At Square we resisted hiring anyone from the payments industry for years. Actually, during our first week in business I found a payments expert who offered to consult with us, but we terminated that relationship almost immediately. His advice was straight from the industry we were trying to avoid copying, and it seemed foolish to pay someone to explain how to do everything we didn’t want to do. For the next several years, we avoided getting anyone with payment DNA into our company. This allowed us to think freely about what new things we wanted to build and not about how it had always been
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