[ryanSrich]

I'm seeing many comments about Sqaure not living up to expectations or slowing down.

I guess I don't see that. Where I live I'd have to guess that 95% of food trucks, coffee shops, and smaller restaurants use square. That's not including the markets where square is pretty much exclusively used by all vendors.

I do agree that 6B is insanely high and most likely not what they are actually worth. However I wouldn't say they are slowing down.

[swartkrans]

Food trucks are not a big business. If you've captured the entire food truck payment system, you're still not likely to be worth $6bn, especially not if you're taking pennies on each transaction. It probably also doesn't take so much money to manage such a business. I know someone who works at Square and it's your typical high flying startup wasting money on pretty offices, amenities, and other non-business related expenses, all while losing $100m a year with nary an idea for how to ever reach $6bn in valuation. The people giving out this money to Square aren't stupid, so there's probably something we don't know, but then again the same kind of people gave a lot of money to Color, RockMelt, Quora, Foursquare and some other less memorable walking zombies.

[gress]

Square's value is that it reduces the overhead for economic participation. If you believe that in the future there will be a more networked economy with a larger number of small businesses and individual tradespeople, then Square is a great bet.

[jdoliner]

Most of the claims I've seen about Square slowing down have acknowledged that they are dominating the small vendor market but claim that this market isn't proving to be profitable enough to sustain their growth. I haven't really double checked the numbers on this and it sounds like you probably know more than me here but it seems possible that Square is in the situation of having lots of customers but not having the right customers to make their business model work.