Jack and I started the presentation by taking the venture capitalists’ money in more ways than they were expecting. After our brief introduction to how messy and ugly the current credit card ecosystem was, we asked each prospective funder in the room to take out a credit card. We had developed a crude but usable card reader and, with this prototype plugged into the headset jack of an iPhone, we read and charged their credit cards, an act that by itself broke more than a dozen regulations. The amount we took varied from $1 to $40, depending on how much we liked the VC in question. Nobody had
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