July 20, 2023 • 48 mins
In 2015, Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant founded Squire Technologies, a software company for barbershops.
In the years that followed, Squire would grow from a simple booking app to a full-service barber shop backend software with a whopping $750 million avaluation.
But along the way, Squire would go through several iterations, raise money from a variety of unlikely sources, fall victim to a scam, and even buy a barber shop to save their only client.
On this week’s episode of All Angles, we talk to founders Songe and Dave, head of product development Aram Muradyan, and head of engineering Troy Payne to hear the unique story of how they came together to form Squire and how together they revolutionized the barbershop industry.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I went down and found them at the office and
I was like, yo, I know what you're about, your
full shit like and he's like no, no, no, no, I'm
like that, I don't want to hear any of that.
Maybe gave him like two or two thousand dollars. I
was like, you're running that back right now.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Like right now.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
He's like, I don't have any cash. All right, let's
go to ATM. So we walked.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I walked him to the ATM.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Idea Generations All Angles, a podcast about culture's
most influential brands and the teams that built them. If
you're an entrepreneur, creative, or anyone interested in harnessing the
power of collaboration, join me Noah Callahan Bever each week
as we dissect the most dynamic companies in culture, because
(00:51):
the only way to truly understand success is to look
at it from all angles. Idea Generations All Angles is
a Will Packer Media podcast. In twenty fifteen, song Laurn
and Dave Salvian found at Squire Technologies, a software company
(01:13):
for barbershops. In the years that followed, Squire would grow
from a simple booking app to a full service barbershop
back end software with evaluation of a whopping seven hundred
and fifty million dollars. But along the way, Squire would
go through several literations, raise money from a variety of
unlikely sources, fall victim to scam, and even be forced
(01:35):
to buy a barbershop in order to save their only client.
On this week's episode of All Angles, we talked to
founders Song and Dave, headed product development Armridium, and head
of Engineering Troy Payne to hear the unique story of
how they came together to form Squire and how together
they've revolutionized the barbershop industry. But before any of that happened,
(01:59):
years before they were to enter the y Combinator, was
secure sixty million dollars in funding. Song Laurn was just
a kid running around the streets of New York City.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I grew up in a relatively unconventional type of household.
Both of my parents were were artists, very artistic. They
actually separated when I was about two, so I don't
have any memory of them being together. Both of them
were very much in my life as a child. I
grew up in Manhattan in New York in the nineties,
and I was a real New York City kid, we
(02:31):
moved around a lot. I lived in like so many
different neighborhoods in the city, from Harlem to downtown near
like fourteenth and six. My mom actually had a workout
studio there, so she was artistic, but also she used
to work as a personal trainer, and she was I
would say maybe the first or one of the first
black owned exercise studios downtown that she ran.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
When I look back at it now, I.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Think that may have influenced me as an entrepreneur. Seeing
that experience her create her own business and run it early.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
On, I'm sure had an impact on me. In the
middle of eighth grade, my mom wanted to move to
La so packed up and moved in the second semester
of the eighth grade.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
That was a big change. It was a big culture shift.
You know, this is the height of the East Coast
West coast kind of dynamic. So it was really interesting.
But I ended up really having a great experience in
La as well.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I knew I.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Really really wanted to be successful and whatever that meant.
I didn't want to be port I wanted to be
financially well off. I didn't know specifically what that required
was that entailed I gravitated more towards humanities, writing, reading,
you know, debate.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Those types of classes to me made sense. The law
was a good option.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
While in school, Song had a career in law and
IVY League on the brain. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, another
Squire partner was also walking the halls of Los Angeles's
Westchester High.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
Song and I actually went to high school together.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
This is Troy Payne, head of engineering at Squire.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
So back in LA his locker was next to my locker,
the year younger than me, but I knew him from
Jaron Hallways Sharon Lockers. I remember he was a class
president and I remember him doing like what class president do,
some sort of a speech.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
At the time in high school, I was pushing burn.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
CDs, so out a CD burner when nobody else had it,
and I would buy blank CDs and ripped albums that
weren't out yet, like Lil Wayne's four hundred Degree. This
made me a lot of money because I had it
before anyone else had it.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I could charge double.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
So I was selling CDs.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
I was helping people chip their PlayStations so that they
can burn the games that I was also selling.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
While Song pursued political science, Troy was into the science
of technology, from illegal downloads and burning CDs to coding
and developing apps. Troy fell in love with computing.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
My first computer was given to me by my father
when I was eight. Used to play video games for
the most part, not a type really, I just knew
how to use a joystick. One day we installed AOL
because back then it used to just pretty much deliver
them everywhere in the mail free. We signed up my
(05:16):
brother and I and we were on it. We were
participants in a chat space called Black Voices. We're at
this at this point, I'm about eleven or twelve, and
I'm in a BV team chat talking about things that
twelve year olds talk about. And there are other people
that are that age as well from other parts of
(05:37):
the world Black as well. There were people from Oakland
and people from down South, and it was interesting to
be able to connect to these kids that were my
age and had similar interest within computers.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Troy's fascination with the World Wide Web continued to grow.
It was a blank canvas and he was obsessed. Song
knew of Troy and was vaguely aware of his interests,
but at the time, they were just locker neighbors passing
like ships in the night.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It was a year headitor, but we kind of knew
each other, knew each other were running in the same classes.
We weren't, like, you know, in the same crew. But
I always thought it was cool. He was quiet, you know,
quiet guy. I had no idea that he was a
codeer or a hacker, or was getting into trouble on
the rush from the law or whatever was going on.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Now.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Troy was never actually on the run from the law,
but by the time he reached high school, his computer
skills had evolved substantially, and he did find himself immersed
in the culture of hacking, which maybe led him into
some gray areas as far as internet legality goes.
Speaker 5 (06:41):
I started playing around with creating my own stuff using
something called Visual Basic three point zero. It was a
great tool because it was simple enough for you to
self learn. It was powerful enough for you to do
all the things that your imagination wanted you to do.
The software was new, it was full of exploits, and
(07:02):
everyone was pretty much exploiting all of the exploits. From
a happening perspective, From a software perspective, That's what really
sort of got me interested in software engineering and development
in general, is because I was just trying to look
for the next edge for me to do what I
was doing as a kid, you know, things that kids do.
(07:23):
Instead of doing it on the streets, I was doing
it on the internet. So my skills developed really developing
products that I made a piece of software called trigger.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Happy, and it had a viral effect.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
Back then, AOL had email, and so you could make something.
You can brand it, you can package it, and you
can distribute it, and it could go viral because people
started to share it. Every time you launch it, it
would advertise in the chat room, you know, trigger.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Happy has been activated or something like that. People would
see that and say, oh, you know, you know, it's.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Sort of like a fear fact that people would know
that you're about to do something malicious to and back
then it was like either terminating your account or kicking
you off the internet. I remember I was in a
chat room and someone used trigger happy and I had
no idea who they were, and that was like that
was it right there. That's when I fell in love
and I'm like, wow, I can make something like this
(08:16):
that's distributed that people that I.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Don't know can get a hold of and use and
they love it.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
And ever since then, my focus has really been on
sort of chasing that feeling.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Troy was down the rabbit hole, and we'd spend the
next several years coding, creating games, apps and websites. Meanwhile,
Songs still had his eyes fixed on law school.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I had in my mind at that point that I
wanted to go to law school and if not be
a practicing lawyer wherever, at least get a law degreeks.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
I thought that would open a lot of doors.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
If you grew up in la like everybody's one step
removed from entertainment. I didn't talk about my dad, but
he was mostly an actor growing up on Broadway and
did a lot of plays in theater, so I was
somewhat familiar with that world. So I thought, you know, entertainment,
law could be a good option.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Song went to UCLA for undergrad and then to Yale
for law school. He got the Ivy League experience that
he had dreamed of and also got his first taste
of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Junior year of college, one of my best friends and
I we used to do tutoring on the side.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
We started seeing that there's a lot of demand for it.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
So we ended up starting a tutoring company and hiring
other college students and matching them with the families that
we knew were in need of tutors, and then like
charging a percentage as well as tutoring ourselves.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
So that was my first taste of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Upon graduation, Song moved to New York City to pursue
his career in law.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
So I was doing with M and A like Murders
and Acquisitions law, where I would work on these big deals,
multi hundred million billion dollar deals. All the lawyers would
celebrate when the deals were closed. But like, I saw
who was really getting patient these deals. It wasn't the lawyers.
And I felt like the guy's on the business selling
weren't any smarter than us, weren't working harder, and they were.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Making millions and tens and hundreds and millions of dollars
on these.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Transactions, and you know, we had our salaries and our bonuses.
I was like, why am I on the side of it?
So I knew I want to do something be on
the business side. I just didn't know what to move.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Was at the same time. Dave Salvin, co founder and
president of Squire, was also in New York City working
in finance.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
Grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Mom was a single mom.
I worked a couple of jobs so you know, get
us through. Went to college in New York at the
University of Already.
Speaker 7 (10:35):
Entrepreneurship was something you think about, but you don't know.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Exactly what it is. It wasn't a goal.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
I think growing up was like, Hey, how do I
make money?
Speaker 6 (10:44):
And the folks that I saw make the money were
lawyers and doctors. After I finished college, I started working
at a market Firman in Rocket County, part of the
Info group. I started hanging out in New York City.
It was like a wait nine, and I saw this
level of wealth that I didn't see before, like young
(11:07):
guys with a decent amount of capital, and they looked
like me. These guys worked on Wall Street in finance,
and I was like, Hey, this is where we can
make them some money. And then I decided to be
in finance. Actually moved to the Bronx and I started
(11:27):
applying for jobs in New York City and I was
lucky to get a job at Dakeon Morgan and the
job was personal banker or type of thing, but it
was at one of the more affluent bad branches in
New York.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
With Dave working in finance and Song in the adjacent
field of corporate law, it was only a matter of
time before the two cross paths at a downtown happy hour.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Dave was also young black professionals and finance. We would
go out a lot with a party a lot and
then at some point I think we both were feeling
versed in there, like this is just like a rat race,
doing the same thing over and over again, and we're
working at these corporations that we're like, don't care about this.
Guy's more life than this. And he was like, yeah,
I'm feeling the same way. So we would start brainstorming ideas.
Speaker 6 (12:16):
We spent so much time and effort basically going out
and having fun, why don't we channel that some of
the effort, even a small part of it, into trying
to start a business.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
We were like, what can we do this better than this,
that can be more impactful. They could create a legacy,
and that was the process.
Speaker 6 (12:35):
We actually went to Columbia on Saturday. Columbia had a
public library. Well, we don't know it's public or not,
but it was public for us. And we went into
the library and we got into one of the classrooms
and we used to just sit there for hours on
end and think about ideas we can create this song,
and we would actually go through the motions. And the
(12:57):
third or fourth session of that idea of square came about.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Song and Dave were determined to come up with a
business of their own. After settling on barbershops as an
area of opportunity, the two went to work figuring out
exactly how they would break into the market.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
We stumbled on this idea of barbershops. It was really
born out of both of our experience.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Havn't gone to barbershops, you know, since we were kids.
You love it, you feel.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Great, you get a fresh lineup, whatever, But like the
process was just so antiquated. Sometimes they waited an hour
or two hours, sometimes not. It was very painful cash
space businesses at that time, and it didn't make sense that,
you know.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
This is like twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
There's already Huber out there, there's already YELP, there's already
all these.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Software that are improving our lives.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
When it came to getting a haircrat there was no
innovation enough technology. That was an interesting idea and we
both were like, wow, that's true, Like I've had that experience.
You've had that experience, Like this is something that I
think would resonate with a lot of people.
Speaker 6 (13:56):
And thisial idea was finding a way for customers to
book pay. Here go into a barbershop and you pay,
you walk out.
Speaker 7 (14:03):
See what experience.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
The ideation of this was solving for what we thought
could work for ourselves.
Speaker 7 (14:10):
And then the real opportunity came was like.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
When we started applying it and seeing the feedback and
seeing how users engaged with the platform.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
We started trying to learn as much as possible about
our customers. So had the idea then started trying to
seek we could validate it. We go walk in the
barbershops and just like try to talk to the barbers,
talk to the owners, talk to the guys sitting in
the chairs waiting to get a haircut, and just see
what were their paying points, what do they want to
(14:42):
improve on, like what.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Could we solve for them? And then we started getting.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
A picture that painted it was pretty clear that there
was a lot of frustration on both sides. On the
client side as well as the barber side, and we
started trying to figure out how could we solve those frustrations.
The hard part was building the product because neither one
of us were our developers a coder as a technical
so we looked at our network and thought of who
could refine to help us build this and that was
(15:07):
a struggle that took almost a year of just back
and forth and failing until we eventually were able.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
To find somebody that could actually build the first version
of the product.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
The vision for Squire was coming into focus, but they
needed someone to help them bring it to life. The
two had no experience in technology, and that learning curve
was leading to some costly mistakes that would threaten to
end the business completely.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
It was a shit show.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
We were hustling and we works.
Speaker 6 (15:44):
We met a guy that worked for us startup, but
he ended up being a total fraudster.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Neither Dig or I are technical, so we immediately started
trying to think about how we could find somebody to build.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
It for us.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
We wanted to recruit someone and sell them on.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
The dream and get them to be part require and
be like our CTO. Essentially, we would go to meet
up a man's startup events try to meet people.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We met this guy that like seemed really interested in
what we're building. He was an older dude, older.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
White guy, and I think he actually was at CTO
at a company that was working out every work pretty
at that time, established company that had raised a lot
of recent money.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
And he was like, you know, I really.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Love what you guys are doing. I want to help
you guys. I've got my full time day. But on
the side, I think I can build this app. It'll
be pretty easy and I'll work with you on it.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
And he was like, and I.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Might even want to invest, So of course, you know,
that was our He is fast forward. This is probably
like weeks now. We're working with him. He keeps saying
he's building the app. We're talking about our ideas and
our vision and what product we want. But funny enough,
he would never actually show us if he was working
on He was just really good at kind of bullshit it.
Speaker 7 (16:55):
Stuff wasn't added up, you know.
Speaker 6 (16:57):
He would say he would invest, so say you'll get
an office space that we were. He also said he
would use the connections to build and he was working
on it, and then nothing was happening after the sixty
to ninety days of this stuff. We gave him twenty
five hundred of our money to work on this, and
then he didn't produce.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into you know, maybe
months of him just giving us the run around. Obviously,
at a certain point start getting more suspicious, like what's
going on.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
By this time, we really started like.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Looking into everything, and it became clear that he was
this total fraud. We actually did some research and found
other articles that had been written about this dude. His
picture of a different name, he had present, pretended to
be a.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Doctor, he pretended to do all kind of shit, but
his job was real. The job at this tech company
was real. They were getting defrauded too.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
He was boosting him and actually had a CEO RO
at a real tech company and they didn't know it.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
So at this point I'm pissed. Once I find out,
I actually wanted to see all that company was like, Yo,
you're dealing with a fraud.
Speaker 6 (18:04):
We actually got him fired from his job and he
actually got busted for this.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I went down and found him at the office and
I was like, yo, I know what you're about. You
your full of shit, like and he's like, no, no, no, no,
I'm like that, I don't want to hear any of that.
We maybe gave him like two or two thousand dollars.
I was like, you're running that back right now, Like
right now. He's like, I don't have any cash. All right,
let's go to ATM. So we walked. I walked him
to the ATM, took out the money and gave it
(18:33):
to me right there, and I took him from.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Him, took his mind. I was like, yeah, like I
never want to see you again. I never saw him
again after that.
Speaker 7 (18:40):
We got out twenty five hundred dollars back and he
went on away.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
After their encounter with a grifter, Dave and Song looked
to their own network to find the next key hire
for Squire. They reached out to a ram Irridim, who
Dave knew from business school. Has a rom learned more
about Squire, it became a parent that he might be
the peace that could help build Squire into the global
business that they all imagined.
Speaker 8 (19:06):
Most immigrant families, you are either going to be a doctor,
an engineer, or a lawyer. At least that's what your
parents want for you. So I studied computer science.
Speaker 9 (19:15):
Believe it or not.
Speaker 8 (19:16):
In undergrad I was good at it from an academic perspective,
but I just didn't see myself as being someone who's
going to, you know, write code twenty four to seven.
I just figured I wouldn't be able to compete with
those guys that were really really into coding and then
writing games and creating games.
Speaker 9 (19:33):
I decided to go to law school.
Speaker 8 (19:34):
I graduated from law school, and I practiced law for
about five or six years. During that time, I was
living in New York and Harlem, and that's when I
met Dave and Song. Song is also an ex attorney.
We were working at similar firms and had mutual friends
and just coming of age, if you will, in New
York City. Together they started the company. I didn't even
(19:55):
know that they did. About a year in is when
I decided to leave law, and I was really just
looking to stay busy.
Speaker 9 (20:03):
I knew I wanted to do something else.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Aramas real lawyer, and we had a lot of common friends.
You know, a Raamas real character.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
He's from Russia originally, but grew up in Brooklyn. You know,
all the friends are black. So we had like a
lot of similar a lot of similar friends come you know,
growing up this around the same time professionally being attorneys,
and we just all hang out a lot in the
same same circles.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
And then he was leaving his firm and there was
an opportunity. You know, he was a super smart guy,
the slight cap.
Speaker 9 (20:33):
I didn't know what it was going to be.
Speaker 8 (20:35):
I spoke to Dave and he said, hey, listen, you
know we're working on this project working out of Rework.
Why don't you just start coming in. There was office space.
It will be easier for you to figure things out.
This way, you'll get to hang out around other people
doing cool stuff. And at that time we were at
the headquarters of we Work believe it was seventeenth Street
in Manhattan. We Work at that time had had this
program called we Work Labs. This was sort of the
(20:57):
first class, if you will, and it was just a
bunch of desks in a room I think ten or
twenty starups working on whatever it is that we're working with.
So it literally just started by me coming to the
office and my personality is I just can't see sit
still and whatever. I'm hearing a discussion about a problem
or a debate about what, you know, what should happen.
(21:18):
I can't help but get involved colon nosey, if you will,
And so I think that's how I got involved with Squire.
Little by little daves and songs. Problems and concerns became
sort of my problems and concerns. Shortly thereafter, you know,
we made the mutual decision that I should join Squire.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Arom joined the team is the head of product, helping
craft Squires ux and optimize this consumer experience. As they
were rounding out the team, the guys would have a
chance encounter at we work labs that would change the
trajectory of Squire forever.
Speaker 7 (21:53):
I was working late one day and I.
Speaker 6 (21:55):
Saw some guys at the headquarters, you know, I was like, Hey,
these guys looking for it. You know, I might as
well tell them what we're doing. And you know, come
to find out, one guy founded we were labs.
Speaker 7 (22:06):
Another guy was a.
Speaker 6 (22:07):
Cheap accountant off for sure, and we were able to
parlay that meeting into an investment. So we actually end
of June got about three hundred thousand dollars and investment.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Initially, Squire was built to be uber for barbers, and
the product worked well, but getting the buying from the
guys actually cutting hair was more difficult than they anticipated.
Why would barbershops digitize a cash based business model that's
worked just fine for the industry for literally hundreds of years.
So the Squire team took it back to the lab
and focused on listening to the real needs of barbers
(22:46):
and implementing them into the app.
Speaker 9 (22:48):
I like simple businesses.
Speaker 8 (22:49):
Simple businesses make sense to me because I could literally
figure out exactly what everyone's intent is, and that makes
it easy to digest, right because one of us for
barbershop owners, you know, none of us have barbers So
from one perspective, it's like, well, what do you guys
know about building.
Speaker 9 (23:06):
Software for barbershops?
Speaker 8 (23:08):
But it's a business that is natural to understand how
it works. We all set in barber chairs before we
all spoke to our barbers. We understand how they get paid,
We understand what lives they live, we understand the culture
behind barbering, and I think those aspects made the company
itself exciting to me. Being with David Song, we were
(23:29):
all pursuing our careers in banking and legal space at
the same time, and just to see how much they
believed in this project and what they were willing to
risk to execute on. It was truly inspiring and that's
exactly what I needed to be around at that time.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
First product we built was a mobile app.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
The way it was referred to by some people as
like Uber for barbers. You're a consumer and you're down
on the app and find a barber, book, pay to
everything seamlessly and now on the business and for the
individual barber to manage his or her schedule and payment
and whatnot. So that was the first product we had
just through you know, sheer Hustle. We were able to
(24:09):
do some barbers to try it out in New York,
but we we learned pretty early on that like that
product was not a great product for the market. The
feedback that we were getting was like, this is cool.
I'll use it if you guys send me customers, they
can book on Squire and I'll cut them cool. But
they weren't using it for all their current customers and
that was the missing piece, Like we couldn't get them
to say Squire is going to be my system of record,
(24:31):
I'm going to be a Squire to manage my business.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
And then when we asked.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Why not, you know, they were like, well, you know
I have a point of seale system.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Can you integrate with that?
Speaker 1 (24:38):
I have inventory I'm selling retail like can your app
do any of that?
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And the answer is no. So we kind of had
to go back to the.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Drawing board and started working on a full and then
system for the entire business.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Instead of an app for individual barbers, they.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Needed something where they could see all the barber schedules
in one place, like like a central platform where they
could manipulate appointments and change things. And importantly, they needed
an integrated point of sale system. So often they were
using like one thing for point of sale and then
something else for booking, and that was that it was
very disjointed and now that was causing a lot of frustrations.
(25:17):
So we identify early on we need to build a
point of sale and that took a while, but that
that was something that we knew it would be very
very important to provide a much better experience for that.
Speaker 9 (25:28):
It's the chicken and egg problem.
Speaker 8 (25:30):
Do you build sort of the supply first, or do
you build up the demand first, or do you build
two of them together. Since most men are very loyal
to the barbers, we don't actually need to build up
two sides of the marketplace. We can just build something
that barbershops and barbers would like, and just by virtue
(25:50):
of knowing how that relationship lays out between a barber
and a customer, because we were all customers of barbers right,
we sort of knew that of felt confidence that the
customers would use it. So if your barbershop starts using Squire,
then even if a customer will complain about having to
book an appointment now versus texting you or calling you,
(26:10):
ultimately the customer will do what their barber is telling
them to do.
Speaker 9 (26:13):
And I think that that was one.
Speaker 8 (26:15):
Of the biggest and most important pivots that we've made,
you know, I think it really led to our success
that we realized this early on and we made the
pivot and we started building software for the barbershop.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
With a product in hand, Dave pounded the pavement looking
for customers. Barbershop after barbershop listened to Dave's pitch, but
they all politely declined. Eventually, through sheer Will, Dave was
able to get one barbershop to sign up for Squire.
Speaker 8 (26:49):
So we build this first version of a booking management
system for the barbershop right, theyve you know, the greatest
salesman on earth basically sells it to this pretty nice barbershop,
Chelsea Market in New York City, right like, this is
not your ranking dinky shop somewhere Brooklyn or Queens Now,
this is Chelsea Market, beautiful shop. He sells the system
(27:10):
to them. When I say sell, he didn't sell it.
They weren't paying us anything. He basically sold them on
using it, which I think, you know, it's the first
battle we must win as a tech company. They start
using our system, and the owners, you know, they were
all over the place. They weren't necessarily seasoned barbershop owners,
(27:30):
and we started to feel that they are actually maybe
considering closing the business, which would be a disaster for us.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Squire was finally in a barber shop, but now that
shop was on the verge of closing. To save that
shop and their only potential revenue stream, Squire decided to
explore buying the business.
Speaker 8 (27:49):
We sat down and we'd literally just crunched the numbers.
We figured out that if we ran the barbershop we
would break even, and so we just approached the owner
and said, look, it doesn't seem like this is something
you want to be doing anyway, let us take over
your lease. You tell us what you need. Thankfully, the
owner was really just trying to get out, and so
we negotiated the purchase and we ran that barbershop I
(28:11):
think for about three to four months. At that point,
a bigger brand took over the barbershop, but those three
four months weren't valuable as far as to knowledge the
experience that we were able to gather.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Squire had saved their company by buying the spot in
Chelsea Market, but more importantly, now they had an inside
look at everything that goes into operating a barbershop.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
We actually took over and operated it because we couldn't
get anybody else to use our business management software like
we were our own first customers.
Speaker 8 (28:46):
From a product perspective, it is pretty much what every
product manager would dream of, right that is, an ability
to just be your customer for three months as part
of your job. It really just made us understand exactly
how a barbershop functions, not on paper, not on theory,
but in real life. I think that just tatapulted our
(29:07):
software to another level.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
As the team operator a legit barbershop doing everything besides
cutting hair. They learned the ins and outs of running
the business, and they were able to figure out firsthand
what Squire's customers needed from their product. Also, the shop
brought new people into their orbit, some of whom had
extremely advantageous connections.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
We had a front desk person called out on this
Saturday morning, I'm not coming. We have an appointment. The barber
shops have to open, so I have to get up
out of my bed. So I go to a barbershop.
I opened a barbershop in the chair, just running operations.
One of the people that came I noticed had an
fbing email, so obviously they worked for Facebook, and I
(29:52):
just wanted to ask that person, you know, how you
like a service or a startup. You know, we took
out the barber shop and that person ended up being
Blake Chandily.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Blake Chanley is currently the President of Global Business Solutions
at TikTok. At the time, Chanley was VP of Global
Partnerships at Facebook, where he'd worked for over twelve years
as a tech startup. There was no one more fortuitous
that the Squire crew could meet.
Speaker 6 (30:17):
He says, if you want to talk, he'll be an
awesome south By Southwest the next week, and I said.
Speaker 7 (30:22):
Yeah, we're going to go there anyway, but we weren't going.
Speaker 6 (30:25):
To go there, but we went down to pitch him
and he ended up investing one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and Squire.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
With the additional funding from Shanley Squire was beginning to
turn some heads in the explosive world of tech startups.
At the same time, Troy Payne songs Old Locker Made
from La had moved to New York to launch his
career in software engineering.
Speaker 5 (30:56):
I was building just basic car or check out experiences,
that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Nothing too crazy.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
Facebook was hot at the time, so I was building
Facebook apps. My wife and I visited New York and
you know, fell in love. I had a condo at
the time, sold it dropped everything moved to New York.
When I moved to New York, Song was the first
person I saw that I knew randomly on the train
and I'm like, Yo, what's up where you get your
haircut around here? Because that's the first thing you asked.
(31:25):
When you move to a whole new city. You don't
want to just go to anybody. You want to go
to people that are like you and get advice from
people that are like you and recommendations. It's crazy, how
what we're doing together right now?
Speaker 4 (31:35):
And it had nothing to do with that question.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Troy and Song reconnected and kept in touch, but wouldn't
join forces just yet. Troy still had a few apps
to develop and a few codes to break.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
I changed jobs started working at Guilt but the travel
subsidiary Jetsenter.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
I was hired based on a game called what Movies
Just from?
Speaker 5 (31:57):
What we would do is we would send out a
movie quote and the first person in reply with the
correct answer would We would send a DVD too. And
then the iPhone came out and I said, this will
be a great game on the iPhone.
Speaker 4 (32:09):
We made it this iPhone game called what movie Is
this from?
Speaker 5 (32:12):
And it was the first asynchronous game that instead of
you playing it, it played you. So it'd be in
your pocket and get a notification or something that says
that you know, we're going to be announcing a movie
quote in about ten minutes or something. You open a game,
you see a time or countdown, it shows a quote
and then you can respond with the answer.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
It shows a leaderboard, et cetera. And it had some success.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
It was number three and all of the trivia games,
and we had some people paying attention. One of the
people that worked at Jetsetter, who went on to start
buying ultimately, was working at Blockbuster at the time, and
when I interviewed at jet Setter, they was pretty much saying, hey, man,
I don't know if you know this, but Blockbuster's been
copying everything you can do it. And I had no
(32:59):
idea that it's great to hear from a kid like me.
I've built this in my dad's living room for three months,
and I'm able to get the attention of these big brands.
I'm beating these these gaming studios at their own game,
and I'm doing it all by myself.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Another one of Troy's endeavors was an early social media
platform called Cosmos.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
I decided to take a little break and start working
on something else.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
I was working on something called Cosmo.
Speaker 5 (33:29):
Cosmo was like Twitter, but instead of random tweets, everything
started with I want to And so you would put
these cosmos out into the universe of what you want
to do. And they're one directional, you know. It's not like, hey,
does anyone want to hang out today? It was I
want to hang out tonight, and that doesn't mean anything.
It could just go off from to the ether, or
(33:49):
somebody could say, yeah, I want to hang out tonight
as well, and a conversation could happen around these sort of.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Desires or once.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
And that also sort of further my strength and design,
my strength and product development. And I got a taste
of fundraising, pitching to billionaires, pitching to whomever would listen,
trying to raise capital and ultimately failing, but realizing my
strengths and now knowing exactly.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
What to look for as far as partners go.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
As Troy learned everything about fundraising and pitching for his
own apps, the Squire team was headed out to Silicon
Valley in search of additional investors for themselves.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Man, it was amazing, one of the best experiences I've had.
If you ever watched that show Silicon Valley and HBO, like,
it really felt like.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
That the characters, the amount of.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Obscene wealth that you have proximity too. It was totally
new to me and I really loved it. We didn't
just apply to I See A getame. We applied three times.
One time we got rejected, the second time we got in,
but not to the main program, like to this small
version of the program and the third time we got
in and moved there. But addition to y see, we
had previously applied to just about every accelerator that exists
(34:59):
that knew about, and we got rejections from all of them.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
I don't even think we got interviews from both of them.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
So this has been like over a couple of years
of really trying to insert ourselves into the tech ecosystem
in New York and then eventually in the Ballet and
just being projected from every angle.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
So when we did get accepted, it was an incredible.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Validation for us, and we really wanted to make the
most of it to embrace the experience as much as possible.
I think we did a good job establishing ourselves, like
we were pretty well known in the bash. We brought
a barber to demo day and we were giving people
haircuts there and they have to book on the app.
We definitely created some buzz that I think helped us
(35:38):
kind of put our name on the mat where people
had heard of those Squire guys. That's what they used
to always call it. Hey, those Squire guys. Yeah I
heard of those guys. Yeah, I saw those guys.
Speaker 6 (35:45):
We got into a Series A program with Y Commador,
So we did the Y Company cores and then we
were able to you know, parlay that into Series A program,
which was January twenty nineteen.
Speaker 7 (35:58):
We went on thirty or show.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Meetings doing that process.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
We got thirty or so knows and the last meeting
we got a yes from Trinity Adventures.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Our first institution around proper Series K led by a
BC fund, Trinity Adventures, and that was for eight million dollars.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
And that was the twenty.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Nineteen With Series A funding in hand and plenty of
publicity to go with it, Squire was now making headlines.
Troy caught winded the rise and decided to tap Song
to see if he could get involved. Too. Little did
he know he was reaching out at the perfect time.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
He reached out.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
When he heard about Squire, I said, Yo, I know
a song. You know, I'm an engineer, Like, you know,
what's up? I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. Cool,
and then we reconnected. At that point, he came at
a trivial moment where we honestly probably would have not
succeeded had he not joined the company when he did.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
At the time, Squire had another partner who was serving
as CTO. Unfortunately the relationship with sour and soon both
parties would want out.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
After the count Artists incident, we still continued trying to
find the right person to join our company, and then
we actually ended up finding the Cocoon.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
The CTO, and he built the first person of the product.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
He kind of like had the keys of the kingdom
as far as the technology goes, like he controlled everything
new everything without him, like there's no company from from
a product standpoint.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
So they had a CTO at the moment, I didn't
know it, but they weren't very happy with progress that.
Speaker 7 (37:39):
Was being made.
Speaker 5 (37:41):
And I came in as a contractor to work on
some iOS stuff. I think the CTO was saying that
we need to bring in someone to port over our
app to the new back end that they were working on,
and he had estimated it would take three months and.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
I did it in three weeks.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
They were impressed by that.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
I had no idea at the time that they were
unhappy with the CTO, but they pretty much said, Troy,
we're gonna let so and so go, we want you
to step in.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
When Troy came in, he basically took over everything and
kept the lights on and even improved on what we
had had he not reached out, had we not had
to locker together, had all these like random occurrences not happened,
I don't know what we would have done at that
time when it didn't work out with the former co founder,
like we you know, probably would have failed.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And what's the odds, you know, like one of the
odds to the same high school.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Now, had we not had lockers in the same place,
I would have not known like we would like there's
a big school, like you know, thousands of students.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
We never had a class together, I would have known
who was.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
But they would have it that we did share lockers
in the same place. So I knew him, so he
knew me. And then all these years later it worked
out joint schore.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
With all the pieces in place, Squire transformed from Uber
for barbers into a full service back end app for barbershops,
and in doing so, became one of the hottest startups
in tech. Incredibly, only a few months after raising their
Series A, Squire received a twenty seven million dollar Series
B investment, and just in time, because although they didn't
(39:16):
know it the COVID nineteen pandemic was just around the corner.
Speaker 6 (39:22):
So we did a twenty seven million dollars series B.
The last five million came in a week before the pandemic.
Everything sat down, so fortuitous timing to say the least.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Revenue went to zero. We're flying high. We had this
growth chart, you know, up to the right. We did around.
Speaker 6 (39:44):
Six or seven million in March, and then in April
it went down to like one hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
That's how drastic the drop off was.
Speaker 10 (39:56):
We were instructed to take PvP longs and we did not, said,
you know, we don't need it.
Speaker 7 (40:01):
We had at that point thirty something million dollars in
the bank.
Speaker 10 (40:05):
We didn't think it made sense for us to you know,
take money that was meant for our customers.
Speaker 7 (40:10):
We didn't take the money.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
We hunkered down and say, hey, we're going to get
to this. It's not gonna last whatever.
Speaker 7 (40:15):
And it didn't.
Speaker 6 (40:17):
And you know, we saw this robust growth out of
the pandemic.
Speaker 11 (40:21):
We really focused on the product and we get focused
on the customers. During that time, we built four or
five products that just were dedicated to the customers. We
created a virtual waiting room.
Speaker 10 (40:34):
We created a way for our customers that are applying the
PPP loans. We created a way for folks to make
wireless not point sell pay me so I didn't have
to touch the cast register. We made it way for
folks to donate to the barber shop that was down
and then actual barber So we created like a gift
(40:55):
card product, all within six to eight week span. So
we were like ray, focused on getting stuff out that
made sense for our customers. And because of that, we
saw this huge growth coming out of the square, like
this huge influctual customers.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
It was a wild time.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
It's going to be crazy to just think that we
all lived through this because they impacted every business. But
our customers are shut down. When the government calls, our
businesses shut down and they started reopening going into summer
twenty twenty. And while they were shut down, as a company,
refocused on how we could help them, how we could
help keep them afloat, provide them with capital, launch futures
(41:36):
that will allow them to reopen safely, and I think
it was the right decision for us.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
We also waived subscription fees for.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
The whole year, even for the following year because we
didn't want for them to have an additional overhead during this.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Really challenging time.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
It was the right thing to do just morally, but
I think it ended up being the right thing to
do as a business as well. And when they reopened,
we started getting more customers than ever. And I think
part of.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
It was the shift to digital.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
A lot of businesses started really understanding why they need
to embrace technology and accept card payments and all that.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
And then some of it was because of the good
will that we were building.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
An industry and really leaning into how can we help
our customers.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
So we saw a lot of growth in the second
half of twenty twenty going into twenty.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
One, a lot of growth. As Song puts it, is
this a severe understatement. From twenty twenty to twenty twenty one,
Squire raised their Series C and Series D funding, putting
over one hundred million dollars in their coffers. Their Series D,
led by Tiger Global, came in at sixty million dollars
and earned a company a whopping seven hundred and fifty
(42:41):
million dollars valuation.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
I think we're just scratching a surface, which is crazy
to think about considering our current valuation and considering the
number of shops that we have on our platform.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
One thing we.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Do have is high our pool.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
You know, our shops pay for great service, and they're
happily paying for a great service, and so we don't
have just a bunch of shops that are barely paying.
We have a handful of really great shops that are
paying for the value of it. We're in three thousand
barbershops in the US.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
And the UK and Canada.
Speaker 5 (43:15):
There are fifty thousand in the US alone, probably two
hundred thousand worldwide, maybe more. We're still sort of doing
our time right now. I know in Europe is becoming
even more popular. I think from that perspective there's a
lot of room, but there's an even bigger sort of
space that if we can capture every barbershop, we can
(43:37):
start marketing to the consumer where I think it gets
really really interesting.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
Similar to with Uber has done.
Speaker 5 (43:44):
Uber has created this household name part of world culture
where you don't think about how you got to someplace.
Speaker 4 (43:53):
They sort of blurred the lines between getting from A
to B.
Speaker 9 (43:56):
You just took an Uber, you booked an Uber.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
But there's also a whole other set of consumers where
they don't know what barbershop to go to. There's a
lot of people on Earth, a lot of of them
have here, and that's the market that I look at.
Speaker 8 (44:11):
I think what's next for us is we are going
to continue scaling. We're going to continue grabbing market share
in the barbershop space where now in five different countries USA, Canada, UK,
Ireland and Australia sort of both English speaking countries that
we're concentrating on those for two reasons. Obviously the software
is in English, but also, you know, we want to
(44:32):
make sure that we always have processing payments for our
clients because I think it really makes for a very
unique offering.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Think about running a company, particularly a tech company that's
growing fast. Is scaling is a tension between the necessity
of short term thinking and planning and then also like
long term vision and thinking three to five years out.
And sometimes the two can seem like their attention because
what's better for the company than long may or may
(45:00):
not seem like the best thing to do, you know,
in the next six to twelve months. Since the economy
has changed slowed down, the fundraising capital marcuts environment is
totally different than it was I think it's actually put
us in a better position in terms of company building,
and I'm actually, you know, weirdly kind of like excited
about this opportunity in this time because it's going.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
To allow us to really focus on building an amazing company.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And part of that, in my opinion, is like actually
thinking about profitability being a company actually generates cash while
also thinking about how that growth is important. It's not
the only thing, So I'm looking forward to that. For me,
what I think about is continuing to build up Squire
and really define like as a category leading, category defining company.
(45:50):
We are, I think the only company that is a
barbershop management platform, and we empower our barbershop owners and
barbers to run their business better, to improve their operations
and added out laser focus.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
We're at the only company probably in the world. I
can say that.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Squire's story is one of ambition, curiosity, and adaptability. Though
they both got their start on the corporate ladder, Song
and Dave were born entrepreneurs with a shared goal of
manufacturing their own success, and they also shared an ingenuity
and a willpower to engineer that success through innovation and
an excellence of product. Once they identified barbershops as a
(46:34):
white space open to disruption. They studied the landscape relentlessly,
and they did their diligence naturally. As the business progressed,
they hit no shortage of walls along the way, but
they were never deterred. They processed the challenges, added the
right team members in Arom and Troy, and pivoted with Finesse.
And as their team product and true marketplace opportunity came
(46:57):
into focus, the financial dominoes just started to fall one
after another, and now as they approach unicorn status, the
much sought after billion dollar valuation despite a rapidly changing
economic landscape, the options for how they grow the business
appear limitless, and Squire remains a cut above from Idea Generation.
(47:23):
I'm Noah Callahan Bever. Thank you for listening to The
All Angles Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please don't
hesitate to like, comment DM or tell a friend to
tell a friend about Idea Generation and the All Angles Podcast.
We can't do any of this without your help, and honestly,
your support means everything. We do this for you, and
we can't do it without you. This episode was brought
(47:48):
to you by Will Packer. Executive produced by John Valachik
and Helena Ox, original music by Valentine Fritz, edit and
sound mixed by Nonsensible Production, and hosted by me Idea
Generation founder Noah Allahan bever Idea Generations. All Angles is
a will packer media podcast
I went down and found them at the office and
I was like, yo, I know what you're about, your
full shit like and he's like no, no, no, no, I'm
like that, I don't want to hear any of that.
Maybe gave him like two or two thousand dollars. I
was like, you're running that back right now.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Like right now.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
He's like, I don't have any cash. All right, let's
go to ATM. So we walked.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I walked him to the ATM.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Welcome to Idea Generations All Angles, a podcast about culture's
most influential brands and the teams that built them. If
you're an entrepreneur, creative, or anyone interested in harnessing the
power of collaboration, join me Noah Callahan Bever each week
as we dissect the most dynamic companies in culture, because
(00:51):
the only way to truly understand success is to look
at it from all angles. Idea Generations All Angles is
a Will Packer Media podcast. In twenty fifteen, song Laurn
and Dave Salvian found at Squire Technologies, a software company
(01:13):
for barbershops. In the years that followed, Squire would grow
from a simple booking app to a full service barbershop
back end software with evaluation of a whopping seven hundred
and fifty million dollars. But along the way, Squire would
go through several literations, raise money from a variety of
unlikely sources, fall victim to scam, and even be forced
(01:35):
to buy a barbershop in order to save their only client.
On this week's episode of All Angles, we talked to
founders Song and Dave, headed product development Armridium, and head
of Engineering Troy Payne to hear the unique story of
how they came together to form Squire and how together
they've revolutionized the barbershop industry. But before any of that happened,
(01:59):
years before they were to enter the y Combinator, was
secure sixty million dollars in funding. Song Laurn was just
a kid running around the streets of New York City.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I grew up in a relatively unconventional type of household.
Both of my parents were were artists, very artistic. They
actually separated when I was about two, so I don't
have any memory of them being together. Both of them
were very much in my life as a child. I
grew up in Manhattan in New York in the nineties,
and I was a real New York City kid, we
(02:31):
moved around a lot. I lived in like so many
different neighborhoods in the city, from Harlem to downtown near
like fourteenth and six. My mom actually had a workout
studio there, so she was artistic, but also she used
to work as a personal trainer, and she was I
would say maybe the first or one of the first
black owned exercise studios downtown that she ran.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
When I look back at it now, I.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Think that may have influenced me as an entrepreneur. Seeing
that experience her create her own business and run it early.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
On, I'm sure had an impact on me. In the
middle of eighth grade, my mom wanted to move to
La so packed up and moved in the second semester
of the eighth grade.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
That was a big change. It was a big culture shift.
You know, this is the height of the East Coast
West coast kind of dynamic. So it was really interesting.
But I ended up really having a great experience in
La as well.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I knew I.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Really really wanted to be successful and whatever that meant.
I didn't want to be port I wanted to be
financially well off. I didn't know specifically what that required
was that entailed I gravitated more towards humanities, writing, reading,
you know, debate.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Those types of classes to me made sense. The law
was a good option.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
While in school, Song had a career in law and
IVY League on the brain. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, another
Squire partner was also walking the halls of Los Angeles's
Westchester High.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
Song and I actually went to high school together.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
This is Troy Payne, head of engineering at Squire.
Speaker 5 (04:07):
So back in LA his locker was next to my locker,
the year younger than me, but I knew him from
Jaron Hallways Sharon Lockers. I remember he was a class
president and I remember him doing like what class president do,
some sort of a speech.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
At the time in high school, I was pushing burn.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
CDs, so out a CD burner when nobody else had it,
and I would buy blank CDs and ripped albums that
weren't out yet, like Lil Wayne's four hundred Degree. This
made me a lot of money because I had it
before anyone else had it.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I could charge double.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
So I was selling CDs.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
I was helping people chip their PlayStations so that they
can burn the games that I was also selling.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
While Song pursued political science, Troy was into the science
of technology, from illegal downloads and burning CDs to coding
and developing apps. Troy fell in love with computing.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
My first computer was given to me by my father
when I was eight. Used to play video games for
the most part, not a type really, I just knew
how to use a joystick. One day we installed AOL
because back then it used to just pretty much deliver
them everywhere in the mail free. We signed up my
(05:16):
brother and I and we were on it. We were
participants in a chat space called Black Voices. We're at
this at this point, I'm about eleven or twelve, and
I'm in a BV team chat talking about things that
twelve year olds talk about. And there are other people
that are that age as well from other parts of
(05:37):
the world Black as well. There were people from Oakland
and people from down South, and it was interesting to
be able to connect to these kids that were my
age and had similar interest within computers.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Troy's fascination with the World Wide Web continued to grow.
It was a blank canvas and he was obsessed. Song
knew of Troy and was vaguely aware of his interests,
but at the time, they were just locker neighbors passing
like ships in the night.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It was a year headitor, but we kind of knew
each other, knew each other were running in the same classes.
We weren't, like, you know, in the same crew. But
I always thought it was cool. He was quiet, you know,
quiet guy. I had no idea that he was a
codeer or a hacker, or was getting into trouble on
the rush from the law or whatever was going on.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Now.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Troy was never actually on the run from the law,
but by the time he reached high school, his computer
skills had evolved substantially, and he did find himself immersed
in the culture of hacking, which maybe led him into
some gray areas as far as internet legality goes.
Speaker 5 (06:41):
I started playing around with creating my own stuff using
something called Visual Basic three point zero. It was a
great tool because it was simple enough for you to
self learn. It was powerful enough for you to do
all the things that your imagination wanted you to do.
The software was new, it was full of exploits, and
(07:02):
everyone was pretty much exploiting all of the exploits. From
a happening perspective, From a software perspective, That's what really
sort of got me interested in software engineering and development
in general, is because I was just trying to look
for the next edge for me to do what I
was doing as a kid, you know, things that kids do.
(07:23):
Instead of doing it on the streets, I was doing
it on the internet. So my skills developed really developing
products that I made a piece of software called trigger.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Happy, and it had a viral effect.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
Back then, AOL had email, and so you could make something.
You can brand it, you can package it, and you
can distribute it, and it could go viral because people
started to share it. Every time you launch it, it
would advertise in the chat room, you know, trigger.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Happy has been activated or something like that. People would
see that and say, oh, you know, you know, it's.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Sort of like a fear fact that people would know
that you're about to do something malicious to and back
then it was like either terminating your account or kicking
you off the internet. I remember I was in a
chat room and someone used trigger happy and I had
no idea who they were, and that was like that
was it right there. That's when I fell in love
and I'm like, wow, I can make something like this
(08:16):
that's distributed that people that I.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Don't know can get a hold of and use and
they love it.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
And ever since then, my focus has really been on
sort of chasing that feeling.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Troy was down the rabbit hole, and we'd spend the
next several years coding, creating games, apps and websites. Meanwhile,
Songs still had his eyes fixed on law school.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
I had in my mind at that point that I
wanted to go to law school and if not be
a practicing lawyer wherever, at least get a law degreeks.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
I thought that would open a lot of doors.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
If you grew up in la like everybody's one step
removed from entertainment. I didn't talk about my dad, but
he was mostly an actor growing up on Broadway and
did a lot of plays in theater, so I was
somewhat familiar with that world. So I thought, you know, entertainment,
law could be a good option.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Song went to UCLA for undergrad and then to Yale
for law school. He got the Ivy League experience that
he had dreamed of and also got his first taste
of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Junior year of college, one of my best friends and
I we used to do tutoring on the side.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
We started seeing that there's a lot of demand for it.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
So we ended up starting a tutoring company and hiring
other college students and matching them with the families that
we knew were in need of tutors, and then like
charging a percentage as well as tutoring ourselves.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
So that was my first taste of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Upon graduation, Song moved to New York City to pursue
his career in law.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
So I was doing with M and A like Murders
and Acquisitions law, where I would work on these big deals,
multi hundred million billion dollar deals. All the lawyers would
celebrate when the deals were closed. But like, I saw
who was really getting patient these deals. It wasn't the lawyers.
And I felt like the guy's on the business selling
weren't any smarter than us, weren't working harder, and they were.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Making millions and tens and hundreds and millions of dollars
on these.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Transactions, and you know, we had our salaries and our bonuses.
I was like, why am I on the side of it?
So I knew I want to do something be on
the business side. I just didn't know what to move.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Was at the same time. Dave Salvin, co founder and
president of Squire, was also in New York City working
in finance.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
Grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Mom was a single mom.
I worked a couple of jobs so you know, get
us through. Went to college in New York at the
University of Already.
Speaker 7 (10:35):
Entrepreneurship was something you think about, but you don't know.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Exactly what it is. It wasn't a goal.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
I think growing up was like, Hey, how do I
make money?
Speaker 6 (10:44):
And the folks that I saw make the money were
lawyers and doctors. After I finished college, I started working
at a market Firman in Rocket County, part of the
Info group. I started hanging out in New York City.
It was like a wait nine, and I saw this
level of wealth that I didn't see before, like young
(11:07):
guys with a decent amount of capital, and they looked
like me. These guys worked on Wall Street in finance,
and I was like, Hey, this is where we can
make them some money. And then I decided to be
in finance. Actually moved to the Bronx and I started
(11:27):
applying for jobs in New York City and I was
lucky to get a job at Dakeon Morgan and the
job was personal banker or type of thing, but it
was at one of the more affluent bad branches in
New York.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
With Dave working in finance and Song in the adjacent
field of corporate law, it was only a matter of
time before the two cross paths at a downtown happy hour.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Dave was also young black professionals and finance. We would
go out a lot with a party a lot and
then at some point I think we both were feeling
versed in there, like this is just like a rat race,
doing the same thing over and over again, and we're
working at these corporations that we're like, don't care about this.
Guy's more life than this. And he was like, yeah,
I'm feeling the same way. So we would start brainstorming ideas.
Speaker 6 (12:16):
We spent so much time and effort basically going out
and having fun, why don't we channel that some of
the effort, even a small part of it, into trying
to start a business.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
We were like, what can we do this better than this,
that can be more impactful. They could create a legacy,
and that was the process.
Speaker 6 (12:35):
We actually went to Columbia on Saturday. Columbia had a
public library. Well, we don't know it's public or not,
but it was public for us. And we went into
the library and we got into one of the classrooms
and we used to just sit there for hours on
end and think about ideas we can create this song,
and we would actually go through the motions. And the
(12:57):
third or fourth session of that idea of square came about.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Song and Dave were determined to come up with a
business of their own. After settling on barbershops as an
area of opportunity, the two went to work figuring out
exactly how they would break into the market.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
We stumbled on this idea of barbershops. It was really
born out of both of our experience.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Havn't gone to barbershops, you know, since we were kids.
You love it, you feel.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Great, you get a fresh lineup, whatever, But like the
process was just so antiquated. Sometimes they waited an hour
or two hours, sometimes not. It was very painful cash
space businesses at that time, and it didn't make sense that,
you know.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
This is like twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
There's already Huber out there, there's already YELP, there's already
all these.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Software that are improving our lives.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
When it came to getting a haircrat there was no
innovation enough technology. That was an interesting idea and we
both were like, wow, that's true, Like I've had that experience.
You've had that experience, Like this is something that I
think would resonate with a lot of people.
Speaker 6 (13:56):
And thisial idea was finding a way for customers to
book pay. Here go into a barbershop and you pay,
you walk out.
Speaker 7 (14:03):
See what experience.
Speaker 6 (14:04):
The ideation of this was solving for what we thought
could work for ourselves.
Speaker 7 (14:10):
And then the real opportunity came was like.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
When we started applying it and seeing the feedback and
seeing how users engaged with the platform.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
We started trying to learn as much as possible about
our customers. So had the idea then started trying to
seek we could validate it. We go walk in the
barbershops and just like try to talk to the barbers,
talk to the owners, talk to the guys sitting in
the chairs waiting to get a haircut, and just see
what were their paying points, what do they want to
(14:42):
improve on, like what.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Could we solve for them? And then we started getting.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
A picture that painted it was pretty clear that there
was a lot of frustration on both sides. On the
client side as well as the barber side, and we
started trying to figure out how could we solve those frustrations.
The hard part was building the product because neither one
of us were our developers a coder as a technical
so we looked at our network and thought of who
could refine to help us build this and that was
(15:07):
a struggle that took almost a year of just back
and forth and failing until we eventually were able.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
To find somebody that could actually build the first version
of the product.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
The vision for Squire was coming into focus, but they
needed someone to help them bring it to life. The
two had no experience in technology, and that learning curve
was leading to some costly mistakes that would threaten to
end the business completely.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
It was a shit show.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
We were hustling and we works.
Speaker 6 (15:44):
We met a guy that worked for us startup, but
he ended up being a total fraudster.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Neither Dig or I are technical, so we immediately started
trying to think about how we could find somebody to build.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
It for us.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
We wanted to recruit someone and sell them on.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
The dream and get them to be part require and
be like our CTO. Essentially, we would go to meet
up a man's startup events try to meet people.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
We met this guy that like seemed really interested in
what we're building. He was an older dude, older.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
White guy, and I think he actually was at CTO
at a company that was working out every work pretty
at that time, established company that had raised a lot
of recent money.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
And he was like, you know, I really.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Love what you guys are doing. I want to help
you guys. I've got my full time day. But on
the side, I think I can build this app. It'll
be pretty easy and I'll work with you on it.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
And he was like, and I.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Might even want to invest, So of course, you know,
that was our He is fast forward. This is probably
like weeks now. We're working with him. He keeps saying
he's building the app. We're talking about our ideas and
our vision and what product we want. But funny enough,
he would never actually show us if he was working
on He was just really good at kind of bullshit it.
Speaker 7 (16:55):
Stuff wasn't added up, you know.
Speaker 6 (16:57):
He would say he would invest, so say you'll get
an office space that we were. He also said he
would use the connections to build and he was working
on it, and then nothing was happening after the sixty
to ninety days of this stuff. We gave him twenty
five hundred of our money to work on this, and
then he didn't produce.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into you know, maybe
months of him just giving us the run around. Obviously,
at a certain point start getting more suspicious, like what's
going on.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
By this time, we really started like.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Looking into everything, and it became clear that he was
this total fraud. We actually did some research and found
other articles that had been written about this dude. His
picture of a different name, he had present, pretended to
be a.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Doctor, he pretended to do all kind of shit, but
his job was real. The job at this tech company
was real. They were getting defrauded too.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
He was boosting him and actually had a CEO RO
at a real tech company and they didn't know it.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
So at this point I'm pissed. Once I find out,
I actually wanted to see all that company was like, Yo,
you're dealing with a fraud.
Speaker 6 (18:04):
We actually got him fired from his job and he
actually got busted for this.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I went down and found him at the office and
I was like, yo, I know what you're about. You
your full of shit, like and he's like, no, no, no, no,
I'm like that, I don't want to hear any of that.
We maybe gave him like two or two thousand dollars.
I was like, you're running that back right now, Like
right now. He's like, I don't have any cash. All right,
let's go to ATM. So we walked. I walked him
to the ATM, took out the money and gave it
(18:33):
to me right there, and I took him from.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Him, took his mind. I was like, yeah, like I
never want to see you again. I never saw him
again after that.
Speaker 7 (18:40):
We got out twenty five hundred dollars back and he
went on away.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
After their encounter with a grifter, Dave and Song looked
to their own network to find the next key hire
for Squire. They reached out to a ram Irridim, who
Dave knew from business school. Has a rom learned more
about Squire, it became a parent that he might be
the peace that could help build Squire into the global
business that they all imagined.
Speaker 8 (19:06):
Most immigrant families, you are either going to be a doctor,
an engineer, or a lawyer. At least that's what your
parents want for you. So I studied computer science.
Speaker 9 (19:15):
Believe it or not.
Speaker 8 (19:16):
In undergrad I was good at it from an academic perspective,
but I just didn't see myself as being someone who's
going to, you know, write code twenty four to seven.
I just figured I wouldn't be able to compete with
those guys that were really really into coding and then
writing games and creating games.
Speaker 9 (19:33):
I decided to go to law school.
Speaker 8 (19:34):
I graduated from law school, and I practiced law for
about five or six years. During that time, I was
living in New York and Harlem, and that's when I
met Dave and Song. Song is also an ex attorney.
We were working at similar firms and had mutual friends
and just coming of age, if you will, in New
York City. Together they started the company. I didn't even
(19:55):
know that they did. About a year in is when
I decided to leave law, and I was really just
looking to stay busy.
Speaker 9 (20:03):
I knew I wanted to do something else.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Aramas real lawyer, and we had a lot of common friends.
You know, a Raamas real character.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
He's from Russia originally, but grew up in Brooklyn. You know,
all the friends are black. So we had like a
lot of similar a lot of similar friends come you know,
growing up this around the same time professionally being attorneys,
and we just all hang out a lot in the
same same circles.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
And then he was leaving his firm and there was
an opportunity. You know, he was a super smart guy,
the slight cap.
Speaker 9 (20:33):
I didn't know what it was going to be.
Speaker 8 (20:35):
I spoke to Dave and he said, hey, listen, you
know we're working on this project working out of Rework.
Why don't you just start coming in. There was office space.
It will be easier for you to figure things out.
This way, you'll get to hang out around other people
doing cool stuff. And at that time we were at
the headquarters of we Work believe it was seventeenth Street
in Manhattan. We Work at that time had had this
program called we Work Labs. This was sort of the
(20:57):
first class, if you will, and it was just a
bunch of desks in a room I think ten or
twenty starups working on whatever it is that we're working with.
So it literally just started by me coming to the
office and my personality is I just can't see sit
still and whatever. I'm hearing a discussion about a problem
or a debate about what, you know, what should happen.
(21:18):
I can't help but get involved colon nosey, if you will,
And so I think that's how I got involved with Squire.
Little by little daves and songs. Problems and concerns became
sort of my problems and concerns. Shortly thereafter, you know,
we made the mutual decision that I should join Squire.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Arom joined the team is the head of product, helping
craft Squires ux and optimize this consumer experience. As they
were rounding out the team, the guys would have a
chance encounter at we work labs that would change the
trajectory of Squire forever.
Speaker 7 (21:53):
I was working late one day and I.
Speaker 6 (21:55):
Saw some guys at the headquarters, you know, I was like, Hey,
these guys looking for it. You know, I might as
well tell them what we're doing. And you know, come
to find out, one guy founded we were labs.
Speaker 7 (22:06):
Another guy was a.
Speaker 6 (22:07):
Cheap accountant off for sure, and we were able to
parlay that meeting into an investment. So we actually end
of June got about three hundred thousand dollars and investment.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Initially, Squire was built to be uber for barbers, and
the product worked well, but getting the buying from the
guys actually cutting hair was more difficult than they anticipated.
Why would barbershops digitize a cash based business model that's
worked just fine for the industry for literally hundreds of years.
So the Squire team took it back to the lab
and focused on listening to the real needs of barbers
(22:46):
and implementing them into the app.
Speaker 9 (22:48):
I like simple businesses.
Speaker 8 (22:49):
Simple businesses make sense to me because I could literally
figure out exactly what everyone's intent is, and that makes
it easy to digest, right because one of us for
barbershop owners, you know, none of us have barbers So
from one perspective, it's like, well, what do you guys
know about building.
Speaker 9 (23:06):
Software for barbershops?
Speaker 8 (23:08):
But it's a business that is natural to understand how
it works. We all set in barber chairs before we
all spoke to our barbers. We understand how they get paid,
We understand what lives they live, we understand the culture
behind barbering, and I think those aspects made the company
itself exciting to me. Being with David Song, we were
(23:29):
all pursuing our careers in banking and legal space at
the same time, and just to see how much they
believed in this project and what they were willing to
risk to execute on. It was truly inspiring and that's
exactly what I needed to be around at that time.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
First product we built was a mobile app.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
The way it was referred to by some people as
like Uber for barbers. You're a consumer and you're down
on the app and find a barber, book, pay to
everything seamlessly and now on the business and for the
individual barber to manage his or her schedule and payment
and whatnot. So that was the first product we had
just through you know, sheer Hustle. We were able to
(24:09):
do some barbers to try it out in New York,
but we we learned pretty early on that like that
product was not a great product for the market. The
feedback that we were getting was like, this is cool.
I'll use it if you guys send me customers, they
can book on Squire and I'll cut them cool. But
they weren't using it for all their current customers and
that was the missing piece, Like we couldn't get them
to say Squire is going to be my system of record,
(24:31):
I'm going to be a Squire to manage my business.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
And then when we asked.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Why not, you know, they were like, well, you know
I have a point of seale system.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Can you integrate with that?
Speaker 1 (24:38):
I have inventory I'm selling retail like can your app
do any of that?
Speaker 2 (24:42):
And the answer is no. So we kind of had
to go back to the.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Drawing board and started working on a full and then
system for the entire business.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Instead of an app for individual barbers, they.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Needed something where they could see all the barber schedules
in one place, like like a central platform where they
could manipulate appointments and change things. And importantly, they needed
an integrated point of sale system. So often they were
using like one thing for point of sale and then
something else for booking, and that was that it was
very disjointed and now that was causing a lot of frustrations.
(25:17):
So we identify early on we need to build a
point of sale and that took a while, but that
that was something that we knew it would be very
very important to provide a much better experience for that.
Speaker 9 (25:28):
It's the chicken and egg problem.
Speaker 8 (25:30):
Do you build sort of the supply first, or do
you build up the demand first, or do you build
two of them together. Since most men are very loyal
to the barbers, we don't actually need to build up
two sides of the marketplace. We can just build something
that barbershops and barbers would like, and just by virtue
(25:50):
of knowing how that relationship lays out between a barber
and a customer, because we were all customers of barbers right,
we sort of knew that of felt confidence that the
customers would use it. So if your barbershop starts using Squire,
then even if a customer will complain about having to
book an appointment now versus texting you or calling you,
(26:10):
ultimately the customer will do what their barber is telling
them to do.
Speaker 9 (26:13):
And I think that that was one.
Speaker 8 (26:15):
Of the biggest and most important pivots that we've made,
you know, I think it really led to our success
that we realized this early on and we made the
pivot and we started building software for the barbershop.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
With a product in hand, Dave pounded the pavement looking
for customers. Barbershop after barbershop listened to Dave's pitch, but
they all politely declined. Eventually, through sheer Will, Dave was
able to get one barbershop to sign up for Squire.
Speaker 8 (26:49):
So we build this first version of a booking management
system for the barbershop right, theyve you know, the greatest
salesman on earth basically sells it to this pretty nice barbershop,
Chelsea Market in New York City, right like, this is
not your ranking dinky shop somewhere Brooklyn or Queens Now,
this is Chelsea Market, beautiful shop. He sells the system
(27:10):
to them. When I say sell, he didn't sell it.
They weren't paying us anything. He basically sold them on
using it, which I think, you know, it's the first
battle we must win as a tech company. They start
using our system, and the owners, you know, they were
all over the place. They weren't necessarily seasoned barbershop owners,
(27:30):
and we started to feel that they are actually maybe
considering closing the business, which would be a disaster for us.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Squire was finally in a barber shop, but now that
shop was on the verge of closing. To save that
shop and their only potential revenue stream, Squire decided to
explore buying the business.
Speaker 8 (27:49):
We sat down and we'd literally just crunched the numbers.
We figured out that if we ran the barbershop we
would break even, and so we just approached the owner
and said, look, it doesn't seem like this is something
you want to be doing anyway, let us take over
your lease. You tell us what you need. Thankfully, the
owner was really just trying to get out, and so
we negotiated the purchase and we ran that barbershop I
(28:11):
think for about three to four months. At that point,
a bigger brand took over the barbershop, but those three
four months weren't valuable as far as to knowledge the
experience that we were able to gather.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Squire had saved their company by buying the spot in
Chelsea Market, but more importantly, now they had an inside
look at everything that goes into operating a barbershop.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
We actually took over and operated it because we couldn't
get anybody else to use our business management software like
we were our own first customers.
Speaker 8 (28:46):
From a product perspective, it is pretty much what every
product manager would dream of, right that is, an ability
to just be your customer for three months as part
of your job. It really just made us understand exactly
how a barbershop functions, not on paper, not on theory,
but in real life. I think that just tatapulted our
(29:07):
software to another level.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
As the team operator a legit barbershop doing everything besides
cutting hair. They learned the ins and outs of running
the business, and they were able to figure out firsthand
what Squire's customers needed from their product. Also, the shop
brought new people into their orbit, some of whom had
extremely advantageous connections.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
We had a front desk person called out on this
Saturday morning, I'm not coming. We have an appointment. The barber
shops have to open, so I have to get up
out of my bed. So I go to a barbershop.
I opened a barbershop in the chair, just running operations.
One of the people that came I noticed had an
fbing email, so obviously they worked for Facebook, and I
(29:52):
just wanted to ask that person, you know, how you
like a service or a startup. You know, we took
out the barber shop and that person ended up being
Blake Chandily.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Blake Chanley is currently the President of Global Business Solutions
at TikTok. At the time, Chanley was VP of Global
Partnerships at Facebook, where he'd worked for over twelve years
as a tech startup. There was no one more fortuitous
that the Squire crew could meet.
Speaker 6 (30:17):
He says, if you want to talk, he'll be an
awesome south By Southwest the next week, and I said.
Speaker 7 (30:22):
Yeah, we're going to go there anyway, but we weren't going.
Speaker 6 (30:25):
To go there, but we went down to pitch him
and he ended up investing one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and Squire.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
With the additional funding from Shanley Squire was beginning to
turn some heads in the explosive world of tech startups.
At the same time, Troy Payne songs Old Locker Made
from La had moved to New York to launch his
career in software engineering.
Speaker 5 (30:56):
I was building just basic car or check out experiences,
that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
Nothing too crazy.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
Facebook was hot at the time, so I was building
Facebook apps. My wife and I visited New York and
you know, fell in love. I had a condo at
the time, sold it dropped everything moved to New York.
When I moved to New York, Song was the first
person I saw that I knew randomly on the train
and I'm like, Yo, what's up where you get your
haircut around here? Because that's the first thing you asked.
(31:25):
When you move to a whole new city. You don't
want to just go to anybody. You want to go
to people that are like you and get advice from
people that are like you and recommendations. It's crazy, how
what we're doing together right now?
Speaker 4 (31:35):
And it had nothing to do with that question.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Troy and Song reconnected and kept in touch, but wouldn't
join forces just yet. Troy still had a few apps
to develop and a few codes to break.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
I changed jobs started working at Guilt but the travel
subsidiary Jetsenter.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
I was hired based on a game called what Movies
Just from?
Speaker 5 (31:57):
What we would do is we would send out a
movie quote and the first person in reply with the
correct answer would We would send a DVD too. And
then the iPhone came out and I said, this will
be a great game on the iPhone.
Speaker 4 (32:09):
We made it this iPhone game called what movie Is
this from?
Speaker 5 (32:12):
And it was the first asynchronous game that instead of
you playing it, it played you. So it'd be in
your pocket and get a notification or something that says
that you know, we're going to be announcing a movie
quote in about ten minutes or something. You open a game,
you see a time or countdown, it shows a quote
and then you can respond with the answer.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
It shows a leaderboard, et cetera. And it had some success.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
It was number three and all of the trivia games,
and we had some people paying attention. One of the
people that worked at Jetsetter, who went on to start
buying ultimately, was working at Blockbuster at the time, and
when I interviewed at jet Setter, they was pretty much saying, hey, man,
I don't know if you know this, but Blockbuster's been
copying everything you can do it. And I had no
(32:59):
idea that it's great to hear from a kid like me.
I've built this in my dad's living room for three months,
and I'm able to get the attention of these big brands.
I'm beating these these gaming studios at their own game,
and I'm doing it all by myself.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Another one of Troy's endeavors was an early social media
platform called Cosmos.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
I decided to take a little break and start working
on something else.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
I was working on something called Cosmo.
Speaker 5 (33:29):
Cosmo was like Twitter, but instead of random tweets, everything
started with I want to And so you would put
these cosmos out into the universe of what you want
to do. And they're one directional, you know. It's not like, hey,
does anyone want to hang out today? It was I
want to hang out tonight, and that doesn't mean anything.
It could just go off from to the ether, or
(33:49):
somebody could say, yeah, I want to hang out tonight
as well, and a conversation could happen around these sort of.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Desires or once.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
And that also sort of further my strength and design,
my strength and product development. And I got a taste
of fundraising, pitching to billionaires, pitching to whomever would listen,
trying to raise capital and ultimately failing, but realizing my
strengths and now knowing exactly.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
What to look for as far as partners go.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
As Troy learned everything about fundraising and pitching for his
own apps, the Squire team was headed out to Silicon
Valley in search of additional investors for themselves.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Man, it was amazing, one of the best experiences I've had.
If you ever watched that show Silicon Valley and HBO, like,
it really felt like.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
That the characters, the amount of.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Obscene wealth that you have proximity too. It was totally
new to me and I really loved it. We didn't
just apply to I See A getame. We applied three times.
One time we got rejected, the second time we got in,
but not to the main program, like to this small
version of the program and the third time we got
in and moved there. But addition to y see, we
had previously applied to just about every accelerator that exists
(34:59):
that knew about, and we got rejections from all of them.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
I don't even think we got interviews from both of them.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
So this has been like over a couple of years
of really trying to insert ourselves into the tech ecosystem
in New York and then eventually in the Ballet and
just being projected from every angle.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
So when we did get accepted, it was an incredible.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Validation for us, and we really wanted to make the
most of it to embrace the experience as much as possible.
I think we did a good job establishing ourselves, like
we were pretty well known in the bash. We brought
a barber to demo day and we were giving people
haircuts there and they have to book on the app.
We definitely created some buzz that I think helped us
(35:38):
kind of put our name on the mat where people
had heard of those Squire guys. That's what they used
to always call it. Hey, those Squire guys. Yeah I
heard of those guys. Yeah, I saw those guys.
Speaker 6 (35:45):
We got into a Series A program with Y Commador,
So we did the Y Company cores and then we
were able to you know, parlay that into Series A program,
which was January twenty nineteen.
Speaker 7 (35:58):
We went on thirty or show.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Meetings doing that process.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
We got thirty or so knows and the last meeting
we got a yes from Trinity Adventures.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Our first institution around proper Series K led by a
BC fund, Trinity Adventures, and that was for eight million dollars.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
And that was the twenty.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Nineteen With Series A funding in hand and plenty of
publicity to go with it, Squire was now making headlines.
Troy caught winded the rise and decided to tap Song
to see if he could get involved. Too. Little did
he know he was reaching out at the perfect time.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
He reached out.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
When he heard about Squire, I said, Yo, I know
a song. You know, I'm an engineer, Like, you know,
what's up? I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. Cool,
and then we reconnected. At that point, he came at
a trivial moment where we honestly probably would have not
succeeded had he not joined the company when he did.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
At the time, Squire had another partner who was serving
as CTO. Unfortunately the relationship with sour and soon both
parties would want out.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
After the count Artists incident, we still continued trying to
find the right person to join our company, and then
we actually ended up finding the Cocoon.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
The CTO, and he built the first person of the product.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
He kind of like had the keys of the kingdom
as far as the technology goes, like he controlled everything
new everything without him, like there's no company from from
a product standpoint.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
So they had a CTO at the moment, I didn't
know it, but they weren't very happy with progress that.
Speaker 7 (37:39):
Was being made.
Speaker 5 (37:41):
And I came in as a contractor to work on
some iOS stuff. I think the CTO was saying that
we need to bring in someone to port over our
app to the new back end that they were working on,
and he had estimated it would take three months and.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
I did it in three weeks.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
They were impressed by that.
Speaker 5 (38:01):
I had no idea at the time that they were
unhappy with the CTO, but they pretty much said, Troy,
we're gonna let so and so go, we want you
to step in.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
When Troy came in, he basically took over everything and
kept the lights on and even improved on what we
had had he not reached out, had we not had
to locker together, had all these like random occurrences not happened,
I don't know what we would have done at that
time when it didn't work out with the former co founder,
like we you know, probably would have failed.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And what's the odds, you know, like one of the
odds to the same high school.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Now, had we not had lockers in the same place,
I would have not known like we would like there's
a big school, like you know, thousands of students.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
We never had a class together, I would have known
who was.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
But they would have it that we did share lockers
in the same place. So I knew him, so he
knew me. And then all these years later it worked
out joint schore.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
With all the pieces in place, Squire transformed from Uber
for barbers into a full service back end app for barbershops,
and in doing so, became one of the hottest startups
in tech. Incredibly, only a few months after raising their
Series A, Squire received a twenty seven million dollar Series
B investment, and just in time, because although they didn't
(39:16):
know it the COVID nineteen pandemic was just around the corner.
Speaker 6 (39:22):
So we did a twenty seven million dollars series B.
The last five million came in a week before the pandemic.
Everything sat down, so fortuitous timing to say the least.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Revenue went to zero. We're flying high. We had this
growth chart, you know, up to the right. We did around.
Speaker 6 (39:44):
Six or seven million in March, and then in April
it went down to like one hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
That's how drastic the drop off was.
Speaker 10 (39:56):
We were instructed to take PvP longs and we did not, said,
you know, we don't need it.
Speaker 7 (40:01):
We had at that point thirty something million dollars in
the bank.
Speaker 10 (40:05):
We didn't think it made sense for us to you know,
take money that was meant for our customers.
Speaker 7 (40:10):
We didn't take the money.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
We hunkered down and say, hey, we're going to get
to this. It's not gonna last whatever.
Speaker 7 (40:15):
And it didn't.
Speaker 6 (40:17):
And you know, we saw this robust growth out of
the pandemic.
Speaker 11 (40:21):
We really focused on the product and we get focused
on the customers. During that time, we built four or
five products that just were dedicated to the customers. We
created a virtual waiting room.
Speaker 10 (40:34):
We created a way for our customers that are applying the
PPP loans. We created a way for folks to make
wireless not point sell pay me so I didn't have
to touch the cast register. We made it way for
folks to donate to the barber shop that was down
and then actual barber So we created like a gift
(40:55):
card product, all within six to eight week span. So
we were like ray, focused on getting stuff out that
made sense for our customers. And because of that, we
saw this huge growth coming out of the square, like
this huge influctual customers.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
It was a wild time.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
It's going to be crazy to just think that we
all lived through this because they impacted every business. But
our customers are shut down. When the government calls, our
businesses shut down and they started reopening going into summer
twenty twenty. And while they were shut down, as a company,
refocused on how we could help them, how we could
help keep them afloat, provide them with capital, launch futures
(41:36):
that will allow them to reopen safely, and I think
it was the right decision for us.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
We also waived subscription fees for.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
The whole year, even for the following year because we
didn't want for them to have an additional overhead during this.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Really challenging time.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
It was the right thing to do just morally, but
I think it ended up being the right thing to
do as a business as well. And when they reopened,
we started getting more customers than ever. And I think
part of.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
It was the shift to digital.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
A lot of businesses started really understanding why they need
to embrace technology and accept card payments and all that.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
And then some of it was because of the good
will that we were building.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
An industry and really leaning into how can we help
our customers.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
So we saw a lot of growth in the second
half of twenty twenty going into twenty.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
One, a lot of growth. As Song puts it, is
this a severe understatement. From twenty twenty to twenty twenty one,
Squire raised their Series C and Series D funding, putting
over one hundred million dollars in their coffers. Their Series D,
led by Tiger Global, came in at sixty million dollars
and earned a company a whopping seven hundred and fifty
(42:41):
million dollars valuation.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
I think we're just scratching a surface, which is crazy
to think about considering our current valuation and considering the
number of shops that we have on our platform.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
One thing we.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Do have is high our pool.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
You know, our shops pay for great service, and they're
happily paying for a great service, and so we don't
have just a bunch of shops that are barely paying.
We have a handful of really great shops that are
paying for the value of it. We're in three thousand
barbershops in the US.
Speaker 4 (43:13):
And the UK and Canada.
Speaker 5 (43:15):
There are fifty thousand in the US alone, probably two
hundred thousand worldwide, maybe more. We're still sort of doing
our time right now. I know in Europe is becoming
even more popular. I think from that perspective there's a
lot of room, but there's an even bigger sort of
space that if we can capture every barbershop, we can
(43:37):
start marketing to the consumer where I think it gets
really really interesting.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
Similar to with Uber has done.
Speaker 5 (43:44):
Uber has created this household name part of world culture
where you don't think about how you got to someplace.
Speaker 4 (43:53):
They sort of blurred the lines between getting from A
to B.
Speaker 9 (43:56):
You just took an Uber, you booked an Uber.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
But there's also a whole other set of consumers where
they don't know what barbershop to go to. There's a
lot of people on Earth, a lot of of them
have here, and that's the market that I look at.
Speaker 8 (44:11):
I think what's next for us is we are going
to continue scaling. We're going to continue grabbing market share
in the barbershop space where now in five different countries USA, Canada, UK,
Ireland and Australia sort of both English speaking countries that
we're concentrating on those for two reasons. Obviously the software
is in English, but also, you know, we want to
(44:32):
make sure that we always have processing payments for our
clients because I think it really makes for a very
unique offering.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Think about running a company, particularly a tech company that's
growing fast. Is scaling is a tension between the necessity
of short term thinking and planning and then also like
long term vision and thinking three to five years out.
And sometimes the two can seem like their attention because
what's better for the company than long may or may
(45:00):
not seem like the best thing to do, you know,
in the next six to twelve months. Since the economy
has changed slowed down, the fundraising capital marcuts environment is
totally different than it was I think it's actually put
us in a better position in terms of company building,
and I'm actually, you know, weirdly kind of like excited
about this opportunity in this time because it's going.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
To allow us to really focus on building an amazing company.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
And part of that, in my opinion, is like actually
thinking about profitability being a company actually generates cash while
also thinking about how that growth is important. It's not
the only thing, So I'm looking forward to that. For me,
what I think about is continuing to build up Squire
and really define like as a category leading, category defining company.
(45:50):
We are, I think the only company that is a
barbershop management platform, and we empower our barbershop owners and
barbers to run their business better, to improve their operations
and added out laser focus.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
We're at the only company probably in the world. I
can say that.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Squire's story is one of ambition, curiosity, and adaptability. Though
they both got their start on the corporate ladder, Song
and Dave were born entrepreneurs with a shared goal of
manufacturing their own success, and they also shared an ingenuity
and a willpower to engineer that success through innovation and
an excellence of product. Once they identified barbershops as a
(46:34):
white space open to disruption. They studied the landscape relentlessly,
and they did their diligence naturally. As the business progressed,
they hit no shortage of walls along the way, but
they were never deterred. They processed the challenges, added the
right team members in Arom and Troy, and pivoted with Finesse.
And as their team product and true marketplace opportunity came
(46:57):
into focus, the financial dominoes just started to fall one
after another, and now as they approach unicorn status, the
much sought after billion dollar valuation despite a rapidly changing
economic landscape, the options for how they grow the business
appear limitless, and Squire remains a cut above from Idea Generation.
(47:23):
I'm Noah Callahan Bever. Thank you for listening to The
All Angles Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please don't
hesitate to like, comment DM or tell a friend to
tell a friend about Idea Generation and the All Angles Podcast.
We can't do any of this without your help, and honestly,
your support means everything. We do this for you, and
we can't do it without you. This episode was brought
(47:48):
to you by Will Packer. Executive produced by John Valachik
and Helena Ox, original music by Valentine Fritz, edit and
sound mixed by Nonsensible Production, and hosted by me Idea
Generation founder Noah Allahan bever Idea Generations. All Angles is
a will packer media podcast
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