Last week, a reader and Shift4 shareholder messaged me, raising questions about the company’s organic growth methodology. After speaking to IR, he learned that Shift4’s 3q25 organic growth calculation excluded revenue from Revel and Vectron, which were acquired in 2q24, from the year-ago base even as it included all the revenue synergies related to those […]
MBI and I recorded an episode of Never Sell recently (The Big Tech Capex Debate, Amazon Retail, Align’s Pricing Challenge) (Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed) What are scuttlebits? h/t @taobanker I’ll keep this brief as nothing material has changed since my March ‘25 update and a number of adherents of the growing Shift4 cult have recently tweeted/blogged quarterly commentary that I […]
It’s been just over two years since I first wrote up Shift4. With founder/CEO Jared Isaacman departing for NASA and the company acquiring Global Blue for $2.5bn in its largest M&A transaction by far, I figure it’s time for an update. To quickly recap: in its first decade, United Bank Card, the fledgling business Jared […]
Block (SQ) I once argued how by taking the problem of merchant payments acceptance seriously, Block knew to start with what must at the time have seemed like the most commoditized part of the payments stack, card readers, when everyone else was obsessed with software. Cheap plastic dongles combined with transparent pricing and no contracts […]