Jack Dorsey uses the Golden Gate Bridge as a model for product design: a great bridge gets you from A to B so smoothly you forget it's there, though the best ones are also iconic. He applies this to Square's goal of moving money seamlessly, noting that any friction makes customers notice problems instead of transacting. The bridge was built by a small team, under budget, ahead of schedule.
Questions this video answers
1933
About 1,300 people
$33 million (1934 money)
Three years (built in three years)
Expected five years and $50 million (implied)
Chapters
All of you have been over the Golden Gate Bridge. One of the things that always strikes me is just every time you come out of those Sausalito tunnels, how much it takes your breath away. And if you think about what a bridge's job in the world is, a bridge has one job, which is to get people from point A to point B and not fall down. And when a bridge does its job very well, it disappears because most people are just thinking about point B. Some bridges, like this one, are so well done and so stunning that they just take your breath away. They don't disappear because it's a joy and a delight to go from point A to point B. So we think about square in very similar ways. We also have a mission of getting money from point A to point B. If we go down, if we have any confusing points, if we have any issues, then people are thinking about our issues, our problems, instead of why they came to square four, which is to transact, to sell or to buy. And if we're doing that, we're putting our problems before our customers. And that's just rude and selfish. And we don't want to be rude or selfish in the world. The other thing that's amazing to us about this bridge is not just the audacity of building it in the first place. This was built starting in 1933, but the audacity of how they built it. They built it with 1300 people, very, very small team. They built it with $33 million of 1934 money, which is under budget. They were expecting it to be 50. They built it in three years. They're expecting to build it in five years, under budget, ahead of time, only 1300 people. The power of small teams is immense. This bridge has stood for 76 years, and it is iconic. Whenever someone says the word San Francisco, people think about this no matter where you are in the world, right? Can we build technologies like that? Can we build technologies that are so iconic, that are so instrumental, that have such an important job in the world that people remember them, that people spread them, that people talk about them?