SROYS

Jack Dorsey in my opinion is one of those people who are going to influence a lot of change in the coming future. He is the founder and ideator of twitter.com, which has clearly revolutionized real time sharing. But what I think will really make him what he is going to be is “Square” - or what it will become eventually - the company which allows you to use a small gadget to receive credit card payments. He and his team are working to reduce the friction that exists in making payments. Here’s an interview where he explains their vision.

I love his style - he is almost like a character out of a classic novel.

The reason why I think he is going to influence a lot of things in the future is because he’s working on a very core concept - the concept of payments.

Although there are many providers in India also who are working on this - like pay via mobile phones I think they will lack the finesse Jack can bring to this product. I think eventually they will have to remove the hardware dependency and be able to work entirely through software placed on any device with a data connection.

User adoption of any payment system can be difficult and it’s difficult to change user behavior but if they can:

• Build an interface which can work with the existing payment system (which they have) - the use of the credit systems in place by visa etc.
  
  
• Be prepared for the coming system of no hardware or cards - this will eventually happen and they really need to be prepared for this.
  
  
• Create a really secure and awesome interface to do the money/invoice management - the idea of invoice management is really awesome - this will sell well with the users as invoice management is a pain point. Acquire or partner with indinero.com
  
  
• Cuddle up with Governments to promote this system.  Governments will be very happy to promote the use of a payment system - more tax dollars and more tracking for them. If they can spend millions in unique identification - they can possible integrate this payment system into that identification system in some way so that payments are tracked for taxes - they should lap it up if square could provide such an integration.
  
  
• Get banks to integrate that money/invoice management interface by making it really easy and secure for them to use it as an add-on service to their online/mobile portal. Banks care a lot about their customers - they will pick this up if it is done in tandem with getting the governments to promote the service.
  
  
• A seamless accounting software to categorize spends - businesses would love that and encourage user adoption. Tax accounting would become much much easier.
• Get investment companies to integrate the add-on - so users can see their complete portfolio and their value on their software. This is a vanity thing but being able to see your net worth can be awesome if there is a neat phone app to show it to me.

Basically they need to become a complete package of finance management and not just a payment method - to become a very dominant player in the world and possibly also make their company goal a reality - “To carry every financial transaction in the world”!

Best of luck to Square. I am rooting for you guys.