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J.P. Morgan 54th Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference

May 19, 2026

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

All right. Thanks everybody for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang and I'm the Payments Analyst at J.P. Morgan. It's always a highlight for me to get to interview this guy and to get an update on Block. Before I do the formal intro, let me just read the safe harbor statement. During this conversation, Jack may make forward-looking statements, including about Block's preliminary expectations for its financial performance in the second quarter that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, including changes in macroeconomic conditions.

They may also speak as to certain non-GAAP metrics. Please take a look at Block's most recent filings with the SEC for a discussion of the company's risk factors and for reconciliations of non-GAAP metrics to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. Further, any discussion of Block's lending and banking products refer to products that are offered through Square Financial Services or its bank partners. I read that without my glasses.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Congrats.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

That's the biggest feat of the day. Jack Dorsey, Block Head, Chairman, Co-founder, thanks for being here with us, Jack.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Thank you.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Always look forward to the conversation. It means a lot to me. I was thinking about how to drive this conversation, Jack. There's a lot of ways to go with it. I was thinking, you know, because you're always talking about empathy and putting yourself in the shoes of the user, the customer, the SMB, you pick it. I thought we'd start that way, if that's okay. You know, you talk about being an intelligence company. What does that mean? Can you talk to it in the way that you would tell a restaurant or a retailer? What does being an intelligent company mean?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Um-

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Start with that.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think in the old world, we would deliver products, those products would be very top-down driven and opinionated. We'd have to bet that we're making the right choices for these products, that's inclusive of the features we offer and the navigation and how to find them. I think in the future it feels more like streaming intelligence and streaming interface.

I wanna figure out how to Like our biggest, any company's biggest limiting factor is their roadmap. If we're entering into a world where our sellers and our customers directly can build what they want, we can make it easy to do it through our interfaces, even if we don't have a feature, they can build a customization, they can build a feature, they can potentially even build a product right through our interface.

If we don't offer the capability to do so, that becomes our ultimate roadmap. What I would say to them is like, if we have anything that's limiting you can just state, "I want this," and it'll be built for you in real time and delivered to you in real time. It's not that far off. I think it's a this year thing, at least within our own ecosystem, rather than like very, very far out. We can do this today internally. It's just making sure that we can deliver that to our customers directly, like in the interface that they know.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

The idea would be if I'm a salon and I take appointments and I've heard this before, they complain that they can't penalize customers for not coming in. They could build a tool or a way to fee that person or to bring them in or to reschedule it. That would be the idea. Simple as that. They could do it themselves.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yeah. Absolutely. They can build the features they want, they can build the customizations. This can scale from the very small, like sole proprietors, all the way up to the very largest customers that we have.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

How about on the Cash App side? What would that look like on the Cash App side? You know, my kids use Cash App. It's gonna become an intelligent company. What does that mean? Is it as simple as they can help manage their budgets? They can figure out what they can afford or not afford. What would that look like?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

For them, I think it means like you have this protector that's constantly watching your inputs and your outflows and like everything that's going on in your life, and we can build a very rich world model around our customers. We have that today because we had to build it for lending and for risk for Cash App. We can be a lot more predictive about what people might do next and also what they might need next, so we can meet them where they are immediately. Instead of us relying upon them finding a product or a feature through our navigation, we can just deliver it in the conversation. I'm a big believer that voice is the definitive interface of the future. Right now it's very turn driven and it's not as interactive as it should be.

I believe we need to figure that out. Like being able to talk with your money allows you to maximize your money a lot more and even build like features or views or things that you wanna see within the consumer side. If we have a lot of customers asking about insurance, for instance, and we don't offer it as a capability, like that becomes our roadmap. We can have a debate within the company, like, should we offer insurance? Should we offer, you know, XYZ because all of our customers are asking about this thing? We have such higher fidelity information about what our customers actually want. Whereas in the past we had to like test things and do A/B tests and like, you know, have strong opinion on this particular direction.

It just uplevels us a bunch with like real concrete data that we can then act upon much faster.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

In terms of discovery and seeing engagement with the users, how soon could we see this, Jack? Is it months, weeks, quarters?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

It's this year.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Okay.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Like it's this year. Like we're working really hard on it. Like we need to convert our company and transition into a pure like intelligence streaming company. I don't think it's that far off. The amazing thing to me is we don't have to be dependent upon the frontier labs to do this. We can use open source models, which we are, like MoneyBot and Manager Bot are based entirely on open source models. We've optimized for speed because we think that's a differentiator 'cause it gives time back. We have this rich understanding of our customers, which we can be proactive around. Like our world models ultimately will be focused on not something that's LLM driven, but actually action driven.

Like that's what our company needs to work through the next few phases, but also what we need to deliver to our customers. Like you just can't do this with LLMs. The most interesting thing about this is like the resource cost for a world model is far less, like order of magnitude less than you would need for an LLM, which is all trained on the past. Like, it's all, like, everything in an LLM right now is just, like, things that happened in the past. What we need is something that's more present based, more real-time based, and more future looking and that's what we intend to build. We've already built it because of, again, the risk and lending engines that we need.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Good. I know you're doing a lot of building and testing and work internally. I've been talking to your team and folks at Block, I mean, the usage of the tools are. It's just incredible. Everybody's, you know, buzzing about it. From an investor standpoint, Jack, I get this question a lot, right? We've all had mixed success in using some of these tools. You're placing a lot of emphasis on AI and Builder Bot internally. What can you tell investors around the guardrails that you have in place that the service and the quality, all of that good stuff, is actually where you want it to be, that you can roll it out as fast as you have been doing?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think it's a framing thing more than anything else. Like, if you're building assistants or advisors, like, you're not inherently building a worldview that protects the code base and protects the cohesion of the system and protects, like, our design elements and, like, our brand's value. If you have that sense going in of, like, these are what we need to build are protectors that are looking at everything that we're doing 24/7 and keeping us from making bad decisions or at least alerting to us where we have variation or any sorts of standard deviations from the norm. We get to choose, like, where we actually go far off and where we stay on track. I think that's the most important thing. Like, it's a decision you make.

Like, we've decided that, like, Goose and Builder Bot are going to be more of a protector role than than anything else, more than an advisor and for assistant, which are more throwaway. If you have a protector, it's just constantly looking and ideally, like, meeting you where you are, helping you think about the next steps, and it's trained exactly to do that, and that's not easy to do if you don't have a lot of real-time data and you don't have a, like, super legible company. We have a, we have a benefit in that we are a remote-first company. Everything that we do, all of our meetings are recorded. We have all the transcripts for every meeting. Everyone's writing in Slack.

Everyone is using Jira and GitHub and Linear and Airtable and all these things. Literally, almost everything in the company is legible and something that's readable and ingestible by an intelligence that we can then use to build a predictive model around and help us think through some of the issues. Nearly everyone in the company is now thinking along this path, and we have 100% usage of the tools. 100% of our population is using the tool in some way in their day-to-day. We're early with Goose, and it's become a portal into our company, and this is a full agentic coding system, but it also allows you to query, have a conversation with any part of the company, any one of our systems. Everything is logged in. Everything is auth-ed to, it just, like, works.

That is probably the best way to, like, change the culture towards, like, our job now is to align this thing. Our job is around judgment. Our job is around taste. Our job is around opinionation and, like, what we wanna see in the world and what we wanna build in the world and how it's differentiated from what others are doing.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Yeah. you know, what does I'm thinking about segueing this into, you know, you've been pretty visible talking about the future of work. You know, you've spoken at a lot of different events. I know you did that podcast with Roelof Botha, and that was great. Maybe it's a good chance for you to maybe elaborate on that, if you don't mind, Jack. I thought it was really insightful and, you know, some of the statements that you've made around the reorganization, we've heard repeated by some of the companies that even I cover, let alone broader tech, so it's quite prescient. Can you just elaborate again, what does this mean for the future of work? You just talked about it, right?

You were on the stage with me before talking about distributed workforce, work from home, and you mentioned how everything is archived and transcribed, and you have reference points to all of this. I didn't know if this is by accident or if this all is getting to the place that we're ultimately landing, which is the future of work. How do you see it, Jack?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think the word and the concept that matters most to us, and I think to every company before they realize it, is legibility. Like, how legible is your company and the operations of your company? I think every organization is, by definition, in a distributed intelligence, but all the intelligence is trapped in people's heads. And if the probability of it reaching to you through the management chain is very, very low and very lossy. If you just look at the history of the management chain and, like, the hierarchy, it's there for a reason. It's there to, like, route information towards, like, huge numbers of people. Now we have much better systems that can coordinate people and that can orchestrate people and put people at the same level of the information as anyone else.

I'm a big believer that an idea that can change our company can come from anywhere in the company, but that's a function of, like, how much information, how much context any one individual has. If, you know, they're right there with the data and right there with the decision, it allows a lot more speed and allows us to feel the product or the feature much faster, and allows us to make a decision much faster. Like, right now, I think we're about, for me, we're about five layers deep. I would love to get that down to 2-3 by the end of the year. The ultimate path, in my view, is that we move from a structure of like reporting to one of assignment.

Instead of like managers, having a team that they tell what to do, you're assigned to a group of potentially hundreds of individuals that you're focused on helping get to mastery of their discipline, and helping them through, think through their career and like how to think about problems, and see around corners, and being strategic, and just mentoring them.

You don't have to like tell them what to do, you can show them how to do it. In engineering last year, we moved from a world of having peer managers to the requirement that every manager must be technical and they must contribute code, and that was just one step, and we need to do that throughout the organization for all of our other disciplines as well, and we're already seeing that. I think Owen right here is probably one of our most voracious builders at the moment.

He's never engineered before this, he's creating entirely complex systems that benefit him, that benefit his team, that are thinking about like what it means like to have this hierarchy, and what it means to diminish it, and how to continue to scale this with these tools. If we have everyone in the company thinking that way, and anyone can have an intent or an idea that can change the course of the company, then our probability of success is much higher because we just have more people thinking about these like creative outcomes, and we have all this customer input coming to us. Like the probability like field that it creates is just unlike anything I've ever seen in building systems and building companies.

It's just like, it's such a I'm so grateful for this time 'cause it's just like something I've always wanted to do. I've just always felt like, and I experience it every day, the reporting structure gets in the way of creativity and it slows everything down, especially as you get bigger and bigger, and deeper and deeper. The sooner we all realize this as companies, the faster we can move and deliver like significant innovations to our customers.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Right. The output we should just think of as more product velocity, Jack? I know gross profit-

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Higher quality as well. Like it, just more creativity. Like we've always been good at interface, and we've been good at like pairing capability with interface, and we've been very inventive. Like the Square Reader was a new interface. The Cash Card with the customization was a new interface. Peer-to-peer with the payment pad was an interface, and it was stark, and it was opinionated, and it was unlike anything anyone has seen. Now it's taken for granted. There's new form factors, there's new mediums, there's new interfaces that today are quite Like the chat one for me right now, how turn-based it is just like so crappy and such like There's so much opportunity to like reinvent that thing and make it feel a lot more human.

I mean, you like When I'm talking you're like saying, "Mm-hmm, mm-hmm," and interrupting, and like all these things, and that's natural. Like the chat interfaces and all, every voice interface that you experience today cannot do that 'cause it has to translate everything back into text, and then go back into a turn and wait and, you know, just like if you're interrupting it stops the whole chain of thinking and like goes back to a different turn. There's just a whole different experience that we can create.

For, for you and your money, and you and your business, I think that's the right thing 'cause we want these intelligences to feel like you hired one of the best business managers you could for your company, your small business or your large business, and the best financial advisor and kind of friend for your, to maximize your money and get you on track, or to like hit your goals, or give you new opportunities. If it's anything but that, it's going to feel just mechanical. Like there's just so much exciting stuff there that like we're building right now, that, I'm excited to push out to the world.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

I'm simple-minded. If I'm thinking about quality, does that mean customization? Are things going to be more customized or more tailor suited to the individual? Is that one way to think about quality?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yeah. I think this concept of product or app like just blurs out into nothing because it just becomes a stream. It just becomes a stream of like what I need in this moment.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Right

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

to do this thing that I need to take care of, and then it dissipates into nothing again, and that's what it should be. We just haven't had the technology to make that scale, but now we do, and we, you know, we can bring it to a very broad base of customers.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Good. No, that's helpful. Always learning, Jack. That's why I love talking to you. Thinking about the two ecosystems, if you don't mind. Let's get into that. Cash App, and I've told you this before, I feel like with Cash App, right, having empathy about your customer, I think that's one of your superpowers, and I think it's really hard, right, to gain this kind of empathy. Do you feel like there's a real point to get to where you can really differentiate from the traditional banking system? We're so accustomed to thinking about banking in a certain finite way. Has your thinking around what Cash App looks like changed here given everything we just talked about?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think it, like I think that framing of a protector, like I'm going to work nonstop to protect your money and give you optionality to grow it and to maximize it. I think that's extremely valuable. I think it's very out of reach for most people. I think we can scale it into something real and feels amazing. The traditional banking relationship is one of taxation more than anything else, and fees, and obscurity of information to encourage bad behavior where, which reaps more fees. That's what our experience was when we first started Square, is like the merchant was encouraged through obscurity of information to overdraft.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Right.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I mean, like, it was ridiculous. Just by, like, doing a simple thing of, like, your rate is 2.75% for every card, changed the game for most of our sellers because they could predict what they could do with their business and what they needed to do with their business. Square Loans, they would go to a bank, ask for a loan. The smallest amount a bank would give them was $25,000 at that time. They would take the $25,000, and they would spend it all, and then they're in this, like, doom loop of, like, how do I pay this back, when all they needed was $1,000 to buy a new salon chair to double, you know, potentially double their business.

Paying back by just swiping their customer's cards on the sale felt like it wasn't a loan. It was more like a stream within their business that they can just, like, they don't have to think about it. I just need to now sell and, you know, focus on my customers. Anywhere where this is alignment with this concept of, like, if we help our customers grow, we grow, and if we grow, we can serve more customers, it's just this amazing virtuous loop that I'm so proud of and, you know, happy to be in this space because we found it because there's a lot of other business models that are, you know, tech-based.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Yeah, 'cause when I think, you know, I'm glad you said some of that 'cause when I think back to Square in the beginning, and you broke the status quo of onboarding merchants, right, with instant underwriting, and that was unheard of at the time, and that's what broke that opportunity open for you on the Square side. Thinking back to Cash App and lending, 'cause Jack, we get questions all the time from investors, right? Why is Square gonna win in lending? How can they lend better than the bank with years of all this data? Do you think of that as the same opportunity?

Okay, I'm gonna instant underwrite a merchant with Square onboarding similar to, you know, Square Loans or a Cash App Borrow or any lending product that you can break that status quo of traditional underwriting and do it your own way?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yeah. We just have a better model. Like, we've been doing machine learning and deep learning for 16 years, and, like, if you really understand what a world model is, it's a customer-focused reality of, like, what's happening, and it understands the consequence of giving, like, a loan or, like, allowing this transaction to pass or not, and just constantly updating its understanding of, like, what these risks are and what the opportunity cost is and, like, what the consequence is.

Not only do I believe that we can continue to grow that and do it better than anyone else, but I believe that we can now translate these systems to all customer actions across Cash App, across Square, and even across our company, where we can be a lot more predictive around what the company should be doing more of or should be doing less of, and, like, how we think about, like, building our company, in total.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Yeah, 'cause even, like, you have a credit score product now, right, Jack? Right, investors are always saying, "Hey, let's see what happens in the down cycle on credit. Will it perform well?" Your response is you have the data. You're confident in the data, and it'll live up to that. Is that the simple response?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yes.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

We'll have to go through a cycle then.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yes

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

and we'll ask you about it. The team, the credit team that we've met have all spoken, again, with a lot of analytical rigor to talk about why it's gonna work. Just one more on the credit side, if you don't mind. What, what's your vision on the, on the Cash App credit score? I mean, thinking about traditional credit scores, and people are always trying to outrun that or think about it differently. This does seem like it's a brand-new way of looking at your credit score. What, what's the vision behind it?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Well, the vision is, like, again, it's a real-time picture.

Like, money is the most honest signal one can have cause you can't lie about it. We see every transaction going in and out for an individual but also a much larger base, and we see it from a seller side, and we see it from a consumer side. We can bring that to bear in terms of what that actually means and, like, what it means from a trustworthiness and, like, how you can increase those scores. We think there's opportunity to, like, you know, distribute that through other parties or just, like, completely own it ourselves or, like, you know, to partner. There's a bunch of paths we can take. We're just trying to figure out, like, what that means.

Right now, like, it's a very credible system, it's very predictive, and it's based on, like, 16 years of understanding and operations.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Yeah. No, I'm excited about it. I think one more, if you don't mind. Just last year on stage, we talked about the shift towards user density and the importance of density. Sort of one year later, has your thought changed on where you're gonna grab that next user from? How are you gonna get that next user? What's the latest?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think, what will always attract new people is, like, as we consider new interface, mediums and new packaging for, like, card formats and new interactions. We'll add all the tactical things that we need to, like, serve customer gaps. I think where we've been great is just truly inventing on the interface and rethinking it from the ground up, and that's what the company now has the freedom to do because a lot of the mechanical stuff is now handled by a bunch of our systems that we built to program and to build and to really shift, like, our outcomes.

I feel like there's a lot more creativity in the company again, like hearkening back to our early days of when we were just, like, thinking, like, "Why, why does this need to be a rectangular, like, piece of plastic or metal? Why can't it be something completely different? Like, why can't we, why can't we focus entirely on voice? Why can't we generate UI in real time?" Just questioning all the fundamentals to make sure that, like, we're 10 steps ahead of the expectations that people will have, including ourselves. Like this change we made in February I think has unlocked a bunch of that because it just kind of shook the snow globe a bit. Like, you know, we need to get creative again. We need to wake up.

We need to like apply the technology in creative ways in the way that we did in the past of like looking at the phone, this thing that just came out, and looking at its capabilities. It has a headphone jack, the back of a credit card, there's a magnetic strip, it's a cassette tape, it's audio, we can get the number, we can set it up to Visa and Mastercard. Like, there's dimensions of that that are still yet to be manifested within our two core capability categories of finance and operations that we're really excited to like bring to life. It, you know, it's just starting, but I think we'll see a lot, you'll be able to experience a lot like this year, which I'm very excited about.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Creativity, I don't know, Jack, sitting here talking to you, I mean, creativity seems like a theme you're excited about. I feel like we haven't talked about that in 15, 16 years. It does feel like that's the big unlock here that I didn't appreciate until we got up on stage. Is that fair?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yeah. I mean, I think the durable skill for humans going forward is judgment, it's creativity, it's taste. I mean, it's like putting the things together. With a lot of these models right now, if you like prompt them and then you get an output, and then you just treat that output as output, I think you lose a lot of the potential. If you treat the output as input for your own creative process, like you get to see a much broader range of possibility. It really, like you get serendipity and you get all these like sparks that you probably would not have otherwise. That's how I use it.

I just wanna increase the breadth of everything that is possible, and then I can pull the thread of what I think is interesting and then keep pulling it and like, you know, keep pushing it. I think that's where the design discipline is going. That's definitely where engineering is going. That's where all of our disciplines that we see are going 'cause now everyone in the organization has a potential to be a builder and to leave a mark in a way that they couldn't in the past. They're not just a user. They're not a consumer anymore. They can actually put something out, produce something that they can use or someone else on the team could use.

The confidence that that builds and the randomness that it gives the company such that like we can see new things, all that fuels creativity, in my view.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Yeah. No, they're fun to watch. We are gonna take questions from the audience, by the way. I should have said that up front. Let me just ask one more, if you don't mind, on the Square side, which is, you know, I think last year you showed off the new terminal. You and Owen showed off the new terminal. I think we just saw the drive-through in Chicago at the National Restaurant Association event. There's so much talk about AI and software development and how that's gonna change, you've always been very focused on hardware, Jack. I know there's questions around memory and supply and everything else, why is hardware so important to you?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Hardware is a superpower. It changes your mindset about how you build things because the lead times are so great and it's so complicated to get things right. To be vertically integrated in the way that we are with deep relationships with our vendors, you know, that have decades because we have a lot of people from Apple.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

That's right.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

We've had those relationships as well, allows us to do things that others can't. Like, they have to contract third parties, they have third-party designers, and like it doesn't really fit the software in the way that it was meant to. Like, we can just be, we can be laser focused on like exactly the experience we wanna have, and we can be very opinionated without compromise 'cause we control the whole stack. I'm really excited this year. Like, there'll be one thing on Cash App that's hardware related that you all will see, and there'll be one thing on Square that's hardware related, which I think completely changes the game in terms of interface and how a seller thinks about operating their business and interfacing with their customers.

Both are only possible because we are a hardware company first and foremost, and everything else, you know, follows that. It's also the impression. Like it's a tangible thing that feels real, I think inspires trust and allows people to like, just have a different experience than they would with just pure software, which is becoming more and more throwaway.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Good teaser. I know you always value the elegance of the hardware, so thanks for answering it that way. Questions from the audience. Happy to take them. We have five minutes left. I promised we'd leave time. Yeah, up front. I thought I saw someone over here too, sorry. It's hard to see up here.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

There is someone up there.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

If you shout, I will try and repeat it.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

AV is hard.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

I can repeat it.

Speaker 4

Got it. I have a big, strong voice. It won't be a problem. I was very interested in the quick uptake on a generational basis for products like Afterpay. I think, particularly those under 30 see that opportunity in many ways as the way the community of over 30s sees other credit facilities, credit cards or traditional models. I wondered if you'd do some longer term thinking about when you look at the next five years about how that business develops since you really one of the leaders there and I'm interested to see the potential.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think the, um-

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Well, what we want to look at is like what is the use case? Like what are the pain points and how is the customer suffering with today's products and today's formats versus like what we could do in the future? The idea that like we're thinking a lot about is most work today is post-paid. It's a two-week post payment. How do we bridge that gap such that it feels like you're being paid in real time? Like, that's a format shift that I think is super compelling, especially to a much younger generation where everything is kind of streamed to them.

If you can imagine money being streamed in a similar sense, there's a packaging there that I think is extremely innovative, presents an entirely new interface, and solves a real need that is, you know, independent of like these categories that we put them in, but more of like how do we like just like what is the customer suffering problem, and like how do we address that with something like super creative? This is exactly what we did with Square Loans all the way, you know, back in the day. We just looked at like what does a seller actually need and how should they pay it back? They should not pay it back in just like one lump sum.

They should pay it back in every transaction they do because it feels like a part of their business. We're looking at the same on the consumer side, we think there's a 10x jump from the current formats into this newer format. Hopefully you'll see some of that this year. It's the one I'm most excited about. It's just like questioning the format altogether.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

I think there's one here.

Brendan
Analyst, Tendence Team

Hey, Jack. This is Brendan from Tendence Team. Thanks so much for doing this. You spoke about creativity, as well as focus, which I feel are sort of dueling strengths of your organization. I wonder if you could share with us to what extent are creativity and focus, strengths that sort of pull against or in concert with one another, and how you manage and prioritize between creativity and focus on the vision. Thank you.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Yeah, I think it's a tension, and I think it's a tension we wanna, we wanna build. We want a lot of people experimenting and like ideating and like just testing things, and then it's a function of like how good our judgment is and how good our taste is and how good our sense of like cohesion is. I think we've been very excellent on all those in the past. There's been some like, you know, mishaps of course, but like you expect it. We come from a very design-driven background, and a lot of that is due to hardware because you can't make mistakes, and it just has to feel like really, really good. It has to feel cohesive, it has to feel tangible, it has to feel weighty, it has to feel real and authentic.

I think that like it's just part of our culture and people are just constantly making sure that like, "I'm walking through this experience and this feels super odd, and why does it feel odd, and like how do we address that?" It's that, it's that healthy tension that like if we do too much of that, we're too comfortable, like we're not taking enough risk, and if we're being too risky and like we're not being cohesive, then it's gonna feel terrible to people. There's a, there's a happy medium. I'd rather us go to the extremes to find the balance than just like stay in the middle. I would say like the past three years we were more in the middle than we should be and not enough on the edge.

Now, especially this year, I feel like we're all edge and like we're finding that balance again, and that's super exciting to me, and it's from a technology and design place as well.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Excellent. I think we're out of time. Unless you had a quick closing comment here, Jack? I appreciate the conversation. I always enjoy it.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Awesome.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Any final mics, remarks?

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

I think, I don't know, how many of you have actually used these tools to build anything? Just by a show of hands. Like the one thing I would encourage you to do is just like go home and fire up Codex or Cloud Code or Goose and just try to get it to do something you didn't think it was capable of doing. It can be anything. It can be taking a picture of you from your laptop. It can be like you can ask it like, "Find all the devices I can control on my home Wi-Fi and build me a dashboard." Just something, just something.

You're not really going to understand the shift we're going through until you feel it and you feel what these capabilities are upon us, and I don't think you'll be able to really judge the companies before you and the opportunities until you understand that, and the shifts that these companies have to make fundamentally as they think about themselves as companies.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Perfect.

Jack Dorsey
Block Head, Chairman, and Cofounder, Block

Awesome. Thank you all.

Tien-Tsin Huang
Payments Analyst, J.P. Morgan

Thank you for the time, Jack.

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