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How does Square compare as a competitor to the range of vertical ERPs, particularly in the SMB fintech, payroll, and checking sectors?

Matt Brown

Co-founder at Bonsai

I think it's an incredible business. First of all, I think they’ve executed extremely well and early on, on a lot of these product and business strategies that we're talking about here that are very hard to do, whether it's early on combining a financial product with a SaaS product, starting very horizontal, layering on multiple financial products. They're in a very interesting spot. 

But I don't have any special insight into them. My sense is that they aspire to be and are a little bit more horizontal. Obviously they're very successful in restaurants and things like that, but I think they aspire to be probably a little bit more horizontal, and you can build, obviously, incredibly large businesses that are horizontal.

If you look at Square, they started in restaurants and I think have already or still have a pretty big kind of customer base there. But Toast is also a very large and very successful business that's gone even more vertical and even more exclusive and just focused on restaurants and restaurant adjacent sort of businesses. Square is more horizontal, but is still running this playbook very successfully, and layering on these businesses. Maybe there's another blog post to be had about horizontal ERPs.

Find this answer in Matt Brown, Co-Founder of Bonsai, on the rise of vertical ERPs
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