YouSaid · the spoken record

Ayesha K. Khanna

lines on the record: 88
first: 2025-12-08
most recent: 2025-12-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is one of the benefits for Square's open platform. At the end of the day, if you're a very small seller, you kind of just want to adopt all the features and products within Square mainly, right? Marketing, loyalty, everything, really. And then as you start to get larger and larger, you want to pull in either tools that you want to use, right? So for whatever reason, it's a best in breed, you know, barbershop loyalty program or whatever. And our open platform and open partnership strategy really helps sellers pick and choose the parts of Square that help them run their business best. And I think there's a continuum, right? So we want to enable our app marketplace and kind of our kind of developers partners to be able to build on top of Square and extend capabilities that work well for them. And then that gives both sellers choice, right? We never want to hold data hostage. We never want to do those things because ultimately...”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that limits the creative process. And almost every time in my experience, it limits the end result of what you're trying to build. I think it's like an interesting thing to reflect on about different companies have taken different strategies, right? Like very top-down requirements based approaches versus more, I would say, bottoms up, creative kind of approaches and kind of the different results that happen because of it.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the art and kind of mainly the art of building great products. It's one of the reasons why Square and Block as a company is a very design-led organization. I think design in its kind of most simplest form is kind of helping understand the core needs and building solutions and designing solutions to help solve those needs. And I think time and time again, I'm always surprised and delighted by the creativity that comes out of basically a design team in org working closely with engineering to craft these experiences. I think if you have too much of a top-down view of exactly what you want to build.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny. I use the cockpit of knobs and levers all the time, but the thing I was thinking about is, okay, I run my little team. And if this was a submarine, like my managing editor needs to sit at a console with a lot of buttons. And how can I put the buttons in front of her so that she can do her job most effectively? She does not like this metaphor, and I don't think it actually works. And I think I'd be bad at driving a submarine because I don't think that's how a submarine works either. But that's what you're describing, right? It's like, how do I put the various tools of the business in front of the person who operates the business? What's the dynamic between Square saying these are the tools we think you need that will be most effective and the customer saying these are the tools we actually want?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think what you need for any software, and I generally agree, a lot of software is like forms and lists of things, which is interesting as a reflection. But you need the core foundational primitives and constructs, right? Like, for example, in the hierarchy that those things kind of how they're designed and engineered in the back end are important to get right and are important to be flexible, you can offer infinite flexibility, right? I think it's important for any software product to provide guardrails to a certain degree and take opinions because if you don't, it could just end up in like a super complicated kind of cockpit of knobs and levers and kind of forms and buttons that are really hard to use and understand.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is gonna be a very esoteric idea, but in my mind, all software is a combination of metaphors and interfaces and templates, right? There's just patterns that repeat and then the patterns match some metaphors. A combo meal fits into that framework really well, right? You open a restaurant, you download Square, and it says enter your menu, and then you get to some part of the menu, and it says, what are your combo meals? And maybe you'll just like enter them. Is that the kind of thing you want to do for people is templatize a restaurant so that they have combo menus because the other way of doing it is I run the restaurant, I invent the combo menu, and I just put it into the menu with a price, and that's fine. And there's no metaphor required.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or food or services that you're creating and present them to customers. So that's why it's important and sellers tell us this, but it's important to be able to help sellers model their business the right way.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Genesis for the public roadmap, and it's pretty unique for larger businesses in the space, is that we wanted to build out in the open and we wanted to drive accountability for what we say we're going to do. We're going to go do, and we're going to do it with speed, velocity, and quality. As far as the granularity and the details of what we show in the roadmap, it's really a judgment call. My general preference is to show more and make it kind of more raw and utilitarian rather than maybe more polished. So I think that's why you kind of see every tiny little features, but also really big things will show up there, specifically for combos and kind of some of the capabilities. It's important for when you run a business, the software has to work for how you want to run your business, right? And that's like how you merchandise your sales, how you present those kind of goods.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's like a big vision, right? We're going to enable sellers of all kinds at every scale. We're going to have hardware that's better, that is a better literal customer experience. And then I was looking at public roadmap, and it is extraordinarily tactical in places. One of the items is there's going to be support for combo meals at Quick Service restaurants. Where do you think that balance is? Square has to do the work to support combo meals, not the restaurant has to decide it wants combo meals and it can make Square do that.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say this hardware and software working together is a differentiator, but specifically from a hardware perspective, I mean, the point of sale is front and center. Every single customer that, at least in brick and mortar businesses where you're selling something, sees that hardware interacts with it, both from a consumer perspective as well as a staff and employee perspective. If we can build workflows that are delightful and simple to use on both sides of the counter, that I think makes the vibe of the business marginally better, right? And if we can help with that and we can have customers walking away like, oh, that was fast, that was easy, that was delightful, and all the software and tools around that, as well as, you know, staff members, it's fast, it's easy to use, right? Kind of, you know, helping customers, making sure technology doesn't get in the way. And I think, oh, like at the most broad strokes, we kind of hope that most of our hardware and technology kind of”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really pushing on is the idea that it's the hardware that is the big differentiator here. What about what's the evidence for that? Is it the customer saying boy, we love these square terminals? Is it just that it's easier and more convenient? Is it that they're more reliable? What are the factors that make it the big differentiator?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the reasons why different hardware companies have different strategies is largely how much the hardware, underlying hardware exposes APIs and enables the software behaviors, right? I think ultimately for Square, we can decouple those to a larger degree where we don't need kind of monolithic hardware software release cycles where we can be more nimble on the software side. And then, yes, there's like step function improvements and things that get unlocked from a hardware capability side. But it's not as monolithic as some of the other kind of hardware companies out there.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make the comparison Apple or even to Google, right? Like every year, Apple shows off iOS, and then a few months later they show off the phone and it sort of embodies whatever new features of iOS happen. Google does the same with Android and the Pixel. Are you on that kind of roadmap where you're like, I've got a bunch of software ideas? And the next version of the point of sale terminal will really bring them to life or are they separate in your mind?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have an incredible hardware team, Thomas Templeton leads our hardware team, and it's, I think, one of the best in the industry. So we partner very closely on making sure that we can form fit seller need, right? Like the form factors that they need to run their business with then the software workflows that work best. And it's a partnership. And the faster that we can iterate and deliver both software and hardware experiences together, I think the better off all the sellers will be.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fascinated by the fact that you said you think the hardware is a big differentiation, right? You design it from the chips up. That's a big investment. The cliche is hardware is hard. That has to run all the time. If the point of sale goes down, that's the end of that, right? Your sellers are probably moving on. How do you think about managing the hardware roadmap next to the software roadmap next to, hey, maybe the future of all these capabilities are on an AI roadmap somewhere else?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the reason why that's, I think, really interesting is that when you think about our competitive set, yes, like, you know, for Food and Bev at the large end of the market and QuickServe and full serve restaurants, it's Toast, it's a queue, it's a couple other folks. In retail, it's like light speed and Shopify, Health and Beauty, there's a bunch of scheduling products out there, services, you know, mainly intuit QuickBooks, Service Titan, et cetera. And then I just kind of come back to what a lot of these sellers need is like they need a rock solid platform and software to help them run their business. And as you kind of build some of these capabilities, a lot of the needs across these industries rhyme, right? And I think that's where you can leverage platform in our ecosystem, you know, especially on like help me understand how my business is running, help me grow my business, help me manage my staff. There's a lot of like very core similar needs so that we can then build”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While I think about competitors, I don't obsess over competitors. I think it's better to obsess over customers. But one of the unique things about Square is that we can serve effectively almost any type of seller, retail, food and bev, health and beauty, services, et cetera.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would think in broad strokes, yes. I think the unique part about Square is that because we build and design all of our own hardware, kind of from the chip up, that we can provide, I would say, better end-to-end experiences than competitors that may be starting in other areas. And at the end of the day, for the majority of brick and mortar businesses, the point of sale is the artery, so to speak, right? Like quick-serve restaurants, retail restaurants, even a lot of services that need kind of this kind of help, you know, help make a sale. It's important to think that if you do the core things that a business really needs done super well, then I think it gives you the ability and the believability that you can build additional products. And then one of the unique things about Square and then Block is that we've also been able to build other business units like Cash App and kind of other complete ecosystems, which is pretty interesting.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a big mission. It's interesting, right? That implies that you're going to go from taking payments to helping more efficiently run businesses or helping small business owners more effectively run their businesses. I've heard variations of this pitch from, I wouldn't even call them competitors from other companies that have an entry point into small business, into it was on the show. And they're like, we're going to run your whole back office. Squarespace has been on the show. And the slide for Squarespace to go from, we set up your website to, your website has a booking calendar on it to now we manage your bookings. We should manage your payments. We're going to do all of your invoicing. It's very easy for them. It was very compelling. It was like, oh yeah, I start a website. Now that you run my front end, you show it on my back end too. I get the pitch. And it all starts with, we're going to do one thing and we'll expand everything else. Is that how you think of Square and that same ecosystem that your competitors or other providers who start with one thing and are trying to expand the entire”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know costs are going up across almost every dimension in the industry. So the problems keep happening, right? And I kind of truly believe that you want to democratize technology, right? You want to take technology, and this is really relevant in the AI space. You want to take technology that's usually locked to just the very large corporations, the Wall Streets, et cetera, and bring them down to Main Street, right? I think if you do that successively and make that technology accessible, you can actually help society. Like you can make things better, right? You can get neighborhoods vibrant again, right? You can help these sellers because, you know, a lot of these small businesses fail, unfortunately, right? And it's because it's hard to run a business. And I think if you can apply technology effectively, you can run a better business and you can kind of revitalize a lot of the main streets across the world.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that it stays easy to use our software. And that's an incredibly hard product and design challenge. But that's where we've kind of built our ecosystem organically rather than via acquisitions and kind of other strategies that companies grow because then we can maintain a bar for how sellers use these products, how they discover them. Anything that's really important to be able to kind of grow with the seller, one thing we say at Square is like, you know, a seller should never outgrow Square. And that means we need to meet them where they are with all these different capabilities. You're right. It starts with just payments have to be good, right? Payments aren't good, fast, et cetera, then like nothing else matters. But as you get larger and larger, most of the problems at one or two locations seller faces staffing. Can I get folks to show up on time? How do I manage my staff schedule so that staff are happy? How can I manage my vendors and all the other costs of goods sold as we?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when you talk to sellers and you listen to the challenges that they have, running a small business is one of the hardest things ever. These are the true definition of entrepreneurs, right? You're putting your livelihood on the line many times to start something that you're passionate about and they kind of reach for software and technology to help them run their business. Right. So in the beginning, it's just an idea, right? I want to sell something, right? And you get started small and you start taking payments very quickly you struggle with, okay, I need to manage my inventory better or I need to hire my first staff member and manage schedules and manage payouts and all those other good things. The idea with Square and the kind of ecosystem that we've built is that every step along that journey should feel simple. And then as you keep getting larger and larger, we want to kind of constrain the complexity.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you think about that slide to we can accept the payments? It's so easy when we square your payment provider, you should just let us run your business. How do you think about that transition and that journey for somebody who signs up just to take payments at a farmer's market?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a good managed PR response to Apple being a good partner. I love it. I can see him coming a mile away. One of the reasons I'm starting here, because I want to get to the big parts of Square, how does Square interact with the death of the penny? The reason I'm starting so like on the ground in the weeds is the move from this is the thing that can accept payments to we are running your business to there's square AI and your product roadmap and it will custom develop applications for you as you ask about your data and that is the future of all businesses and now we're running you know stadiums it starts with we can accept the payments as easily as possible”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not as much as you'd think, right? I mean, it's in Apple's best interest, I believe, to provide APIs and accessibility to let kind of sellers people use products on their devices. Apple's in a lot of news around a lot of other things that they're doing with the App Store. On the business side of software and the business side of payments, we haven't really felt kind of a lot of those constraints. And Apple's a fantastic partner of ours as we continue to innovate.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And somewhere in the middle of that is whether or not Apple wants you to do that in a way that they could not really stop you from doing it with iPhone Jack. There's been a lot of controversy on what Apple will and will not let you do with the NFC reader on the phone, with the other parts of the phone. Has that come up with Square?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I start with open ecosystems is that easy initiation in the square where I'm a merchant, I download the app, and someone can just tap their phone onto my phone and pay through Square. That is very powerful, right? That is the selling point for a lot of small merchants. That's right. It's just that easy and it's the hardware they already have.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Registered with Apple or Google and easily just boop, take a payment. And we're seeing a huge amount of adoption, particularly in the smaller sellers that kind of value portability and value kind of being able to take payments easily. As far as like an open ecosystem, ecosystems evolve. And I think it's important to realize that and be able to kind of lead through those changes.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've always wanted to help sellers get started easily, right? So Square is, you can download the app, sign up, and get going within seconds many times. And as the payment landscape has evolved and the hardware interconnect landscape has evolved, we've kind of supported both the Lightning plug or Lightning Jack for Apple and then USB-C now. And our hardware and software ecosystem is really meant to support both when you want a really pro device that's all in one, right? Running kind of our own Android and kind of our own version of Square Point of Sale all the way through integrated kind of beautifully designed hardware all the way through just bring your own hardware, right? This is your cell phone. You can plug it in either to Bluetooth or one of our kind of jack-based card readers. And then now tap to pay is really blowing up, right? So if you get started, you can just click a button.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm gonna talk about the headphone jack. I promised myself I would not get totally sidetracked with what enabled the first square reader, but it is interesting to me, except any payment in a world where most payments are going digital or at least passing through a credit card and lots of people didn't even have wallets or cash anymore. You are in direct competition with cell phones in like a very real way. And the reason I bring up the headphone jack is that first square reader was just a card swipe and it plugged into the headphone jack and it passed the magnetic data from the stripe on the card through the headphone jack to the square app. And suddenly the phones could read credit cards. That's right. And that was an open interconnect, maybe the last great open interconnect on cell phones. The cell phone companies have a lot of thoughts about me talking about it this way. But it was the last great open interconnect. And then obviously that went away and you moved to a Bluetooth reader and now you have dedicated hardware. But an iOS and Android, you can just beep a credit card to it. You can beep a phone to it. There are other kinds of payment transactions.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people listen to Virt Chast know I have a lot of feelings about headphone jacks on cell phones, but we've all seen Square, we've all seen the hardware, certainly. What do you think of Square is as a company, as a product?”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Willem Avet. You are the global head of product. It's Square. Welcome to Doder. Excited to talk to you. It's an interesting time to run businesses. It's an interesting to run businesses connected to the internet. It's an interesting time for money, which is an odd thing to say, but it is an interesting time to money. I suspect you and I are going to talk about the end of the penny quite a bit on this episode. As somebody who has to accept literal cash at restaurants, it seems like we should talk about the penny. Let's start at the start. I feel like everybody knows what Square is. Everyone's seen the reader. I have a lot to say about the headphone jack and how it enabled the Square reader and how it went away.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One fun piece of trivia after we wrap this recording Square got back to us and confirmed that it moves at least 16.7 million pennies between merchants and customers every week. It's all going to go away now if the penny's been discontinued. There's a lot going on in this episode. It's a pretty fun one. I can always tell when I'm talking to a Dakota fan and Willem is someone who came ultra prepared to talk about not only his org shark but how he makes decisions. You will actually hear him use French winemaking terms to describe his decision making process which might be as nerdy as we have ever gotten on Dakota. One last note before we start we're running a special end of the year mailbag episode of Dakota later this month where we answer your questions about the show who we should talk to you next what topics we should cover in 2026 what you like what you hate all of it please send your questions to Dakota at theverge.com and we will do our best to feature as many as we can okay squares head of product willem avey here we go”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of cash businesses every day, and at the same time it holds large reserves of Bitcoin and is working to enable merchants to actually transact in cryptocurrencies. It's been a long time since anyone anywhere has wanted to give up any portion of Bitcoin to pay for something except crime. But you'll hear Willem make the case that enabling this kind of choice is part of Square's mission.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You hear Willem and I dig deep into what it actually means to enable AI for small business owners. What kinds of questions might a Square user ask a language model about their sales data? And how Square might turn that into actionable input that won't just hallucinate or straight up fail to do what you ask? Willem says the really meaningful shift for this kind of AI is to take the non-deterministic elements of LLMs and agents and link them to deterministic systems like traditional computers. That's going to be how a company like Square moves beyond the gimmicky, often unreliable era of AI chatbots into meaningful automation for small business owners that helps them be more productive and grow their businesses. It is also a very weird time for money when you combine what's happening in decentralized finance and the Trump administration's interest in crypto with things like the discontinuation of the United States penny and the overall turbulence of the economy. Well, it square is pretty deep on all of it. It's a company that processes transactions for”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So sure, Square might not move as fast as if it was an independent division working autonomously, but Willem says the new structure is already reaping benefits as to how the company develops new products and plans for its next turn, which he refers to as Swear 3.0.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A functional organization so that it shares resources across all of its units. For square, that means it's sharing engineering resources with title, a company that makes an entirely different product serving an entirely different industry. So I asked Willem about how all of that works, and his answer might surprise you. He says that Square and Block is a whole are better aligned now that they have a single shared roadmap, one that, as you might imagine, is pushing very hard into AI and the kinds of back-end financial automation that companies like Square want to bring to business owners.”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Dakoda. I'm Neil I Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Dakoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Willem Ave, who's head of product at Square. You know, Square was started by billionaire Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame more than 15 years ago, and it got big on the back of that little magnetic reader that plugged into the headphone jack on the iPhone and let small businesses accept credit cards. Now, of course, Square is much more than a credit card reader, and sadly, the headphone jack is ancient history. Square itself is part of a new parent company called Block, which is made up of a really interesting mix of financial services, like Cash App, the digital wallet, and payment platform, the Buy Now Pay Later Service AfterPay, and quite a few other subsidiaries. Block also owns a majority stake in the music streaming service title, for some reason, but no one can quite explain. And that's where this episode becomes pure decoder-bait right from the jump, is you'll hear Willem explain Block restructured the entire company last year into”
2025-12-08 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Square's product chief on the death of the penny and the future of money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT