“As soon as you get to that space where you actually have something to play with and something tangible, that’s when the real learning happens,” Dorsey, who cofounded Twitter and Square, told the Money20/20 conference in Copenhagen on Monday. “Get out of Keynote, get out of PowerPoint, and just start building and start showing it off to people.”
Dorsey offered the advice to a packed conference hall of thousands of finance industry execs, startup founders, and would-be entrepreneurs on the first day of the fintech conference. He was speaking in his capacity as CEO of Square, the Silicon Valley startup that helps small businesses accept credit-card payments through their smartphones.
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Dorsey said: “We will not talk with anyone — VCs, investors, customers, other people we’re trying to hire — until we’ve got something to show, in Square’s case until we had something that could actually take money from them off their credit card.”
He added: “The biggest thing for us back in the day, especially when we were just getting started, is, you know, you have so many ideas and you’re talking about what if, what if, what if, instead of just doing it, just making it.
“The faster you can get to making it, really create that time to build the idea and write that code, the faster you’re going to be able to answer your questions and you’ll be able to attract people to your idea and what you’re doing.”
Square was founded in 2009, and Dorsey said the company’s mission was to “make sure a seller can always make a sale.” The company recently launched in the U.K., and Dorsey said that, while still in its early days, “it’s resonated in the same way many other markets have for us.”
This article was originally published on Business Insider. Copyright 2017.
