Hi, everyone. Thank you all for joining our inaugural episode of On the Block. My name's Matt Ross. I'm Head of Investor Relations. After each of the last two quarters, we've done something with, in a similar forum with Owen Jennings, our Business Lead. We're taking questions from investors and discuss just business strategy and performance. Very excited to continue that here and expand it with Jack and evolve the format a bit. Going forward, we're hoping to do this pretty regularly with different folks from around the company that are building the business and building product for our customers. More to come on that in the future. First, everyone's favorite, a list of disclosures. I'd like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call.
All statements other than statements of historical fact could be considered forward-looking. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and you should take a look at our filings with the SEC for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ. We disclaim any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Okay. With that, Jack, I think needs no introduction, but I'll give him a quick one anyway. Co-founder and CEO of Twitter, co-founder and head of Block, formerly known as Square. The only person ever to be the founder and CEO of two S&P 500 companies, among many other accolades, which I won't list out. Jack, let's dive right into it.
A lot of questions, as I said, sourced from Twitter, and a lot of questions that I've gotten over email and other folks that I've just, I've caught up with over the last couple of days. A lot to talk about. You haven't seen any of these questions. You don't know what's coming. This is like a pretty authentic, I think, Q&A, and some of the questions will be a little blunt. First group is obviously what we, what we did last week or we announced last week with the organizational changes. You've talked a lot about AI changing how we build products, what we deliver to customers, how we orchestrate the company. I wanna talk about each of those.
I think the first question, and I think some of the folks that I've had conversations with, is people just trying to grapple with like how we can do this. I know you said in your shareholder letter that you don't think we're early, but we kind of are in the sense that just other companies haven't done something like this. I'd love to start with just from a technological perspective, like how are we able actually to do this? You know, what have we built? What do we have access to that enables us to make this kind of a change that's so meaningful to the scope of our organization?
Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you all for showing up and participating here, and excited to do this and excited to do more of it. There was a, I think there was a fairly fundamental shift in December in the capabilities of the intelligence models and the ecosystem of tools around them. I think, Well, I know we were one of the earliest companies to start playing with these tools and applying them in unique ways. Goose was created and existed before even Claude Code, and I believe inspired some of that effort, certainly around, you know, creating MCP and, you know, giving that to The Linux Foundation. Our team has been pretty early in terms of what this technology means for companies like us.
In December, I think things compounded in such a way that it really changed the calculus on what's possible. I've been thinking of for quite some time, like, what the impact on not just how we build technology, but, like, how we actually run the company. It just feels like within the next year or two, the way the companies are structured and the way that they're run and what is expected out of them changes completely and changes from a foundational level. Like a lot of the companies that we've built over time are really copies of a copy of a copy of all the way back to 1900s manufacturing. Even the management structure is borrowed from that. If you look at really what the management structure does and the hierarchy does, it's information flow.
It's how the company actually carries information between one part to another and is able to scale it, you know, across hundreds if not thousands of people. Now we're independent of AI. We exist in a world where we have all these artifacts and sources of truth that are built and created as we actually do the work. It could be Jira tickets, it could be GitHub, it could be the source code, it could be Google Docs, all these things, and they kind of exist everywhere. Every time we do something, it's written to, and it creates this artifact that if you have the right tool, you can learn from it, and you can actually change the requirements for the information flow completely. That's what the intelligence models, for me, in terms of impact to company, do.
Like there is a layer now, there is a capability where we can take all these artifacts and can actually have a conversation with the business and with the company itself in a way that you couldn't have with just a hierarchy of managers. I think that's a very positive thing because it points towards the future where organizations are much flatter and much closer to customer concerns and much closer to the work.
I think that leads to much better outcomes and much better products and much better features ultimately. Like I literally think companies in the future, and for us it's gonna be the very near future, normalized to three roles. One of which is an IC, an individual contributor, which is a builder or a or an operator such as a salesperson or a customer support advocate or compliance.
It's gonna be a DRI, which is the directly responsible individual who actually owns customer outcomes and strategy, and it's going to be what we're calling a player coach, which we typically would have thought of as a manager, but someone who's actually tasked with, like, just developing people and getting them to mastery in their craft. I think each one of those have durable human skills paired with these tools that allow them not necessarily to do more, but to do a much better and much more cohesive job. I think it just takes away a bunch of the requirements that you had in the past to manage all the understanding of the company, because that understanding of the company can now be managed by all these artifacts paired with these intelligence tools.
That's really what it comes down to. You know, as I said in the letter, there's four layers to this. Three of them we've built and are building, and the last of which requires some more work, but you know, we have line of sight towards. That is, number one, our capabilities. Like, these are the things that we can do for customers. These are the pure utilities without interface, such as peer-to-peer or lending or banking or card acceptance or card issuance. The second is interface, and this is our distribution. This is the Square Register, this is Cash App, this is the Dashboard.
it's where, you know, our customers experience our capabilities today. It's highly static at the moment, but it doesn't need to be, especially with the third layer, which is what we've been calling proactive intelligence. We have this real-time understanding of our customers and their data, and we can actually proactively reach out to them. Instead of the typical model you have where you prompt an AI, our intelligence can actually prompt our customers and alert them to things that they should pay attention to or might wanna consider doing. Finally is having these, a concept of a world model, both for our customers, understanding of all their inputs and outputs so that we can be helpful, and we can help protect their cash flows and protect their business or protect their financial life.
Also a world model for the company and all of its inputs and outputs and how it runs. That will ultimately help us orchestrate in a completely different way that than what we've had to in the past. That, that ultimately is what led to the decision, I wanted to do it us to be early because I didn't want to react into it. Reacting into it over time meant that we might be in a state where our backs are against the walls and not being able to make the choices that we need to make or being you know, our hand being forced in some particular way.
This gave us an opportunity to have some space to be ahead of the market, to be ahead of our customer aspirations and what they want, and just focus on building the right thing that's much more durable in the future than is reactive to whatever is happening in the market and technology.
Yeah. I think, like, the concept, to me, like one of the things that's really, it's a lot to unpack. I think that there's probably a whole other hour we could have on this. Just like information theory and how information flows through the organization I know is like one of the big factors here. In terms of like enabling this move.
Mm-hmm.
I know you talked a little bit about the artifacts and like the tooling that we built in Goose and the foundation models changing. It does feel like talking to you and others that it was almost like a zero to one moment in December with the foundation models changing. I'd love to just understand, again, like what I think was one of the drivers of us making this decision. What changed in December in terms of? Let's start with like the external toolings. I think talking about Goose is also important, but.
Mm-hmm.
What changed in December with Opus 4.6 and just like all these other like foundation models that makes this move doable or achievable?
I, When we started building Goose and I started really applying myself to building these tools, I was building features for Goose, and I was iterating it. One of the reasons I built BitChat for myself is I challenged myself to build something that was extremely complex and would really tax both Goose and the models. I was building a feature to auto compact the conversation context in the window and just handle a bunch of that, and I needed a big project in order to really test that, so I could build the right feature. I built something that worked. Like it was a very complicated iOS app and macOS app, using technologies stacks that I didn't fully understand, but it worked.
This was all the way back in April of last year or even earlier than that. It worked, but I had to like, really work with it more. It got to maybe like, you know, 50%, 60% of the solution. In December, one of the things I constantly do is like I just rewrite everything because I think that is a change in how we think about building software now. In December, it could get closer to 85%, 95% of the solution for just as a, you know, a challenging technology. But the other thing that shifted was that it could handle much larger code bases with ease, and the tooling harnesses around the intelligence model was far richer and had much more capability.
All these things compounded into like a net change that, you know, really stated that like there's been no other technology that has compounded fast, as fast as this, and how it's affecting every single thing that we do and every single thing that we, every single industry around it. It really pushed me into thinking like our gap is not in the model or the tooling. Our gap is in applying the models and the tooling, and applying it more evenly throughout the company, and starting with everything that we do. I do believe, like it does require like a hard shift to really focus us to get there and to push in ways, and to be first, in a lot of this.
We have to behave more like a frontier lab that's actually building the company as an intelligence itself than building something that is just putting intelligence on top of what we do or on the side of what we do. It has to be core to every single thing that we do. The models also, the interesting thing is the switching cost, and I think you saw a lot of this play out over the weekend. The switching cost between the big labs right now and also even the open source models is close to zero. Like there's some loyalty to the interface, but the intelligence model behind it itself is roughly similar at the moment, and I think that persists for quite some time.
We could switch out an open source model and switch it with another corporate model, and switch it with another corporate model, and actually have these things compete with each other or create adversarial conversations between the two to get to much better answers for our code bases. We could envision a world where actually the limiting factor for our customers is our roadmap. Like, our customers could potentially be building their own features and their own customizations right through our interface. Like, if we didn't have a particular feature because we didn't think about it or it's farther down on our roadmap, they could simply ask for it through ManagerBot or through MoneyBot, and it could be built, and the interface can be composed.
Then we can see if that should apply to all of our customers or if it's so unique that it's just the one. The power that brings and that vision, it's not far out, and it is achievable. It's going to be, you know, a lot of testing and a lot of iteration to get there, but it is fully achievable with the technology of today. That just gave me a whole lot of confidence and like, wow, this is. It's a new world. Like it's completely different. We really must think about like how to run the company in a different way.
I feel like that was a, again, a zero to one or a light switch moment to some degree in December with the foundation models. Ultimately, everyone or every company in theory has access to foundation models, and it. I was at an investor conference yesterday, and I definitely sensed skepticism, that was coming from other companies that we can actually do this. I feel like the thing that most companies haven't done to the same degree that we have is Goose and just how we've thought about the agentic interface on top of the foundation models, which I think you helped build. We're part of the core team of building some of Goose. I'll just help us. What is Goose?
I know we've talked about a lot internally.
Yeah
I still think a lot of people understand what it is, and just I think it'd be great to conceptualize like what that is and like how that's been compounding over time, like to hit the moment where the foundation models changed in December.
Yeah. Just to be clear, I just built some features. I wasn't the core team. Goose, the easiest way to think about Goose is it's an agentic harness that works on top of any model. An agentic harness is equivalent to what you see in Cloud Code today or Codex or Cowork. It is effectively the tool set. It's the hands for the intelligence. It's the thing that can actually operate things on your computer or tools on your computer or command line interfaces or APIs, directed by the intelligence, the brain. As I said, we're very early. We were, you know, building something like this, the team, before Cloud Code really got significant adoption.
We've built our almost our entire resulting stack on top of some aspect of Goose. MoneyBot is possible because of Goose. ManagerBot is possible because of Goose. We have internal systems that are bending towards like an internal company world model that are built on Goose.
We have a thing called BuilderBot, which we talked about in Investor Day, that's built on Goose and that harness that allows us to get to closer and closer to, you know, agents doing 100% of the code and based on like customer requests and call transcripts and customer support transcripts and checking that against what we have in the code base, and enabling anyone from a product manager to a designer to an engineer to even a customer service rep to potentially build a feature out, at least a prototype that we can feel and then decide with more confidence that we wanna put this in production, take more time to get it right.
It, you know, we've been thinking about these tools for quite some time. Again, like we were early in that, and I think it's led us to be early in how we think about building the company going forward and how we think about operating the company going forward.
There's been, as I know you're aware, like some of the discourse around this has been, I think there's a new term, AI washing. Just reading you some direct quotes, I'd love to get your thoughts. Framing this as AI layoffs and air quotes is BS. Block over hire during COVID, plain and simple. It makes zero sense to downsize a team because of AI. If you're twice as productive with AI, why cut output by 50%? What are your thoughts on those two, you know, schools of thought?
I think on the second one, you have to assume that like we're just working in the same way. There's a huge coordination tax on any company that, you know, adds more and more people. I think that coordination tax is real friction, and You know, we have to really consider what that means. Like we certainly saw that in. You know, I do think I made a mistake in building two separate company structures in Square and Cash App that were duplicated, and that's something we corrected in 2024 and have benefited from since by functionalizing the company. That's independent of AI.
I guess to the first question, I would just ask like how would you want a company like ours to measure that efficiency? Like the only measure I know of is, and I think it's the most credible one, it's gross profit per employee. If I just look at where we were from 2019 to today, we were roughly in line with all of our fintech peers and in line with a lot of our technology peers. In 2024, when we corrected, you know, building two separate companies in one and functionalizing, we were above and ahead of our peers. You know, this is yet another correction that puts us in a completely different league.
I just like There's certainly factors that contributed to our size that we've worked to correct over time, but they were not out of line with the rest of our industry. There are certainly factors, especially given the complexity of our business and everything that we're doing around lending in particular, and there's certainly factors that AI allow us to ease. I don't think this is just about like one person being able to do 10x more. I think it's the very structure of the company and companies going forward and acknowledging that they have to change, they will change, and they have to change, and being either ahead of that or reacting into it.
Yeah. I mean, there's I mean, just factually to your point, like gross profit per employee doubled between 2019 and 2025, obviously now we're gonna be in pretty rarefied air in terms of just gross profit dollars per employee going forward, like up there with any, you know, any of the like the biggest technology companies and ahead of a lot of them.
I think we're just behind NVIDIA.
Yeah
As what's being targeted. Again, like if there's a better metric to understand what bloat is, then tell us, and we'll measure ourselves by that way. I think the other thing that was important to us is like to do this the right way as a company, and we did something like, you know, challenging ourselves to meet Rule of 40 over operating income, which is inclusive of SBC costs. I don't know of any other company that has done that since to really recognize stock-based compensation as a true cost of running our business.
Mm-hmm.
We've put a lot of constraint on how we're building this company and how we're making it efficient as it can be, so we can serve as many customers as possible.
I wanna talk. There's I mean, we could talk about like orchestration of the business for probably the entire hour because I think it's really fascinating, just like in thinking about how information flows through an entity and how that's changing with these tools and how we're kind of organizing to respond to that and trying to be you know, aggressive and early in it. I would love to spend time though on like the products, and you talked earlier about proactive intelligence.
I think there's a quote, I forget where if you said this in your introductory remarks or in your letter, but we're moving toward a model where our customers can build their own features directly on top of our capabilities. That changes the nature of what we are as a company, and it dramatically increases value we can deliver per customer.
Maybe like the simple way to ask, like what does that actually mean? Like what will customers be able to do with our tools and our products in like, let's say, like one to two years? Like not like super far in the future, but within.
Yeah
A reasonable time horizon. Like what's the customer gonna be able to do, a Square seller, a Cash App consumer?
Yeah, I. The overarching theory here is that the biggest limiting factor for customers from any company is the company's roadmap. Like it's what a product manager and an engineer and designer decide to build and when they decide to build it and when they ultimately ship it. If you think about a different way of organizing and building the company, if you think about it more aligned with what we're seeing with agentic systems and intelligence and even things like OpenClaw, there's a set of capabilities that your computer has or a company might have.
There's an interface that it can be delivered in, such as text messages, an app, WhatsApp, a website, and there's an intelligence and a model behind it that can take all the data that it sees and create actions and triggers upon them. That's effectively what we're doing is how do we build, Like I'm assuming that what we know of Cash App and Square in terms of the app and the navigation disappears. I think the concept of interface is changing rapidly. The most efficient interface is having a conversation like we're having right now, but being able to compose interface directly to handle a task that needs your attention or needs your direction.
Being able to like put up a screen that is optimized for a particular choice or for a particular action and do so, whether through a touch screen or a keyboard or whatever it is, and then that disappear. I think more and more you'll have a reality and an experience where the customer is presented a situation that's happening within the business that needs attention, and that can be automated or that can be, like we can introduce, you know, lending or a feature that we have in our ecosystem that otherwise you would have to go search through our ecosystem or a navigation around. That allows us to build, I think, like I don't think customers in the future are just going to be asking for more products and more features.
They're going to be asking for more peace of mind. Help me protect my cash flow, help me protect my business, help me make better decisions around my financial life and what I'm trying to do. I don't need like all these features. I just need to like I need help getting this thing done and just like protecting that cash flow and that's what we hear from customers. That's what we hear from sellers. That's what we see in the data. Now we actually have the technology to do it. Like you can imagine a world where like I go in my Square Dashboard or I even like on iMessage and in my chat, I can ask how the business is doing.
I can be suggested that like, you know, might wanna change prices here. We have a shift shortage today because someone's not gonna be able to show up, what would you like to do? Would you like to see what happens on a rainy day versus like, you know, a good weather day? Like, all these things can now be anywhere I am with whatever interface, using the information and the understanding that we have about our customers. Which again, is not a prediction, it's actually real-time information coursing through our system. These are real life tangible actions that are happening every single second of every single day that we can then utilize to trigger actions and give people a much more accurate understanding of what's happening within their business or what's happening within their financial life.
How do you do this without like cognitive overload? 'Cause I just think like if I opened Cash App and it was like, "What do you wanna solve for?" It's like, I don't know, a lot of things.
Yeah
H ow do you make it such that is this like a data element where it's like we just know these Square sellers and Cash App customers so well that we can make it legible, and that's like the proactive element? 'Cause I feel like there's a lot of, To your point, a lot of the competitors I see, especially on the Square side and probably on the Cash App side too, but it's like it's almost like a sidecar like chatbot, and it's like I don't even know what to ask, right? A lot of-
Yeah
H ow do
Exactly
Make it comfortable to people?
That's where, that's where I think there's a significant shift is like today the interaction model is you go to these tools and you prompt it. I think when you have deep customer understanding and real-time data, you can move to a model where you're prompting the individual, you're prompting the customer, and you're bringing them something of high value, and you can get instant feedback on whether it was valuable or not based on whether they do anything or they just flat out say, "This is like stupid, and I wanna go back to the old interface." We just have much more data to play with and much greater understanding of our customers such that we can prompt them instead of putting the burden on them to ask the right question.
We can see this, and I do think we can truly help with a number of things around how they operate their business or their financial life.
Is that something we see soon? Like it just, it feels like so far in the future. What's your expectation on like a specific timeline? This doesn't seem like that. Like I think in your mind it's not that far away.
It's not that far away. I think we see it this year, certainly. Like I think it's something that we can like really act upon this year, and the teams are working on it right now. It's just making sure that we're, you know, evaluating the outcomes in the right way and that we're testing and getting all the angles correct. This is line of sight. This is something that compounds fast as we get this model in place.
There's two other questions. like again, I think we could spend the entire hour talking about AI and our strategy and differentiation and so on, but there's two more that I'll ask that are a bit higher level, and then get into some of the other questions that I got from folks on just the core business, I'd say, or just, or non-AI related questions. It seems like there's risk in AI, just like as a technology, it just like shuffles the board, like shakes the deck or shuffles the board or whatever analogy you wanna use in a lot of industries. How do you, like what is what are enduring competitive advantages for us as we move into a world where it's just things change really quickly, the technology changes, the capabilities change?
To your point, like there's a world in which people are vibe coding, vibe coding apps at an accelerator. I think you already see that in the App Store. Like what are the things that are enduring over the next five or 10 years, however long of a time horizon, that gives you conviction in our ability to, like, withstand these technology changes?
I think being early is certainly one of them. I think having deep real-time customer understanding and data is another. I think having distribution is a critical one. We have distribution in our interfaces, whether it be Cash App or Square Register or the dashboard. I believe having good judgment is important because ultimately people are going to choose things that they trust, and that's a function of judgment and taste. I think good strategy in orchestrating all these tools is critical and durable. And I think having a team that, you know, wants to think differently and is not just adapting to the tool, but leading and, you know, on the frontier of how to not just build the technologies, but build the organizations to support the building of those technologies. Like, that has to change.
If like, if it's happening to you, I think you're too late. We need to make it happen instead. Even if I were to start a startup today, I'd be super excited about how quickly I could build. There is so much noise out there that the attention span and actually getting attention such that you can even build distribution is very challenging, and it's going to get increasingly challenging as time goes on. I think there is probably some event horizon around distribution until new distribution modalities come to be.
Mm-hmm.
I wanna make sure that we're ahead of that and that we're really building from a place of strength where we have incredible massive distribution, we have incredible data, incredible understanding of our sellers, and, like, are early in applying that in the right way such that we're getting to the right customer outcomes, which goes back to the value of the company ultimately.
There's a world in which, like, a lot of what you're saying is spot on. It could be kind of bleak from a, an employment perspective, from a, you know, macro, and then that reverberates onto our business, and it's just like a broader change in employment and just how labor works in the U.S. and around the world. Like, not to ask you to, like, pontificate about macroeconomic scenarios because who knows? Like, I'd just be curious of your thoughts on this doesn't seem bleak to you. It feels like you're really energized by it, so, like, why isn't this a, like, a really bleak outcome in five years if other folks follow the same trajectory?
I don't believe it's bleak and just to be clear, like, I don't know and I don't think anyone else knows what's going to happen, and, like, we're all making it up as we go. I think it's important that we help everyone through the shift as well, and that's what we're taking on with our, with our customers. I think the work changes, but I don't think, like, the necessity of jobs changes. It's just different jobs. It's a different focus. you know, instead of us actually writing the code, we're applying judgment and architecture and design thoughts and strategy to the work and orchestrating tools in different ways.
It's just a different way to work with these things. I do think we need to evolve towards that. I do think the bar is lowering for everyone to participate. It does require, like, a change in mindset, and it does require, like, you know, a willingness to alter and to change. I think, you know, the economy generally only accelerates from here and I think puts more emphasis on things that are truly valuable and truly authentic and truly real. Like, that's one of the things I appreciate about Square being so dominant in in-person commerce is because I think more and more people will seek that out.
I think a lot of the world online is becoming more commodity, and a lot of commerce is becoming very commodity, and people will be seeking out real experiences, authentic experiences, and being able to create them in a much easier way such that they can be more localized, and they can be more unique, and they can be more spot on for what, you know, what people wanna see and consume and create and, you know.
Yeah
experience at the end of the day.
Last question on this broad topic, and it's, kind of amalgamating a bunch of questions on this subject, but it's really, like, operational dynamics with making this change. They ask, like, a few different ones and take it in any direction. How do you handle loss of tribal knowledge from the size of a reduction? How do you maintain morale of people that are left and have had some colleagues, you know, colleagues let go? What steps have we taken to limit operational risk around this meaningful of a change?
Yeah. I mean, we started with that principle of, like, what is absolutely critical for us to maintain stability and to grow reliably. Stability is not just the services being up, but fulfilling all of our commitments that we've made to regulatory bodies and compliance and also, you know, what we've promised our investors and our shareholders. That was the exercise. It is a big cultural shift and, like, you know, a big part of my job is to make sure that's evolving in the way that it needs to, like, I feed that a lot.
I think what this technology means for me personally in my role is that I get to see the company in a completely different way, and I get to be a lot closer to the execution of it. It goes back to that like feeling like the feeling that the company is more in startup mode and there are very few layers between me and the rest of the company. The company itself and every one of our folks is much closer to the customer, and that means we're solving problems and we're finding product market fit much, much faster because we're more customer-focused and forward. It's work. Like, it's not like a day one thing we're going to get absolutely right. Like it's work that we have to iterate.
It is a massive shift, but it's one I believe we had to take and like anything else, like the dawn of the company, we're going to make it work. We're going to make it, we're going to be entrepreneurs and we're going to make it work. That's, you know, what the goal is. That's what we've always done. We've faced significant challenges every time. Every time I do make a move like this, I lose credibility, I know that. I think that's important for anyone who's doing something like this to understand because it's, you earn it over time then you lose it by doing something that is big and changes like what the company can be.
Probably one of the biggest like we've had many times in the company where I've had that loss. One is, you know, when we started Square Loans and moved from just being a, you know, point of sale to lending. Another one was Cash App. No one in the company wanted us to build Cash App, only focus on the consumer side. I had to lose a lot of credibility internally and even with our investors and earn it back by proving it. This is another one of those moments, and I'm going to earn it back by proving that it was the right decision.
Yeah. Some of the skepticism that permeates sometimes it's interesting when you observe like just how skeptical I know the investor world was on Cash App and just like, "Why are we spending any time on this?" Now it's two-thirds of the business growing, you know, 30%+ last quarter, I think it was a pretty good decision ultimately to invest behind that.
It the investor set was so skeptical that it only got like 13 mentions in RS-1. Like we just weren't we didn't wanna put it in there because they were like, "What? Why? Why is this thing a thing?" It's just. That's okay. Like, you have to be comfortable with like making those moves.
Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Let's shift gears and talk a little bit more about just like the core business and we got a lot of questions on those too beyond some of the AI topics that we've been talking about. I'd love to start on just connecting the ecosystems, and again, I'll amalgamate a lot of questions that we got on these topics. How, like how do we measure success on Neighborhoods? What are the key challenges in scaling it from here? Just what, we've had a lot of stops and starts, I'd say, with connecting ecosystems, like why this time?
Yeah
It genuinely feels different to me. Like, why is this time different?
I think this time is different because we've structured the company to make it easier. Like it's not two companies under one company umbrella, it's one company under a functional structure that allows us to, you know, see each other much better. So the structure itself incentivizes working together across our two brands and our two businesses in a different way. What's challenging about it is for it to really work, we have to have quality on both sides of the counter.
Like a lot of sellers, for instance, like for it to really feel good as an experience in the Cash App side, we need to make sure that our sellers are putting their best foot forward in terms of like their inventory and their catalog and, you know, how they show up in Cash App, and that they have the operational capacity to do things like pickup and that they're not surprised by it. Like if we just simply turned it on for everyone, we would create operational hardship for a lot of our sellers, and we would not, we'd not, you know, have a quality experience for Cash App customers because, you know, we just have some work to do to like put ourselves in the best light and our items in the best, in the best light.
Those are the constraints and, you know, we're working through it as quickly as we can. I think it's an incredible tool for our sales staff, and I think it is, you know, the ultimate virtuous loop that we could build in the company, and a viral loop to build both sides of the network. We have massive scale on Cash App, we have massive scale on Square. Connecting both sides of the counter allows us to do some very interesting things from an economics perspective and also experience perspective for both. You know, we wanna get the quality right because if we show up with like bad quality, no one's going to use it. Like, it's just like you have to do this right.
These two-sided marketplaces aren't built like overnight because you do have quality differentiation on both sides, and you need to make sure that they're at parity with one another. That's the governor.
It does feel like in the last, really the last few weeks, so the change from kind of a heavy operational sales motion for sellers to auto-enrollment, and then the change from just being able to redeem in-app versus like we're now redeeming in store. Like it's still quite early, but the scaling data seems to show that those things have worked.
Yeah. It's definitely working. I think we can certainly accelerate it, and we're pushing ourselves to do so. I just wanted, you know, to enumerate some of the reasons why it hasn't been as fast as, like, just launching a feature.
Yeah.
Like it's a two-sided marketplace, and if it works, it's very, very deep and instrumental in terms of, like, what we can do for both sellers and customers and our consumers and our overall business. Like it is a capstone moment.
I also think having a two-sided network that's, like, very oriented and offline or, you know, in-person commerce experiences, this is one of those things that if you, if you build it and scale it well, that it's pretty enduring and whatever technology changes you know, are to come in the next however many years.
There's not many of them that exist at all.
Yeah.
Like I can only count them on one hand.
Yep. What role does Bitcoin play in connecting our ecosystems?
I think it's easy to bucket Bitcoin into the crypto world. That is not how we've ever approached Bitcoin. We've approached Bitcoin because it's an open protocol for money movement and money transmission, and if you look at the original whitepaper, like the title of it is Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash, and it solved one problem, which was ensuring that there wasn't double spend without a third party. Like, that's it.
I believe the internet needs that. I believe commerce needs that. I believe that we want to reduce the number of gatekeepers that are companies, and if we do so, we have a level playing field for all companies, including our own, to work on a global scale rather than a permissioned market by market scale, and that's huge. Like, that is what the internet did. That's what HTTP, the web did.
That's what email did. That's what SMS did. It levels the playing field through open protocols and allows you to build fantastic, phenomenal businesses on top, such as what Google did on HTTP. We don't have that for money, and I fear for any financial advancements and innovations if a few companies control the gates for us being able to innovate. Like we're definitely going to support stablecoins because our customers will want to use them, but moving from one gatekeeper to another gatekeeper is not the right outcome in my view. Moving from a world of gatekeepers and permissioned technologies into open technologies and open protocols is because it allows much faster innovation and allows us to have a much more global company instantly.
When we started Square, we could not be an internet company 'cause we had to get, you know, particular things and partnerships market by market by market by market, and it's just like a ton of friction that slows everything down. Some for the right reasons, but mostly not. I think that needs to be challenged, and it's, you know. Again, it's not about crypto, it's about protocol, and Bitcoin is just the best manifestation of that open protocol that I've seen thus far.
There was a question that came through that's tangentially related to this and talks about our international strategy, but I think you can probably broaden it out a little bit. Where are we on that technical roadmap for Bitcoin actually fulfilling a lot of those things, both from like our ability to move globally more quickly and also the idea that it can be like Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash and like actually facilitate transactions as opposed to being digital gold or whatever you wanna call it?
Yeah.
What else needs to happen for that technical roadmap to be completed?
We're very far along in the infrastructure part, and we'll get more and more of that this year. I think it's more a function of the adoption and more on the consumer side. Again, this is a two-sided marketplace, so we put one of the biggest puzzles in place, which is allowing sellers to accept Bitcoin, and doing so at zero fees. They are very, very cost driven, and if you know, give them that versus like the alternative, they're going to try to start convincing their customers to go that way. At the same time, like it needs to be easy from the customer perspective, like to pay this way. I think that's there's more of this adoption and open mindset outside of the United States than there is inside the United States.
If you go and look elsewhere, there's just more people using Bitcoin for everyday remittance and everyday payments than there is in the U.S., which is, you know, purely a function of store value. Our bet is like we can help change that, and that's the work we're trying to do. Like a lot of that infrastructure to enable that to exist, you know, continues to roll out throughout the year.
Again, just mindful of time. We only have 10 or so minutes left, but I'd love to ask a couple of questions on just Cash App and Square. For Cash App, there's a question that came through, like as Gen Z and Millennial cohorts increase their earnings power, will we consider offering home and auto loans? Like can Cash App's score be used to expand new types of loans beyond Borrow and BNPL, what would that look like?
I certainly think it could be. It's just like building up the data, building up the understanding, then building up the confidence that we could reasonably and responsibly give someone a loan like that that doesn't put them underwater. The reason that Square Loans worked back in the day is we found that sellers were going to banks, and they were asking for a loan, and a bank would come back with, like, this huge outsized loan of, like, $25,000 at a minimum. The seller just is incentivized to spend all that and then has a lot of trouble paying it back. The only thing they needed was $5,000.
They needed that to buy another few salon chairs so they could actually build their business and they could pay it back, you know, just through the course of running their business. It has to feel like that model where we're not burdening the customer with something that they won't be able to handle, that it's like, you know, completely custom to what they actually need and no more. The industry before us worked in a way to overburden so that they could reap more fees, and I just think it was a lot more predatory. I think, in ensuring that we have that level of understanding is the thing that blocks us from doing other categories of lending.
Yeah. I think, and it's my thought on this too, but I think Cash App Score is one of those pieces that like the capability or piece of infrastructure that's just incredibly valuable and will really allows us to do a lot of potentially interesting things in the future. I think in the not too distant future, we'll have Cash App Score visible to customers so they can understand how to build credit within Cash App and what activities they can do to make themselves more legible to us. I think over time, that also lends itself to maybe having conversations with partners.
Like, there's a website that's public now, with building partnerships. There's a world in which Cash App Score is used to provide an auto loan to somebody with a vetted partner that we've chosen and to work with, and that's.
Yep
B eneficial for everybody. I think it's really exciting.
As an API that there's a lot of places that the credit, our credit score can go.
Yep. another Cash App question, but Afterpay pre-purchase really seems like a game changer in making BNPL universal. How do you think that solution, maybe a few of the others that we've launched in the last few years, like Afterpay post-purchase, like how are we capturing more of the commerce ecosystem within Cash App with some of these tools?
I mean, basically just like getting a lot more understanding of our customer and again, it's reaching them in time and giving them utility that they actually need instead of just like blanketing them with something that feels nondescript and ultimately not useful. All this is, all this is based on understanding. Like Afterpay is interesting because it's a calculation of our understanding of both the seller and the consumer. Like, does it allow someone to manage their cash flow better? Like that's the ultimate question, and this is something that does. It's just with a whole lot more understanding and confidence because we know the customer better, and we have a vehicle with which to deliver to someone that feels natural.
Mm-hmm. Shifting to Square, we had actually a few different questions on just the future direction of online payments in Square. It feels like folks like Stripe and Shopify have done a really good job of capturing that market. What's our approach to gaining share there more meaningfully in the future?
I think making sure that we're offering a unique interface and a unique experience that people can. They may start offline and they want the best tools to do that, and then they want to expand to online, and it feels very natural, and it feels sufficient and above and beyond. Like our approach is going to be on quality and the fact that you have flexibility to go any direction that you want. We have a lot of work to do to improve our endpoints and to improve like APIs and developer tools, but I have no doubt that we can get there, especially given the tools that we have access to.
Like our strength has always been the quality of our experience and how thoughtful the, and how intuitive, I should say, the customer experience is.
Do you think Neighborhoods is ultimately like the differentiating wedge for online? I know, like it's a little different from like a DT, you know, Direct-to-Consumer brand that you might see on others.
Cool
I s Neighborhoods like the core bedrock you think of our online product offering in the future, or are there other things that we can do outside of Neighborhoods?
I think it could be. I, you know, I think it points to that being a future, but it's just not the focus for us at the moment.
Okay. There was a time when you were, I think, a were somewhat opposed to distribution channel expansion and field sales, obviously we've made good strides on that in the last year. Like, what changed your mind there?
We were opposed to it early on in the company because we heard from sellers, number one, that like they had sales people visit them seven times every single week. It just really disrupted their flow. Number two, the sellers had to help them set up whatever they're purchasing from them. That led to like a non-intuitive product. We gauged the quality of our products by does it require customer support and does it require sales to help you set it up? This was pretty much unheard of in the business because everyone built this dependency upon someone setting this hardware up, and it was all really terrible hardware, really terrible software. It sucked. We changed it such that it like was intuitive, it worked.
We changed our mind about having sales because we saw a lot of sellers wanting to have more human touch and have more of a conversation. When we added it, I think we got a double benefit. We got that conversation, but also we got something, we delivered something to them that was intuitive that they didn't have to talk with anyone about. Like they felt like they can control it more and they felt like they had something of real quality that was going to be reliable and really serve them in the way that they needed.
Yep. All right, I know we're coming up on the end here. There's five or so minutes left. I wanna just leave with a couple of higher level like just questions about what, you know, what makes you tick. You've been CEO of large scale technology companies, I would say, for, I don't know, a decade or well over a decade now. I'd be curious like what your biggest learnings have been in that period. Like what would you do? Like, what do you do differently now compared to when you started, you know, as like a kind of an air quotes like, "CEO" of a big tech company, what's different today versus when you started?
Everything is different, like absolutely everything. That's the exciting thing, is like everything is changing right now. like I don't wanna hold on to any ideas of our past or like how we used to operate things. Like everything is up to be questioned. I, you know, I think the public market is a good accountability layer to that, like where it just things are a lot more visible in terms of what's working and what's not working. You know, that's a positive and a negative sometimes, but I'll embrace it as a positive that can help us like move in better ways.
What do you think the biggest misconceptions are about you or Block just more generally among in the market or among investors?
How incredible our business is. I think it is an incredible business when you look at the data. I just, yeah, there are certain reactions that I just don't fully understand about our company, and that might be more of a failure of me than anything else. But I don't think people are seeing the full cohesiveness of what we do and how early we've been in almost everything in our path. We will continue to be so. It's a strange time, but like these are the times that we live for and that we want to, we wanna embrace and we wanna drive and lead.
Mm-hmm. What do you want your legacy to be?
That we're building things that we're building tools that help people, that empower people. Like I think all of our tools give people superpowers and like if you're giving someone a superpower, that levels the playing field. Like you just have these outsized outcomes and I just love seeing that people are using what we're building and that they're doing things that we didn't expect. That's the electricity, that's the joy, that's the interestingness. I want more open protocols to be the basis for what we do, 'cause I think it's just more fair. I think it allows us to reach more people and have a much larger customer base.
I think that's a pretty good way to end it. First of all, thank you Jack for your time. I had a lot of fun doing this. Thank you all for listening, to all the folks that have listened live and or will listen to the recording in the next few days and weeks. Like I said at the beginning, we're hoping to do this a lot more frequently going forward with different folks that are building the company and building products for our customers. If you have any feedback on how we can make this better, like we're all ears, like reach out to me on X, reach out to us over email, and we'll keep iterating on this to make it as useful as possible. Thank you all, until next time, take care.
Awesome. Thank you all.