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Square Was Originally Called “Squirrel”, Here’s The Story From Jack Dorsey

Drew Olanoff

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Drew Olanoff has over 10 years of marketing, PR, customer service and support, relationship building and management, product management, and technical support experience in multiple verticals. Online, including mobile. He prides himself on being a connector. Connecting people, stories, information. He has worked under some amazingly talented and gifted PR pros while working for startups as a “Director of Community”,... → Learn More

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
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It’s pretty interesting to learn about how a company got its name, and every company has a story. We learned about Square’s today, and it was almost called “Squirrel”, according to founder Jack Dorsey and Square’s Creative Director, Robert Anderson. MG Siegler broke this three years ago, but here are the full details, in tweets, fittingly:

Here’s Square on a really old iPod:

And the team whiteboarding it up:

Can you imagine if the company had stuck with the whole Squirrel theme? “Hey dude, do you have an “Acorn” reader?” Yeah, Square was the right move, and Acorn as the reader name would have been a bit tragic.

We’re told that “Squirrel” was just the early name that Dorsey was contemplating, so maybe it wasn’t such a close call. Regardless…whew.

Here’s Dorsey discussing the whole Squirrel name thing:

Dorsey has a thing with company names, as Twitter might have/almost was named after a Bubble Tea shop called Quickly.


Crunchbase

Company: Square
Website: squareup.com
Launch Date: February 2009
Funding: $341M

Square is making commerce easy for everyone. Starting with a free credit card reader for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, Square Reader allows anyone to accept credit cards anywhere, anytime, for a low transaction rate of 2.75 percent per swipe, with no hidden fees. Square Register serves as a full point-of-sale system for businesses to accept payments, manage items, and share menu and location information. Square Wallet, available in the US, is the most seamless way to pay,...

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Person: Jack Dorsey
Companies: Thrive Capital, Twitter, Square, Ustream, Fancy

Jack Dorsey is the creator, co-founder, and Chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack’s early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work, Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it...

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