I went down and found them at the office and I was like, yo, I know what you're about, your full shit like and he's like no, no, no, no, I'm like that, I don't want to hear any of that. Maybe gave him like two or two thousand dollars. I was like, you're running that back right now.
Like right now.
He's like, I don't have any cash. All right, let's go to ATM. So we walked.
I walked him to the ATM.
Welcome to Idea Generations All Angles, a podcast about culture's most influential brands and the teams that built them. If you're an entrepreneur, creative, or anyone interested in harnessing the power of collaboration, join me Noah Callahan Bever each week as we dissect the most dynamic companies in culture, because the only way to truly understand success is to look at it from all angles. Idea Generations All Angles is
a Will Packer Media podcast. In twenty fifteen, song Laurn and Dave Salvian found at Squire Technologies, a software company for barbershops. In the years that followed, Squire would grow from a simple booking app to a full service barbershop back end software with evaluation of a whopping seven hundred
and fifty million dollars. But along the way, Squire would go through several literations, raise money from a variety of unlikely sources, fall victim to scam, and even be forced to buy a barbershop in order to save their only client. On this week's episode of All Angles, we talked to founders Song and Dave, headed product development Armridium, and head of Engineering Troy Payne to hear the unique story of how they came together to form Squire and how together
they've revolutionized the barbershop industry. But before any of that happened, years before they were to enter the y Combinator, was secure sixty million dollars in funding. Song Laurn was just a kid running around the streets of New York City.
I grew up in a relatively unconventional type of household. Both of my parents were were artists, very artistic. They actually separated when I was about two, so I don't have any memory of them being together. Both of them were very much in my life as a child. I grew up in Manhattan in New York in the nineties, and I was a real New York City kid, we moved around a lot. I lived in like so many different neighborhoods in the city, from Harlem to downtown near
like fourteenth and six. My mom actually had a workout studio there, so she was artistic, but also she used to work as a personal trainer, and she was I would say maybe the first or one of the first black owned exercise studios downtown that she ran.
When I look back at it now, I.
Think that may have influenced me as an entrepreneur. Seeing that experience her create her own business and run it early.
On, I'm sure had an impact on me. In the middle of eighth grade, my mom wanted to move to La so packed up and moved in the second semester of the eighth grade.
That was a big change. It was a big culture shift. You know, this is the height of the East Coast West coast kind of dynamic. So it was really interesting. But I ended up really having a great experience in La as well.
I knew I.
Really really wanted to be successful and whatever that meant. I didn't want to be port I wanted to be financially well off. I didn't know specifically what that required was that entailed I gravitated more towards humanities, writing, reading, you know, debate.
Those types of classes to me made sense. The law was a good option.
While in school, Song had a career in law and IVY League on the brain. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, another Squire partner was also walking the halls of Los Angeles's Westchester High.
Song and I actually went to high school together.
This is Troy Payne, head of engineering at Squire.
So back in LA his locker was next to my locker, the year younger than me, but I knew him from Jaron Hallways Sharon Lockers. I remember he was a class president and I remember him doing like what class president do, some sort of a speech.
At the time in high school, I was pushing burn.
CDs, so out a CD burner when nobody else had it, and I would buy blank CDs and ripped albums that weren't out yet, like Lil Wayne's four hundred Degree. This made me a lot of money because I had it before anyone else had it.
I could charge double.
So I was selling CDs.
I was helping people chip their PlayStations so that they can burn the games that I was also selling.
While Song pursued political science, Troy was into the science of technology, from illegal downloads and burning CDs to coding and developing apps. Troy fell in love with computing.
My first computer was given to me by my father when I was eight. Used to play video games for the most part, not a type really, I just knew how to use a joystick. One day we installed AOL because back then it used to just pretty much deliver them everywhere in the mail free. We signed up my brother and I and we were on it. We were participants in a chat space called Black Voices. We're at this at this point, I'm about eleven or twelve, and I'm in a BV team chat talking about things that
twelve year olds talk about. And there are other people that are that age as well from other parts of the world Black as well. There were people from Oakland and people from down South, and it was interesting to be able to connect to these kids that were my age and had similar interest within computers.
Troy's fascination with the World Wide Web continued to grow. It was a blank canvas and he was obsessed. Song knew of Troy and was vaguely aware of his interests, but at the time, they were just locker neighbors passing like ships in the night.
It was a year headitor, but we kind of knew each other, knew each other were running in the same classes. We weren't, like, you know, in the same crew. But I always thought it was cool. He was quiet, you know, quiet guy. I had no idea that he was a codeer or a hacker, or was getting into trouble on the rush from the law or whatever was going on.
Now.
Troy was never actually on the run from the law, but by the time he reached high school, his computer skills had evolved substantially, and he did find himself immersed in the culture of hacking, which maybe led him into some gray areas as far as internet legality goes.
I started playing around with creating my own stuff using something called Visual Basic three point zero. It was a great tool because it was simple enough for you to self learn. It was powerful enough for you to do all the things that your imagination wanted you to do. The software was new, it was full of exploits, and
everyone was pretty much exploiting all of the exploits. From a happening perspective, From a software perspective, That's what really sort of got me interested in software engineering and development in general, is because I was just trying to look for the next edge for me to do what I was doing as a kid, you know, things that kids do. Instead of doing it on the streets, I was doing
it on the internet. So my skills developed really developing products that I made a piece of software called trigger.
Happy, and it had a viral effect.
Back then, AOL had email, and so you could make something. You can brand it, you can package it, and you can distribute it, and it could go viral because people started to share it. Every time you launch it, it would advertise in the chat room, you know, trigger.
Happy has been activated or something like that. People would see that and say, oh, you know, you know, it's.
Sort of like a fear fact that people would know that you're about to do something malicious to and back then it was like either terminating your account or kicking you off the internet. I remember I was in a chat room and someone used trigger happy and I had no idea who they were, and that was like that was it right there. That's when I fell in love and I'm like, wow, I can make something like this that's distributed that people that I.
Don't know can get a hold of and use and they love it.
And ever since then, my focus has really been on sort of chasing that feeling.
Troy was down the rabbit hole, and we'd spend the next several years coding, creating games, apps and websites. Meanwhile, Songs still had his eyes fixed on law school.
I had in my mind at that point that I wanted to go to law school and if not be a practicing lawyer wherever, at least get a law degreeks.
I thought that would open a lot of doors.
If you grew up in la like everybody's one step removed from entertainment. I didn't talk about my dad, but he was mostly an actor growing up on Broadway and did a lot of plays in theater, so I was somewhat familiar with that world. So I thought, you know, entertainment, law could be a good option.
Song went to UCLA for undergrad and then to Yale for law school. He got the Ivy League experience that he had dreamed of and also got his first taste of entrepreneurship.
Junior year of college, one of my best friends and I we used to do tutoring on the side.
We started seeing that there's a lot of demand for it.
So we ended up starting a tutoring company and hiring other college students and matching them with the families that we knew were in need of tutors, and then like charging a percentage as well as tutoring ourselves.
So that was my first taste of entrepreneurship.
Upon graduation, Song moved to New York City to pursue his career in law.
So I was doing with M and A like Murders and Acquisitions law, where I would work on these big deals, multi hundred million billion dollar deals. All the lawyers would celebrate when the deals were closed. But like, I saw who was really getting patient these deals. It wasn't the lawyers. And I felt like the guy's on the business selling weren't any smarter than us, weren't working harder, and they were.
Making millions and tens and hundreds and millions of dollars on these.
Transactions, and you know, we had our salaries and our bonuses. I was like, why am I on the side of it? So I knew I want to do something be on the business side. I just didn't know what to move.
Was at the same time. Dave Salvin, co founder and president of Squire, was also in New York City working in finance.
Grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Mom was a single mom. I worked a couple of jobs so you know, get us through. Went to college in New York at the University of Already.
Entrepreneurship was something you think about, but you don't know.
Exactly what it is. It wasn't a goal.
I think growing up was like, Hey, how do I make money?
And the folks that I saw make the money were lawyers and doctors. After I finished college, I started working at a market Firman in Rocket County, part of the Info group. I started hanging out in New York City. It was like a wait nine, and I saw this level of wealth that I didn't see before, like young guys with a decent amount of capital, and they looked like me. These guys worked on Wall Street in finance, and I was like, Hey, this is where we can make them some money. And then I decided to be
in finance. Actually moved to the Bronx and I started applying for jobs in New York City and I was lucky to get a job at Dakeon Morgan and the job was personal banker or type of thing, but it was at one of the more affluent bad branches in New York.
With Dave working in finance and Song in the adjacent field of corporate law, it was only a matter of time before the two cross paths at a downtown happy hour.
Dave was also young black professionals and finance. We would go out a lot with a party a lot and then at some point I think we both were feeling versed in there, like this is just like a rat race, doing the same thing over and over again, and we're working at these corporations that we're like, don't care about this. Guy's more life than this. And he was like, yeah, I'm feeling the same way. So we would start brainstorming ideas.
We spent so much time and effort basically going out and having fun, why don't we channel that some of the effort, even a small part of it, into trying to start a business.
We were like, what can we do this better than this, that can be more impactful. They could create a legacy, and that was the process.
We actually went to Columbia on Saturday. Columbia had a public library. Well, we don't know it's public or not, but it was public for us. And we went into the library and we got into one of the classrooms and we used to just sit there for hours on end and think about ideas we can create this song, and we would actually go through the motions. And the third or fourth session of that idea of square came about.
Song and Dave were determined to come up with a business of their own. After settling on barbershops as an area of opportunity, the two went to work figuring out exactly how they would break into the market.
We stumbled on this idea of barbershops. It was really born out of both of our experience.
Havn't gone to barbershops, you know, since we were kids. You love it, you feel.
Great, you get a fresh lineup, whatever, But like the process was just so antiquated. Sometimes they waited an hour or two hours, sometimes not. It was very painful cash space businesses at that time, and it didn't make sense that, you know.
This is like twenty fifteen.
There's already Huber out there, there's already YELP, there's already all these.
Software that are improving our lives.
When it came to getting a haircrat there was no innovation enough technology. That was an interesting idea and we both were like, wow, that's true, Like I've had that experience. You've had that experience, Like this is something that I think would resonate with a lot of people.
And thisial idea was finding a way for customers to book pay. Here go into a barbershop and you pay, you walk out.
See what experience.
The ideation of this was solving for what we thought could work for ourselves.
And then the real opportunity came was like.
When we started applying it and seeing the feedback and seeing how users engaged with the platform.
We started trying to learn as much as possible about our customers. So had the idea then started trying to seek we could validate it. We go walk in the barbershops and just like try to talk to the barbers, talk to the owners, talk to the guys sitting in the chairs waiting to get a haircut, and just see what were their paying points, what do they want to improve on, like what.
Could we solve for them? And then we started getting.
A picture that painted it was pretty clear that there was a lot of frustration on both sides. On the client side as well as the barber side, and we started trying to figure out how could we solve those frustrations.
The hard part was building the product because neither one of us were our developers a coder as a technical so we looked at our network and thought of who could refine to help us build this and that was a struggle that took almost a year of just back and forth and failing until we eventually were able.
To find somebody that could actually build the first version of the product.
The vision for Squire was coming into focus, but they needed someone to help them bring it to life. The two had no experience in technology, and that learning curve was leading to some costly mistakes that would threaten to end the business completely.
It was a shit show.
We were hustling and we works.
We met a guy that worked for us startup, but he ended up being a total fraudster.
Neither Dig or I are technical, so we immediately started trying to think about how we could find somebody to build.
It for us.
We wanted to recruit someone and sell them on.
The dream and get them to be part require and be like our CTO. Essentially, we would go to meet up a man's startup events try to meet people.
We met this guy that like seemed really interested in what we're building. He was an older dude, older.
White guy, and I think he actually was at CTO at a company that was working out every work pretty at that time, established company that had raised a lot of recent money.
And he was like, you know, I really.
Love what you guys are doing. I want to help you guys. I've got my full time day. But on the side, I think I can build this app. It'll be pretty easy and I'll work with you on it.
And he was like, and I.
Might even want to invest, So of course, you know, that was our He is fast forward. This is probably like weeks now. We're working with him. He keeps saying he's building the app. We're talking about our ideas and our vision and what product we want. But funny enough, he would never actually show us if he was working on He was just really good at kind of bullshit it.
Stuff wasn't added up, you know.
He would say he would invest, so say you'll get an office space that we were. He also said he would use the connections to build and he was working on it, and then nothing was happening after the sixty to ninety days of this stuff. We gave him twenty five hundred of our money to work on this, and then he didn't produce.
Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into you know, maybe months of him just giving us the run around. Obviously, at a certain point start getting more suspicious, like what's going on.
By this time, we really started like.
Looking into everything, and it became clear that he was this total fraud. We actually did some research and found other articles that had been written about this dude. His picture of a different name, he had present, pretended to be a.
Doctor, he pretended to do all kind of shit, but his job was real. The job at this tech company was real. They were getting defrauded too.
He was boosting him and actually had a CEO RO at a real tech company and they didn't know it.
So at this point I'm pissed. Once I find out, I actually wanted to see all that company was like, Yo, you're dealing with a fraud.
We actually got him fired from his job and he actually got busted for this.
I went down and found him at the office and I was like, yo, I know what you're about. You your full of shit, like and he's like, no, no, no, no, I'm like that, I don't want to hear any of that. We maybe gave him like two or two thousand dollars. I was like, you're running that back right now, Like right now. He's like, I don't have any cash. All right, let's go to ATM. So we walked. I walked him to the ATM, took out the money and gave it to me right there, and I took him from.
Him, took his mind. I was like, yeah, like I never want to see you again. I never saw him again after that.
We got out twenty five hundred dollars back and he went on away.
After their encounter with a grifter, Dave and Song looked to their own network to find the next key hire for Squire. They reached out to a ram Irridim, who Dave knew from business school. Has a rom learned more about Squire, it became a parent that he might be the peace that could help build Squire into the global business that they all imagined.
Most immigrant families, you are either going to be a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer. At least that's what your parents want for you. So I studied computer science.
Believe it or not.
In undergrad I was good at it from an academic perspective, but I just didn't see myself as being someone who's going to, you know, write code twenty four to seven. I just figured I wouldn't be able to compete with those guys that were really really into coding and then writing games and creating games.
I decided to go to law school.
I graduated from law school, and I practiced law for about five or six years. During that time, I was living in New York and Harlem, and that's when I met Dave and Song. Song is also an ex attorney. We were working at similar firms and had mutual friends and just coming of age, if you will, in New York City. Together they started the company. I didn't even know that they did. About a year in is when I decided to leave law, and I was really just looking to stay busy.
I knew I wanted to do something else.
Aramas real lawyer, and we had a lot of common friends. You know, a Raamas real character.
He's from Russia originally, but grew up in Brooklyn. You know, all the friends are black. So we had like a lot of similar a lot of similar friends come you know, growing up this around the same time professionally being attorneys, and we just all hang out a lot in the same same circles.
And then he was leaving his firm and there was an opportunity. You know, he was a super smart guy, the slight cap.
I didn't know what it was going to be.
I spoke to Dave and he said, hey, listen, you know we're working on this project working out of Rework. Why don't you just start coming in. There was office space. It will be easier for you to figure things out. This way, you'll get to hang out around other people doing cool stuff. And at that time we were at the headquarters of we Work believe it was seventeenth Street in Manhattan. We Work at that time had had this
program called we Work Labs. This was sort of the first class, if you will, and it was just a bunch of desks in a room I think ten or twenty starups working on whatever it is that we're working with. So it literally just started by me coming to the office and my personality is I just can't see sit still and whatever. I'm hearing a discussion about a problem or a debate about what, you know, what should happen.
I can't help but get involved colon nosey, if you will, And so I think that's how I got involved with Squire. Little by little daves and songs. Problems and concerns became sort of my problems and concerns. Shortly thereafter, you know, we made the mutual decision that I should join Squire.
Arom joined the team is the head of product, helping craft Squires ux and optimize this consumer experience. As they were rounding out the team, the guys would have a chance encounter at we work labs that would change the trajectory of Squire forever.
I was working late one day and I.
Saw some guys at the headquarters, you know, I was like, Hey, these guys looking for it. You know, I might as well tell them what we're doing. And you know, come to find out, one guy founded we were labs.
Another guy was a.
Cheap accountant off for sure, and we were able to parlay that meeting into an investment. So we actually end of June got about three hundred thousand dollars and investment.
Initially, Squire was built to be uber for barbers, and the product worked well, but getting the buying from the guys actually cutting hair was more difficult than they anticipated. Why would barbershops digitize a cash based business model that's worked just fine for the industry for literally hundreds of years. So the Squire team took it back to the lab and focused on listening to the real needs of barbers and implementing them into the app.
I like simple businesses.
Simple businesses make sense to me because I could literally figure out exactly what everyone's intent is, and that makes it easy to digest, right because one of us for barbershop owners, you know, none of us have barbers So from one perspective, it's like, well, what do you guys know about building.
Software for barbershops?
But it's a business that is natural to understand how it works. We all set in barber chairs before we all spoke to our barbers. We understand how they get paid, We understand what lives they live, we understand the culture behind barbering, and I think those aspects made the company itself exciting to me. Being with David Song, we were all pursuing our careers in banking and legal space at the same time, and just to see how much they believed in this project and what they were willing to
risk to execute on. It was truly inspiring and that's exactly what I needed to be around at that time.
First product we built was a mobile app.
The way it was referred to by some people as like Uber for barbers. You're a consumer and you're down on the app and find a barber, book, pay to everything seamlessly and now on the business and for the individual barber to manage his or her schedule and payment and whatnot. So that was the first product we had just through you know, sheer Hustle. We were able to do some barbers to try it out in New York, but we we learned pretty early on that like that
product was not a great product for the market. The feedback that we were getting was like, this is cool. I'll use it if you guys send me customers, they can book on Squire and I'll cut them cool. But they weren't using it for all their current customers and that was the missing piece, Like we couldn't get them to say Squire is going to be my system of record, I'm going to be a Squire to manage my business.
And then when we asked.
Why not, you know, they were like, well, you know I have a point of seale system.
Can you integrate with that?
I have inventory I'm selling retail like can your app do any of that?
And the answer is no. So we kind of had to go back to the.
Drawing board and started working on a full and then system for the entire business.
Instead of an app for individual barbers, they.
Needed something where they could see all the barber schedules in one place, like like a central platform where they could manipulate appointments and change things. And importantly, they needed an integrated point of sale system. So often they were using like one thing for point of sale and then something else for booking, and that was that it was very disjointed and now that was causing a lot of frustrations.
So we identify early on we need to build a point of sale and that took a while, but that that was something that we knew it would be very very important to provide a much better experience for that.
It's the chicken and egg problem.
Do you build sort of the supply first, or do you build up the demand first, or do you build two of them together. Since most men are very loyal to the barbers, we don't actually need to build up two sides of the marketplace. We can just build something that barbershops and barbers would like, and just by virtue of knowing how that relationship lays out between a barber and a customer, because we were all customers of barbers right, we sort of knew that of felt confidence that the
customers would use it. So if your barbershop starts using Squire, then even if a customer will complain about having to book an appointment now versus texting you or calling you, ultimately the customer will do what their barber is telling them to do.
And I think that that was one.
Of the biggest and most important pivots that we've made, you know, I think it really led to our success that we realized this early on and we made the pivot and we started building software for the barbershop.
With a product in hand, Dave pounded the pavement looking for customers. Barbershop after barbershop listened to Dave's pitch, but they all politely declined. Eventually, through sheer Will, Dave was able to get one barbershop to sign up for Squire.
So we build this first version of a booking management system for the barbershop right, theyve you know, the greatest salesman on earth basically sells it to this pretty nice barbershop, Chelsea Market in New York City, right like, this is not your ranking dinky shop somewhere Brooklyn or Queens Now, this is Chelsea Market, beautiful shop. He sells the system to them. When I say sell, he didn't sell it.
They weren't paying us anything. He basically sold them on using it, which I think, you know, it's the first battle we must win as a tech company. They start using our system, and the owners, you know, they were all over the place. They weren't necessarily seasoned barbershop owners, and we started to feel that they are actually maybe considering closing the business, which would be a disaster for us.
Squire was finally in a barber shop, but now that shop was on the verge of closing. To save that shop and their only potential revenue stream, Squire decided to explore buying the business.
We sat down and we'd literally just crunched the numbers. We figured out that if we ran the barbershop we would break even, and so we just approached the owner and said, look, it doesn't seem like this is something you want to be doing anyway, let us take over your lease. You tell us what you need. Thankfully, the owner was really just trying to get out, and so we negotiated the purchase and we ran that barbershop I
think for about three to four months. At that point, a bigger brand took over the barbershop, but those three four months weren't valuable as far as to knowledge the experience that we were able to gather.
Squire had saved their company by buying the spot in Chelsea Market, but more importantly, now they had an inside look at everything that goes into operating a barbershop.
We actually took over and operated it because we couldn't get anybody else to use our business management software like we were our own first customers.
From a product perspective, it is pretty much what every product manager would dream of, right that is, an ability to just be your customer for three months as part of your job. It really just made us understand exactly how a barbershop functions, not on paper, not on theory, but in real life. I think that just tatapulted our software to another level.
As the team operator a legit barbershop doing everything besides cutting hair. They learned the ins and outs of running the business, and they were able to figure out firsthand what Squire's customers needed from their product. Also, the shop brought new people into their orbit, some of whom had extremely advantageous connections.
We had a front desk person called out on this Saturday morning, I'm not coming. We have an appointment. The barber shops have to open, so I have to get up out of my bed. So I go to a barbershop. I opened a barbershop in the chair, just running operations. One of the people that came I noticed had an fbing email, so obviously they worked for Facebook, and I just wanted to ask that person, you know, how you
like a service or a startup. You know, we took out the barber shop and that person ended up being Blake Chandily.
Blake Chanley is currently the President of Global Business Solutions at TikTok. At the time, Chanley was VP of Global Partnerships at Facebook, where he'd worked for over twelve years as a tech startup. There was no one more fortuitous that the Squire crew could meet.
He says, if you want to talk, he'll be an awesome south By Southwest the next week, and I said.
Yeah, we're going to go there anyway, but we weren't going.
To go there, but we went down to pitch him and he ended up investing one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and Squire.
With the additional funding from Shanley Squire was beginning to turn some heads in the explosive world of tech startups. At the same time, Troy Payne songs Old Locker Made from La had moved to New York to launch his career in software engineering.
I was building just basic car or check out experiences, that sort of thing.
Nothing too crazy.
Facebook was hot at the time, so I was building Facebook apps. My wife and I visited New York and you know, fell in love. I had a condo at the time, sold it dropped everything moved to New York. When I moved to New York, Song was the first person I saw that I knew randomly on the train and I'm like, Yo, what's up where you get your haircut around here? Because that's the first thing you asked. When you move to a whole new city. You don't
want to just go to anybody. You want to go to people that are like you and get advice from people that are like you and recommendations. It's crazy, how what we're doing together right now?
And it had nothing to do with that question.
Troy and Song reconnected and kept in touch, but wouldn't join forces just yet. Troy still had a few apps to develop and a few codes to break.
I changed jobs started working at Guilt but the travel subsidiary Jetsenter.
I was hired based on a game called what Movies Just from?
What we would do is we would send out a movie quote and the first person in reply with the correct answer would We would send a DVD too. And then the iPhone came out and I said, this will be a great game on the iPhone.
We made it this iPhone game called what movie Is this from?
And it was the first asynchronous game that instead of you playing it, it played you. So it'd be in your pocket and get a notification or something that says that you know, we're going to be announcing a movie quote in about ten minutes or something. You open a game, you see a time or countdown, it shows a quote and then you can respond with the answer.
It shows a leaderboard, et cetera. And it had some success.
It was number three and all of the trivia games, and we had some people paying attention. One of the people that worked at Jetsetter, who went on to start buying ultimately, was working at Blockbuster at the time, and when I interviewed at jet Setter, they was pretty much saying, hey, man, I don't know if you know this, but Blockbuster's been copying everything you can do it. And I had no idea that it's great to hear from a kid like me.
I've built this in my dad's living room for three months, and I'm able to get the attention of these big brands. I'm beating these these gaming studios at their own game, and I'm doing it all by myself.
Another one of Troy's endeavors was an early social media platform called Cosmos.
I decided to take a little break and start working on something else.
I was working on something called Cosmo.
Cosmo was like Twitter, but instead of random tweets, everything started with I want to And so you would put these cosmos out into the universe of what you want to do. And they're one directional, you know. It's not like, hey, does anyone want to hang out today? It was I want to hang out tonight, and that doesn't mean anything. It could just go off from to the ether, or somebody could say, yeah, I want to hang out tonight as well, and a conversation could happen around these sort of.
Desires or once.
And that also sort of further my strength and design, my strength and product development. And I got a taste of fundraising, pitching to billionaires, pitching to whomever would listen, trying to raise capital and ultimately failing, but realizing my strengths and now knowing exactly.
What to look for as far as partners go.
As Troy learned everything about fundraising and pitching for his own apps, the Squire team was headed out to Silicon Valley in search of additional investors for themselves.
Man, it was amazing, one of the best experiences I've had. If you ever watched that show Silicon Valley and HBO, like, it really felt like.
That the characters, the amount of.
Obscene wealth that you have proximity too. It was totally new to me and I really loved it. We didn't just apply to I See A getame. We applied three times. One time we got rejected, the second time we got in, but not to the main program, like to this small version of the program and the third time we got in and moved there. But addition to y see, we had previously applied to just about every accelerator that exists that knew about, and we got rejections from all of them.
I don't even think we got interviews from both of them.
So this has been like over a couple of years of really trying to insert ourselves into the tech ecosystem in New York and then eventually in the Ballet and just being projected from every angle.
So when we did get accepted, it was an incredible.
Validation for us, and we really wanted to make the most of it to embrace the experience as much as possible. I think we did a good job establishing ourselves, like we were pretty well known in the bash. We brought a barber to demo day and we were giving people haircuts there and they have to book on the app. We definitely created some buzz that I think helped us kind of put our name on the mat where people had heard of those Squire guys. That's what they used
to always call it. Hey, those Squire guys. Yeah I heard of those guys. Yeah, I saw those guys.
We got into a Series A program with Y Commador, So we did the Y Company cores and then we were able to you know, parlay that into Series A program, which was January twenty nineteen.
We went on thirty or show.
Meetings doing that process.
We got thirty or so knows and the last meeting we got a yes from Trinity Adventures.
Our first institution around proper Series K led by a BC fund, Trinity Adventures, and that was for eight million dollars.
And that was the twenty.
Nineteen With Series A funding in hand and plenty of publicity to go with it, Squire was now making headlines. Troy caught winded the rise and decided to tap Song to see if he could get involved. Too. Little did he know he was reaching out at the perfect time.
He reached out.
When he heard about Squire, I said, Yo, I know a song. You know, I'm an engineer, Like, you know, what's up? I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. Cool, and then we reconnected. At that point, he came at a trivial moment where we honestly probably would have not succeeded had he not joined the company when he did.
At the time, Squire had another partner who was serving as CTO. Unfortunately the relationship with sour and soon both parties would want out.
After the count Artists incident, we still continued trying to find the right person to join our company, and then we actually ended up finding the Cocoon.
The CTO, and he built the first person of the product.
He kind of like had the keys of the kingdom as far as the technology goes, like he controlled everything new everything without him, like there's no company from from a product standpoint.
So they had a CTO at the moment, I didn't know it, but they weren't very happy with progress that.
Was being made.
And I came in as a contractor to work on some iOS stuff. I think the CTO was saying that we need to bring in someone to port over our app to the new back end that they were working on, and he had estimated it would take three months and.
I did it in three weeks.
They were impressed by that.
I had no idea at the time that they were unhappy with the CTO, but they pretty much said, Troy, we're gonna let so and so go, we want you to step in.
When Troy came in, he basically took over everything and kept the lights on and even improved on what we had had he not reached out, had we not had to locker together, had all these like random occurrences not happened, I don't know what we would have done at that time when it didn't work out with the former co founder, like we you know, probably would have failed.
And what's the odds, you know, like one of the odds to the same high school.
Now, had we not had lockers in the same place, I would have not known like we would like there's a big school, like you know, thousands of students.
We never had a class together, I would have known who was.
But they would have it that we did share lockers in the same place. So I knew him, so he knew me. And then all these years later it worked out joint schore.
With all the pieces in place, Squire transformed from Uber for barbers into a full service back end app for barbershops, and in doing so, became one of the hottest startups in tech. Incredibly, only a few months after raising their Series A, Squire received a twenty seven million dollar Series B investment, and just in time, because although they didn't know it the COVID nineteen pandemic was just around the corner.
So we did a twenty seven million dollars series B. The last five million came in a week before the pandemic. Everything sat down, so fortuitous timing to say the least.
Revenue went to zero. We're flying high. We had this growth chart, you know, up to the right. We did around.
Six or seven million in March, and then in April it went down to like one hundred thousand dollars.
That's how drastic the drop off was.
We were instructed to take PvP longs and we did not, said, you know, we don't need it.
We had at that point thirty something million dollars in the bank.
We didn't think it made sense for us to you know, take money that was meant for our customers.
We didn't take the money.
We hunkered down and say, hey, we're going to get to this. It's not gonna last whatever.
And it didn't.
And you know, we saw this robust growth out of the pandemic.
We really focused on the product and we get focused on the customers. During that time, we built four or five products that just were dedicated to the customers. We created a virtual waiting room.
We created a way for our customers that are applying the PPP loans. We created a way for folks to make wireless not point sell pay me so I didn't have to touch the cast register. We made it way for folks to donate to the barber shop that was down and then actual barber So we created like a gift card product, all within six to eight week span. So we were like ray, focused on getting stuff out that
made sense for our customers. And because of that, we saw this huge growth coming out of the square, like this huge influctual customers.
It was a wild time.
It's going to be crazy to just think that we all lived through this because they impacted every business. But our customers are shut down. When the government calls, our businesses shut down and they started reopening going into summer twenty twenty. And while they were shut down, as a company, refocused on how we could help them, how we could help keep them afloat, provide them with capital, launch futures that will allow them to reopen safely, and I think it was the right decision for us.
We also waived subscription fees for.
The whole year, even for the following year because we didn't want for them to have an additional overhead during this.
Really challenging time.
It was the right thing to do just morally, but I think it ended up being the right thing to do as a business as well. And when they reopened, we started getting more customers than ever. And I think part of.
It was the shift to digital.
A lot of businesses started really understanding why they need to embrace technology and accept card payments and all that.
And then some of it was because of the good will that we were building.
An industry and really leaning into how can we help our customers.
So we saw a lot of growth in the second half of twenty twenty going into twenty.
One, a lot of growth. As Song puts it, is this a severe understatement. From twenty twenty to twenty twenty one, Squire raised their Series C and Series D funding, putting over one hundred million dollars in their coffers. Their Series D, led by Tiger Global, came in at sixty million dollars and earned a company a whopping seven hundred and fifty million dollars valuation.
I think we're just scratching a surface, which is crazy to think about considering our current valuation and considering the number of shops that we have on our platform.
One thing we.
Do have is high our pool.
You know, our shops pay for great service, and they're happily paying for a great service, and so we don't have just a bunch of shops that are barely paying. We have a handful of really great shops that are paying for the value of it. We're in three thousand barbershops in the US.
And the UK and Canada.
There are fifty thousand in the US alone, probably two hundred thousand worldwide, maybe more. We're still sort of doing our time right now. I know in Europe is becoming even more popular. I think from that perspective there's a lot of room, but there's an even bigger sort of space that if we can capture every barbershop, we can start marketing to the consumer where I think it gets really really interesting.
Similar to with Uber has done.
Uber has created this household name part of world culture where you don't think about how you got to someplace.
They sort of blurred the lines between getting from A to B.
You just took an Uber, you booked an Uber.
But there's also a whole other set of consumers where they don't know what barbershop to go to. There's a lot of people on Earth, a lot of of them have here, and that's the market that I look at.
I think what's next for us is we are going to continue scaling. We're going to continue grabbing market share in the barbershop space where now in five different countries USA, Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia sort of both English speaking countries that we're concentrating on those for two reasons. Obviously the software is in English, but also, you know, we want to make sure that we always have processing payments for our clients because I think it really makes for a very unique offering.
Think about running a company, particularly a tech company that's growing fast. Is scaling is a tension between the necessity of short term thinking and planning and then also like long term vision and thinking three to five years out. And sometimes the two can seem like their attention because what's better for the company than long may or may not seem like the best thing to do, you know,
in the next six to twelve months. Since the economy has changed slowed down, the fundraising capital marcuts environment is totally different than it was I think it's actually put us in a better position in terms of company building, and I'm actually, you know, weirdly kind of like excited about this opportunity in this time because it's going.
To allow us to really focus on building an amazing company.
And part of that, in my opinion, is like actually thinking about profitability being a company actually generates cash while also thinking about how that growth is important. It's not the only thing, So I'm looking forward to that. For me, what I think about is continuing to build up Squire and really define like as a category leading, category defining company.
We are, I think the only company that is a barbershop management platform, and we empower our barbershop owners and barbers to run their business better, to improve their operations and added out laser focus.
We're at the only company probably in the world. I can say that.
Squire's story is one of ambition, curiosity, and adaptability. Though they both got their start on the corporate ladder, Song and Dave were born entrepreneurs with a shared goal of manufacturing their own success, and they also shared an ingenuity and a willpower to engineer that success through innovation and an excellence of product. Once they identified barbershops as a white space open to disruption. They studied the landscape relentlessly,
and they did their diligence naturally. As the business progressed, they hit no shortage of walls along the way, but they were never deterred. They processed the challenges, added the right team members in Arom and Troy, and pivoted with Finesse.
And as their team product and true marketplace opportunity came into focus, the financial dominoes just started to fall one after another, and now as they approach unicorn status, the much sought after billion dollar valuation despite a rapidly changing economic landscape, the options for how they grow the business appear limitless, and Squire remains a cut above from Idea Generation. I'm Noah Callahan Bever. Thank you for listening to The
All Angles Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please don't hesitate to like, comment DM or tell a friend to tell a friend about Idea Generation and the All Angles Podcast. We can't do any of this without your help, and honestly, your support means everything. We do this for you, and we can't do it without you. This episode was brought
to you by Will Packer. Executive produced by John Valachik and Helena Ox, original music by Valentine Fritz, edit and sound mixed by Nonsensible Production, and hosted by me Idea Generation founder Noah Allahan bever Idea Generations. All Angles is a will packer media podcast