Finance History | Block — A Lost Glass Sale and a Square Reader from St. Louis
· 2009-5
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · Report an issue
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Finance History | Block — A Lost Glass Sale and a Square Reader from St. Louis
kevin
People treat Block as the San Francisco payments house that always sold a Cash App balance and a white square dongle from a Nasdaq-100 book.
The first book was a missed sale of glass.
In 2008 Jim McKelvey could not take a two-thousand-dollar card payment for a piece from his St. Louis glass studio. He called Jack Dorsey, another St. Louis native then between Twitter jobs.
They incorporated Square in May 2009 and worked between a small St. Louis room and San Francisco. The name came from the stamp-sized reader that plugged into an iPhone jack.
Khosla Ventures led the first official round later that year at a valuation of about forty-five million dollars in 2009 money.
The reader went into Apple stores. A later iPad register replaced the cash drawer. The company renamed itself Block in December 2021.
The mechanism is still the first one.
A merchant who could not pass a bank underwriting test could take a card if a plastic square sat in a headphone jack. That cut the floor of who counted as a seller.
A visitor at 5200 Delmar can still watch glass leave the furnace at Third Degree, the public studio McKelvey built. The lost faucet is gone. The reader is how the book started.
Photo: St. Louis streetscape, Wikimedia Commons contributors, via Wikimedia Commons.
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