Excited to see how the platform grows !

congrats to eugene and the blend team! have seen them come a long way :)

I'm a co-founder of Nootrobox. We're super excited to really invest into the rigor and quantitative metrics behind cognitive modulation. I'll be floating around answering any questions if you folks have them.

cool concept. interested in seeing the results.

Very low margin business. As a multiple of net revenue, it's at the high range of comparable payment processors.

A combination of things - a super old/competitive market (processing), the ever changing risk dynamics and Square's targeting

Let me illustrate points 1 and 2 with an example.

a) Square earns $2 in revenue per $100 of transaction volume b) $0.5 would be their gross margin accounting for expenses i.e. bank/visa fees c) The next biggest line item to subtract would be risk. If there is a fraudulent transaction of $100, then square has to compensate it with 200 transactions of $100 each. (200 txns *0.5 gross margin). Net effect is not only do they have to deal with low margins, they also have to manage risk very well. And this is not something you accomplish overnight especially as you enter new markets. Personal anecdote: I had $120 or so disappear from my Starbucks wallet a couple of months ago and the merchant had to eat the loss.

Lastly, large payment processors get out of this loop because they manage the big (Targets and Walmarts of the world) with the small and over time have fine tuned their risk engine. Square went into it in the reverse order, targeting mom-and-pop stores first (which have low volumes and high acquisition costs) and then trying their hand at large merchants (Startbucks in this case and they lost a ton doing this). In the process they never got risk management right for either segment.

My 2c.

Their net revenue should be about 100 bps, and their loss is 16 bps, at least for 2015.

And revenue growth prospects aren't all that high?

Not when you're competing against every other payment processor.

What were supposed to be Square's differentiating features? What competitive edge is being hyped?

30-35% margins are exceptional in this type of business.

interesting. we use coffeescript at nootrobox.com, but as you noted, it doesn't have a lot of hand rails. many a time, i've run javascript through a js2coffee translator to verify. will look into typescript.

Cool to see screenshots of price discrimination in practice

Thanks man!

Was pretty surprising when we first saw it, but have seen since that lots of sites now serve different prices/coupons depending on the device you use to access.

The question is what kind of price discrimination is this? Do we attribute browsing/shopping on the phone to be being poor?

I'll tell you one thing I don't attribute to being poor, and that's buying clothes from Banana Republic.

I wonder how much of their total traffic comes during the work day, from office computers.

Keanu - Download the New You by Nootrobox https://nootrobox.com/keanu

Curious what compounds you've dabbled with.

Yes, I encourage you to do your own research. A lot of the chemicals have not been formally studied on a significant group of healthy adults. A lot of the models in studies are mice models or alzheimer patients, etc.