Square's founder reveals why they built hardware when everyone said go software-only

Yeah. I wanna jump into this. Right? Seems like a pretty great idea. Because, you know, at the time, people would have these, like, credit card, like, school like these sort of boxes that were plugged into the Internet and connected to a register, and you would swipe the card through this thing. Right? But it was big and heavy. It was like a brick. Yeah. And expensive. They were a thousand bucks. And so you're you were saying,

let's make something that works with an iPhone that we can plug into the iPhone. Yeah. I mean, hardware was my idea because Jack wanted to do software only and just use the phone, and I'm like, no. We need a piece of hardware. Right. And then we quickly realized that there are two ways to process a card. One is called card present, and the other is called card not present.