Invested: The Rule #1 Investing Podcast

Square is a financial service, merchant services aggregator, and mobile payment company based in San Francisco, California. Danielle has openly expressed her excitement for this company—but what makes it so special? In 2009, Square initially started as a solution to mobile businesses without mobile payments. It took Founders Jim McKelvey and Jack Dorsey about 3 years to understand the market at the time, and how they could make an impact in this space.  They entered the market and were able to provide a small device that could be easily inserted into the audio jack of smartphones. With this convenient hardware and only a 2.75% transaction fee, they quickly divorced the merchant from the shackles of digital wires.  The successes of these innovations were multi-faceted. The infrastructure for payment processing was no longer costly for a specialized machine, but a small add-on to devices we already own. This also meant that as long as someone had the Square app, they could be a transaction node as well. Squa