cash-app
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Lachlan Donald’s Second Act Has a Different Job Title
He helped Buildkite grow, stepped aside as CEO, and returned as CTO. Lachlan Donald’s career keeps circling the same question: what gets in the way of people doing good work?
Kristen Tyrrell and the work a paycheck does
A union household in Reno taught her what financial stability could make possible. At Catch, and later Cash App, she tried to build some of that machinery for people whose working lives refused to fit the form.
Daniele Perito Went Around the World to Return to His First Problem
Before he built a wholesale marketplace, Perito studied how systems fail, guarded Cash App against fraud and learned to trust both evidence and instinct. Now AI has brought him back to security, with higher stakes and a larger map.
Catherine Ferdon Makes Complicated Money Feel Like Culture
After 13 years helping Cash App find its voice, Catherine Ferdon took on crypto's harder brief: make an invisible, volatile technology feel legible, human and worth talking about.
Catherine Jue Is Building the Browser Layer AI Agents Need
After bookkeeping, payments, tea and a world title in Taekwon-Do, Catherine Jue found her next hard problem hiding in plain sight: the browser. At Kernel, she is turning it into infrastructure that AI agents can use at production scale.
Block
Block, Inc. is a global financial technology company that builds tools for economic empowerment. Founded in 2009 as Square by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, it renamed itself Block in 2021 to reflect a broader mission spanning commerce, consumer finance and bitcoin. The company operates a portfolio of ecosystems - Square for sellers, Cash App for individuals, Afterpay for buy-now-pay-later, plus TIDAL, Bitkey and Proto - and trades on the NYSE under the ticker XYZ.
Valerie Mahoney
Valerie Mahoney is a Principal at NFX, one of Silicon Valley's leading seed-stage venture capital firms managing ~$1.5B across four funds. A Materials Science engineer from Imperial College London who earned both an MBA and MPP from Stanford as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, she brings an operator's lens to early-stage investing after stints at Funding Circle (through IPO), SumUp, Tala, and Cash App/Block. At NFX she focuses on AI, fintech, enterprise software, and marketplaces - backing founders at the pre-seed and seed stages where network effects can be built from the ground up.
Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter and Square (now Block), a Bitcoin maximalist, and one of Silicon Valley's most enigmatic figures. He sent the first-ever tweet, built a payments empire, walked 5.3 miles to work daily, meditates two hours a day, eats once a day, and is currently obsessed with decentralizing everything from money to social media. His latest ventures - Bitchat (Bluetooth mesh messaging) and Block's Bitcoin treasury - reveal a builder who has moved far beyond the platforms that made him famous.