Square COO and angel investor Keith Rabois took the stage today with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss the mobile payments product, his investment strategy and more. As you may know, Square just launched a new version of its disruptive mobile payments platform this week. The company also reached some important milestones—500,000 card readers shipped, one million Square transactions in May, and the company is now on track to process $1 billion in payment volume within a year.
When Michael asked if Square will do better financially than PayPal, Rabois said there’s a 95 percent chance that Square will be worth more financially and be more valuable in the greater payments space. He explains, “we are not limited to just e-commerce, we actually enable real world payments, which is a much bigger market and is more valuable.”
Of course, Rabois is very familiar with PayPal’s market size as he was one of the first employees of the company, and went on to serve as PayPal’s Executive Vice President of Business Development and Policy. As for whether Square wll be more important culturally than PayPal, Rabois gives Square a fifty-fifty chance.
He says that Square is growing as fast (if not faster) than PayPal at the same stage of the company where was payola at this point (open to public for seven months). And PayPal is a free product and wasn’t making any money initially, whereas Square charges a 2.75 percentage on all transactions.
As for competition from Google with the search giant’s soon to be launched NFC feature, Rabois doesn’t seem worried. It’s an interesting technology but we don’t feel like it’s going to be competitive, says Rabois.