Jack Dorsey： The Future Has Already Arrived

Well, thank you all for having me. This is an amazing honor. And I want to use this time to share a few ideas that I like to think about and that have helped guide me throughout my career and have guided me out of school into building companies. But also, I want to get as quickly as possible to questions, because I believe the best sort of invention, the best sort of conversation happens in this dialogue. So I'm excited to hear not only questions, but also ideas that we can share together. So my name is Jack. And I never grew up wanting to be an entrepreneur. It's not something I woke up in the middle of the morning, middle of the night, saying I really need to be an entrepreneur. It's something that I really never entered into my vocabulary at all. And I've never thought about building companies, never thought about becoming a CEO, never thought about becoming a leader. When I was a kid, I wanted to do some pretty simple things, which I thought were simple at the time, which was I wanted to be a sailor. I wanted to sail around the world. By the time I was 21, I completely failed in that ambition. I wanted to sail by myself and have a cat as well. Again, failed with that ambition as well. I wanted to be a sailor because I wanted to explore the world. I've always had a curiosity about how the world works. And I want to see the world. I've always wanted to see every aspect of it and really be wherever I thought was most interesting. And that was the sailing aspect for me. I wanted to be a tailor. And this is not a picture of the water. This is actually a picture of denim. What was interesting about tailoring was the aspect of craft, building something with your hands that someone else would delight from. And not being delighted just in the end product, not being proud of just the end product, but all the work going forward into it, the actual craft of building something, of constructing something like denim. And I was always fascinated by denim because it's this natural journal that you wear. As you wear jeans, if you put your phone in your back pocket all the time, it's going to actually make an imprint. So you can look at someone's jeans. You can actually see how they live, how they move, and what they do with their life. And I thought that was just an amazing, amazing concept and really well crafted. And I wanted to be a surrealist painter. And this was the one that my parents never really understood all that well. In many ways, I didn't either. But I've learned so much from artists. I've learned that you can see the world in a completely different way. In fact, you can make up how the world should look. And then you can build it, and you can paint it, and you can actually share it with people. And that actually inspires action, inspires people to move, and inspires people to think in a very, very different way. And I thought that was just an amazing, amazing idea. And if I could explore the world, if I could craft something and really learn how to build and how to build a vision of what I wanted to see in the world, I could do amazing things always. And that was the concept that I've realized over time, is the most important thing for me to do is to see a picture of where I want to go, see a picture of what I want to do in the world, and then figure out how to work backwards from that and to make sure that every single detail of working backwards from that, I'm proud of, something that I love to do. I love the work, not just the end product, not just the end picture, but every step along the way. And in that sense, also be able to explore the world. And I found this great quote by William Gibson. Anyone know who William Gibson is, just by a show of hands? Unfortunately, too few. So William Gibson is a science fiction author. And he coined the term cyberspace. He coined the term cyberpunk in a novel called Neuromancer. And he has this great quote, which I think really captures everything that we're trying to do in this world as entrepreneurs, as founders, as builders of companies and products and ideas, in that the future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet, which is an amazing thing to think about. And this is exactly how we run our companies as well. We get before the company and say, an idea that can change the course of the company can happen anywhere in the company. The future is already in all of your heads and your work. Everything that you have to do in your life is to distribute it. It's to make sure that other people can see it. It's sharing it with other people so that it resonates in a way that speaks to them. And then they want to build it as well. And over the course of doing that, of realizing that picture and making sure that I am distributing my idea, distributing my picture to folks, I realize that's the most important thing. It's to have that strong vision, to have that sense of what you want to do in the world, to be selfish, to build something for yourself, and then be able to convince others to do the same and by showing them what to do. We talk a lot in the Valley. We talk a lot in technology about one word, and that word is disruption. And this is disruption. Disruption is moving things around, moving things, scattering it around. Has no purpose, has no vision, has no values, no leadership. This is not what I want to do in the world. This is not what I want to see more of in the world. I want something with purpose. I want something with direction. I want something with thoughtfulness. So instead of constantly talking about disruption, I believe that we should talk and focus more on things like revolution. Revolution actually has shared purpose. Revolution has an idea, it has values, it has leadership, it has direction. It has something that people can see. It has an end state that actually has a positive impact. But most importantly, it's a cohesive end-to-end experience that people can really get behind and join. And sometimes revolution changes everything, and it's loud and it's violent. Sometimes revolution is silent, and it moves just as much. It can move the entire world in just one image, one action. So revolution can also take on the power of the individual. There's someone I look to all the time, lived a very complicated life, did a lot of great things, but also did a lot of poor things. But a very simple action of collecting salt created a revolution in the country that actually brought India back, inspired people to take their own steps, inspired people to think in their own way and to really question everything that was going on around them. We talk a lot about disruption. We don't talk enough about revolution. We don't talk enough about values and purpose. We talk a lot about founders. We talk a lot about founding moments. We put so much emphasis on the founding moment of a company, the founding moment of an organization, the founding moment of an idea. And these are the rock stars in the organizations. This is what everyone wants to be. And I think that's actually not reality. The great companies don't have just one founding moment. They have multiple founding moments. And just to show an example of this, we would look at the United States. This is one of my favorite paintings because it shows that these guys had a good idea, but their best idea is captured in the phrase a more perfect union, a more perfect union. We did not get everything right today. We're not going to get everything right right now. Others will come and they will finish the painting. Others will come and actually finish the organization in a way that we just can't predict. We can't project right now. And in fact, they did. We had people like Lincoln who completely changed how everyone thought about living in a union. Everyone thought about living in a United States of America. Had a significant impact and I would consider him a founding father of our nation, of our ideas. We had not just individuals, but also movements like the woman's suffrage. Completely questioning every single thing that we took for granted before. Having another founding moment that set the tone for the rest of the country and how the country would move forward. JFK not only doing it in this country, but also pushing us to explore outside of our planet itself and pushing ourselves to make sure that we're taking on significant engineering challenges. That we're really going beyond what we consider possible. And that is what we always want to strive for in our companies is that we have multiple founding moments. We don't have just one, right? A lot of people look at Biz and Ev and myself and this green deer as the founders of Twitter and then just stop. But the thing is, Twitter has had multiple founding moments throughout its history. We had one spark in 2006. We built and we built and built and then we listened. We listened to the people using the service. And in fact, a lot of what you see in Twitter today, the app symbol, the hashtag, the retweet, the word tweet came from the people using the service. It was not something that was invented by the company. It was not something that was invented by any of these guys up here. We just made it easier because we were really good listeners. We built a simple utility that anyone could come to and build their own social products on top of it and then use it in a way that made sense to them on a daily basis, tweet by tweet by tweet. And with every single thing that they did, we were able to make that a little bit easier and make that with less friction. And that increased the usage, increased the conception of all the people who were going to use the service and going to use the system. So the world certainly places a lot of attention on these founding moments, but in fact, you don't really need to start a company to have founding moments. You don't need to start a company to actually take the company in a completely different direction. And a lot of emphasis is also placed on the word entrepreneur, someone who is thought to start something new. But if you look at the definition of entrepreneur, it's actually someone who just takes significant financial risk in order to create something in the world. It doesn't say you need to start a company. It doesn't say you need to be a CEO. It doesn't say that you need to build a business. It says you need to take significant risk to build something new. And the quote that kind of captures the way that I've always thought about building that picture that I want to see in the world is by Steve McQueen. This is him in San Francisco. He only had one really good quote that's worth remembering or mentioning. But it is, when I believe in something, I fight like hell for it. When I believe in something, I fight like hell for it. And that has been my life. I've had a picture of what I wanted to see in the world. And I did whatever it took to make sure that it succeeded, to make sure that it thrived in the case of both companies. Twitter started because I had this fascination with cities. I had this obsession with what was happening around the street corners in St. Louis, Missouri that I wasn't present at. And I had this obsession because my parents had always lived in the city. They had a police scanner. I could hear the police cars and the fire trucks and the ambulances roam around my city. And my parents bought a Macintosh in 1984 when I was eight years old, and I was blown away by that. And I decided that if I really wanted to see what was happening in the city, I needed to make these maps that I was obsessed with move around, and I could do that with the computer. So therefore, I had to learn how to program. I never wanted to be a programmer. I never wanted to be an engineer. I just had to do it to see this idea work out. And at 14, I actually learned how to do an op where I could draw the map on the screen and I could draw some dots and I can move the dots around and figured out how to constrain it within the streets, which was a great day for me. And then I would listen to these ambulances and they would be, I'm at Fifth and Broadway. I'm going to St. John's Mercy. I have a patient in cardiac arrest. I would type that into my program. I could see the dot move, and that would be an ambulance move in my city of St. Louis, Missouri. So suddenly, I had this picture of the city was doing and I had added more and more data sources. I figured out how to get into some databases that I could actually see some of these things myself. And then I could put in my program. And then one day I realized at 16 that there's a whole industry around this that's called dispatch. So I should find the biggest dispatch firm in the world and I should go work there because then I can see the entire city. And I found one, it was called Dispatch Management Services in New York City. They'd just gone public and I could not figure out how to contact them. So I was, by this time, pretty good with computers, very curious kid. And I figured out that they had a hole in their system and I got into their system and I found their email address list for the entire corporation. And I got the email for the CEO and I got the email for the chairman and I sent them an email and said, I'm Jack, you have a hole in your system, here's how to fix it. And by the way, I write dispatch software. And a week later I was hired. And that was my resume. So I moved out to New York City. I dropped out of school for the first time. I went to NYU. I started working on the system. I was loving it because I could see the entire city now. We had taxi cabs, we had black cars, we had couriers, we had emergency. I could see swarms of taxi cabs going to the Met for an event. It was just an amazing, amazing thing. Somewhere along the line, after that, I then dropped out of NYU. And I'm a double dropout, which I don't think anyone else can claim in the dropout league. I dropped out of NYU. I went to San Francisco and we started a web-based dispatch firm. The company was a complete and utter failure. But the one thing that I did realize during my time there was I had all these verticals. I could actually see the city in a very, very interesting way, but I was missing one key element. And those were the people. Where were the people? What were they doing? And where were they? What are they thinking? And that's where the idea for Twitter came from. 2001, I tried to build a system with my RIM 850, which was a little snub-nosed pager, email pager. I spent a weekend, I wrote a simple program so I could email it. It would send an email out to all my friends that I listed out. And I went out to Golden Gate Park, said I'm at the Bison Paddock in Golden Gate Park, typed in an email, went out to the service, and I quickly learned two things. First, no one cared. No one cared that I was at the Bison Paddock. And then second, no one else had a BlackBerry. So it was the completely wrong time and the wrong technology for this. I put the idea on the shelf. In 2006, 2005, 2006, SMS got really big in this country because you could send a message from Verizon to Singular, which was the first time you could cross carriers because Singular was GSM, which was what SMS was built off of. And then Verizon was CDMA, and they had no way to talk to each other. But in 2006, you actually could. So it just became huge, even though the rest of the world had it for 10 years and was using it very effectively for 10 years. I just fell in love with the technology. This is a technology that barely works, but it's on every single device. And once I saw that technology, I said, this is the time. I was working at the first company I had to actually write a resume for, which was Odeo, a podcasting company. And I had not a care in the world about podcasting. When I joined the company, I also learned that no one else cared about podcasting at the company. So the company had no direction. It had no passion for what it was doing, but it had an amazing group of people, including my two co-founders. And they had started Blogger before, and they had a sense of what text mediums could do. So I could bring up this idea. It was a very simple idea and said, can I have two weeks to work on it? And they said, yes. And we built Twitter in two weeks. And the first human-written tweet is inviting coworkers, which was inviting all my coworkers in the system. And then two weeks after that, we invited friends. And then invite, invite, invite, and it just has taken off ever since. But a lot of what you see today hasn't really changed from those initial two weeks. It's stayed fairly consistent, but it's gotten better and better and better and more refined as we've learned from how people are using it and what they're doing. In 2008, at the end of 2008, I departed the company. I switched roles with my co-founder, Ev. He was chairman. I was CEO. He became CEO. I became chairman. And I reconnected with my roots. I reconnected with where I'm from, which is St. Louis, Missouri. And I met, reconnected with my friend, Jim McKelvey, who was my first boss when I was 15 years old. He was actually my second boss. My first boss was my mother when I was 14 years old at her coffee store making cappuccinos for people who didn't know what really a cappuccino was. St. Louis was not that sophisticated at the time. And I would make cappuccinos and I hated coffee. And I would serve a cappuccino and give it to someone. They would say, this is the best cappuccino I've ever had. And I said, really, that's the first one I've ever made. So I knew the bar was very low and I could only go up from there. But Jim came into my mother's coffee store and said, do you know anyone who loves computers, works with computers? And I said, I did. And I worked at his office that night and we just developed this great friendship. I went back to St. Louis in 2008 for Christmas and we wanted to work together. We wanted to do something together. We didn't really know what. We didn't know what to do together. So he had an idea of like, let's build an electronic car. And I said, okay, I have no idea how to do that, but I'd really love to work with you on figuring it out. And then we kept coming up with ideas and nothing was really sticking. And then he called me in frustration one day saying, Jack, he's a glass artist. Jack, I just lost a sale because I couldn't accept a credit card. And we both had these phones next to our ears, these iPhones and supercomputers that could do anything right next to our ears. And we wondered like, why was that so difficult? Why was it so difficult for Jim to accept a credit card? And we took a month and we figured it out. And that month was the answer to that question, why? And that month was the beginning of Square. And since then, we've realized what we're actually doing, what we're actually building, and it's all around making commerce easy. So with Twitter, we made communication easy. We simplified it down to its base essence. With Square, we wanna make commerce just as easy. And the interesting thing about communication and commerce is I don't really see a very large difference between the two. We were actually trading goods as a civilization before we're using language to speak with one another. Commerce actually was occurring before communication was occurring. And communication has always been worked on to be more efficient and more free and more frictionless and easier, simpler. And you see that with Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Vine today. But commerce, for whatever reason, became more complicated and more abstract and more expensive, and it departed from communication. But when you really think about what commerce is, it's not payments. It's a simple activity between buyer and seller. It's a simple exchange of value. Exchange of value is just communication. So our mission at Square is to make commerce as free as communication, to make sure that it goes back to its natural state, to make sure it goes back to something social, something that is conversational. And the way we started is we looked at the system and we realized that, hey, everyone in the world is paying with plastic now. Everyone is paying with credit cards. They're not paying with cash anymore. They're not carrying their checkbooks around. So you have all these people using these cards, but you barely have anyone who can accept them. No one can accept them for whatever reason. We didn't really know what the reasons were, but we found out. We saw that people were not only charged for the hardware, they were charged monthly, they were charged a PCI fee, they were charged a fee for the transaction, they were charged a percentage fee, which is called the interchange, which is just this giant guessing game of things that you have to do. And it took anywhere from a week to four weeks to even start accepting credit cards, right? So if the economy is moving to plastic and you can't participate as a small business, as a medium-sized business, or even as a large business, then how do you build your business up? How do you remain relevant? And the answer is you can't. So that's the problem that we wanted to solve immediately because Jim had that problem, because we wanted him to be able to accept credit cards. That was the picture initially, and it was something that we could achieve. We decided that we wanted to get it down to such simplicity that someone could download an app and in under a minute start accepting credit cards, download an app, put in their name, put in their mailing address, we would send them a free credit card reader, and they were in business. So this is Square, you plug it into the phone, and it's very simple. And we actually were able to do that. We actually were able to build the hardware, we were able to build the software, and we did that in one month. And this was the best company to pitch and demo in the world because I would go around to all my friends and to all these investors and say, do you want to see my new product? And they would say, yes. And I would say, well, give me your credit card. And they would say, no. And I would say, well, I'll show someone else then. And I would say, okay. And that would take anywhere from $5 to $500 depending on who it was. Some people would give me a black Amex and you know exactly what I would do with that. So we ate very, very well in the early days of the company. But the thing is, when people saw that, when people saw that swipe, they said, wow. And the second time they said wow was when they signed on the screen with their finger. And it seems very simple now, it seems very obvious now, but at the time, it was seen as a superpower. You just took money off my card. I said, yeah, check your statement. It'll say Jack Dorsey, $500. And they brought up their Amex statement and they saw Jack Dorsey, $500. Just an amazing feeling. And then I would say, see ya. But it was a great thing because you could actually, like you had this visceral reaction to something that you only see behind counters, you only see behind barriers. And now it was right in your pocket. And it really resonated with not just individuals like Jim, but also larger merchants and folks who are growing at the same time. After we built the original credit card terminal, we really looked and listened to our customers and how they were using the system. And we realized that the following thing happened on most counters around the country. This is what most mom and pop stores have in their businesses. They have what's effectively a calculator on top of a cash box. And then they have a credit card terminal if they accept credit cards, which most don't, right next to it. And the interaction that happens for the buyer is this. I walk into this store and I order a cappuccino. And they find the cappuccino button and they press the cappuccino button. A receipt pops out and says $3.25. And I hand over my credit card and they look up and they groan or they sigh. They say, okay, I'm gonna take this. Type in $3.24 into the terminal, into the machine right next to it. They swipe the card. Another receipt pops out. They give me that receipt to sign. Take that receipt back. Take the other receipt. Take a coffee card. Staple that together. Give that to me. And then I throw that away. It's a complete waste. And at the end of the day, they don't have any information about what just happened. All they have is how much they made, the dollar amount. If they try to figure out how many cappuccinos they sold during the day and they press the button, like the report button, the receipt starts flying out and at the end, the ink runs out so they can't actually get the answer. The whole thing is terrible. The way they count cappuccinos is actually the number of cups coming out of the dishwashers, right? If they need to buy more inventory. Simple, simple, simple things that allow you to make great decisions on how to build your business. Allow you to make decisions whether you wanna have a lifestyle company like my mother's coffee store. She only wanted to have two employees. Or you wanna build a global business like Howard Schultz. All you need is data. You need to be able to see what's happening in your business. And this doesn't matter what scale you're at. So the only way to really do this is not to build two separate systems, but to build one system. And that's exactly what we recognize and exactly what we did. And we built something called Square Register. So took all the mess off, put something in an iPad. And there's some really important things that we realized in doing this. Number one is that merchants put all of this attention and craft into their aesthetic. They really build up their store. And then they have to compromise at the counter. They have to compromise at the payment system. You know, they're so proud of what they built. And then they have to have these ugly systems right on the counter. And worse, it's right before their customers. Like this is the thing that is in front of their customers when they walk in. And there's a few folks who have realized how bad this is. If you go to any luxury store, you go to like a Hermes or a Prada or Armani, and you buy something, first of all, you enter in this like weird universe where you can't really tell what time it is and everything looks magical. And if you buy that, you're going to be a completely different person. If they were to put this on the counter, that would completely bring people back to reality. So what they do is if you buy a belt or you buy a tie or you buy anything, what they do is they say, okay, can I please have your credit card? And they take your credit card and then they go off into the back room and they close the door. And then they swipe the credit card and they print a receipt and then they put the receipt in this like beautiful leather envelope. They come out and they say, please sign. It's like the heaviest pen you'll ever feel. You sign it. Like, oh my God, this experience is so amazing. Why can't this happen all the time? They close it. One minute, please. And then they go back into the back room and then they take that receipt and they put it in the most expensive envelope you'll ever see. And they take that out and they hand it with two hands and they give you that envelope. It's just a receipt in it. It's a paper receipt. But they've removed everything that looks mechanical. They removed everything that looks like it has friction to contain that experience. And that actually builds loyal feel. It actually builds a desire to come back and to really continue to exist in this magical world that they created. Every single merchant in the world wants to do this. They can't because they don't have the infrastructure. They don't have the basic simple things. The other thing that we learned is that the folks who are using this iPad, they're two-year-olds are using the iPad. In fact, in many cases, they're two-year-olds are teaching them how to use the iPad, right? So if we use commodity hardware that people already know how to use, people are already familiar with, there's no training. It's just intuitive. People spend six hours of their day behind one of these things, right? So it better well damn feel amazing and not something that is constantly complicating. So we focused a lot of our energy on the merchants. But again, we were being quite selfish because we go to get coffee every day. We go to have food at restaurants every day. We go through all these commerce transactions that we love every single day. And we have to put up with all this mechanical crap all the time. So if we can fix this side of the counter, we can actually improve the buyer experience, our experience. Not all of us in the company are merchants. Barely anyone in the company is a merchant. I hope. They may be doing a side business. I'm not sure. But we've always approached in this very selfish way of let's improve the buyer experience. Because if you improve the buyer experience, you'll have more buyers. And that means more commerce for sellers. That means more transactions for sellers. But we can do even more. So we built the credit card terminal. Then we realized we have to actually build a register to account for someone's entire business. We have to give them great analytics so they can build their business up and make simple decisions around it. But we can do more than that. We can actually improve the payment experience and we can make it disappear. And I got in front of the company one day and I said, I want us to build an experience where I can walk into a coffee store. I can order a cappuccino. I can take the cappuccino and I can walk out. And on my way out, I will wonder if I paid or not. It should feel that intuitive and it should disappear completely. And the company came back three months later and built it. And we called it Square Wallet. And what it does is you have a consumer with a phone. They download Square Wallet. They link their credit card once. And then you have all these merchants around. And for your favorite merchants, you can turn on hands-free payment. And what that means is you put your phone in your pocket. You keep your phone in your bag. You leave your wallet at home. You walk up to the merchant. You walk into their store. And as you walk in, your name and your face appears on the register. It says Jack is entering the store and it's likely that he's going to order a cappuccino. Because that's his favorite. He gets it every single day. So what the tool we just gave the merchant is that they can recognize you by name. They can say, hey Jack, would you like your regular? I'm like, whoa, how'd you do that? How'd you know that? This is what Starbucks did with their entire business. They trained baristas to ask a very simple question. How is your day going? Very, very simple things. And then the barista learns about that customer. They recognize when they come back in. That's what builds loyalty. So every single merchant that uses Square has this tool where they can recognize their customers coming in. They can say, hey Jack. And then all I have to do is say, you know, I'd like a cappuccino. You can put it on Jack. They hand me the cappuccino. I walk out. And as I'm walking out, they ask me if I want to leave a tip or not, right? Very, very simple. On my speed, doing what I want to do, I'm actually tipping the quality of the cappuccino I'm enjoying right now, instead of someone's ability to enter in to a point of sale system. And our merchants have seen a 22% increase in tips because of this very, very simple thing. But this is giving the merchant a tool to build natural loyalty. They don't need coupons. They don't need groupons. They don't need sales. They just need a great product. And they need to be able to recognize their customer. And what this means is not just at that place do I have this VIP experience, but anywhere I go that's using Square, I can walk in and they know who I am. And they know what I like. And they can treat me like a VIP, which means that I'm going to keep coming back there again and again and again, because it feels like my place. It feels like something I own. And in fact, it's another one of those superpowers. It's another one of those things that when people see someone walk up to the counter and say like, hey, cappuccino please. Okay, thanks for walking away. Like, how'd that guy do that? Like, who's he know? Who's he friends with? I want to do that. And those are the products. Those are the products we want to build. These are the products that they give people these superpowers that they want to show off naturally. Twitter was very, very similar in that you can communicate with the entire world from wherever you are. You could see what was happening in the entire world wherever you are. Doesn't matter if you're in front of TV, if you're out, if you're in front of a computer, all of that has the power to make you better and to give you a better experience. And it's so great that people want to show it off. And that's how products really, really spread. We think a lot about this end-to-end experience. And one of the things that we derive a lot of inspiration from is something that we'll find in our own area, which is the Golden Gate Bridge. Something that we have the opportunity to cross every now and then. We really built the company around this very simple idea. There's many, many aspects of this bridge that I love, but going back to something I said earlier, it's not just the end product that was magical. It was also the way they built it. If you look at just the end product for a minute, what it is is it's a bridge. It has one purpose, it has one feature, and that feature is it doesn't fall down. That's all it has to do. It just doesn't fall down, right? And most people who are crossing that bridge, they're not thinking about, oh, is the bridge gonna fall down? Because they know bridge is probably not gonna fall down. There's gonna be some people who are thinking the bridge is gonna fall down, and why do I have to do this? It's gonna be an earthquake and the whole thing, but they're actually protected from that. So the bridge's goal, the bridge's function is to get people from point A to point B. And most of the commuters that go on this bridge every single day, all they're thinking about is point B. They're thinking about what's on the other side. What do I have to do at work today? What's for dinner tonight? What are my kids going to say tonight? Where am I going? I'm going to this concert, I can't wait to get there. They're thinking about point B, and they're thinking about point B so much that the bridge completely disappears. They don't even notice it, right? It's served its function, it's served its utility. It's a utility that does it so well, it's so intuitive that it disappears completely, and that is magical. That's a product. Those are products that I wanna build, things that are so intuitive and such a part of people's lives that they disappear when you're using them, right? That's how we think about Square, that's how we think about Twitter. People come to Twitter for a very simple reason. It's another A to B. They wanna get some information from someone, or they wanna communicate and share with the world. With Square, they wanna move money from one place to another. They wanna build their business. Our job, in both cases, is to make sure that it stays up 100% of the time. If we have any failures, if we go down, if we have any issues, then we are putting ourselves and our issues in front of our customers, and they're going to notice it. They're going to start thinking about all the failures of the bridge. They're going to start thinking about the failures of Twitter. They're gonna start thinking about the failures of Square instead of the reasons they came to us for. So we wanna disappear, disappear. But the amazing thing about this bridge is if you actually do take a moment to notice it, it is absolutely breathtaking. When you're coming down the Sausalito Tunnels and you see the two towers rise above the city, which is normally rising out of clouds because it's always foggy there, unlike here, which is absolutely gorgeous today, it's breathtaking. It literally takes your breath away, and you notice that it's not just a bridge that provides utility, but it's something that's iconic. It's something to be proud of. It's something that everyone who worked on this bridge is immensely proud of, so proud that their grandkids are proud of it today. And that's one of the most amazing things about this bridge is just the story of building it. This is a bridge that is crossing one of the most tumultuous spans on the West Coast. It's this area underneath the bridge. This area right here is about 60 feet deep. Underneath the bridge, it goes down to 400 feet deep. All the weather is forced right through this golden gate. You have these high winds, and you have earthquakes. It's the last place on the planet that you wanna build a bridge, 1.7-mile span across the golden gate. And not only did they have the ambition and the audacity to cross this span and to build something that would last, but they also had the audacity to make it beautiful, something that people would be proud of. 1,300 people worked on this bridge, 1,300 people. It cost $1.3 million, which would be about, I'm sorry, $33 million, which would be about $1.3 billion in today's money. They gave themselves a goal of building it in five years. They built it in three years, in 1934, which is amazing. And it just celebrated its 75th anniversary. It's still up, it's still something that we look at and we wonder at and are proud of. You contrast that with what's happening with the Bay Bridge right now. The Bay Bridge has been worked on by over 200,000 people, this extension, right? It's not over a very tumultuous area. It's pretty simple. It was completely manufactured in China, shipped over here to be assembled. The goal was originally about seven years. It's been over 12 years now. No one is proud of this bridge. No one is proud of that huge amount of bureaucracy and the teams and all the mass and the resources it took. So small teams can do really audacious, amazing things if they have a vision for what they want to see. They didn't just build this bridge and said, well, we need to build a bridge across and we'll figure out what it looks like when we're building it. We don't know where it's going, but we'll figure it out. No, they had a specific vision of what that would look like. And it wasn't just an engineer saying, this is what it's going to look like. It wasn't just an architect saying, this is what it's going to look like. It's the pairing of the two. If you give an engineer this job of building this bridge, it would stay up 100% of the time, but it wouldn't be something that anyone would want to remember. If you gave an architect the same job, it would be something that would look absolutely gorgeous, but it wouldn't stand up. No one could use it. So it's this pairing between the two that actually creates something like this, which is just absolutely stunning when you see it in person from every single angle. So we want to build companies. We want to build products. We want to build ideas that have a timeless, effortless value, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, something that we can look at and draw inspiration every single day. But every company, every idea, everything that we do has to have some sort of purpose. It has to have the answer to the question, why? And this is a question that I think is one of the most important to ask. It's the easiest question to ask, which is why kids ask it all the time. And it's the hardest question to answer, which is why adults get so fresh at it by answering the question. But if you keep asking why, you keep getting to the essence of what's most important. And that is where truly great ideas, where truly great companies come from, is the constant asking of this very, very simple question, getting deeper and deeper and deeper, simpler and simpler and simpler into a great question. And that's how you drive your purpose and your vision. There's this great quote by Bill Clinton, which really speaks to Square's purpose and what we're trying to do in the world, which is, work is about more than making a living, as vital as that is. It's fundamental to human dignity, to our sense of self-worth, as useful, independent, free people. So when I was starting Square, I was really nervous. How can we attract people to work on payments? It is the least sexy thing in the world. No one wants to work on payments. No one wants to even deal with it. It's not something that people wake up and say, oh my God, I need to work on payments today. I want to revolutionize payments. Nobody says that. But we can focus on what's really meaningful in payments, and in realization, it's not about payments. It's about the experience. It's about that end-to-end. It's about building something that allows more conversation to happen. It's about building something that fades away and disappears completely, so people can focus on what's most meaningful to them. So before we get into questions, I thought I'd end a very simple founding story of my own, which is where I came from. My father, when he was 19 years old, in St. Louis, Missouri, started a pizza restaurant with his best friend. And they called the pizza restaurant Two Nice Guys. And they were very nice guys. My father didn't finish high school. His best friend didn't finish high school. They never went to college. They just loved making pizza. Again, they didn't wake up thinking, I need to be a founder. I want to be an entrepreneur. They just loved making pizza. They loved the delight on someone's face when they were enjoying what they made. Very, very simple, very pure. And the business started doing really well because they put a lot of their heart into it, and they loved everything they did. And they wanted to preserve their friendship, and they wanted to preserve the sanctity of the business. So they made one rule. They had to hire waitstaff. And their one rule was they would not date any of the waitstaff. And the first person they hired was my mother. And my father fell in love with this girl, Marcia, in a week, and realized that, oh my God, I'm about to break the rule. So he went to his best friend. He said, I fell in love with this girl. You can, the business is yours. I broke the rule. And then I was born 10 months later. And that was my founding story. So I thought I would end the speech and start the questions keeping the baby picture up. So that always takes the edge off the questions a bit. Thank you. you