Lawrence Summers joins start-up Square’s board
Square, the mobile payments start-up from Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey, has added former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers to its board of directors.
Until late last year, Summers served as President Obama’s chief economic advisor. He was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006 — while Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was a student.
The San Francisco payments processor — known for its small, white, cubed credit card readers that plug into the headphone jacks of smartphones and tablets in place of a register — added an extra seat to its board for Summers.
“We are proud to have Larry join our board and we welcome his insight and decades of leadership to our growing company,” Dorsey said in an emailed statement. “Square is at a key point in our trajectory and we know Larry will contribute tremendous wisdom and expertise toward our continued success.”
Square announced the move Wednesday. Summers was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001, deputy secretary from 1995 to 1999 and chief economist at the World Bank from 1991 to 1993.
Summers is also known for a controversial speech he made in 2005 while president of Harvard in which he said, “Innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers.” Summers later apologized for the comments.
The addition of Summers to Square’s board follows the appointment of Vinod Khosla as a director earlier this month and an investment from Visa in April. Khosla, a longtime Square investor, runs his own venture capital firm and was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.
The moves come at an important time for Square. The company has shipped out more than 500,000 of its Square card readers and now rings up more than $3 million worth of mobile payments a day.
Square is also pushing its new Card Case mobile wallet service, which has a deep-pocket challenger in Google Wallet.
