6 ms·

The Many Sides of Jack Dorsey

49 points by mshafrir 14y ago

s1rech 14y ago
I had heard from square, but never bothered to look up what they exactly do. I've been surfing through their wikipedia entry and website (very nice design!), and it looks very intriguing. Now the question is of course, who has had some experience with it? Is this confined to SF, other american cities? Does it work as elegantly as it looks? Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  It's not just a Valley thing. A local corn maze was using iPads with them last year as the POS terminals for what would have previously been a cash-only affair.
- achompas 14y ago
  I've seen Square used by vendors in NYC and DC, and my Miami friends use it to transfer money around.
- Multiplayer 14y ago
  We use square for somewhat large (10k-15k) rental transactions. They have always been really accommodating and even when we were newly using them released our funds far faster than anyone else would. Great service.
- wwweston 14y ago
  > Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle. I don't think Square is confined geographically, at least within the US, but I have my doubts will help with the "processing at restaurants takes forever" problem. Most restaurants who plan to take cards already have merchant accounts; Square is most helpful if your problem is "I'm a person or small vendor and want to accept credit cards from other people, perhaps even on-the-go." (Or, if this Quora question is any guide: http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-place-to-work http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-pl... if your problem is that you haven't been able to find a workplace environment that's sufficiently uncircumspect about its place in employee's lives and the world.) I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. There might even be incentives to do that: moving people faster means you can server a higher volume of customers. Whether that'd be enough to overcome Good Enough+Inertia is the question.
  - dmckeon 14y ago
    tl;dr - we use Square & like it a lot. Using Square is faster and more convenient than cell-based (Nurit, Verifone) processing: enter total, swipe, sign screen with a stylus or finger, and, only for customers who have never paid with Square on that card before: receipt via SMS or email (or none)? and enter phone number or email address. Customers often got the receipt by SMS before leaving the shop. Using a Nurit meant total, swipe, wait for connection & authorization, print paper receipts for merchant & customer, get customer to sign and return merchant receipt, make sure merchant & customer end up with the right bits of paper, credit card, and pen. It may sound like a trivial difference in reading the steps, but when dealing with a flurry of customers the ability to spend more attention engaging with customers while still handling payments correctly is an important difference. We are on our 4th credit card processing technology in 8 years (paper imprinter, pay by cell & numeric entry, Nurit, Square), and Square is the best so far at making payments a trivial part of the sales process instead of a minor hassle.
  - jarek 14y ago
    > I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. Pretty much every even slightly classy restaurant in Canada has mobile POSes the server brings to your table and you use to punch in your credit card PIN (or it prints the receipt for you to sign, if you have an ancient or American card). It still takes too long and I wish the limit for RFID-authorized transactions was higher so I could tap rather than PIN, but at least the card remains in my sight at all times.
- azylman 14y ago
  A lot of the small, new businesses/restaurants in Evanston, IL use Square with an iPad for POS.
snitzr 14y ago
"'I wrote down everything that happened at Twitter, and we corrected all the mistakes,' [Dorsey] says." This is kind of Zen. I saw this as an example of motivated and deliberate learning. I find that taking notes instead of winging it can lower the chance of making the same mistake twice. You miss and forget more than you realize. To put it another way, you forget what you remember and don't even remember you forgot.
- AkThhhpppt 14y ago
  It's sensible, but how is it Zen? In what way does it partake of the Buddha nature? :-)
  - theorique 14y ago
    Pop-zen is minimalist, like an iPad or a near-empty apartment, or a fixed-gear bicycle. Or a Moleskine. You know ... Zen. The kind of brands the Dalai Lama would consume if he were a rich SF hipster. Zen.
    - kragen 14y ago
      Like a raku tea bowl, or a haiku, or a Japanese rock garden? Those actually are Zen.
      - Uchikoma 14y ago
        No. A Haiku is not Zen. Haikus are influenced by Zen thinking or influenced by the same principles, but Haikus are not Zen. Rock gardens are not Zen. And tea bowls are not Zen.
        kragen 14y ago
        Japanese rock gardens originate in Zen monastery practice in Kyoto. That is, Zen monks designed, built, and maintained them as part of their practice of Zen Buddhism. The best-known ones are all part of Zen Buddhist temples today. So in that sense, rock gardens are Zen. The other two cases are not as open and shut. Basho, who brought haiku into its modern form, was not a monk, but did practice Zen meditation as a layman, and lived as a pilgrim and hermit, teaching a circle of disciples, like an abbot. Issa, the second most influential haiku poet after Basho, was an honest-to-goodness Jodo Shinshu Buddhist (though not Zen!) priest. Furthermore, the haiku aesthetic embodies Zen's fierce focus on the ephemeral beauty of the current moment. I think that saying that the practice of haiku is "influenced by the same principles" is such an understatement as to be absurd. Right now I am not going to dig into the history of raku.
fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
Naturally, when choosing his own jeans, Dorsey prefers pants that reflect that heritage. He is an aficionado of those made by fashion designer Scott Morrison. Dorsey notes that he plans to make a pilgrimage to Morrison’s shop in New York City’s SoHo district, where they sell jeans made from cotton handpicked in Zimbabwe and woven by craftspeople in Japan. Once, Dorsey says with quiet awe, Morrison provided rigid, unwashed jeans to dishwashers at a New York City restaurant. They wore them constantly in the filthy steaming kitchens, creating a bewitching pattern of wear that was painstakingly replicated by Morrison’s jeansmiths. It’s an elaborate process, all in the pursuit of wabi-sabi. I wonder how the dishwashers feel about super rich people paying a ton of money to pretend they have a life as full as dishwashers.
- rshlo 14y ago
  Got to admit: this quote seemed like a parody to me at first.
- wwweston 14y ago
  Not "full" -- authentic. And your life can be more authentic too, if you just wear clothing of such carefully crafted impermanence and imperfection!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- skunkworks 14y ago
  A bit incredulous but bemused, I imagine. The world of so-called denimheads can be strange and fetishistic -- at its most extreme, it has a Zoolander Derelicte quality to it, where beat-up raw denim is left unwashed well-past its due date and the goal is to look like a merchant marine from 1920 or a railroad conductor -- but as someone who really loves his jeans, I can tell you that I derive a lot of joy from the fit, detail, style, and comfort of a good pair of raw denim that I've broken in myself.
  - trafficlight 14y ago
    You've piqued my interest. Where's a good place to find raw denim jeans?

49 points by mshafrir 14y ago

I had heard from square, but never bothered to look up what they exactly do. I've been surfing through their wikipedia entry and website (very nice design!), and it looks very intriguing. Now the question is of course, who has had some experience with it? Is this confined to SF, other american cities? Does it work as elegantly as it looks? Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
It's not just a Valley thing. A local corn maze was using iPads with them last year as the POS terminals for what would have previously been a cash-only affair.
achompas 14y ago
I've seen Square used by vendors in NYC and DC, and my Miami friends use it to transfer money around.
Multiplayer 14y ago
We use square for somewhat large (10k-15k) rental transactions. They have always been really accommodating and even when we were newly using them released our funds far faster than anyone else would. Great service.
wwweston 14y ago
> Paying with a credit card at a restaurant always seems to take forever, I'd like to be able to spare some hassle. I don't think Square is confined geographically, at least within the US, but I have my doubts will help with the "processing at restaurants takes forever" problem. Most restaurants who plan to take cards already have merchant accounts; Square is most helpful if your problem is "I'm a person or small vendor and want to accept credit cards from other people, perhaps even on-the-go." (Or, if this Quora question is any guide: http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-place-to-work http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Is-Square-an-unpleasant-pl... if your problem is that you haven't been able to find a workplace environment that's sufficiently uncircumspect about its place in employee's lives and the world.) I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. There might even be incentives to do that: moving people faster means you can server a higher volume of customers. Whether that'd be enough to overcome Good Enough+Inertia is the question.
- dmckeon 14y ago
  tl;dr - we use Square & like it a lot. Using Square is faster and more convenient than cell-based (Nurit, Verifone) processing: enter total, swipe, sign screen with a stylus or finger, and, only for customers who have never paid with Square on that card before: receipt via SMS or email (or none)? and enter phone number or email address. Customers often got the receipt by SMS before leaving the shop. Using a Nurit meant total, swipe, wait for connection & authorization, print paper receipts for merchant & customer, get customer to sign and return merchant receipt, make sure merchant & customer end up with the right bits of paper, credit card, and pen. It may sound like a trivial difference in reading the steps, but when dealing with a flurry of customers the ability to spend more attention engaging with customers while still handling payments correctly is an important difference. We are on our 4th credit card processing technology in 8 years (paper imprinter, pay by cell & numeric entry, Nurit, Square), and Square is the best so far at making payments a trivial part of the sales process instead of a minor hassle.
- jarek 14y ago
  > I guess Square could be used creatively to solve the processing time problem: a restaurant could hand out mobile devices to all servers and just process customer payments at the table. Pretty much every even slightly classy restaurant in Canada has mobile POSes the server brings to your table and you use to punch in your credit card PIN (or it prints the receipt for you to sign, if you have an ancient or American card). It still takes too long and I wish the limit for RFID-authorized transactions was higher so I could tap rather than PIN, but at least the card remains in my sight at all times.
azylman 14y ago
A lot of the small, new businesses/restaurants in Evanston, IL use Square with an iPad for POS.

snitzr 14y ago

"'I wrote down everything that happened at Twitter, and we corrected all the mistakes,' [Dorsey] says." This is kind of Zen. I saw this as an example of motivated and deliberate learning. I find that taking notes instead of winging it can lower the chance of making the same mistake twice. You miss and forget more than you realize. To put it another way, you forget what you remember and don't even remember you forgot.

AkThhhpppt 14y ago
It's sensible, but how is it Zen? In what way does it partake of the Buddha nature? :-)
- theorique 14y ago
  Pop-zen is minimalist, like an iPad or a near-empty apartment, or a fixed-gear bicycle. Or a Moleskine. You know ... Zen. The kind of brands the Dalai Lama would consume if he were a rich SF hipster. Zen.
  - kragen 14y ago
    Like a raku tea bowl, or a haiku, or a Japanese rock garden? Those actually are Zen.
    - Uchikoma 14y ago
      No. A Haiku is not Zen. Haikus are influenced by Zen thinking or influenced by the same principles, but Haikus are not Zen. Rock gardens are not Zen. And tea bowls are not Zen.
      - kragen 14y ago
        Japanese rock gardens originate in Zen monastery practice in Kyoto. That is, Zen monks designed, built, and maintained them as part of their practice of Zen Buddhism. The best-known ones are all part of Zen Buddhist temples today. So in that sense, rock gardens are Zen. The other two cases are not as open and shut. Basho, who brought haiku into its modern form, was not a monk, but did practice Zen meditation as a layman, and lived as a pilgrim and hermit, teaching a circle of disciples, like an abbot. Issa, the second most influential haiku poet after Basho, was an honest-to-goodness Jodo Shinshu Buddhist (though not Zen!) priest. Furthermore, the haiku aesthetic embodies Zen's fierce focus on the ephemeral beauty of the current moment. I think that saying that the practice of haiku is "influenced by the same principles" is such an understatement as to be absurd. Right now I am not going to dig into the history of raku.

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago

Naturally, when choosing his own jeans, Dorsey prefers pants that reflect that heritage. He is an aficionado of those made by fashion designer Scott Morrison. Dorsey notes that he plans to make a pilgrimage to Morrison’s shop in New York City’s SoHo district, where they sell jeans made from cotton handpicked in Zimbabwe and woven by craftspeople in Japan. Once, Dorsey says with quiet awe, Morrison provided rigid, unwashed jeans to dishwashers at a New York City restaurant. They wore them constantly in the filthy steaming kitchens, creating a bewitching pattern of wear that was painstakingly replicated by Morrison’s jeansmiths. It’s an elaborate process, all in the pursuit of wabi-sabi. I wonder how the dishwashers feel about super rich people paying a ton of money to pretend they have a life as full as dishwashers.

rshlo 14y ago
Got to admit: this quote seemed like a parody to me at first.
wwweston 14y ago
Not "full" -- authentic. And your life can be more authentic too, if you just wear clothing of such carefully crafted impermanence and imperfection!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
skunkworks 14y ago
A bit incredulous but bemused, I imagine. The world of so-called denimheads can be strange and fetishistic -- at its most extreme, it has a Zoolander Derelicte quality to it, where beat-up raw denim is left unwashed well-past its due date and the goal is to look like a merchant marine from 1920 or a railroad conductor -- but as someone who really loves his jeans, I can tell you that I derive a lot of joy from the fit, detail, style, and comfort of a good pair of raw denim that I've broken in myself.
- trafficlight 14y ago
  You've piqued my interest. Where's a good place to find raw denim jeans?