Block

“Block, formerly known as Square, is Jack Dorsey's payment company, one of the few entrepreneurs to ever create two decacorns in our industry, and they're contributing seventeen billion in equity in the combined offer.”

“What is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.”

“This is the exact reason why if this had happened two years ago, this would have been the antitrust equivalent of a colorectal exam. I mean, you would not even get one step close to doing this deal two years ago.”

“For every anthropic employee who's making 20 to a hundred million, there's 7000 block employees being laid off. It's not sustainable. You can't have 50,000 people with all the money.”

“But maybe with a company like Block maybe it's controversial, but I think it's more about the COVID overhiring.”

“Two of the biggest companies that have done this, crypto companies, and we know crypto's on the outs. So it leads me to believe it might be business, business realities versus AI improvement. Funny that Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey have both seen the light …”

“And I think actually it's going the other way, which is it's not that the AI works for us, but that we work for the AI. And people are going to hate that sentence, but let me just describe what that means. AI is very good at Understanding a broad set of inform…”

“Well, at one point the team was 23, and the age of AI it's now 12, and we've seen what you guys are talking about, which is just a massive collapse of product design, engineering, and even go to market, where people can do so much more, and so, you know, we di…”

“Jack came out and just said, no, I'm pivoting the entire infrastructure of this company for an AI era. We think you're going to need to be remote. Because you're going to move faster if you're remote, and so he's kind of laid out a whole vision about how he wa…”

“The biggest moat is going to be which companies understand something that's super hard for other people to understand. And if your answer to that is, I don't know, then you maybe could get vibe coded away.”

“And what we were seeing is that one or two engineers who was on the tools Is able to be 10, 20, a hundred X more productive.”

“And recently Block executed a roughly 40% reduction in force. And they've been pretty candid about AI being a critical component of that decision.”

“We actually launched Goose, which was the first agent harness, at least that I know of in early twenty-twenty-four”

“We did a reduction in force that was, you know, slightly greater than 40%. And that wasn't even you know, to the conversation we were just having, the tools were flowing through really meaningfully on the development side. And so the cuts were way larger on th…”

“I mean, we're like, we're not writing code by hand anymore. That's over. That's done.”

“We basically did not touch our compliance team and our compliance technology team.”

“We've massively reduced the number of meetings we have, probably, like, 70 or 80%, so I now have time to, like, build and work, and it's not back-to-back meetings.”

“Okay, we're building MoneyBot, and we want to roll MoneyBot out to 50%, and there used to be a team of 15 people working on it, and now there's a team of four people, plus 2000 dollars on the tokens. That, this is like unlimited access to tokens, and you can u…”

“We have an agentic operating system, internal only, called G-two, where anyone can automate any deterministic workflow.”

“All of our designers are shipping PRs. All of our product managers are shipping PRs.”

“We have internal tools that are similar to Claude Code, but they're, like, more plugged into our infrastructure, so we have a tool called BuilderBot. BuilderBot is just autonomously Merging PRs, and actually, like, building features to a hundred percent. We've…”

“For the past 10 or 15 years, everyone's used to a static UI, a rigid UI, you tap through the UI, everyone has the same, everyone's Uber or Lyft or Cash App or whatever looks the same. That's gonna fundamentally change in the next, like, six months. Generative,…”

“I don't think that if we ask customers to like, prompt these tools themselves, they're gonna necessarily know the right prompts and come up with the right answers, so we've invested massively on the proactive intelligence side, where what we've found, especial…”

“I remember in 20, 21, when Our stock price was like, I don't know, 260 bucks, and I was like, that was a little bit irrational.”

“I like to say like any of us can create a peer to peer app in probably a week. No one's going to vibe code, you know, 50 or sixty million monthly actives who are actually using that.”

“And right now, you basically, you've taken that, humans used to do that, and it used to take a couple months to build a feature. Now it takes maybe a week or two, and there's still humans involved.”

“This is the biggest percentage change for a publicly-held tech company in the last 20 years, which is just an astonishing certificate. The statistics.”

“Most of you have heard about blocks, 40% layoffs by now, but the numbers are even worse. Engineering was hit harder. We've lost close to 70% of our engineers.”

“Black employees are currently expected to send an update email to Dorsey every week, who then uses generative AI to summarize the thousands of messages.”

“If you're asking everyone to give you essentially sell themselves and the work they're doing on a weekly basis and using that as your like foundation for understanding the state of your company. It's gonna be biased positive. Like, that's not actually good. Ca…”

“Square is cutting from 10,000 to 6000 employees, a 40% reduction.”

“It is the largest layoff as a percentage of the overall workforce in S&P 500 history.”

“We got approached by our friends at block to discuss because they were looking into like donating goose, I think at the time. And so there was a question around doing something together. And then we approached open AI and they were very, very welcoming and lik…”

“We S we changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team. Now all designers report in one single team and their single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera.”

“We had a lot of momentum in each of these silos, be it cash app, be it after pay. Be it square or even title or music streaming service. And no one was really talking to each other. No one was really aligned on technical strategy on what we even wanted to be f…”

“We at least speak the same language. We're all have access to the same tools. We share the same policies. So like a certain level of senior engineer means the same thing across the whole company. People can move from one team to another into an area of need.”

“So we have these tools that run 24 seven or run in the CI pipeline, and they're analyzing vulnerabilities. They're looking at even bugs filed on tickets and trying to build patches While engineers are asleep. So they come in and the next day and look at it.”

“But even now we find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward that you're using goose every day are reporting about eight to 10 hours saved per week.”

“And we feel across the whole company, we're probably trending towards 20 to 25% of manual hours saved.”

“If you're building a totally new green fields code base, or you're building an app for a new platform, then we we're seeing those pretty aggressive gains, but in, you know, very complex code bases that already exist, those gains are not quite there yet.”

“And Goose can write its own MCPs, so it's pretty, ah, bootstrappable as well.”

“And we have a lot of companies using Goose pretty actively. I don't want to name too many names, but from our competitors to our sort of close partners, a lot of them are using Goose pretty regularly on their teams. I know Databricks talks about it a lot, but …”

“And so he built this system where it's essentially just watching everything he does all the time. And he'll be talking to a colleague on Slack or an email, and they'll be discussing some feature that they think is useful to implement. And then a few hours late…”

“Our average, our median session length is five minutes and on average seven.”

“And it's successful, I would say, on, like, 60% of those things if the features are sort of well enough described, and it struggles on the remaining 40 where you have to kind of intervene and massage it, yeah.”

“The savings and costs that there might be in replacing a vendor tool by something you build in-house is probably not worth it in the mental bandwidth that you've lost and the amount of the team's sort of technical focus that's being taken away.”

“In cash card, for example, we built the entire functionality of cash card. I would say pretty much in a weekend or maybe a week of sort of integration and work. And then it took a really long time to iron out all these edge cases”

“I don't think that things have Progress far enough that it's really impacted in a fundamental way how you would, how many people you would need to sort of build an app of the scale of cash app, for example.”

“I think what's changed for us is much different and it has nothing to do with AI. It's that what we talked about earlier is moving from our GM structure to a functional structure.”

“And I think that speaks to how these roles are going to evolve in the future. The lines are going to be blurred between whether you're in legal or in risk or in engineering and design even.”

“Although I think that it's a little bit like the analogy of if you build a bigger highway, you'll just get more cars on the road. So I think the fact that everyone's building software means that there's more software to be built, more coordination to happen, a…”

“So we have this really cool tool that analyzes our test suites and selects the right tests to run for changes that were made. So we cut down basically 50% of test runs this way, which is pretty great, and like we're not warming the planet as much with all thes…”

“Jack uses goose. I use goose, our executive team all have used goose and use it regularly and use other other AI programming tools and assistance as well. And we do it every single day.”

“You know, I remember even in the early days, people used it to pay each other as a peer to peer money transfer system. And that's why we built Cash App and that was really successful on the back of that.”

“There's a big echo chamber in Silicon Valley and big negative bias towards SMB, but you can make it work in SMB. HubSpot and Shopify have shown it. Block has shown it.”

“Today some of the top growth companies, like, Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Substack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies, like thousands of other companies using, using Linear.”

“That Hindenburg report is, I mean, it's a work of art”

“You know, I don't remember exactly in dollar terms, but it was, you know, it was in the low millions of, you know, an investment that basically an amount of money we lit on fire.”