Jack Dorsey on entrepreneurship
From Jack Dorsey | Making Square Hip (5/25/11) · · Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California
“We started Square and there's no better time to start a company than in a depression or a recession because the slates have been cleaned and we took advantage of all the chaos going on in the market at that time and we could walk in the door to Visa who's right up the street and we showed them what we had and they loved it right away.”
On , Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder, Block Head & Chairman at Block, Inc., spoke about entrepreneurship during Jack Dorsey | Making Square Hip (5/25/11) on Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.
About Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey discussed Block's Q1 2025 financial results, projecting gross profit growth of 12% for the year and an acceleration to low double digits in the third quarter. He noted that Square is gaining market share following consolidation efforts and that the company received FDIC approval to use Square Financial Services for nationwide consumer loans through Cash App Borrow, which he said roughly doubles the number of actives eligible for the product and improves unit economics. Dorsey also highlighted the integration of Afterpay products into Cash App, describing it as a "meaningful unlock" that exposes buy-now-pay-later products to 57 million monthly actives. At The Bitcoin Conference 2026, Dorsey appeared with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki to support the documentary "The Six Billion Dollar Man" about Julian Assange. Dorsey described Bitcoin as "an open protocol for money transfers" that routes around gatekeepers such as Visa, Mastercard, and banks. He also argued that traditional corporate hierarchy is obsolete, saying that companies can operate as "mini AGI" by placing an artificial intelligence "intelligence layer" at the center of the organization. Dorsey stated that after experimenting with AI tools in late 2024, Block's leadership uniformly agreed that if they were to rebuild the company from scratch, it would not be the same size or structure.