Philadelphia Coffee Shop Owner Using Twitter Founder's New Business Venture To Help His Own Grow
By Pat Ciarrocchi
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A small business got a boost from a big business giant Tuesday.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and the recently created Square, came to Philadelphia to meet the owner of a local coffee shop using Square to help his business grow.
And at the coffee shop, HubBub, the barristas were creating afternoon magic in a cup.
Sipping nearby, the 38-year-old Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. He's now on a mission with a new enterprise, Square, which aims to level the financial playing field for small businesses.
"They need access to capital, so investment or revenue," Dorsey explained, adding that banks are cumbersome.
Dorsey took Square, his mobile payments system, and developed Square Capital.
"It's not a loan, it's an advance with a fixed fee that you understand right up front," Dorsey said.
For HubBub owner Drew Crockett, it was a perfect blend for an entrepreneur who needed branded cups for his three stores, but found there was an expensive minimum order.
"Fifty-thousand cups," he said. "A lot of banks look at that and want you to jump through a lot of hoops."
But a loan of less than $10,000 did the trick.
"You tap one button and that money is advanced to your bank account the very next business morning, and you can start using it," Dorsey said.
He calls it a flexible and an essential tool -- much like Twitter, his original venture.
"Twitter was something similar, where we knew the idea was so essential that it would be big. We had no idea how [big]," Dorsey said.
These days, Twitter has 271,000,000 active monthly users.
"The power of a good tool is [the people] make it theirs," Dorsey said. "The generation coming into competing devices today are not using email as much."
"Twitter persists because it allows for every type of media, and every type of medium, and all technologies that do will be timeless," he added.
As for those 140 characters? Dorsey thinks the shortened length of Twitter messages allows people to speak more dynamically.
"The constraint inspires creativity...and it really worked out."
At HubBub, Square Capital is inspiring more -- a branded coffee cup on the streets of Philadelphia very soon.
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