Ed Cowan

speaker

535 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 Oct

Ed Cowan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Scaling Up: Lessons From The World's Best CEOs and Founders · Block by Block: Building the Future of Money - Owen Jennings, Head of Product, Block [S9.E6] · 7 Sep 2025 podcast

Block has managed something that very few founder-led companies of its size and scale can achieve.

Re-engineering that startup DNA inside a scaled business.

And Owen has been at the heart of this cultural reset, hands-on, close to customers, and unafraid to tinker with the new ideas himself.

In this conversation we'll trace his journey through Block's defining product, Cash App, and talk about how he thinks about network effects, as well as a discussion on the future of money.

So with that, here is my conversation with Owen Jennings.

Owen, I'm pretty pumped up to welcome you to Scaling Up today.

I think to start with, it's probably worth setting some context for the listeners.

Block is now a massive business and it's been on an incredible scaling journey since it was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey.

Back then, of course, it had one product, a little square reader.

It was a little white dongle that plugged into a smartphone.

basically just let micro merchants accept credit card payments and it was really aimed squarely at helping those merchants who were excluded from traditional payment networks.

And in many ways it's this theme of innovation based in this belief of financial empowerment that will be an overarching theme today.

So to bring you in, your story in many ways is

It's deeply intertwined with the Cash App story.

Uh you've been there from the early days, you've helped take it from a scrappy side project to over six billion in gross profit, and is now really the growth engine of the block business.

And in the process you've scaled yourself from a simple operator to an admired and trusted executive.

So welcome.

Can you take us back to twenty fourteen, when you were at Square?

This little side project just popped up, those early days, this little internal project team that was led by Brian Grasidonia.

What

Showing 401–420 of 535 · page 21 of 27