Block, Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Thank you for having me.

Sure. When I look back at what we said we would deliver this year at Investor Day in November and where we are today, I think there is a lot to be incredibly excited about. In November, we thought we would deliver 17% gross profit growth and about $2.7 billion in adjusted operating income. Our latest guidance calls for 21% gross profit growth and nearly $3.5 billion in adjusted operating income for 2026, with 70% growth on adjusted EPS and seven points of adjusted OI margin improvement year-over-year. What's encouraging to me is that the incredible traction that we've seen so far this year is broad-based across each of our ecosystems.

Whether you look at Square, where we had the strongest U.S. GPV growth in the second quarter that we had seen in three years, with compounding benefits across product velocity, delivered three times more features at 130 features in the first half of this year than we did in the first half of last year. Or it's the compounding benefits that we have of our scaling distribution channels across field sales, telesales, the ISO channel, and of course, tried and true self-onboarding, which continues to also grow at the fastest rate of growth that we've seen in five years. So that's Square. From a Cash App perspective, growth of 31% in the second quarter, growth of 59% on our consumer lending originations, growth of 17% on our primary banking actives. This is broad based across commerce, banking, and lending within Cash App.

We see an opportunity to do even more when we look at each of those ecosystems. This is all fundamentally underpinned well by us refactoring and redesigning how we operate the company in an AI world. That what you see is greater product velocity, our ability to start small, experiment, and double down on what's working, whether it's products or it's distribution channels, our agility and ability to move more quickly with a flatter organizational structure. This is the year, as you say, where we're harvesting all of those benefits, all those changes that we've been making over the past few years, and you see that bearing fruit. Maybe the final thing I'll say is, three years ago, we set out to be a Rule of 40 company, and that's inclusive of stock-based compensation expenses, we feel is a higher bar.

So far what we've delivered is Rule of 52, and our guidance shows we should be at close to a Rule of 50 company for the year. We continue to push even above and beyond what our own internal financial targets are.

Sure. We feel that there's a tremendous amount of leverage in our business. First, before I get to the fixed cost aspects and what we've done there, I want to talk about how we run the business from a unit economic standpoint. There's two key things that we think about. One, on a product-by-product and initiative-by-initiative scale. We look at returns on investment, we look at payback periods, and we look at unit economics. We don't think about scaling loss leader products. We think about the health and the overall value of an ecosystem that we're delivering to our customers. That then ultimately means that we can continue to invest in the business. We don't see it as a trade-off between investment and growth.

The two need to move in tandem with each other, and that's only when we are able to hold ourselves accountable and deliver on the returns on investment for those investments that we're making. By the way, that may look different depending on the investment type. Go-to-market, very measurable, deep years of data science underpinning those models where we can measure by channel and by customer type. Other types of investments, like our AI investments, we need to come up with new forms of measure, things like developer velocity or time to customer value that we would be measuring and that we are now rigorously measuring on a week-by-week basis. The second key thing that we look at is incremental margins. As we said at our Investor Day last year, and as you saw in Q2, just this past year, we had 50% incremental margins.

That means that half of the incremental gross profit that we accrete to the business flows through to the bottom line. It is only from those investments, those focus, and that rigor, and that discipline in driving strong unit economics that we can drive the 50% incremental margins. Then finally, we think about the leverage of our fixed cost base and how we run the business overall, which has been, as I said, a big journey that we have been on and involved making ourselves a much smaller and flatter company earlier this year.