Hello. Good afternoon, and thank you all so much for being here. I want to start us off by asking a quick question. When you think of your neighborhood, what makes it special? What gives it character? What do you think of? I bet the answer is your favorite local restaurant or neighborhood business. The one where you don't go to eat or transact, but you're there to celebrate, build relationships. These are the places where communities gather. This is the magic that makes each of our neighborhoods feel like home, and at Square, we want to help every seller on our platform become a neighborhood favorite. Now, today at Square Releases, we are super excited to show you what's new with Square and how it can help your business. We're incredibly fortunate to serve over four million businesses around the world.
And I'm incredibly fortunate that I get to spend a lot of my time meeting with so many businesses around the world. Just last month, I was actually in Australia. I had the great opportunity to meet with dozens of business owners and operators, many of whom were restaurants. And the questions are often quite similar. How do I simplify my operations? How can I learn more from my data to better run and grow my business? How can I reach more customers and expand my sales channels? How do I better control my costs when the costs of doing business keep rising? These are questions that many of you face every single day. And these are exactly the questions that we set out to solve with this Square Release. With today's release, Square is going all in on restaurants.
From full service to quick service, this is the biggest shift of food and beverage product functionality you have seen. And it's going to be electric. Now, let me give a quick preview of what you're about to see today. First, the team is going to share new tools that help you nail order accuracy even during the busy hours. Then you're going to learn about new systems that help you gain precise control over your costs. We'll share some really exciting new advancements with Square AI that help you make faster data-driven decisions without spending hours in spreadsheets. Let's face it, we could all use some of that. And drum roll, you're going to learn more about Bitcoin and how today you can put Bitcoin to work for your business and save more of every sale in the process.
We have a few other exciting updates at the end. Now, just before we dive in, I want to leave you with a thought. I hope that as we go through this, you feel that these aren't just nice-to-haves products and features. These are true practical solutions built for the realities and rush of today's restaurants. Solutions that work whether you're running your first business or your 500th location. Solutions that fit seamlessly into your existing workflows and actually help you solve the realities of your daily operations and hit your bottom line. That is what this is all about. With that, it is my pleasure to welcome to the stage our Head of Food and Beverage Product and a restaurant owner-operator himself, Ming.
All right. Awesome. So glad to be speaking with you all here today. Before joining Square, I built and operated restaurants for over a decade. I actually currently own eight different restaurant concepts in the Boston area. Quick service, full service. I know our industry's challenges firsthand. Are there any other food and beverage operators in the room? All right. Like I expected, these are my people. Look, well, then I won't sugarcoat it. Running a restaurant today is very hard, and it's getting harder. My team has to juggle phone orders, digital platforms, catering, in-store orders, all knowing that a missed order or a table is lost revenue and an unhappy guest. That's why I'm proud to be running Square's restaurant products, because I believe with the right technology, restaurants can transform operations for the better.
And we're excited to share with you more today about that. Let's talk about our latest innovation, AI-powered voice ordering. Imagine a perfectly trained employee at every location who answers the phones around the clock, never misses a call, knows your menu back and forth, and can answer 15 calls at once and never misses an order. Let's see it in action. All right. We're going to call a restaurant that I know well. It's called Amba Cafe, and it's one of mine.
Hi. Welcome to Omba. Just letting you know we're recording the call to maintain quality. What can I get for you today?
Yeah. I'd like to order a Street Cart Rice Bowl, an Arnold Palmer, and a cookie.
For the Street Cart Rice Bowl, would you like it with cold mushroom, falafel, chicken shawarma, or lamb kofte?
Yeah. I'll do chicken shawarma and falafel.
I've got your Street Cart Rice Bowl with chicken shawarma and falafel, a cool mint Arnold Palmer, and a Florentine cookie. Would you like to add anything else? If not, can I get your name for the order?
Actually, on second thought, let's not do the cookie. I told my wife I would avoid sugar.
No problem. I've removed the cookie from your order. Anything else you'd like to add?
No, that's it.
Can I get your name for the order?
Yes. It's Ming, M-I-N-G.
Great. Sending your payment link now. One moment while I process your order. Your order is almost set, Ming. Please complete your payment using the link I just texted you. Once paid, your order will be ready for pickup in about 15 minutes. Come see us at the register at your pickup time. Can I help you with anything else?
No, that's it. Thank you. All right. So I can make a quick payment here with my Cash App Wallet, and then it should appear on the KDS. There we go. Look, this is just the beginning of voice technology improving a wide array of use cases in restaurants. Really excited to see where the operators take this next. Now, voice ordering is just one part of our big vision for taking orders everywhere. Let's talk about delivery. For far too long, restaurants have had to juggle multiple tablets, tablet farms from Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, and then wait up to 11 days to receive their earnings. With Square, all of these orders from DoorDash, Uber Eats, and now Grubhub flow directly into your point of sale. No more tablet chaos, no more missed tickets, easy 86ing, just with one system.
And with a Square Checking account, receiving access to your delivery earnings instantly. So you can count on your cash flows when you need them most. And delivery is just one more thing that we're improving. We're hearing from guests that they want self-serve, easy ways to order in store, a.k.a., looks like people don't want to talk to people anymore. And kiosks make that possible. They're not just convenient for customers. They're a powerful way to serve more people, especially during those peak rush times. With Square Kiosks, ordering is up to 30% faster, keeping lines moving, and helping your staff focus on hospitality. And the best part, whether it's delivery, kiosks, or in-store ordering, you only have to manage your menu in one place: bulk edits, seasonal specials, price changes, updated all in Square Dashboard. And it syncs instantly everywhere.
That's one powerful menu, all locations, all channels, all your fancy customizations perfectly in sync, and on top of it, you have Square reporting, so you can see all your channels all in one place, see what's working, what's not working with all that rich data. This is what we mean by taking orders everywhere. It's not just about being on all the platforms. It's about making all those channels work seamlessly together so you could focus on your customers and growing your business. Thank you. I'm excited to meet and speak with you all later. Now I'd like to introduce Andy Schwartz, who's going to talk about the flip side of this coin, your cost.
Good job, buddy. Good job, buddy. There you go.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ming. Hey, everyone. I'm Andy. I lead our financial suite of products here at Square, and I'm really psyched to be here. I spent the last 10 years in food and beverage, where I was co-founder and CEO of xtraCHEF, a back-office automation tool that streamlined the supply chain, helping restaurants better manage their money, time, and get paid faster. One of the main reasons I'm here at Square is to help build products that increase your profits and put money back into your business. Now we're going to talk a little bit about how. Ming just spent some time talking about taking orders everywhere, and I want to talk about something that's also critical to every business and even harder right now, controlling costs. As everybody knows, margins are tight. Food prices keep rising. Labor costs are higher than ever.
But as a business owner myself, I see firsthand how technology can streamline your business and actually make you more money. And I'm not alone in thinking this. Just last week, we heard from a restaurant owner who's spending 15 hours every week managing vendor relationships and comparing prices. Another told me they're losing sleep over whether they're getting the best deals from their suppliers. And here's the reality. Restaurants spend about 30% of their food costs of sales on food costs and have less than 10% margins, making any cost control tool critical to operating a profitable business. That's why we're excited to be expanding Square's tools for vendor management and accounting to make it easier for you to understand your costs and control your costs. Meet Square's new Order Guide, an AI-powered procurement tool that helps sellers take back control when it comes to rising food costs.
Let's take a look at how it works.
With Order Guide from Square, you can compare prices from your food vendors. Let's say you run a local burger chain. You're ordering meat, bread, fresh produce, and condiments. Each vendor has a different spreadsheet, format, and delivery schedule. It's a lot to keep track of. Order Guide helps you get all your food vendor data into one place and compare prices in real time and by unit, think pounds or ounces, so you always know who's giving you the best deal. Setup takes minutes. Upload your menu and instantly build a complete ingredients list. Next, import your price sheets from your food vendors to generate your Order Guide. You can track SKU level spend, spot price trends, and update your purchasing strategy without bouncing between emails with your produce guy and phone calls with your beef supplier.
With restaurant margins on food only getting tighter, the Order Guide helps you spend smarter and get the best deal so you can invest more in showing up for your regulars each and every day. Access it in your dashboard to import your menu. Head to squareup.com/dashboard to give it a try.
Wow. That's pretty sick. You can start saving today with Order Guide and our new full suite of accounting tools on dashboard under the items section. We can't wait for you to try it. And please give us your feedback. But what excites me most is seeing how it's already helping our sellers, giving them more control over their purchasing and taking a lot of the manual work off their plate so they can increase their savings. Order Guide is just the start of how we're transforming restaurant procurement. It's more than a tool. It's a partner that helps you uncover savings, streamline your purchase costs, and put real cost control back in your hands. Thank you all so much. And now I'd like to introduce Stephanie Grodin to introduce our next release.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andy. Hi. I'm Stephanie, the Product Lead for Square Point of Sale and Square AI. I've spent over 20 years helping small businesses succeed, and I've been building tools at Square for the past eight years, and that's why I'm so excited to introduce Square AI, your always-on business partner built right into your Square Dashboard. Square AI is designed to help you make decisions faster. You can check daily sales, explore performance in a multitude of different ways, and get clear, actionable insights by combining your business data with industry and local trends. I'll give you an example. One business owner in our beta asked Square AI if it made sense to keep his wine bar open an extra hour each night. AI instantly showed tips from that hour were significant.
And within minutes, he and his staff decided to stay open, a decision that used to take hours of spreadsheets and debate. And we're not done yet. Today, we're rolling out some exciting new features for Square AI that take it to the next level. Pin data, save AI-generated insights right to your dashboard, auto-updated for you. Mobile access, use Square AI anywhere, anytime through the Square Dashboard app. And my personal favorite, neighborhood insights. Tap into local weather, events, news, and reviews in your area with Square AI. For example, you could ask, what are the most popular dishes at restaurants near me? And get local insights that help you get creative and bring in more customers. Now, beyond just talking about it, I want to show you how Square AI works for business owners like you.
We're fortunate to have Gary Thomas, Owner and CEO of Keva Juice, who's been using Square AI to optimize his operations across 11 locations and multiple channels. Gary, welcome.
All right. All right.
You got this.
Thank you so much, Stephanie, and happy to be here today. I've been in business for over 20 years, and it was immediately clear to me how Square AI brings all of the data to our fingertips like never before, transforming our speed to execution. It's especially important given the competition today. Square AI puts us on par with billion-dollar brands and allows us to spend more time focusing on the customer experience. Before Square AI, I was constantly keeping tabs of our sales trajectory in reports. But now I can simply ask, show me monthly sales this year versus last year and get a chart in a few seconds. I can expand into full-screen mode to get a better view and instantly see how I'm pacing. But for me, the real beauty comes from being able to combine multiple variables.
Let's start with my sales by day of the week. I can ask, break down for each one of my locations, and boom, I have data I could have gotten before, but by spending time piecing in multiple reports together. And I can follow this line of questioning as far as my curiosity takes me. I've looked at sales trends by hour of the day, by customer type, and by sales channel. I can download the data or pin it to my dashboard where it'll auto-update, and it's always fresh. Square AI has empowered me to order ingredients, set schedules, and plan promos more confidently. Another big unlock has been menu optimization. We sell a lot of seasonal items, and I recently asked Square AI about the top sellers last year. I was surprised to see that our Smashing Pumpkin Smoothie blew the others out of the water.
and based on this insight, we launched it over a month earlier this year and introduced a second fresh pumpkin smoothie, the Pumpkin Chai Chiller. We expect this decision to drive $250,000 higher revenue compared to last year, all based on the quick insight I may not have gotten if I wasn't able to dig into Square AI. I believe that we're on the onset of AI, and there's never been a more exciting time to be in business. and I can't wait to see how it can continue to transform our operations. Thank you, Stephanie.
Thank you, Gary.
Thank you.
Thank you, Gary. Thanks so much for sharing your experience and for joining us here today. And this is just the beginning for Square AI. We're seeing incredible adoption and feedback, especially for larger sellers who have more complex needs. I encourage you to all try Square AI today in your dashboard and dashboard app. It's available now, and we'd love to hear your feedback as we continue to evolve this technology to serve you better. And now I'd like to introduce Miles to talk about our next release.
Thanks, Steph and Gary. Hi, everyone. I'm Miles Suter, Bitcoin product lead here at Block. I've spent over eight years living and breathing Bitcoin, and that's why I'm so excited to be talking to you about it today. But I also know that not everyone is as deep in it as I am. So let's do a quick show of hands. Who here owns some Bitcoin? ok. And what about if you've ever been a little curious about it? Well, let's go. That's great. Here's the thing. For a long time, Bitcoin was a far-off concept, especially for restaurants, coffee shops, and small businesses. But that's changing. Bitcoin is starting to work like everyday money. It's gone from just a store of value to something much bigger. And at Block, we think it can actually be transformative for businesses of every size.
Square's whole reason for existing is to give you the tools to adapt to whatever's next and to turn that into opportunity. Money and payments are changing fast, and we want to make sure you've got the tools to meet your customers wherever they are, even if you're the furthest thing from an expert. So today, I'm really excited to announce Square Bitcoin, the first fully integrated Bitcoin payments, treasury, and wallet solution built for local businesses. Here's what that actually means. First, Bitcoin payments. And this one's huge. You can now accept Bitcoin right through your point of sale with zero processing fees through 2026. Not just lower fees, zero. That means near-instant settlement, no chargebacks, and more of every sale staying in your pocket. And the best part, you can accept these payments as U.S. dollars without even thinking about it.
It's just another payment option blended in seamlessly to your current experience, except it's free. Next, if you're ready to use Bitcoin to save and invest in your business, I'm excited to announce Bitcoin conversions. This feature lets you automatically convert a slice of your card sales into Bitcoin every single day. It's a smart, seamless way to build savings in the background. Think of it as a hedge against inflation and a way to set aside value for the future. We've already been piloting it, and sellers are seeing real growth in those converted balances, empowering some merchants to even be able to expand and open new locations. And all of this runs straight from your Square Dashboard with our native Bitcoin wallet. You can buy, sell, hold, withdraw, all inside the same tools you already use to run your business. This isn't about bolting on Bitcoin features.
It's about making powerful financial tools simple and accessible to anyone running a shop, restaurant, or small business. For us, this is about helping local businesses of all stripes to future-proof. Just like Order Guide helps you control costs today, Square Bitcoin gives you more control over payments, fees, settlement speed, and long-term strategy for the future. And I'm excited to announce Bitcoin conversions is live, starting today. And Bitcoin payments will roll out to all eligible U.S. sellers on November 10th. For the last year, Bitcoin treasury companies have been all the rage on Wall Street. Today, we are thrilled to be democratizing access to this superpower to Main Street. Because when local businesses thrive, whole neighborhoods thrive with them. So with that in mind, I'm excited to bring up a seller who's already been using these tools. Please welcome Joe Carlo, owner of Pink Owl Coffee.
Miles, how you doing? Thanks, Miles. Hi, everyone. I'm Joe Carlo, owner of Pink Owl Coffee in California. Our shop started as a passion project with my fiancée inspired by her breast cancer journey. Pink represents the fight, the owl, the long nights we've spent building the business. We wanted to create a neighborhood space that feels personal and community-driven. Like a lot of small businesses, we're always thinking about how to make numbers work, especially with costs rising, coffee, sugar, labor, you name it. That's where Bitcoin's been a game changer for us. Back in 2023, we turned Square Bitcoin conversions. Every day, about 10% of our sales automatically convert into Bitcoin. It's completely seamless. I don't even think about it, and under two years, that self-set-it-and-forget-it approach has built us close to three whole Bitcoin. For us, it's a reserve account that actually grows in value.
We even tapped a small portion to invest back into the shop, upgrades that boosted sales immediately while still keeping most of it as a long-term asset for the future, and the best part is we don't have to be Bitcoin experts. It's built right into the same Square Dashboard we already use for scheduling, inventory, invoices, and everything. Bitcoin's gone from this far-off idea to something that works for everyday businesses like mine. With Square, it's not complicated. It's just part of running the shop, and that gives me confidence that we're not just keeping up, we're getting ahead.
Awesome, Joe. And thank you for joining us. And we'd like to welcome our next speaker, Willem, to the stage.
Hello, everyone. I'm Willem, Global Head of Product for Square. I first want to thank all of our partners and customers for coming here today. Thank you. You are the reason why we wake up every single day and work so hard to build incredible software and hardware. Next, I want to thank all of the presenters who covered awesome innovations here today. Thank you. Wow, it's just incredible what we've launched. We're helping restaurants with next-generation tools like AI voice ordering. We're helping them control their costs with Order Guide. We're helping businesses make smarter, more personal, and better decisions with Square AI. And finally, Square Bitcoin, which we think is going to be completely groundbreaking. I want to say that today we are back to building, and everything we've launched shows it.
I have a promise to you that we're going to show up with each and every release with speed and innovation. You can count on that from us. While we've built this incredible platform, we've also made it complicated. We've locked a lot of it behind paywalls. You really shouldn't need a PhD to figure out how Square can work for you. So today, I'm very proud to announce a new pricing and packaging plans for Square. Whether you're just starting out, scaling up, or accelerating with advanced capabilities, we are here for you. Now, if you need something custom, we have the industry-best API platform, as well as a world-class account management team that will help you get set up for exactly what you need. So we believe that there's an industry filled with competitors that don't really hold the same values that we do.
But you can count on us to always have no hidden fees, no surprising costs, and no empty promises. So I truly believe that these plans are the best reflection of Square. When the best technology gets into the hands of local businesses, they can succeed, and they can invest in their neighborhood. That's what economic empowerment means to us. So this is just the start. We're listening. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your challenges, your stories. I'll be around later to help. Ask me any questions about anything that's on your mind. And now I'm excited to announce Brian Grassadonia, founder and creator of Cash App.
All right, how's everybody doing? Awesome. Good afternoon, and thank you for coming, so I'm incredibly excited to get to chat with you all today, and believe it or not, it's actually been almost 13 years since I've had the privilege of launching a product on behalf of Square, so to just share a little bit of background, I was the first product manager at Square back in 2010, and I was part of the team that launched our original flagship product, the Square Card Reader, so after working on that for a couple of years, I went on what I thought would be a short journey and ended up being quite a long journey to explore solutions that would help us lower the cost of payment processing for our sellers.
And as part of that exploration, we quickly came to the realization that in order to do that, we needed to create a platform that could achieve absolutely mass market scale in order to make a dent and also achieve a lower cost of funding. So we went on this exploration, and as part of our journey, we kind of came across peer-to-peer payments, and we decided to launch a product in 2013 called Square Cash. Our customers later renamed this product on our behalf to Cash App. And I spent the next 12 years scaling Cash App to become one of the country's largest financial applications, reaching today 57 million monthly actives and moving in over $300 billion every single year.
So last year, I moved on from Cash App to kind of come back full circle and explore product solutions that could not only help us leverage Cash App to lower the cost of payment processing for our sellers, but also leverage Cash App to drive economic empowerment for our sellers in a much, much deeper and more meaningful way. So we began to kind of explore this work in the Neighborhood. And you've heard a lot about Neighborhoods today. And I just believe that Neighborhoods is where the opportunity for economic empowerment really comes to life. And I've always believed that in many ways, Neighborhoods are kind of the battleground of the cultural identity of our society.
On one side, you have the opportunity for neighborhoods that are driven by a thriving small business community with creators and builders and entrepreneurs that are inspired and infusing creativity into their storefronts and their products. And we've always been about building solutions that help these entrepreneurs start, run, and grow, building software solutions that streamline their operations. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about the solutions that we could build to help our sellers grow as well, attracting new customers, retaining their existing customers, and engaging their customers. I've always felt that this work is incredibly important. But all too often, our neighborhoods don't end up taking the shape of what we just looked at.
I think we've all experienced or visited neighborhoods that look more like this, kind of a repeatable grid where we take the 50 largest national chains and kind of put them in place, and these neighborhoods, they aren't always places that inspire us. They aren't places that we love to linger. They're kind of more utilitarian. We go there because we need food or we need to buy something really quickly, but I would much rather our neighborhoods have the vibrancy of what we just looked at, and the unfortunate reality is many of these national chains really have a more sophisticated suite of tools to open new locations with repeatable playbooks, software suites that help them streamline their operations, and tools that help them grow to attract new customers, engage their customers, and retain their existing customers, and they've gotten really sophisticated in the last few years.
We've seen a major trend where large national chains have been developing first-party proprietary branded apps in order to develop a much deeper relationship with their customers, and the strategy is really, really working for them. The playbook is they develop an application. Many of them do the same thing. They develop an application that wraps kind of online ordering with a rewards program, and consumers really love this. This is working quite well. The benefit to the national chains is that they have a direct relationship with their customers where they're not getting disintermediated. They're able to message their customers when they need to re-engage them or drive win-back campaigns, and this is a really, really valuable tool, and this playbook has kind of become a best practice for national chains across the country, as we kind of see from the App Store here.
There's a lot of really successful applications, and so local businesses are kind of looking at this, and they have the same job. They are looking for ways in which they can develop deeper relationships with their customers, and many of them have tried to develop similar applications. There are white-label solutions that can kind of help them do this, but the stark reality is that for many local businesses, this solution just isn't a practical reality. It's not working, and it's not working for a lot of reasons. The first reason is a lot of these applications kind of get lost in the clutter. We all have phones with many applications on them, and we kind of know what this feels like. For many consumers, it's just not realistic for them to want to carry dozens of apps on their phone.
When they do visit these applications, oftentimes they're logged out. They kind of forget their login. Many of the most successful large national chains are able to drive a stored balance ecosystem where they're able to drive down the cost of funding. And this is also just not a realistic solution where consumers are going to do this for a much longer tail of apps. And also, it's just not realistic for consumers to kind of manage a fragmented suite of different rewards programs. And so I don't believe that the solution is a realistic one for local businesses. So what are local businesses supposed to do to kind of drive growth and level the playing field? We know that the kind of solutions of the past, these antiquated rewards and loyalty programs, these aren't going to work. There are definitely digital solutions.
We offer a digital solution of loyalty, Square Loyalty, that does a pretty good job helping businesses develop a customer directory, and you can message customers. But I just don't believe that it goes far enough. I don't believe that it's at a level playing field with what other national chains have been able to create with their own applications. So we kind of set out to solve this problem and develop a solution for local businesses that levels the playing field. And so we're creating a solution that delivers online ordering with the power of a mobile app for all local businesses on Square. And so what's going to give this solution the power of a mobile app? We'll talk about the feature set now. So as we talked about before, Cash App has been able to build up a very, very large pool of stored balances.
We bring in over $300 billion a year into the application, and so we're going to be able to give the leverage of that stored balance to all of the sellers on our network, and because of that, we're able to offer only a 1% processing rate for all orders in the app. Third, we're developing a network-wide rewards program so that consumers can kind of streamline their reward systems, and they only need to kind of keep track of one loyalty program across networks, and this drives a lot of benefit for sellers in the network because it also helps them attract customers that have points that they can use at their store. Our sellers will be able to build a loyal base of followers that they can turn their regulars into followers to build up their proprietary relationships and build an audience.
And we're going to provide them free tools to market to those followers without any gatekeeping. They're your followers. You can message them. You can drive campaigns free of cost. And so with that, I'm excited to announce Neighborhoods. And so this is what it looks like. And next, I'm just going to play a video that helps bring it to life.
All right. You guys excited for Neighborhoods? All right. ok, so we're just getting started bringing our first wave of sellers onto the network. And if you're interested in joining that first wave, please visit squareup.com slash neighborhoods to get started. All right, thank you, everybody.
Good job. All right, that was super exciting. I hope you guys are feeling pumped up. There's a lot of great innovation you've seen, and I know I speak on behalf of all of our presenters when I say the most exciting part is going to be how you all put it to work for your businesses. Now, we would genuinely love your feedback. This is what gets us going, so if there's particular things you are really loving, let us know. We'd love to hear it. Also, feel free to tell your fellow business owner friends if there are things, new ideas you want us to try and solve, please give us feedback, and you can share that right here. Now, I am incredibly excited to share that What's Up Next is a very special fireside chat with two truly incredible, legendary innovators and entrepreneurs.
Joining me on stage in just a moment will be Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Square & Block, and Randy Garutti, the CEO of Shake Shack for over two decades. I can't wait to have a conversation. There's going to be incredible wisdom that's gathered. So stay tuned in, and we'll be back in just a moment. All right. Can you guys hear me? All right. How was that? Did you guys have fun? Yeah? ok. This is going to be a fun conversation. All right, so let's get ready for it. Please join me in welcoming Jack and Randy. Hi, guys. Thanks for being here.
Good to be here.
It's going to be fun.
Yes.
This is great. ok, right before we get into it, it's hard to introduce yourself. So I'm going to boast a little bit about these two. Randy, you helped turn Shake Shack over 24 years from a hot dog cart that started out here in New York City, amongst a lot of hot dog carts, to an iconic brand with over 500 locations across 18 countries.
625 now.
Oh, wow. 625. ok, that's insane. Jack, you started Square in 2009, if we all remember the little iconic white reader, which, if you think about it, at the time was transformative for businesses and entrepreneurs everywhere who could now follow their dream, accept payments, and run a business, and you've expanded that far beyond. Square is now.
We have.
I love that. Thank you. We have all expanded this far beyond, including Block, which is Cash App and Bitcoin and a lot of the great stuff you guys saw here today. These two have a lot of wisdom. We don't have endless time. So we're going to get into it. But first, I thought we'd start out with some surprise questions. I hope you guys are ready. Jack, we're in New York. What is your favorite restaurant in New York? Your favorite meal?
Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken.
Do you like how fast that was? That was like, I know the answer.
As soon as I land, I know it's open till 4:00 A.M., and I don't know what time I come in. And I can always get a really good meal. And the vibe there is incredible.
I needed that when I landed late the other night. ok, Randy, different question. Your favorite meal at Shake Shack?
Double Smoked Shack, extra bacon, Cookies and Cream Shake, Cheese Fries, and a Chicken Shack and a lettuce wrap just on a second bun.
This is one meal?
Can you walk after this?
I got to try all the products.
ok, ok. Everyone's taking notes. I love it. Jack, favorite thing you vibe coded recently?
I vibe coded an app called BitChat, which is a Bluetooth peer-to-peer app. And I recently learned about three weeks ago that the young generation in Nepal overthrew their government with it. So that was kind of cool.
What? ok, that's a round of applause. Wow. Randy, hard to follow that one. But I'm just going to say you recently retired after 24 years as CEO of Shake Shack. What hobbies have you taken up?
I'm not comfortable with that word, retired, yet. Listen, I'm not missing a single soccer or basketball game with my kids because I miss a lot.
I love that.
That's the number one focus, but professionally, I'm spending a lot of time with young entrepreneurs, startup sellers, just learning and supporting them and trying to share lots of the mistakes that we made and some of the things that we got right, and that's been probably the most fun I'm having right now.
I love that. That's awesome. ok, we're going to go back to the beginning, early days. You both, when you started out, had a lot more in mind than just a product or a new service. You both had big, bold, disruptive visions and weren't willing to accept things as they were. Randy, what made you think that you could take a hot dog cart amongst a sea of other hot dog carts while you were, I believe, in fine dining at the time and turn it into what is now Shake Shack?
Well, I won't bore you with the whole story. But for all of you small sellers in the room, we were just a fine dining company with one restaurant at a time, Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern. And we put out a hot dog cart one day to raise money for an art project. And 50 people lined up and 100 people lined up. And we ran that hot dog cart for three years. And nobody wanted to deal with it. It was a pain in the ass. We were busy running fine dining restaurants. And it turned into this little burger joint. But it wasn't for nearly seven years after the hot dog cart that we opened our second location. And I think we never sat there and said, let's have 500 restaurants or let's have an IPO. And I think that's exactly why it happened.
We just cared about one burger at a time for years and years and years. We surrounded ourselves with the most high-energy, fun, naive young group of leaders who just wanted to kick ass doing one great thing. And because of that, we earned the right to do a second great thing and then a third and then a fourth. And it just went as truly organically. And I think if I had known everything I know today and you put me back in that job 25 years ago, I would have messed it up. And that was the whole beauty of just being a single unit operator having fun.
Yeah. Jack, you first launched a product that helped people take payments. But I know from the beginning your vision was much broader and tied to economic empowerment. And you kept building. How has that kind of bigger, more disruptive vision shaped both the problems you tackle and where you focus the team?
Our vision wasn't actually that large when we started. And I think for most entrepreneurs, it's just so hard even beginning that you have to figure out exactly what Randy said. You have to figure out what's next by actually doing the work. So I remember the one moment, the crystallizing moment for us is we were building this credit card reader. And it felt magical because you could plug it into your phone. And it was cool that we were like listening to the little audio track on the back of a credit card, which no one really knew that there's audio on the back of all these credit cards. And we figured out a way to hack it and build this. And we built a reader. We built some software. We built some server software on the back end.
And then we would try to sell it to the merchants around my apartment, which is where our office was. And we realized it took us a little bit of time to realize it. But nobody wanted to accept credit cards. That's not what they wanted at all. But the world was actually moving to a place where more and more of their customers were using plastic because it was more convenient. So the sellers didn't want to accept credit cards, but they didn't want to miss the sale. So they wanted to make the sale. And if we didn't have that insight, if we didn't go a little bit deeper into the why behind what we're making, we would have been a very small company. And I would not be here talking to you at all.
When we had the insight of it's not about building a credit card reader, it's about helping a seller make the sale, then that allowed us to look at the point of sale. That allowed us to look at lending money to sellers to help them build their business, customer relationship management, staff management, all these other things that made us the company that we are today. And to Brian's point earlier, Cash App came out of an exploration to minimize the cost to sellers and look at making the payment rails even more efficient. And now, finally, after 16 years, we can actually pass that on where we can save 1% for a transaction fee, which is pretty incredible. So we didn't have the vision for Cash App before. We didn't have the vision for everything that we have in our ecosystem today.
We just kept asking the question, why? And we figured out and pulled the thread. And little by little, it expanded and compounded and compounded. And I think our success has only been limited by our speed of iteration and how quickly we can experiment and how quickly we can see if something feels great. It feels amazing. We can listen to our sellers and get feedback from them. And if that's slow, then we fail. The more we can speed that up, the faster we can react to our demand, our customer demands. But ideally, we want to be a company that's like 10 steps ahead of a customer expectation and a customer desire. And I think we're now finally in this year getting back to that, which is how we started the company. But there was no grand vision.
And anyone who tells you that there has ever been a grand vision, I think is making the story up a bit. Because you just don't know. You have to feel it. You have to discover it. There's no true invention. These are all discoveries. And you discover by actually using the thing or talking to your customers or figuring out that you now need to sell a chicken sandwich. And we've heard that twice now on this stage. But those are the things that really break the company open and break the potential open. And those unexpectedly great things are what gives you, I think, the lasting power.
I'm going to guess that you both have had to buck conventional wisdom at one point or another. Was there a time when someone said, this won't work, but you pushed forward and it was an important milestone? And what did it feel like?
So many times. So many times. And I think it was probably mostly us who said that to ourselves. We asked one question day in and day out as entrepreneurs that I hope all of you ask in your business. Whoever wrote the rule, it's got to work this way. So all we did is we said, like, ok, traditional burger. We didn't invent the cheeseburger. We're not going to be the last ones to make a good one. There's really good cheeseburgers and shakes and fries. We did zero unique things, zero. But we took every little bit of what traditional fast food had destroyed over a 50-year period and said, what if we just do that one little thing a little bit better, a little bit better, and a little better?
Every day, my mantra with the team in the restaurants was, today, we need to do what everybody else is unwilling and unable to do. And that's not that hard. And 95% of people will walk through their day and they do what everybody else is willing and able to do. Who do you want to be when you go home? And that's what I would say to our team is, like, just do the thing that we're unwilling and unable to do. I'm glad Amrita, the Block CFO, is not here. Because what I was going to say is, if Amrita had looked at the decisions we made from a financial perspective in the beginning of the company, there is no way any smart financial person would have signed off on what we did. And that's exactly what sometimes you got to do.
Yeah.
For us, there's four points we like to think in for the Square. First, the first time was actually starting the company at all. Visa told us that this is never going to work. Actually, we weren't allowed to use their network. That was pretty scary because that was our whole business model. One significant dependency on that one person saying yes. They said no for nine months until we could prove it out. Then we had this board of all these old head financial folks from Goldman Sachs and everywhere else in the world. We were planning on launching Square Loans, which was called Square Capital at the time. They said that would never work. We should never be in that business. It took us another six months of convincing them, like, this is going to work. It's fantastic.
There's a gap in the market. Because when small sellers go to banks, they're giving them this huge onslaught of cash. And it puts the seller into really negative behaviors. And they outspend and get into this cycle of debt. And that's the financial industry by design, by the way. So we were giving sellers $1,000 or $5,000. And it was an invite instead of them having to ask for it based on the understanding we had of them. So we got through that. And then the third was Cash App itself. Every single person in the company hated this thing, said that we should not be doing it. Our COO at the time was what was his role, Brian? PayPal? Well, he had a big role. He's in the PayPal mafia. And he said, you know, PayPal exists, Venmo exists. There's no chance that another peer-to-peer app would work.
That was the tone. It was such a tone in the company that we only mentioned Cash App, I think, eight times in the S-1. Like, it was nothing because we wanted to kind of hide it. That worked out. And then finally, Bitcoin. Everyone in the company hated it. There were a lot of people outside of the company, including our investors, not you all. You all loved it. They just didn't really understand it. And like, what does this have to do with anything you're doing? And it was a bet. But we want to make a bet on something that is an alternative to Visa and Mastercard. We want to make a bet on an open network.
We want to make a bet on an open protocol for the internet that allows us to move money and be on a level playing field that we can bring all our customers onto as well, and those four times are probably the most significant in our company. We had some smaller ones, but every one of those, if we took the other path, again, I would not be on the stage talking with you. Randy would not be on our board, and it would just be a very different company, and there's more to come, which we're really excited about, which we'll talk about soon, but those are the moments in the company where I think as a leader in the company, you have to be ok with losing credibility.
Because in each one of those moments, and every phase was different, everyone in the company thought I was a Block Head, which is why I named my role Block Head. But everyone in the company thought I was losing my mind. Like, why are we doing this thing? And you have to be comfortable with that loss of credibility to do what you believe is the right thing for your company and do something completely different.
I want to piggyback off that point and maybe shift gears to leadership and accountability. Right? Like, every entrepreneur, everyone in this room, I'm sure, has faced those moments where the playbook falls apart. Right? Things get really hard. You don't know what the right answer is. And it's hard to make the tough calls and lead through change in that time. Randy, I think the pandemic was hard for everyone. But I think you had to shift everything operationally. Can you maybe share a bit about that journey? And also, what did you learn in terms of leading through chaos, leading through change?
This morning, I was with a group of young entrepreneurs from China, 60 of them who are studying at Cornell Tech here in New York, and I shared with them a little bit of our journey, and I put up a slide. January 23, I think I got the date right, was the day that, in 2020, the day that Wuhan shut down. I was in Guangzhou choosing sites for our southern China expansion for Shake Shack. It was crazy, and my wife's calling me like, "Hey, you might want to come home," and I'm like, "No." Like, bad things don't happen to me. Like, I'm good. We're going to finish this trip out. When I think about leadership now, as I try to describe it, there's lots of good definitions.
But the word I'm trying to use is similar to how I think I got to be as a husband and a dad. So my 21-year anniversary is tomorrow.
Woo!
I got three kids. Thank you. Sturdy is the word I think leaders got to be. I think when stuff goes bad, which it does every day, and when stuff goes good, are you a leader who is sturdy and still standing tall? When the wind is blowing, most people run for the hills. At that moment, I'm going to stand there, and I'm going to try to dig my roots deeper so that the next time the wind blows, I'm even sturdier, and today, as I try to work with young leaders, it's like, who are you going to be when the tough stuff and those tough moments come?
Yeah.
You got to be sturdy. That's my favorite new word.
Jack, you have clearly faced a lot of critical moments and inflection points. Maybe I'll ask you to speak a bit more about how did you rally the team and make those hard calls when people didn't believe it?
I think the only way to do it is for people to feel it themselves. So this principle of show, don't tell. And if people can get excited about it because they feel like, wow, this thing feels electric, like we need to get this out there, then everything else takes care of itself. And it's a battle a lot of the time. But we can't win if you just have one person telling you you have to be excited about this thing. It has to be intrinsic. And it has to be something that people feel really good about. And it's also, by the way, a good test to see, like, is this really the company you want to be at? This is where we're going. This is what we're trying to do. And if it's not, that's great because it saves us a bunch of heartache.
And it saves you a bunch of heartache as well. And we just need to recognize that and acknowledge it in part ways. And I think early in most companies or early in most leaders' careers, they don't recognize that. And it's just hard to push that. But you need to set some opinionated milestones or stakes in the ground such that it's enough provocative that it really filters the company a little bit more in every direction. And as soon as companies stop doing that, I think they become more and more irrelevant.
You both, I know, are incredibly passionate about customer experience and also the power of design to transform the customer experience in a good way. Jack, I'm going to go back to you to start. You talk a lot about making the complex things simple, right, and doing things that give our customers time back. What are your guiding principles as we approach new problems to make sure our product and design teams are making the complex things simple and really fostering the connection?
Yeah, the only one is give time back if I had to go down to one, and just by the way, I just want to say I'm very grateful for you all for giving us all this time and spending some time with us. It means a lot. We have our sellers here. We have customers who don't use us anymore, and they're interested again. We have customers who are considering us. We have our investors here. We have our employees here, so it means a lot for you to take time out of your day to spend some time with us, and it's just like, if you focus on those three words, give time back, like, it puts everything in motion. Because we cannot be selfish. We have to build something that is so intuitive that as soon as you look at it, you understand exactly how it works.
And if you have that, then our customer, our employees, our investors, whoever it is that we're designing this for, like, they can focus their time on what they want to focus on instead of us or our problems. It's why we named Square Square in the first place. We didn't want something that was in front of our customers. We wanted a name that was boring, that was plain, that felt like it was something that a seller could put their whole business on instead of us being in front of their personality. Like, we were underneath it. And it was very deliberate. And I think it set the tone for the company about giving time back. And now, as we have all this AI and all this automation, like, we can just go crazy.
We can just give so much time back so that we're doing 80% of the work for our customers, for our employees, for all of our stakeholders so that that end 20% can really be focused on the meaningful refinement and the taste and the art of the thing, which brings out the personality. That's the thing that allows for a breakout message and the uniqueness that we see in all of our sellers and our customers and ideally ourselves as well.
Is there a moment that comes to mind of late where a small design change has made a big difference to our sellers?
I don't ever think there's one thing to point to. These compound. And I think when we try to point to one, we get in this habit of resting everything on these hero moments. And I'd rather just focus on our iteration speed and our velocity and making sure that everything feels amazing as we put it out. But I think the biggest net change that our sellers are going to experience, and it's not just with our software, but it's with the world, is AI and interacting with this alien intelligence. And how do we do that? And what does it mean for our businesses? What does it mean for our day? And do we make a choice to let it diminish us?
Or do we make a choice to embrace it and see it as a new floor that we can stand on that allows even more creativity, that allows even more business, and allows a better experience for everything that we do? And speaking on behalf of our company, but also all the companies that we serve as well.
I'll go quick.
No.
I'll think about design from a restaurant perspective. Great restaurants, the term we use is they're of its place. You had Katz's Deli up here earlier. Only at Katz's Deli, in that place, if you've been there, and what's on the walls and the way it moves and the way it smells and the way it feels like, it is singular, of its place. There is nowhere else in the world you can be but at Katz's Deli when you're at Katz's Deli, and so many of you sellers, I hope that you're designing of its place. We talk about neighborhoods, and a restaurant, to me, when it becomes essential to its neighborhood, like, you've won, and it starts with the design. That has to be of its place.
Even us, ok, as we built and built and built, if you go to the original Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in 2013, like, it's the only place in the world that that thing could have been built that way. But if you go to Shake Shack in China, it feels like it belongs in that building in Shanghai. And it feels like it belongs in that building in Kuwait with Arabic letters and the way we've designed the materials. So as you have one or you scale, design has to be of its place always, entirely.
I'm going to come back to you on that because you were one of the first that piloted kiosk-only stores, which was pretty bold in an industry known for hospitality. What did that teach you in terms of where tech can most help and where human connection still needs to be at the forefront?
I'll jump off what Jack was just saying about give back time. Right? If we use technology and further take away from the experience, we're dead. Right? I don't know if anybody I was an old-school restaurant guy. ok? I've learned how to run a fine dining restaurant at the front door with a pencil and the reservation that you took over the phone. So Randy's coming in tonight, 7:30 P.M., with a pencil. And one day, Danny Meyer, our founder, comes in. And he says, I know there's some OpenTable people here. He says, like, we're doing an OpenTable. You all remember your first experience when you walked into a restaurant that used to have your name written down? And now, what do you do? They walk in. And the guy goes, look at that computer. I'm not looking at you. I got all this out.
I'm going to go, take them to table eight. You know, and I'm going to say it really loudly and uncomfortably. This is a great example of where technology can really hurt us. ok? But if I use that tool, OpenTable, to say, hey, John, welcome back. I know you had the steak last time. You know what, man? I got that special tonight. Again, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. And you're like, oh, that's cool. How did I know that? When we talk about all the tools these guys are building and all the stuff we can do with Square or kiosks or whatever, tech has got to fuel hospitality to do one thing for us restaurant people.
Allow us to just be in the restaurant on the floor, not in the back office doing other stuff, and extending the amount of hospitality, information, and data we know. When we were listening to "Where's the Juice Guy?" earlier, that's exactly what they're doing when they are using those tools to answer questions for them so we can be out with our guests.
Ok, I'm going to go back to you and piggyback off that point, which is AI and automation. Let's say it's the new floor. Randy, how are you thinking about how it can let restaurant owners focus more on the front-of-house experience, you know, and less of operations? How can it help?
Well, who in this room is a restaurant person? Ok, all you restaurant guys. ok. Do you wake up like, AI, man, I can't wait? No. You say, I fucking hope my dishwasher shows up today. That's what you say and the minute you go, AI, oh my god, I got the schedule right, you're like, Johnny called out sick. Susie got a Broadway gig. I'm screwed. That's real life. That's how it works. ok, so like, that's all that matters, so everybody at Square, anything we got to build needs to answer those things so that when that happens, which it will, it makes you that much more powerful, so that being said, what I just said, like, I am all in on what AI needs to do for our restaurant people, for everybody. It evens the playing field of our staff. You think about it, guys.
Like, the people we hire, it's usually their first job. They may not have any financial information about how to balance a checkbook, right? We can use these things to train up our team, to help them know what we're doing, to give them opportunity. We created a whole thing at Shake Shack called Shift Up. That was our creation of giving people the basic tools so that they could go from an hourly team member to a manager. These are the ways we need to be using AI in our restaurants. Make us smarter, keep us on the floor, and elevate our guys so that they have a chance that they would have never had. And by the way, like, that's why the restaurant business is the coolest business out there. Anybody can start in it.
And with the tools we have now, like, we got to embrace that and allow that to catapult these guys into the next generation.
Yeah, I love that. ok, so I mean, that's a round of applause. That was awesome. All right, so if it's about how those of us in tech can give that time, help that, Jack, we saw a little bit about Square AI today. Where do you see this going? Like, where can Square, where can technology be helpful from an AI and automation standpoint to business owners?
The thing we're very curious about and we're focused on is, AI can be scary. And I think that the biggest challenge is going to it and knowing what question to ask. And a lot of people just don't have that. Like, they just don't want to do that work. And you don't know what you don't know. But fortunately, we have a very great understanding of our sellers' businesses. And we can make these systems a lot more proactive. And where it feels that you're actually hiring a manager, you're hiring an operator to sit alongside you. And it can actually be proactive for you and make suggestions that are actually rooted in real data and your data and something that feels very organic and it feels very human. And that's the thread we're pulling on is like, we're all used to these chat boxes and queries.
But the shift is going to be how these things prompt you and not do so in an annoying way, but how can they actually be proactive based on the understanding that Square already has about the business and you have about the business? And how does it feel such that, like, you've just hired this incredible manager that just helps you and gives you time back every single day with smart suggestions so that you don't have to know what question to ask? And then as it does that, you can ask more informed questions. And it can work just like a normal conversation.
So that's the thing that I'm super excited about and something that we've been testing internally on the development side in terms of how we build systems and how these things can actually prompt us for things that we need to take care of and we need to look at. We use them significantly for security incidents, for instance. And now we can apply that to our entire company, but also all of our businesses as well. So that's the thing to look out for.
That's exciting. I want to kind of go back to actually where a lot of this content started in the beginning, which is just the importance of investing in local neighborhoods, local businesses, the local community. I think this is common ground for all of us. And man, at this time, we want our neighborhoods to thrive and grow. Interesting fact, by the way, there is power in shopping locally. For every $1 you spend in a local business, $0.68 stays in that community. Right? So there is real power in all of this. And I know that both Shake Shack and at Square, like, this has been a core thesis from the beginning. Randy, you hit on this. Like, Shake Shack feels different in New York than it does in the Pittsburgh produce market than it does in the store you opened up in Shanghai.
Like, for everyone here, how do you think about opening and growing but doing it in a way that stays truly local?
We were lucky. I mean, as I said, we literally started as a hot dog cart to raise money for a park. Today, our rent in that park, we pay an 11% rent, ok? And 100% of that just goes right to the park. Right? So like, we were born public. Right? We were born as a business that has to do that. I think I heard a lot of good things earlier today in Brian's thing and everybody talking about it. It has to be embedded in the things that we do. And when I would meet a manager, a general manager of a restaurant, wherever it was in the world, I would say, your job is to be the mayor of Pittsburgh. That's where you live. And you know what?
If you're a Little League coach, get your team to work there and donate to that Little League. If you're a church is your thing, awesome. Make that part of your community. And you know what? This is another I keep talking up restaurant industry because I love it so much. Every time there's a fundraiser or a need, you know who people ask? They ask their local restaurant every time. And you know what that local restaurant says? 100% of the time, yes. And we got to keep being that part of the industry. We always got to be there for the locals, the schools, and the community.
And I love how what Brian was talking about earlier, to be able to power up and take us, and now extend it to our friends in the neighborhood, is one of the coolest things I think you guys got to keep looking out for. It's going to be a really cool product.
Yeah. I guess on that, Jack, as we saw kind of Brian speak to it earlier, like, Neighborhoods on Cash App is one really exciting example. How do you see technology being able to create those neighborhood networks and really fuel community growth?
I just want to say that Brian, for the record, nailed his prediction.
He crushed it.
Nailed his prediction. Just crushed it. I think we've been fortunate to bear witness to so many networks. We have an inbuilt seller network. Like, sellers talk to each other all the time, especially within the neighborhood. And anything that technology can do to make that easier or make it more connective, that's what we want to do. We have the same with Cash App. It's inherently a social network. Money is speech. And it has a lot of the same properties. And it's something that we're recognizing more and more with things like pools. And then the combination of the two and the connective tissue between the two ecosystems, Square and Cash App, is the most interesting because we have all these Cash App customers who live in these neighborhoods. They don't really have an understanding of what's around them and what's cool.
It's a pretty high-taste culture and community on Cash App. It's something that these are folks that are looking for the coolest things around them. Now that we're able to actually connect those at the counter and provide an incredible incentive to the seller, but also an incredible incentive to those sellers' customers, like, it just fully loops the circle, which is amazing. There's even more networks beyond that, such as your staff. For all of you who are restaurant owners, a lot of them are using Cash App as well. There's a lot of our products can hook in and really recognize that network.
So we're looking at all these networks that are either hidden or manifesting more within our products, and using technology to make them easier to see, but also make the density between them much stronger, because we only get better with denser networks.
Maybe say more about Bitcoin, too. Like, what excites you most about what we announced today with Bitcoin in terms of how it can help local commerce, local businesses? And maybe for those in the room that are like, oh, where do I start? Like, what would you recommend in terms of starting point for people?
I was really surprised to hear on stage today that the word inflation come up multiple times. I wasn't expecting that. I knew tariffs would come up, but inflation was interesting, and Bitcoin is inherently deflationary because there's only 21 million, and if it's proven anything, it's proven that it's a pretty safe store of value. You have to look at it over 16 years, of course, but over those 16 years, the pattern follows itself pretty much every single four years, and being able to what I loved about what we launched is that you can test it, right? You can say that I want 1% of my incoming revenue to be auto-converted to Bitcoin, and you just let it sit there, or you can decide to sell at any time and go to fiat, and you can also accept Bitcoin.
And one of our principles at Square in the early days is help the seller make the sale, which meant that always accept whatever form of payment that came across the counter. And the seller shouldn't have to consider what it is at all. So this product means that your customers can pay in Bitcoin. And by default, it'll just auto-convert to fiat for you. But you can also change it so that it just stays in Bitcoin. And you save that up. And it will likely increase in value. But it's certainly a hedge against everything that we're seeing in the economy. And Miles has been talking with a lot of people who they're 100% fiat currency, 100% cash. Shouldn't you diversify a little bit? And should you rethink that just a little bit or experiment with it?
And I think that's all a function of how easy it is to do. And what we launched today makes it super simple. And it's not a large risk if you don't want it to be. But it can be as whatever your appetite is. But I think this is Bitcoin, for me, is one that lasts because it speaks to the principles of what we need for a payments network. And I think more and more sellers are getting frustrated with credit card fees for the value that they get back from it. And I think you're going to see more and more people move to cash-only signs again. And I think Bitcoin is a good alternative to that because it has a low cost basis and low fees. And it's something that allows for convenience of digital, but doesn't require this significant fee on top.
So it's worth looking at and playing with and understanding. But with all this stuff, you just have to feel it for yourself. So hopefully, you'll be able to do that with our interface.
Randy, your thoughts just from a restaurant owner-operator standpoint?
I think it's so exciting too. I always think about things from the team and the guest perspective. So first, with the team, I want us to be thinking about how can we pay in Bitcoin in some way, right? How can we allow that choice for our team if that's something they want? And as Jack just said, just allowing for guests, we just got to make it frictionless and easy. And if that's how I want to pay, that's how I got to pay. And I just think we got to be all those things at all times seamlessly for guests.
Yeah. All right. As you can tell, I could keep going for hours on all of this stuff. But we're going to close with a fun kind of like lightning round set of questions. One-liners, I mean, two-liners maybe, but one-liners, best advice you've ever received?
Staying matters.
What is it?
Staying matters. Stay for a little bit. You don't need to jump around all the time. Staying matters.
The easiest question to ask, the hardest one to answer, why? It solves for everything.
You do like to ask that a lot.
I like to ask why.
Ok. Favorite failure, one you learned the most from?
I don't have time to tell the whole story. But there was a quick moment where we got a New York Times review at Shake Shack, one star. That was big, one-star restaurant for a burger joint. But they wrote, "Can't those guys figure out how to make a good French fry?" We had frozen French fries. So we were pissed. And we set out to create the greatest damn fresh-cut French fry we ever had. We spent millions of dollars. We're cutting fresh fries. We're shipping potatoes around the world. We're soaking them three times, frying them twice. And we create the single greatest fresh-cut French fry you've ever had. Screw In-N-Out. And we launch them. Everybody fucking hates it. But we were like, no, no, no. Stick with us. Fry five, man. People hitting us on Instagram were like, "you don't know what you're talking about.
This is true north, fresh, better than frozen. We love you. My kids are telling me, "Dad, they kind of suck." And Jessica Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld's wife, who's a cookbook author and foodie, she posts an Instagram post where we donated some burgers to their Little League. And she said, "Hey, Shake Shack, we love the burgers. Thanks so much. PS, what's up with the new fries?" And people start piling onto her Instagram. And we're just like, "Can't you just tell those guys we're not looking for them to tell us what to do? We like the old fries." Lesson in leadership. When you're going true north and you think you're doing the right thing, but it turns out you were wrong and nobody ever asked you to make that change, when do you make the decision? And we immediately switch back.
We recognize that no one. This is the lesson. Don't let a few loud voices tell you what to do in your restaurant or in your business. Go with what you know. And the year after, we went public. And we had messed up the business so bad with the fresh fries the year before that year after, our sales were like through the roof after we went public. And that was a genius move. So if you're ever going to go public, you got to screw something up bad the year before you IPO.
Good lesson.
This is my favorite failure or what everyone else in the world thinks is my failure?
You pick, Jack. You pick.
Those are very different answers. I guess my favorite was when we were starting the company, we finally got Visa to say yes. But they said yes to 1,000 merchants. And we accidentally put an extra zero on the 1,000 merchant cap in the code. And they called us one day. And they said, it looks like you're doing a lot more than processing for 1,000 merchants. It looks like it's about 10,000 merchants. Is that correct? And we're like, oops. And we asked, do you want us to turn off all those other merchants to hit the original cap? And they said, no, you can add another zero to it as well. And that's when we knew, like, ok, we're solid now. We can go.
I love that. Ok. Yeah. Aren't these fun guys? We could keep going. Ok. Most important design decision you've ever made?
Choosing the name Square and making it, well, our first company name was Squirrel, like the animal, and we were going to make the reader in the shape of an acorn, which was very, very challenging from a hardware perspective, so when we looked in the dictionary for the SQ words and we found the word square, it's just like, oh, this is perfect, and the hardware is going to be so simple now, done.
I'll play along. I'll keep the theme. We serve frozen custard, so our original first thought for the name was it was going to be called Custard's First Stand, and that was our LLC name when we created it, so I'll stick with the theme here. Good call on Shake Shack.
Good call. Good call. All right, last one. And then we'll give them a round of applause. If you could leave all the business owners and operators in this room and listening with one kind of guiding piece of advice as you've scaled that they will remember tomorrow morning, what would it be?
That's easy. Do less. Just do less. We all think we got to do so much. Just do less.
If Shake Shack guy was here, I would tell him, do not add that chicken sandwich, bro. Stick with the one thing you do and just do it. That's it. Do less.
That was a really good one. I feel like saying less right now. I think we're in such a pivotal time that if, again, back to this point of diminishing, it's a decision. And with all technology, you choose to let it diminish you or you choose to let it empower you. And you all individually have a choice to make. And whatever you choose is going to model for your whole company as well. And everyone is going to follow that aspect. So being able to embrace these new technologies and actually play with them and experiment, again, it's like this time, it is almost zero cost to experiment and to create new things. And you can create anything. I mean, you can create a whole app by yourself right now just by speaking, just with English, right, or whatever language you choose to use. And that's incredible.
And this time where you get to really explore your ideas and have this mirror on your business, it's just so, so, so exciting. And I fear that instead of the excitement and therefore leading to opportunity, we get fear. And that leads to pessimism and irrelevance, ultimately. So I think the one thing that saves our personalities and our humanity and the character of everything that we do and all your stores represent is really being able to embrace this technology such that it's giving you time back to be focusing on what matters most, which is the experience you're trying to create and the customers you're trying to serve. So don't be afraid of it. Just go in and have fun.
I love it. All right, well, join me in thanking Jack and Randy.
Thank you all.
All right. Thank you all. That concludes the day. I hope you've had an amazing.