Square gives the credit card terminal an upgrade. My interview with CEO Jack Dorsey. What's going on? I'm Rich Damiro. This is Rich on Tech. Just how crazy is the current state of payment affairs in our country right now?
Think about it.
We just went through the whole chip and dip thing. Now we're getting into mobile payments, and when you go into a business, you have no idea what payment method they are going to accept. Personally, I would love to ditch my wallet and only use mobile payments, but you never know if they're going to take it. And even the newest credit card terminals are still pretty bad. They seem to be designed by someone who never has to
use one. The screen is tiny, you can't even tell what it's asking you to do.
So enter Square.
This is the company that revolutionized payments by allowing anyone to accept a credit card in seconds, thanks to that tiny reader that you plugged into your phone.
Yeah, we saw this nine years ago with a very simple purpose, which was we saw sellers missing sales because they couldn't accept credit cards, and we realized pretty early on it just wasn't about building a credit card reader, it was actually helping them make the sale in the first place, and we've grown a business around helping them not only make that sale, but ideally helping them make more sales as well.
That's Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. Recently I met up with him in San Francisco, and if his name sounds familiar, that's because he's also the guy who started Twitter. We checked out some shops using Square hardware along hate Ashbury, which is a trendy section of town.
Our philosophy has always been it doesn't matter what device comes across the counter, you should always be set up to make the sale. So if someone wants to pay with their watch, or their phone, or their chip card or swiping their old MasterCard, they can do it. You don't have to think about it. It's really in the pay it's in the your customer's hand, the payer's hand, and we just need to make sure that we're building something for a seller where they don't have to think about it at all.
And that's what they hope to accomplish with their latest device. It's called Square Terminal and that credit card swipey thing that you know but don't love, but it is so much better than what we have right now.
Terminal is uh is the launch I'm most excited about. It's just not only something that you see everywhere. You see those little rectangular h black boxes that look like they barely work, and they have these grungy keypads, and you don't want to touch the thing, but you have to touch the thing because I swipe your credit card and it's always yelling at you too. It's always yelling at you. It's screaming at you. It's kind of terrible,
but like it's you know, it results. It's a culmination of our understanding of like how to build hardware and build software that work together that it is intuitive that you can just pick it up and start using it.
Terminal looks like an iPhone that's in a permanent white plastic housing. It's wireless, it's Wi Fi enabled, you charge it up, and it accepts all the ways that we want to pay, whether you want to swim your card, whether you want to dip your card, or whether you want to tap to pay using mobile pay from Google, Samsung or Apple.
It's something we're really proud of because we hope to replace all those big and small black boxes on the counter that people feel like it's a burden and they have to put up with instead of enjoying using so that you know, my favorite question ask a seller is just how does this make you feel? That's what that's what we're trying to build is like how does this
thing make you feel? And if it makes them feel great, if it makes them feel empowered, if it makes them feel like they can sell more and they can treat their customers better than awesome if it if it doesn't come back positive, then way of work to do.
Terminal is really fast. Plus it's flexible.
It can hang out on a counter, but since it's wireless, it can also be brought anywhere customers want to pay, like table side. And one of the businesses that I spoke to that tested the terminal told me the battery easily lasts the entire day.
This is a great use case on the countertop here. But you know, we have a lot of restaurants who are now going to the table and saying, you know, it's gonna be you know, fifteen dollars and you swipe your card or you tap your watch, or you know, you tap your phone, and you operate the whole thing. And then I take it back and I go to the next table, So it is super flexible for whatever a seller needs to do. And that was by design.
And yes, if you still like an old school receipt what some of us need, there is a printer built in as well.
Try to emphasize digital and going to a phone number and email address, but you know, sometimes you put one paper. It's important.
After seeing terminal inaction at a busy hair salon, we decided to head to a record shop, which to me is the quintessential small business. Jack picked out some Marvin Gay then paid with his preferred choice, tapping his Apple Watch to the Square terminal reader and paying with Apple Pay.
We believe a small business's key to any community. It provides a fabric and a support network that I think helps residential neighborhood as well. So anytime you have a place to walk, place to hang out, place to think, it's it's much more attractive place to live. And it's also often these places that are the the meeting points where we you know, converse and debate and have conversations and move everything forward. So the critical part of our society and anything that we can do to help enable
them to participate more fully in the economy work. We're down for now.
If I ever started a small business, I would love to use the stuff that Square offers. And since Jack is an entrepreneur and CEO of two companies at the same time, I was curious to hear his thoughts on entrepreneurship.
You definitely have to be a hustler of sorts and you know, do whatever it takes to make it work. And I love that attitude. It's an entrepreneurial attitude. But I hope that you know, our our hardware and our software takes a little bit of the burden off. One last thing you have to think about, because you should
never really have to think about making the sale. You should think about the creativity and the soul that you put into your place or your experience, and how you treat your customers and how you hire folks to help and you know what that means, and what you might want to do for the broader community outside of your own location. That's what you should be thinking about. You shouldn't be thinking about how does my terminal work.
Talking to the Square folks about the other way of accepting plastics sounds like it's a very complicated process with lots of contracts, equipment costs, and negotiations, which is probably why we see such a mess when it comes to what businesses decide to accept or not accept. Sometimes you only take certain cards, others ask for minimum charges when using a credit card, or other businesses just don't accept cards at all.
That's the key insight we had is like more and more payments, we're moving away from paper cash to a credit card, and the credit card industry was leaving merchants out because they wouldn't I actually allow them to accept them in the first place, because they had to go through a credit check process to do that. And a lot of people who are just getting started have bad credit or don't have much of a credit card record at all. Like when we started Square, I was in
a credit card debt. I had terrible credit, so I would not be allowed to start a small business. So that's what we faced and just solving that problem, in addition to building the hardware on the software, is what made us valuable to people.
Square Terminal is available now.
It's four hundred dollars or ninety nine dollars if you've never had a Square account. After a three hundred dollars processing credit you pay two point six percent of transactions plus ten cents per transaction. If you have a small business, I highly recommend you take a look at what Square offers. Personally, as a consumer, I love seeing Square at small businesses. It's such a pleasure to use, and from a technology standpoint, it just seems like a step in the right direction.
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That's the best way we're gonna grow here. I'm Rich Damiro.
If you want to watch my TV segment with Jack Dorsey, you can go to my website Rich on tech dot tv, or check the show notes.
I'm Rich Demiro. I'll talk to you real soon.