Square files to go public, reveals millions in losses and a Jack Dorsey distraction factor

After years of waiting, Square, the payments and e-commerce company run by new Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has filed to go public.

I’m still picking through the company’s S-1 filing, but here are some early highlights:

• Square’s net revenue is growing — from $552 million in 2013 to $850 million in 2014, and $561 million in the first half of 2015.
• But its losses are growing too — the company lost $154 million in 2014, compared to $104 million in 2013. (The company lost $78 million in the first half of 2015.)
• Square is spending a boatload on marketing. The company’s sales and marketing costs rose from $64 million in 2013 to $113 million in 2014.

• Jack Dorsey, who took over as Twitter’s permanent CEO earlier this month, is splitting his time with running Square. The risk of losing Dorsey’s attention to Twitter was so important that Square listed it as a risk factor for its overall business. The company wrote:

“If we lose the services of any member of management or any key personnel, we may not be able to locate a suitable or qualified replacement, and we may incur additional expenses to recruit and train a replacement, which could severely disrupt our business and growth. Jack Dorsey, our co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer, also serves as Chief Executive Officer of Twitter. This may at times adversely affect his ability to devote time, attention, and effort to Square.”

• Dorsey only made a salary of $3,750 for serving as Square’s CEO last year. (But he owns 24.4% of Square’s stock, so he’ll probably be okay.)

• After Dorsey, the next-largest shareholders in Square are co-founder James McKelvey and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, each of whom owns 17.3% of the company.
• Square’s three-year partnership with Starbucks is coming to an end. The company disclosed that it “[does] not intend to renew our payment processing agreement with Starbucks when it expires in the third quarter of 2016.” That Starbucks contract gave Square $123 million in revenue in 2014, but cost the company $151 million. So perhaps there’s relief at Square that the deal is ending soon.
• Most of Square’s customers are small businesses. This isn’t exactly a shocker, but here’s the breakdown of Square’s gross payment volume. The gray bar is businesses processing less than $125,000 a year through Square. You can see that although small businesses are the biggest share of Square’s customers, that percentage is shrinking as larger businesses adopt the company’s technology.

• Somebody ripped Square off earlier this year, to the tune of $5.7 million. In the filing, the company discloses that in the first three months of 2015, it “recorded a loss of approximately $5.7 million related to fraud by a single seller using our payments services.” It doesn’t disclose who the seller was.