Keep pulling the thread on Willem Ave.
In late 2023, Block restructured from a divisional, general manager-led organization to a purely functional organization to improve alignment and build connections between its business units like Square and Cash App.
Block has capped its total headcount at approximately 12,000 employees and is not planning to grow past that number.
Automation through AI is a top priority for Block, with CEO Jack Dorsey pushing the company to automate internal processes across support, sales, compliance, and risk.
Willem Ave believes the current shift to AI is a seismic change comparable to the advent of mobile, and that companies that fail to integrate AI into both their products and internal processes may not survive.
Square is not seeing significant transaction volume in Bitcoin on its payment network.
Square's 'conversions' product, which allows merchants to automatically convert a percentage of their sales into Bitcoin, is experiencing significant adoption.
Square is a subsidiary of the parent company Block, which also owns financial services like Cash App and the buy-now-pay-later service Afterpay.
The Square division of Block employs roughly 4,000 people.
Square believes that designing its own hardware from the chip up provides a competitive advantage by enabling better end-to-end customer experiences.
Square competes with Toast and Q in the food and beverage sector, Lightspeed and Shopify in retail, and Intuit QuickBooks and Service Titan in the services sector.
Square's AI tools are connected to a Multi-Component Platform (MCP) ecosystem, which allows its large language models to write and execute real SQL queries against a data warehouse for deterministic results.
Willem Ave predicts that over the next few years, user interfaces will increasingly be generated by the customer's natural language inputs rather than being pre-designed by software teams.