[rco8786]

> My impression of Block was that it was mostly a one-trick pony (okay, two if you include CashApp) with a bunch of side initiatives that never seemed to pan out,

I worked at Block for ~6.5 years up until 2024. This is mostly correct.

They were the first to market for portable CC readers, and segued that into "high tech" POS systems which, to be fair, were significantly better than the available alternatives at the time. But flashy hardware design and iPads isn't really a moat, and the company never developed a great muscle for launching other initiatives. The strategy was "omnibus" - trying to do everything for everyone and win on the ecosystem efficiencies...but when none of your products are particularly standout it's hard to get and keep customers.

CashApp being the notable exception, because they gave the founder carte blanche. It was effectively 2 different companies operating under the $SQ ticker. They even had their own interview process for internal transfers. Although ironically the engineering standards on the CashApp side of the fence were significantly sloppier than on the Square side...to the point where I stopped using CashApp and stopped recommending it to friends once I transferred to that org and saw how the sausage was made.

[paxys]

Exactly. Square was the first great checkout system, but now a decade and a half later every other system is good enough that retailers aren't going to pay extra for a flashier app.

[tshaddox]

Over the last 10 years or so in SF and LA, I’ve seen so many countless POS systems at restaurants and small businesses that it’s difficult to believe that Square is anything more than 1 player in an enormous field.

And businesses I frequent over many years seem to change their POS systems often. I’ve always assumed that every year there are a bunch of new startups using their VC funds to give away free iPad minis. When the cheap hardware breaks or the software company goes under, there’s always a new one to take its place.

[raw_anon_1111]

And before people like my barber would have had a square reader. With NFC in modern phones, they just use that

[jrjeksjd8d]

Square is a great option for selling crafts at a market once a month. I tried to use it for a proper multi-channel retail store and it immediately fell apart:

- the e-commerce integration (Weebly?) is very limited and the resulting sites are dog slow

- the POS itself and the backend don't work when you have hundreds of SKUs and many variants

- there's very little customization or support

My business wasn't huge but we were doing ~300k revenue annually online and in-store. We started on Square, tried Lightspeed (also garbage) and finally ended up on Shopify (best of a bad lot).

Despite making noise about "supporting small business" Shopify makes most of their money from e-commerce for giant brands. They've tried to juice returns from small customers with merchant cash advances but my sense is they make more doing professional services for big e-commerce brands

[mattmaroon]

It’s not extra and their hardware is still far better than the competition. Square is still awesome in the small business PoS space. Their lead has not shrunk.

[simonw]

Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?

[ursuscamp]

They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.

[daxfohl]

I don't think so. I know a couple people that worked in TBD (the bitcoin org) and everyone said it was directionless. Eventually the CTO ~abandoned that org and took on that Goose AI project.

[Scoundreller]

The bought $170m of bitcoin at $50k a pop when their stock was $250, now it’s $67k and their stock is $67 (in after hours trading), so I guess it went pretty far in that respect.

[rco8786]

The only thing it served was to distract Jack from building real products.