1. The Business

Credit card processing is one of the most frustrating parts of starting a company. To simply accept a credit card, hardware can cost anywhere from 800 dollars to 13 thousand, but the data sent is trivially small. Square, or "squirrel" at the time, gave merchants an alternative that used the phone they already had, and a low cost card reader. 

1 year in, we've changed the payment market.  We see Square in the wild all the time.  We have a product which people can touch and use to make money. Solving a problem for millions with a clever hack and commodity hardware.

2. The Tech

Square's card reader uses the actual motion of the card swipe to generate a sound, which is decoded through a microphone, and processed in real time using the phones internet connection.

1 year in, we have:

• A cheap reader that works on a wide variety of hardware
• A web infrastructure to log transactions securely and persistently
• An interface that makes credit card payments simple

We've seen a lot of hard puzzles come and go, but the amount of data and opportunities we have with it are just starting to show. Also, more than a couple geeks give our hardware the highest compliment possible "it reminds them of Woz's work".

3. The Chance to Work With Jack

Jack, our CEO, is absurdly good at what he does. He is an incredibly steady leader, relentlessly revising things to create simple products, and pushing the people around him to do the same. It isn't a fluke that both Twitter and Square are incredibly simple technologies in every aspect. I knew the opportunity to work with Jack was rare when it came up.

1 year in, Jack has not only lead the product out of the banking world, but he's also created a flat culture of product oriented engineers. In addition to that, we've managed to increase our execution speed as the team has grown and given people control over more aspects of the product.

is now working

When you're in a startup, you need to be constantly doing the most effective thing for the startup.  Your startup is small, you have limited resources, and you need to use them wisely.

There are a million things to do every day and choosing which ones to do is important.  Making good decisions move your company forward, bad ones leave you in the same place, or worse move you backwards.

Whenever you choose what you want to do each day, there are temptations to procrastinate.  In this case, I'm defining procrastination as whenever you do something you'd like to do, something you find pleasant to do instead of doing something where you can produce lot of benefit to yourself or others.  For example, playing soccer instead of studying, or watching tv instead of playing soccer, or doing nothing at all, instead of watching tv?

These examples might all be easy to recognize, but I think there are more examples of procrastination that are less easy to recognize.  Some of which I do everyday to my chagrin, and some of which I watch other people do.

Solving the big problem instead of doing the minimum viable solution: writing a new abstraction or toolset for an abstract problem (sometimes a real problem) but in the meantime leave the customer without any solution.  Procrastination by solving a fun problem instead doing the minimum thing required to help the customer.  Sometimes, making a tool is absolutely required to your startup, it might be your actual startup, sometimes it is just more fun than doing real work.

Researching new technology, new key value store, nosql, eventual consistency.  people love to read about them. reading about it feels like work, but unless you actually need them that day it is more like practice for possible work.  there is value in constantly learning, constantly being a better programmer, but it is investing is a distant future.  we became programers and entrepreneurs because we liked to learn, but, it is procrastination because it doesn't often doesn't immediately benefit your users.

Stats procrastination.  I love doing this one.  just paging through page after page of stats.  correct pattern is pickin the stats that matter, and work towards them.  just building random stats, or reading a million google analytics pages, it not going to make your company strong.  especially if they don't change very often.  it is superficial. 

Reinvention procrastination, Recreating a 3rd party library, because you want the functionality you see, but don't like the number of spaces they use for indentation in their code base.  Do your customers know you rewrote something?

Refactor procrastination. the customer wants their life made easier, not your life made easier.  refactoring is a way of making your programming life easier, or making yourself smart (i'm using anonymous functions!).  when you need to refactor to give users a benefit (we can't do this until we have some better caching in place).  

Productivity p0rn procrastination.  kinda like what you are reading right now. go fix the biggest problem for your customers, right now. make something they will want to email you about and say "OMG THANKS!"

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30 minute post.