah check your statement it'll say Jack Dorsey $500 and they brought up you know their Amex statement and they saw Jack Dorsey $500 and just an amazing feeling and then I would say see ya but it was a it was a great it was a great thing because you could actually like it you had this visceral reaction to something that you only see behind counters you only see behind barriers and now it was right in your pocket and it really resonated with not just individuals like Jim but also larger merchants and and folks who folks who are growing at the same time after we built the original credit card terminal we really looked and listened to our customers and how they were using the system and we realized that the following thing happened on most counters around the country this is what most mom-and-pop stores have in their businesses they have what's effectively a calculator on top of a cash box and then they have a credit card terminal if they accept credit cards which most don't right next to it and the interaction that happens for the buyer is this I walk into this store and I order a cappuccino and they find the cappuccino button and they press the cappuccino button the receipt pops out and says three dollars and 25 cents and I hand over my credit card and they look up and they groan or they sigh and I say okay I'm gonna take this type-in 324 into the terminal into the machine right next to it they swipe the card another receipt pops out they give me that receipt to sign take that receipt back take the other receipt take a coffee card to staple that together give that to me and then I throw that away it's a come it's a complete waste and at the end of the day they don't have any information about what just happened all they have is how much they made the dollar amount if they try to figure out how many cappuccinos they sold during the day and they press the button like the report button the receipt starts flying out and at the end like the ink runs out so they can actually get the answer like the whole thing is terrible the way they count cappuccinos is actually the number of cups coming out of dishwashers right if they need to buy more inventory simple simple simple things like that allow you to make great decisions on how to build your business oh yeah allow you to make decisions whether you want to have a lifestyle company like my mother's coffee store she only wanted to have two employees or you want to build a global business like Howard Schultz all you need is data you need to be able to see what's happening in your business and this doesn't matter what scale you're at so the only way to really do this is not to build too systems but to build one system and that's exactly what we recognized and exactly what we did and we built something called square register so took all the mess off put something in an iPad and there's some really important things that we realized in doing this number one is that merchants put all of this attention and craft into their aesthetic they they really build up their store and then they have to compromise at the counter they have to compromise at the payment system you know they're so proud of what they built and then they have to have this these ugly systems right on the counter and worse it's right before their customers like this is the thing that is in front of their customers when they walk in and there's a few folks who have realized how bad this is if you go to any luxury store you go to like a hermas or a Prada or armani and you buy something first of all you enter in this like weird universe where you can't really tell what time it is and everything looks magical and if you buy that you're going to be a completely different person if they were to put this on the counter that would completely bring people back to reality so what they do is if you buy a belt or you buy a tire you buy anything what they do is they say okay can I please have your credit card and they take your credit card and then they go off into the back room and they close the door and then they swipe the credit card and they print a receipt and then they put the receipt and this like beautiful leather envelope they come out and they say please sign it's like this head the heaviest pen you'll ever feel you sign it like oh my god this experience is so amazing why can't this happen all the time they closed it in one minute please and then they go back into the back room and then they take that receipt and they put it in the most expensive envelope you'll ever see and they take that out and they hand it with two hands and they give you that envelope but it's just a receipt in it it's a paper receipt but they've removed everything that looks mechanical they removed everything that looks like has friction to contain that experience and that actually builds loyalty it actually builds a desire to come back and to really continue to exist in this magical world that they created every single merchant in the world wants to do this they can't they don't have the infrastructure they don't have the basic simple things the other thing that we learned is that the folks who are using this iPad their two-year-olds are using the iPad in fact in many cases their two-year-olds are teaching them how to use the iPad right so if we use commodity hardware that people already know how to use people are already familiar with there's no training it's just intuitive people spend 6 hours of their day behind one of these things right so a better well damn feel amazing and not something that is constantly complicating so we focused a lot of our energy on the merchants but again we were being quite selfish because we go to get coffee every day we go to have food at restaurants every day we go through all these commerce transactions that we love every single day and we have to put up with all this mechanical crap all the time so if we can fix this side of the counter we can actually improve the buyer experience our experience not all of us in the company are merchants barely anyone in the company is merchants is a merchant I hope they may be doing a site business I'm not sure but we we've always approached in this this very selfish way of let's let's improve the buyer experience because if you improve the buyer experience you'll have more buyers and that means more commerce for sellers that means more transactions for sellers but we can do even more so we built the credit card terminal then we realized we have to actually build a register to account for someone's entire business we have to give them great analytics so they can build their business up make simple decisions around it but we can do more than that we can actually improve the payment experience and we can make it disappear and I got in front of the company one day and I said I want us to build an experience where I can walk into a coffee store I can order a cappuccino I can take the cappuccino and I can walk out and on my way out I will wonder if I paid or not right it should feel that intuitive and it should disappear completely and the company came back three months later and built it and we called it square wallet and what it does is you have a consumer with a phone they download square wallet they link their credit card once and then you have all these merchants around and for your favorite merchants you can turn on hands-free payment and what that means is you put your phone in your pocket you keep your phone in your bag you leave your wallet at home you walk up to the merchants you walk into their store and as you walk in your name and your face appears on the register it says Jack is entering the store and it's likely that he's going to order a cappuccino because that's his favorite he gets it every single day so what the tool we just gave the merchant is that they can recognize you by name they can say hey Jack would you like your regular I'm like whoa how did you how did you do that how did you how did you know that this is what Starbucks did with their entire business they trained baristas to ask a very simple question how is your day going very very simple things and then the barista learns about that customer they recognize when they come back in that's what builds loyalty so every single merchants they use ask where has this tool where they can recognize their customers coming in they can say hey Jack and then all I have to do is say you know I'd like a cappuccino you can put it on Jack they hand me the cappuccino I walk out and as I'm walking out to ask me if I want to leave a tip or not right very very simple on my speed doing what I want to do I'm actually tipping the quality of the cappuccino I'm enjoying right now instead of someone's ability to enter in to a point-of-sale system and our merchants have seen a 22 percent increase in tips because of this very very simple thing but this is giving the merchants a tool to build natural loyalty they don't need coupons they don't need Groupons they don't need sales they just need a great product and they need to be able to recognize their customer and what this means it's not just at that place do I have this VIP experience but anywhere I go that's using square I can walk in and they know who I am and they know what I like and they can treat me like a VIP which means that I'm going to keep coming back there again and again and again because it feels like my place it feels like something I own and in fact it's another one of those superpowers it's another one of those things that when people see someone walk up to the counter and say like hey cappuccino please okay thanks for walking away like how'd that guy do that like who's he know who's he friends with I want to do that and those are the products those are the products we want to build these are the products that they give they give people these superpowers that they want to show off naturally Twitter was very very similar in that you can communicate with the entire world from wherever you are you could see what was happening in the entire world wherever you are it doesn't matter if you're in front of TV if you're out if you're in front of a computer all of that has the power to make you better and to give you a better experience and it's so great that people want to show it off and that's how products really really spread we think a lot about this you know this end-to-end experience and one of the things that we derive a lot of inspiration from is something that would find in our own area which is the Golden Gate Bridge something that we we have the opportunity to cross every now and then we really built the company around this very simple idea there's many many aspects of this bridge that I love but going back to something I said earlier it's not just the end product that was magical is also the way they built it if you look at just the end product for a minute what it is is it's a bridge it has one purpose it has one feature and that feature is it doesn't fall down that's all it has to do it just doesn't fall down right and most people who are crossing that bridge they're not thinking about oh is the bridge gonna fall down because they know bridge is probably not gonna fall down there's gonna be some people who are thinking of the bridge is gonna fall down and like why do I have to do this and it's gonna be an earthquake and you know the whole thing but they were actually they're actually protected from that so the bridges goal the bridges function is to get people from point A to point B and most of the commuters that go on this bridge every single day all they're thinking about is point B they're thinking about what's on the other side like what do I have to do at work today what's for dinner tonight like what what am i what are my kids going to say tonight like you know where am I going you know I'm going to this concert I can't wait to get there they're thinking about point B and they're thinking about point B so much that the bridge completely disappears they don't even notice it right it served its function it served its utility it's a utility that does it so well it's so intuitive that it disappears completely and that is magical that's a product those are products that I want to build things that are so intuitive and such a part of people's lives that they disappear when you're using them right and and that's how we think about square that's how we think about Twitter people come to Twitter for a very simple reason it's another A to B they want to get some information from someone or they want to communicate and share with the world with square they want to move money from one place to another or they want to build their business and our job in both cases is to make sure that it stays up 100% of the time if we have any failures if we go down if we have any issues then we are putting ourselves and our issues in front of our customers and they're going to notice it they're going to start thinking about all the failures of the bridge they're going to start thinking about the failures of Twitter you're gonna start thinking about the failures of square instead of the reasons they came to us for so we wanted disappear disappear but the amazing thing about this bridge is if you actually do take a moment to notice it is absolutely breathtaking when you're coming down to Sausalito tunnels and you see the two towers rise above the city which is normally rising out of clouds because it's always foggy there and unlike here which is absolutely gorgeous today it's breathtaking and it literally takes your breath away and you notice that it's not just a bridge that provides utility but it's something that's iconic it's something to be proud of it's something that everyone who worked on this bridge is immensely proud of so proud that they're their grandkids are proud of it today and that's one of the most amazing things about this bridge it's just the story of building it this is a bridge that is crossing one of the most tumultuous spans on the west coast it's this this area underneath the bridge that this area right here is about 60 feet deep underneath the bridge it goes down to 400 feet deep all the weather is forced right through this Golden Gate you have these high winds and you have earthquakes it's the last place on the planet you want to build a bridge 1.7 miles span across the Golden Gate and not only did they have the ambition and the audacity to cross this band and to build something that would last but they also had the audacity to make it beautiful something that people would be proud of 1300 people worked on this bridge 1300 people they cost 1.3 million dollars which would be about I'm sorry 33 million dollars which would be about 1.3 billion dollars in today's money they gave themselves the goal of building it in five years they built it in three years in 1934 which is amazing and it just celebrated its 30 its 75th anniversary it's still up it's still it's still something that you know we we look at and we we wonder at and are proud of you contrast that with what's happening with the Bay Bridge right now the Bay Bridge has been working on by over two hundred thousand people this extension right it's not over a very tumultuous area it's pretty pretty simple it was completely manufactured in China shipped over here to be assembled the goal was originally about seven years it's been over 12 years now no one is proud of this bridge no one is proud of that huge amount of bureaucracy and and the teams and and all the mass and the resources it took so small teams can do really audacious amazing things if they have a vision for what they want to see they didn't just build this bridge and said well you know we need to we need to build a bridge across and we'll figure out what it looks like when we're building it we don't know where it's going but we'll figure it out no they had a specific vision of what that would look like and it wasn't just an engineer saying this is what's going to look like it wasn't just an architect saying this is what it's going to look like it's the pairing of the two if you give an engineer this job of building this bridge it would stay up 100% of the time but it wouldn't be something that anyone would want to remember if you gave an architect the same job it would be something that would look absolutely gorgeous but it wouldn't stand up no could use it right so it's this pairing between the two that actually creates something like this there justice absolutely stunning when you when you see it in person from every single angle so we want to build companies we want to build products we want to build ideas that have a timeless effortless value such as the Golden Gate Bridge something that we can look at and draw inspiration every single day but every company ever idea everything that we do has to have some sort of purpose it has to have the answer to the question why and and this is a question that I think is one of the most important to ask it's the easiest question asked which is why kids ask it all the time and it's the hardest question to answer which is why adults get so frustrated by answering the question but if you keep asking why you keep getting to the essence of what's most important and that is where it truly great ideas where truly great companies come from is the constant asking of this very very simple question getting deeper and deeper and deeper simpler and simpler and simpler into a great question but that's how you drive your your purpose and your vision there's this great quote by Bill Clinton which really speaks to Squares purpose and what we're trying to do in the world which is work is about more than making a living as vital as that is it's fundamental to human dignity to our sense of self-worth as useful independent free people so when I was starting square I was really nervous like how can we attract people to work on payments it is the least sexy thing in the world like no one wants to work on payments no one wants to even deal with it it's not something that people wake up and say oh my god I need to work on payments today I want to revolutionize payments like nobody says that but we can focus on what's really meaningful in payments and it's not and within the realization it's not about payments it's about the experience it's about that end to end it's about building something that allows more conversation happen it's about building something that fades away and disappears completely so people can focus on what's most meaningful to them so before we get into questions I thought I'd end a very simple founding story of my own which were at where I came from my father when he was 19 years old in st. Louis Missouri started pizza restaurant with his best friend and they called the pizza restaurant two nice guys and they were very nice guys my father didn't finished high school his best friend didn't finish high school they never went to college they just loved making pizza again they didn't wake up thinking I need to be a founder I want to be an entrepreneur they just loved making pizza they loved the delight on someone's face when they were enjoying what they made it's very very simple very pure and the business started doing really well because they put a lot of their heart into it and they they loved everything they did and they wanted to preserve their friendship and they wanted to preserve the sanctity of the business so they made one rule I had to hire waitstaff and their one rule was they would not date any other way stuff and the first person that hired was my mother and my father fell in love with this girl Marsha in a week and realized that oh my god and I'm about to break the rule so he went to his best friend he said I fell in love with this girl you can the business as yours I broke the rule and then I was born ten months later when I was my funding story so I thought I would end the speech and the start the questions keeping the baby picture up so that always takes the edge off the questions [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Views: 176,298

Rating: 4.7186184 out of 5

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Management, Media & Technology, start-ups

Id: AckvbL5Tfic

Length: 44min 8sec (2648 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2013