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But the interesting thing I realized along the way
is that payment is another form of communication.
It's another exchange of value.
The really interesting thing about payments in the
financial world is no one has really designed it.
If you think about it, every single person in this world has some
connection to money, they all hate it.
At some point or another, you're going to hate some aspect of money.
So, there has never been anyone who has really designed a payments
platform or an exchange of value or a currency that's really
beautiful and that's really thoughtful and that engages a user
experience around communication instead of purely the service
and the mechanics of transferring the value.
So, when we were building Square, we realized that,
"Wow! The receipt is something that has never really
been designed or looked at. I go up to a coffee
store and I hand them my credit card. I say,
"I want a cappuccino." I hand them my credit card.
And they type in "cappuccino" on a little terminal,
which is basically a calculator on top of the cash box,
and then they get $3.24 from that. They get a receipt.
Then, they take that amount and they go over and they
type that amount into the credit card terminal.
Then, they swipe the card and then they get that receipt.
And then, they hand me that receipt and I sign for
that receipt and then I give it back to them.
And then, they take that receipt, take the other receipt,
staple it together with a little coffee card and then
give me all that and I throw that paper away.
It's useless.
It would be so easy if you built a cohesive system that carries
the entire transaction to create a receipt that is useful.
With one swipe, I can sign on electronic screen,
get rid of paper completely.
But with that one swipe, I learn of the merchant's Twitter handle.
I learn of their Facebook page. I learn of their Yelp account.
I learn of their menu,
their hours, whatever they want to put on their receipt,
they can put there. It can be used as a publishing medium and
something that you can interact with,
instead of something that is a burden to receive.
And a lot of retailers out there are embarrassed by the receipts they
give out and the whole payment processing aspect of their business.
They go above and beyond to craft a beautiful experience in their
store and they have to compromise to accept credit cards.
They have to compromise to accept any form of payment.
And then, what do they get out of it?
If you go to any coffee store in America and you ask them,
"How many cappuccinos did you sell today?"
apart from Starbucks and Pete's, "I don't know, we made $300."
How many cappuccinos did you sell?
And then, what percentage of these people bought biscottis?
What happens when it's a rainy day?
What happens on Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.?
All these data were used for Google Analytics.
We've used these effectively to build our electronic systems
and our blogs and all of these companies that we're building.
But real-world offline merchants have none of these data.
They can buy into it if they buy into a $15,000
point-of-sales system.
But then, they would also need to buy into an entire
service army of people to figure out how to use it.
So, what we want to do is we want to build a full point-of-sales
system that is just gorgeous and that allows and enables
someone to immediately not just make the transaction
fast and feel great but to get very,
very rich data for everything that they're selling,
Google Analytics type of data for everything that they're selling.
This becomes really,
really important, not just when you're starting a business
but when you're trying to grow that business.