Weekly Book Club 039 (Exclusive) - Innovation Stack

One book per week:)

Square is the second company founded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which focuses on mobile payments. At the time, credit card fees were very expensive for small and medium-sized merchants in the United States, so Square focused on solving the problem of helping small and medium-sized merchants provide credit card services more easily and at a lower cost. With such a financial focus, they encountered many unprecedented challenges, the two biggest challenges: working with credit card issuers and anti-fraud. In order to meet these challenges, Square has developed its own unique strategy - constant innovation.

Author Jim McKelvey calls this innovation stack. Just like we need to fix bugs in programming, when we fix problem A, problem B may pop up, so in order to fix problem A, we need to fix problem B as well. When we fix problem B, we may encounter problems C and D, so we have to fix problems C and D in order to fix problems B and A. In other words, in order to fix a problem, we have to fix a bunch of problems. In Jim's view, this was the problem Square faced in the first place, and it was no longer as simple as fixing a code bug; Square needed to come up with an innovative solution to the problem they were facing, and that solution might require other innovative ways to implement it, so that it would take a innovation stack to solve a problem.

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Square 是 Twitter 创始人 Jack Dorsey 创办的第二家公司，这家公司专注于移动支付。当时针对美国中小商户的刷卡费非常贵，所以 Square 着眼解决的问题就是帮助中小商户更便捷更低成本的提供刷卡服务。也因为着眼于这样一个金融问题，他们碰到了很多前所未有的挑战，两块最大的挑战就是：与信用卡发卡方合作，以及反欺诈。为了应对挑战，Square 使出了自己的独门秘笈 -- 不断创新。