At first, Starbucks customers will need to show the merchant a bar code on their phones. But when Starbucks uses Square’s full GPS technology, the customer’s phone will automatically notify the store that the customer has entered, and the customer’s name and photo will pop up on the cashier’s screen. The customer will give the merchant his or her name, Starbucks will match the photo and the payment will be complete.

longreads:

Jim McKelvey, who owned the company (which archived documents onto CD-ROMs) and who today is Jack Dorsey’s partner in Square, recalls that first meeting in 1992. “I was sitting at a terminal entering all this data, and this kid walks up behind me, with his arms straight at his sides. He was like [McKelvey speaks in a robotic voice], ‘Hi, I’m Jack.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be with you in a minute,’ and I turned around and completely forgot about him until I had to get up to pee. Jack was in exactly the same position. He’d been motionless for 45 minutes.”

McKelvey took Dorsey on as an intern and learned that this awkward teenager could swiftly master most computing tasks. When McKelvey began to worry his company could get killed by an online competitor, he found that Dorsey was the only one on his small staff who agreed on the need to migrate the business onto the fledgling Internet. McKelvey hired several freelancers for the project. “One guy asked me, ‘What’s my job title going to be?’ I said, ‘Assistant to the summer intern.’ He was basically a stick figure. I said, ‘Just do everything this kid says.’ ”

By David Kirkpatrick, Vanity Fair

(Source: vanityfair.com, via longreads)