It’s party season in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco-based payments startup Square is flying high and holding parties and events around the country that recall the heady days of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. The Square holiday party in San Francisco this past weekend, pictured at left, set the Twittersphere buzzing the morning after as the revelers got their caffeine fixes and attempted to piece together the night. Was MC Hammer there? Yes, he was. The Bay Area impresario is a friend of Jack Dorsey’s and an investor in Square. Square has laid out some serious cash lately, opening new offices in New York and Canada, as well as a new global headquarters in San Francisco that contains its own coffee bar. The company has also launched a series of Let’s Talk economic development events in Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis and most recently, Harlem in New York, renting out the famed Apollo Theater, which seats 1,500. All of this takes place while analysts looking at the company’s possible IPO bid for 2014 estimated the company’s net revenue at a mere $110 million. Square is up against some stiff competition in its core market of small merchants as PayPal [...]
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