Jack Dorsey: Twitter IPO and Square Payments after the Billions

Jack Dorsey may shy from being called the Steve Jobs of his generation, but there's no question he's on one hell of a hot streak, developing his latest creation Square Payments recently, and as the yellow of the fall is covering all the streets of Europe I might warn you to put those hard earned extra € into the next big IPO "Twitter" you will certainly more than double your money.

Square, the mobile-payments startup that's landed $340 million in venture capital, just moved into sprawling new offices in San Francisco after doubling its head count in less than a year. The new digs sit -- coincidentally, Dorsey insists -- a block from those of Twitter, which he cofounded in 2006 and whose looming IPO figures to make Dorsey his second billion dollars in the past 13 months.

 The 36-year-old declined to say much about Twitter, citing federal "quiet period" rules that precede an initial public offering of stock. But asked how it felt to have invented two products whose users number into the hundreds of millions worldwide, the entrepeneur allowed himself a moment of introspection.

"If you're climbing on the mountain, it doesn't look that massive to you," he said from the glass-and-wood accented Market Street headquarters into which CEO Dorsey and most of Square's 600 other employees moved last week.

Twitter made news of its own last week with its long-rumored IPO filing, which revealed the microblogging service has more than 200 million active monthly users. Square, meanwhile, claims to process $15 billion annually in credit card transactions -- not including a deal cut last year to handle all of Starbucks' card payments. Today while having my morning coffee at Starbuck´s I was just thinking this guy is going to make STAR BUCKS!!!

But, on  Dorsey's words, "we don't feel we're at even 1 percent of our potential with either company."

Dorsey, a bachelor who grew up in a blue-collar St. Louis family, owns 5 percent of Twitter and a reported one-third of Square. Each of those holdings is worth at least $1 billion, according to the estimated valuations of both companies.

To his admirers, though, Dorsey's accomplishments aren't measured in dollars, but in influence and vision.

The parallels to Apple's (AAPL) cofounder are obvious: Both men were forced out of startups they launched, only to return and help lead them to new heights. Both men, after being ousted, started second companies that became powerhouses in their own rights (Pixar, in Jobs' case).

And both men became famous for a relentless focus on simple, elegant design: Even the pillars that support the new office's ceiling have been rounded to resemble Square's namesake plastic reader, which lets anyone accept credit cards via smartphone or tablet.

One way in which Dorsey differs from his role model: "He doesn't lose his temper," said Maja Henderson, who was Dorsey's executive assistant in Square's early days and now rides herd on the company's design and construction efforts. Those include the 150,000-square-foot headquarters, where employees avail themselves of such perks as in-house chiropractic care and unlimited vacation.

Henderson acknowledged that few "Squares" take much time off, although she said Dorsey "has gotten a lot better" about breaking away from work after a stretch in which he split 80 hours each week between Twitter and Square.

The Twitter creation myth has various versions, but the fundamental story is that Dorsey was working at a San Francisco podcasting startup, Odeo, in 2006 when he and several others cooked up a 140-character instant messaging system for mobile phones. Twitter spun out of Odeo with Dorsey as CEO, only to see a shake-up when co-founder and investor Evan Williams moved him aside amid much mutual finger-pointing.

Williams, in turn, was replaced in 2010 by Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo, who brought Dorsey back in a product development role. Costolo said then that "having the inventor in the room" helped solve arguments about what the service should be.

With those debates more or less decided, Dorsey these days focuses most of his time on Square. He still spends Thursday afternoons at Twitter, where he's executive chairman and holds a weekly lunch with Costolo.

Steve Wilson, an analyst at Constellation Research, noted that Twitter essentially created a new category of communication before anyone realized it was needed. With Square, on the other hand, Dorsey identified a huge and lucrative problem with an existing market. In the United States alone, credit card payments are expected to hit $31 billion a year by 2016, according to an estimate by industry newsletter The Nilson Report.

"Amazing that no one thought to jump in before" to bring small merchants into that ecosystem, Wilson said. While he and others call Square a tempting acquisition target for a major financial services player, Dorsey insists he's building for the long haul.

To be sure, Square faces plenty of competition, from entrenched payments giants like Verifone andeBay's (EBAY) PayPal unit to startups like Clinkle -- which drew gasps around Silicon Valley in June by raising a $25 million "seed" round from titans including early Facebook investor Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. And here is my main idea we haven't even preceived the real potential of all these tech companies and start ups namely: Facebook,Twitter and Square to name a few.

"Square is primarily a credit card reader for your iPhone or Android device. To me, that's really not mobile payments," said Lucas Duplan, the 22-year-old who founded Clinkle last year with a bevy of other young Stanford University programmers.

Dorsey acknowledges that Square Wallet, which his company rolled out in 2011 to let consumers buy things via smartphone, has struggled for widespread acceptance despite two rebrandings. But he's content to focus on building services for small merchants, confident that the consumers eventually will follow.

"Jack holds true to his vision of empowering local business," said Mary Meeker, of Kleiner PerkinsCaufield and Byers, who sits on Square's board along with fellow venture capital star Vinod Khoslaand former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Dorsey and Henderson applied that same sense of vision to their new offices, which take up parts of four floors in a dowdy former Bank of America data center. The theme is one of a miniature city, with conference rooms named for famous streets and a grand "boulevard" the length of two football fields.

But Dorsey said the headquarters is more than a pretty place. Much thought went into breaking the open floor plan into clusters, to preserve the camaraderie of a small company.

And in discussing the finished product, Dorsey said something that might sum up his entire approach to design: "It's not just about how it looks," he said. "It's about how it works."

Jack Dorsey's Square mobile payments company offers a growing suite of products:

Square Reader: Lets anyone accept credit cards via a smartphone or tablet for a 2.75 percent transaction fee.
Square Register: Helps merchants track payments, manage inventory and share menu information with customers.
Square Wallet: Allows consumers to pay at local businesses automatically via smartphone.
Square Market: Newest addition is an eBay-like marketplace that lets Square Register users set up online storefronts.

On Jack Dorsey's

Age: 36
Born: St. Louis
Education: Dropped out of New York University to launch his first Silicon Valley company in 2000.
Lives: San Francisco
Making history: In March 2006, Dorsey sent the world's first tweet: "just setting up my twitter."
Human touch: Takes every new Square employee on a walking tour of San Francisco.

Five More Reasons Not to Look for a Job and Make Millions

Now that we are entering into Fall, and with the purpose of making 5 Million Euros in less than 5 years, we have to focus on the idea of making ourselves valuable in many different ways, making new connections and developing new ideas, therefore this guest blog is related to our main subject.  Written by Larry Klein he contacted me and proposed the paradigm of why people should not look for a job anymore.

Larry is a personal finance blogger, member of Yakezie challenge, CPA (inactive), retired financial advisor and Harvard MB.I hope you enjoy this reading as much as I did.

Looking for a job has been unproductive for you and for good reason.  I have written on this issue a number of times on my own blog and here are yet more reasons why looking for a job is an

activity left over from the last century and won’t be productive this year, next year or in 10 years.

1. You are one of 300 resumes for one open position.  The odds are way against you so why waste your time.  You are likely someone that also buys lottery tickets figuring  that someone has got to win.  Good luck to you.

2. A robot will likely replace your job or has already done so.  If you don’t watch Sixty Minutes, youshould.  A recent episode explains how so many jobs have already been replaced by robots and

way more to come. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57601121/are-robotshurting-

job-growth.

 People who are unskilled are now also unneeded.  Sorry, but if you could not figure out why you had to learn geometry on ninth grade (it was to learn how to think) and now youhave no skills and no ability to think and need a job where someone shows you what to do, you

are out of luck.

3. Looking for a job is backwards. You are trying to find someone who needs a worker and thenyou will fit yourself to the position.  That is backwards.  The way to make money is to figure out

what people value, what they will happily pay for and then learn how to provide it.That is called making yourself of value.  Note that learning something does not necessarily mean going

to school. Some of the most successful people are self-taught.

4.  You place yourself in a continuous position of dependence. If the job disappears or the company goes out of business, you are back in the same place.Don’t  look for a job—figure out how to earn income that is independent of some company or someone giving you anything. Make yourself valuable so that people want what you offer. I pay the woman who cleans my house $160 for 5 hours of work.  She has worked for us for 30 years and I hate to think she might ever retire.   She has no education, speaks only some English but is valuable. 

5. Looking for a job is just laziness.Up until the year 1900 or so, there were no jobs.  People farmed their land, learned a trade or took up a profession.  These people sold their talents and skills to other people in town. Looking for a job is finding someone who has already done the hard work or creating excess work so that you can simply show up and get paid.The good times are over there is no excess work.

A few months ago, I saw an interview on CNBC with Jack Welch, the ex-chairman of General Electric.  He said that one of GEs business was hurt so badly in the recession, that its revenues would not recover until 2014.  However, that division would achieve its pre-recession revenues with 14,000 people instead of the 23,000 employed pre-recession.  The point—if you are just "labor," this economy has little need for that.  What the economy needs is skills, talent, ability to innovate, leaders who motivate, create and move an idea from inception to fruition.

Fast food workers can strike all they want but the reality is, none of the above is required to work in fast food service.  Reality is just that, like it or not, fair or not.  You can piss and moan or use this post as a description of the new reality our reality so go out there and make yourself valuable.

Larry Klein is publisher of the Wealthy Producer Blog, is among the 1% and has not has not had a job in  33 years. Fire and Passion that is all we need Enjoy!