Big ideas usually have modest beginnings. In the case of Jack Dorsey and Square, his $7 billion payments company that launched in 2009, that modest beginning involved a sketch on looseleaf paper and a misspelling of the word cappuccino.
This is one of Jack Dorsey’s early sketches of what became a $7 billion business
If you think Square’s design is simple now ...
Henry Dombey / Recode
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
On Saturday, Robert Andersen, Square’s fourth employee and now the creative director for Square Cash, tweeted an image of the Dorsey sketch.
Andersen told Recode the drawing is from 2010 and was an idea for the design of a version of Square’s checkout software for the iPad, which had been announced but not released at the time.
If you’ve ever seen a piece of Square software, the simple design shown above shouldn’t be a surprise. Neither should the oversized numbers — which are a thread that runs through several Square products — nor the name of the merchant that’s name-checked, Sightglass Coffee, a favorite coffee house of Dorsey’s where he is also an investor.
Andersen said the team succeeded in having the iPad version of the checkout software ready for launch day. They celebrated at Sightglass.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
