Good afternoon, and welcome to Square Inc. 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. Please note that this event is being webcast. I would now like to introduce Jack Dorsey, the company's President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board. Mr.
Dorsey, please go ahead.
Welcome everyone and thank you all for joining our 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. We are pleased to hold our Annual Stockholder Meeting virtually as we aim to increase access and participation. Stockholders may submit questions at any time during this meeting through the web portal with a limit of 1 question per stockholder, and we have allotted a certain amount of time after the formal business portion of the meeting to respond to questions. Only questions that are relevant to our business operations will be answered. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Siobhan Whitely, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, who will lead the formal business of the meeting and also as our secretary.
Thank you, Jack. At this time, I'd like to introduce the other members of our Board of Directors who are participating in the meeting today. They are David Viner, Anna Patterson, Jim McKelvey, Lawrence Summers, Mary Meeker, Navin Rao, Paul Dighton, Randy Garutti, Roloff Botha and Ruth Simmons. We also have with us Amrita Ahuja, our Chief Financial Officer Charles Lynch of KPMG, our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ended December 31, 2018 and Dave Cabral of Ernst and Young, our independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2019. Mr.
Lynch and Mr. Cabral will be available to respond to appropriate questions during the Q and A session at the end of this meeting. We have appointed Chris Vico to act as the Inspector of Election today. She has executed an oath of office to carry out her duties with strict impartiality and to the best of her ability, and she will examine and tabulate the proxies and ballots at this meeting. With introductions concluded, we will move on to other procedural matters.
As an overview of today's meeting, we will begin with the formal business portion, during which we will address the matters described in our 2019 proxy statement and vote on the proxy proposals. We will then announce preliminary voting results and adjourn the formal portion of this meeting. Afterward, we will provide time for a Q and A session. Note that the meeting is being recorded and a webcast replay will be available on the same meeting website following today's meeting. Our Board of Directors has fixed April 23, 2019 as the record date for determining the stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting.
I have an affidavit of distribution from Broadridge Financial Solutions confirming that proxy materials related to this meeting were mailed to stockholders of record determined as of the close of business on the record date starting on April 26, 2019. A complete list of stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting will be available online for the duration of this meeting and can be found in the footer section of the virtual meeting webpage. Ms. Vico reports that the holders of a majority of the combined voting power of our Class A and Class B common stock outstanding as of the record date are present at this meeting either virtually or by proxy, which constitutes a quorum. Therefore, today's meeting is duly convened and open for business.
We'll now proceed with the formal business of the meeting. It is 1:0:6 p. M. And the polls are open. If any stockholders have not yet voted or wish to change their vote, please click on the voting button in the web portal and follow the instructions.
If you've already sent in a proxy or voted via telephone or Internet and do not wish to change your vote, no further action is needed. There are 2 proposals to be considered and voted upon by our stockholders. Each of these proposals is more fully described in our proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 26, 2019. The first proposal is to elect 4 Class 1 directors, Jack Dorsey, David Viner, Paul Dighton and Anna Patterson to serve until our 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified. No other director nominees have been properly submitted pursuant to our bylaws or the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, so no other nominations are being considered.
Each of the 4 director nominees is currently serving on our Board and our Board of Directors recommends a vote for all of these director nominees. The second proposal is to approve on an advisory basis the compensation of our named executive officers. We currently hold the say on pay vote every year. Our Board of Directors recommends a vote for the advisory approval of the compensation of our named executive officers and the adoption of the following resolution. It reads as follows: Resolved, that the stockholders approve on an advisory basis the compensation paid our named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement for the annual meeting pursuant to the compensation disclosure rules of the SEC, including the compensation discussion and analysis, compensation tables and narrative discussion and other related disclosure.
The polls are still open and we will vote on these proposals. Voting today is by proxy and online ballot. As previously mentioned, if you already submitted a proxy or voted via the telephone or Internet and do not wish to change your vote, no further action is needed at this time. If you have not yet voted or wish to change your vote, you may do so now by clicking on the voting button in the web portal and following the instructions. If you have not yet submitted a proxy or electronic ballot, you must submit your electronic ballot now for your vote to be counted by the Inspector of Election.
We will leave the polls open for another minute to allow anyone who chooses to vote electronically to cast their ballot. It is now 1:10 p. M. And since everyone has had the opportunity to vote, the polls are now closed. No additional ballots, proxies or votes and no changes or revocations will be accepted.
Ms. Vico will report on the preliminary voting results. Ms. Vico, please go ahead when you're ready.
My preliminary report shows the following. Regarding proposal number 1, the election of Class 1 directors, Jack Dorsey, David Viniar, Paul Dighton and Anna Patterson received the greatest number of votes in favor of their election, with each receiving more than 95% of the votes cast in favor of their election. Regarding proposal number 2, the advisory approval and resolution on the compensation of the company's named executive officers, more than 99% of the votes were in favor of approval.
Thank you, Ms. Vico. Based on these preliminary voting results, the stockholders have elected the 4 Class 1 directors to serve until the 2022 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified and approved on an advisory basis the compensation of our named executive officers. The final voting results will be set forth in a report of the Inspector of Election and will be included in the minutes of this meeting. We will also report the final voting results on a Form 8 ks, which we will file with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 4 business days of today's date.
This concludes our planned agenda today and there is no other formal business before us. I now declare the formal business portion of the meeting adjourned. We will now answer stockholder questions received today through the web portal. Please note that only questions that are relevant to our business operations will be answered and there is a limit of 1 question per stockholder. We will attempt to answer as many questions as time allows.
I'll now turn it over to Nikhil Dixit from our Investor Relations team to oversee this Q and A session.
Thank you, Savan. Before we begin, I would like to note that our responses to your questions today may include forward looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward looking statements. Reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please take a look at our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ.
Also note that any forward looking statements are based on information available to us as of today's date, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward looking statements except required by law. Also, our responses may include discussion of certain non GAAP financial metrics. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in our shareholder letters to prior quarters and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, all of which are available on our Investor Relations website. These non GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. We will now pause for a moment to assemble the queue of questions.
We will now take our first question. As an individual investor who might not share the same viewpoint on cryptocurrencies, how should we view the hirings regarding open source contributions to the crypto Bitcoin ecosystem. Should these be viewed as a non profit venture and what is being done to ensure a limit in scope costs relative to the core business?
Well, thank you for the question. And we definitely appreciate different viewpoints on crypto and our industry more broadly. But the reality is that there are 2 majorly impactful technologies facing our industry. The first is artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. And the second is blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
We believe that we first must learn as quickly as possible in terms of how this might impact our industry and how it might help us increase access to the financial systems and further empower people into the economy. And we do believe that it has a very strong ability to do so. We also believe that we have taken a lot from the open source community and specifically the crypto community and Bitcoin community. And we believe it's our responsibility to give back as well. This should not be thought as a non profit.
This should be thought as something that is giving back to the ecosystem generally good for financial industry under our purpose of economic empowerment. We also want to make sure that we are doing this in a smart way that is consistent with Square's values and that we are learning and experimenting along the way. As we mentioned in our announcement, this is going to be a small team of 5 people, 4 engineers and 1 designer, 4 engineers to work entirely on open source free software that betters the crypto ecosystem cryptocurrency, which we believe could become a native currency for the Internet, which would be not good for our business long term. To follow any updates around our hiring of these engineers and designers, please go to twitter.com/squcrypto. Thank you.
Thanks, Jack. We will now pause for a moment to assemble the next question. We will now take our next question. Square was asked to join Libra, the stablecoin initiative of Facebook, but decided not to join. Why did Square refuse?
And while I think it correct and have an idea, I would appreciate hearing the rationale for refusing to join the consortium.
Thank you for the question. I don't recall us being directly asked. We're definitely going to look deeply into UroLUBRA and try to figure out how it might impact our sellers, our customers and whether it makes sense for us to join. Thank you.
At this time, there are no other questions and we will now conclude the question