Block by Block: Building the Future of Money - Owen Jennings, Head of Product, Block [S9.E6]
episode
Scaling Up: Lessons From The World's Best CEOs and Founders
49 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 18 days ago
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Ed Cowan and this is Scaling Up.
I think one thing that people tend to hand wave is the concept of network effects versus virality. And so a given business can have both of those. You can have one of those or you can have none of those. The amazing thing about Cash App was that we had both.
This podcast aims to educate and inspire by telling the stories of great growth companies as told by their CEOs and founders. TDM is an Australian-based investment firm that invests globally in fast-growing public and private companies. For more insights, visit our website, TDMgrowthpartners.com.
My guest today is Owen Jennings, the head of product at Block and a key person around the executive table of what is now by market cap one of the largest 500 companies in the world. Block, formerly known as Square, today is really several powerful ecosystems under one roof. Square serving millions of merchants, Cash App, the consumer super app that's become the financial home for. tens of millions of people, and of course, Australian founded Afterpay, the global BuyNow PayLader platform that connects these two, bringing shoppers and sellers together. Owen is one of the rare executives that has truly grown up inside a company. Over the past 13 years at Block, he's worn just about every hat, from early roles in ops to becoming the COO of Cash App, where he helps scale it from a scrappy side project into a fintech powerhouse that now generates around $6 billion in annual gross profit, more than half of Block's total.
Today, Owen leads product across all of Block. He's widely credited for the new sense of product velocity inside the company, and the ability to ship faster, to experiment at scale, and to embed AI as a multiplier in everything they do. But most importantly, this is a story about scaling culture. 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 was the vision and why was it so important at the time to the overall square mission?
Uh, thanks so much for having me. I I appreciate it. Excited to chat today. So as you said, I I joined block in early 2014 and I was originally focused on the Square side of the business. And so that was a pretty interesting time for Square. We were really becoming more of a mature business. We had our eyes set on an eventual IPO.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from Scaling Up: Lessons From The World's Best CEOs and Founders
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