Card companies such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express fear their access to information generated when a consumer swipes a credit or debit card is being blocked by some of the digital applications.

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The app, which can accept PayPal and cash in addition to credit cards, is aimed at shops that want something more than an iPhone to swipe cards and don’t already have a dedicated point-of-sale system.

The iPad version of PayPal Here, which takes clear aim at Square Register, is a version of the app already available for the iPhone and Android. However, the iPad app uses the spacious screen real estate to provide additional options not found on its phone app.

It can connect wirelessly to a register or cash drawer and also can scan items via barcode. Plus, it supports multiple users on the same device.

The app also serves as a showcase for some of the eBay unit’s acquisitions, including RedLaser, which powers the bar code scanning, and Card.io, which has technology for capturing credit card info via a photograph.

Even with the exit of VeriFone, mobile payments remains an incredibly crowded space, with everyone from mobile operators to software makers, credit card companies, daily deal providers and startups looking to get in on the act.

Earlier Wednesday, PayPal announced its purchase of Duff Research, a Silicon Valley mobile app design firm.

Fliesler is leaving the entrepreneurial world for the cushy VC life at the relatively young age of 28. That’s because, as he put it, “I do growth.” He wants to work closely with young startups, rather than fill a role at an already large company.

At Square, “I was spending a lot of time being a manager and not as much time at the white board,” Fliesler said. And rather than repeat (hopefully) that pattern with other fast-growing companies, he chose what he called “a terminal path” of being a VC for the rest of his life.

Fliesler has had a rapid-fire career. From an early gig in real estate investments, he joined Max Levchin’s Slide in 2007, where he led partnerships, platform relationships, payments and various products. When Slide was acquired by Google, he was director of product.

Then he followed former Slide executive Keith Rabois to Square, where Rabois was COO until he left after allegations of personal misconduct (that’s the other Square guy who became a VC — Rabois is now joining Khosla Ventures). Fliesler attested that the departures were unrelated, and that Square has a strong remaining executive team. Former Square director of products Megan Quinn is also now a VC at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

At Matrix, Fliesler said, he doesn’t intend to specialize in any particular category — Slide was a social product, Square was business-to-business — but rather intends to find young companies he likes and thinks he can help.

Such gaps in cash flow — or so-called “lumpy money” — can make it difficult for business owners to focus on expansion rather than, say, managing payrolls or paying other bills.

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While it may be true for the purposes of the law, politics and human rights, it’s sadly not true of programmers. Some are more skilled than others, while those others may specialize in things that make them peculiarly suited to a particular job.

The problem comes when it’s time to evaluate a person for a specific job. On paper they may claim to have certain skills, but when the rubber meets the road, can they really carry off the job at hand? Wouldn’t it be great if you could vet someone not by word of mouth, but by evaluating the code they’ve written in the past?

That’s the idea behind Gild, which I first wrote about over the summer when it was just getting out of the starting blocks.

Today Gild will announce that it has landed an $8 million series A round of venture capital funding led by Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Prior investors in Gild’s seed round also participated. They include SAP Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and investor Mark Kvamme, best known for his early stake in LinkedIn.

Gild has created a cloud-based service that tracks the code that developers share publicly on services like GitHub and Google Code. It monitors how often that person’s code is accepted for open source projects, and how often other developers borrow from their code or “fork” it, which is a sign that other developers like what they see.

The result is that the programmers with the prestigious academic degrees may or may not be the ones you’re looking for, but it’s hard to know for sure until you’ve seen the code they’ve published. Software development becomes more of a meritocracy.

“Everyone is under pressure to find the best people,” Desai told me. “Those companies that hire based on pedigree and people from the best schools, we know that’s not working any more. They’re missing out on a lot of talented people.”

The company has been growing fast, and has seen its overall user base grow by 900 percent. Its customers include Box, Red Hat , Rackspace, Zynga and Square.

Gild has also been on a hiring tear: Jill Erickson, a former senior VP at advertising agency TMP Worldwide, joined as chief revenue officer in November. In December, Vivienne Ming, a Carnegie Mellon PhD and former research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Mind, Brain and Computation, joined as chief data scientist.

High-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur Max Levchin is launching a new mobile payments startup today called Affirm.

It’s the first project emerging from Levchin’s San Francisco tech incubator Hard, Valuable, Fun (HVF), which he started after selling his last company — Slide — to Google and then eventually leaving the search giant. Previous to that, Levchin and investor Peter Thiel had sold PayPal to eBay.

While it might seem at first as if Affirm is in direct competition with other mobile payments-focused companies such as Square and Stripe, it seems to be aimed at another layer of the value chain in an effort to improve conversion for mobile payments.

In fact, Stripe — in which Levchin is an investor, too — will be processing credit card payments on the back end.

But it will be an uphill battle for Levchin in the current payments arena, with a range of challenges from a multitude of rivals to regulatory scrutiny to the risks associated with credit in general.

Its most similar competitor, for example, is Klarna, a hugely funded company based in Sweden that offers payment solutions for a wide range of online storefronts across Europe that did $200 million in revenue last year. Klarna, which means “clear” in Swedish, is likely to be eying the U.S. market and has well-regard VC Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital on its board.

As part of its effort, Affirm will use Facebook for authentication of consumers, and also use a number of other social and data signals to assess risk. It will then guarantee payment to merchants — who will pay Affirm a fee — after this check.

“We are trying to get as close as possible to one-click, which has always been the case on the desktop,” said Levchin in an interview today. “In mobile, it has become an imperative to be able to buy it now or you lose a customer quickly.”

Levchin described Affirm as a digital charge card rather than a credit card, trying to be valuable to merchants by lowering the abandonment rate of mobile transactions. Affirm’s beta launch retail partner is 1-800-Flowers.

“You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back,” said Levchin.

Like an American Express or other charge card, consumers will have about 30 days to settle bills, although Affirm will not be making any money from them.

As to why he decided to enter the increasingly competitive online payment space — which is also rife with regulatory and fraud issues — Levchin said that his efforts at PayPal did not go far enough.

“Payments online are still too hard — we started the revolution with PayPal and democratized payments for small businesses, but we stopped short of changing the system,” he said. “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.”

In addition, he added, the “overwhelming transformation of everything toward mobile changes all the fundamentals.”

Relying on Facebook could be an issue, of course, opening up a thicket of privacy issues and also worrisome reliance on the social networking giant. But Levchin said that Affirm’s system depends on the company for confirming identity more than anything else and there will eventually be a number of ways to do that.

Other data Affirm will be using, he said, range from incomes per zip code and even a user’s mobile device ID.

Affirm has been funded by Levchin and a group of friends in the “low-digit millions,” he said, with only a few dozen employees compared to bigger mobile payments efforts from others.

He said he knows the risk of entering the space, especially given that there are only so many solutions and a limited retailer attention.

Still, Levchin noted: “I just think there is so much more to do. Technology has come a long way since PayPal.”

Image copyright Suzanne Tucker

I make this assertion because if we look closely, we can already see what will cause the decline of Silicon Valley. In fact, the valley’s residents are consciously planting the seeds of the valley’s own demise. What’s more, I believe many of them will celebrate when the valley is no longer on top.

My cheery assessment depends on this sleight of words: Decline is relative, and the decline that Silicon Valley faces will be less like watching Hewlett-Packard slip into irrelevance and more like proudly standing to one side as the rest of the world — eventually even the less-developed world — catches up to it. Thus, the “decline” I claim the valley seeks and will eventually succumb to is a most desirable decline, indeed.

Digital disruption — a force that Silicon Valley gestated and nursed from its earliest days — is now global. Digital devices, the networks that connect them, and the software tools that prod human beings to hanker for more of all these things will soon be everywhere. The long-term effect of rising digital disruption will be to redistribute the benefits of the future across the planet even as it continues to improve the already futuristic valley that started it all. What does Silicon Valley have today that other places will eventually enjoy as well? Access to three things the valley currently has in spades:

• Knowledge. With ubiquitous sensors in every device we own or location we frequent, we will soon collect in a single day far more information than we could have stored in all the hard disks manufactured prior to 2000. But that information is meaningless if we can’t render it into knowledge, which granted the smart people of Silicon Valley an early edge that they are now giving away for free. Analytics available to even the lowest YouTube channel producer now rival the most sophisticated reports CBS, NBC and ABC had available in the 1980s. Apply even better analytical engines to the data from Fitbit pedometers, Google Glass and the myriad of sensors that will listen to the stress in our voices or identify behaviors that undermine our health, and you’ve got an unprecedented depth and breadth of knowledge available soon to anyone, anywhere.
• Tools. Knowing something is nice, but being able to act on that knowledge is even better. Digital disruption depends on the distribution of tools — most of them free or nearly free — that equip anyone who wants to use knowledge to initiate and test a new concept. Kickstarter and its peers provide this opportunity for thousands of people who want to test their ideas; Amazon can make anyone a merchant partner, an affiliate, or an author, all for no cost; and the Square card reader just helped local merchants sell $800,000 worth of goods and services around the Super Bowl on game day in New Orleans.
• Capital. It’s not that there’s money going around. But thanks to the knowledge and digital tools available to you, you need a whole lot less of it to bring your idea to fruition. I recently spoke to Charles Teague, CEO of FitNow, the company behind the wildly successful LoseIt! calorie- and weight-tracking app. A veteran of the startup business from the earliest days at Allaire, Charles described for me with a slight tone of disbelief in his own words how cheaply he can launch and manage a company today compared to even ten years ago. This is partly because the tools are cheaper — you can open your Amazon Web Services account with a credit card — but also because much of the value digital disruptors deliver today comes through software. And as a successful entrepreneur who had sold his company to Qualcomm told me last year, “It’s just software; I can do anything in software for $40,000.”

People fond of wine and cheese will argue that there’s more to valley life than just these three things. That’s certainly true, but when you have more knowledge, tools and capital, some of the other things the valley prizes become common elsewhere as well. A culture of achievement, for example. As only people who have lived in a subculture that keeps them down know, the valley is a unique place where even surfers think they can be the next startup billionaires, leading to the creation of a company like GoPro.

It’s presumptuous of me to suggest that all valley residents will be so happy to be dethroned, even if the decline is only relative to the rise of the rest of the world. Venture capitalists, lawyers and politicians will feel the relative decline the most because their services have long been offered under the presumption that the value they provide is scarce, an assumption that’s now patently false. Other valley residents will be pleased, at least if Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera, is any indication. As he told me in an interview for my new book, “Digital Disruption,” “I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree. “

He actually talks like that. And that’s what makes him and many others like him the planters of the same seeds that will sow the relative decline of Silicon Valley by lifting everybody else up to join it. Even — perhaps especially — Detroit, home of over 250 Kickstarter projects.

James McQuivey is the author of “Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation.” He is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption.

As I previously reported was likely, former Square COO Keith Rabois will be joining Khosla Ventures as a venture capitalist.

The well-known entrepreneur left the prominent San Francisco-based payments company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct a month ago.

Rabois, who will start in March, has a lot of informal investing experience as a longtime angel, and is on many public boards, such as Yelp and Xoom, but for the most part, he has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square.

And, in fact, Rabois was considering another job like that, deciding between Khosla and a top job at Airbnb, the San Francisco online rentals startup.

But he chose Khosla, he said in a blog post, because he has long wanted to formalize his interest in investing.

Wrote Rabois: “I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, joining a bunch of misfits who had some provocative ideas about how the world should work. Three years later, I started investing to enable other driven people to chase their dreams. I quickly discovered that the more companies I invested in, the more brilliant and inspirational new people I could encourage. As a result, for twelve years I harboured dreams of becoming a VC who did this every day for a long time.”

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey endorsed the move in a statement:

“I couldn’t be more excited to see two of the top entrepreneurs I know, join forces at Khosla Ventures to support and coach the next generation of entrepreneurs the world over,” Dorsey said.

Here’s the official press release from Khosla:

Keith Rabois Joins the Khosla Ventures Team

Angel investor, Internet Entrepreneur and Hands-On Advisor
Brings His Experience to Khosla’s Broad Portfolio of Companies

MENLO PARK, Calif., February 26, 2013 — Khosla Ventures, a venture assistance firm that focuses on sustainability and technology startups, announced today that Keith Rabois, a former PayPal, LinkedIn and Slide executive, will join the firm. Most recently Keith was chief operating officer at Square, a Khosla Ventures portfolio company, where he oversaw all aspects of business operations, including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management.

While serving in executive roles, he has also developed a distinguished track record angel investing in technology companies, such as YouTube, Yammer, Airbnb, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), Quora, Palantir, and Eventbrite.

He will begin his new role at Khosla in March 2013.

“I love Khosla Ventures’ vision and passion for assisting the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Keith Rabois. “The Khosla team encourages entrepreneurs to be bold. And the team’s legendary work ethic ensures that entrepreneurs will receive the best possible assistance.”

“We are thrilled to have Keith join us as he has shown himself to be a great investor, but even more importantly he’s a true advisor. Our extensive conversations with entrepreneurs repeatedly elicited comments like, ‘he asks the toughest questions’, ‘he pushes me the most and makes me think’, ‘he is always there when I need help’, ‘he is the most valuable among all my board members and advisors’, ‘he can imagine the future’,” said Vinod Khosla, founding partner of Khosla Ventures. “Our belief in bringing the best venture assistance to our companies is why we’re very excited about the newest addition to the Khosla Ventures team. He truly has earned the right to advise companies.”

Jack Dorsey, the CEO and founder of Square added, “I couldn’t be more excited to see two of the top entrepreneurs I know, join forces at Khosla Ventures to support and coach the next generation of entrepreneurs the world over.”

Keith currently holds board roles at Xoom (NASDAQ: XOOM), since June 2003, and Yelp (NYSE: YELP), since September 2005.

Keith Rabois, the former Square COO who left the company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct, is weighing an offer to join Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures, according to sources close to the situation, and is currently leaning toward accepting the job there.

But, that could change. In an interesting twist, the longtime entrepreneur and investor has also been in discussions with Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky to become COO or president there.

Both the VC and the startup have been doing reference checks on Rabois, news of which has gotten out in the ever-chatty Silicon Valley scene. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Rabois had been in talks with the San Francisco-based online housing rentals company.

But sources with knowledge of the situation said that Rabois — who has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square — seems “99 percent” ready to move into a more formal investing role.

Of course, there is still that one percent chance he might not, underscored by the eternal lure of the hot startup for serial entrepreneurs like Rabois. That said, he has also been an active angel investors for many years, with a wide-ranging portfolio, and is on many boards, including Yelp’s.

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois at the time in an interview with me. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

Today, the company is launching “Business in a Box” — a package that includes a cash drawer, an iPad stand, card readers and an optional printer for printing receipts. It costs $299 for the readers and cash drawer, and $599 if you include the printer.

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Okay, so maybe this tech hasn’t hit its stride yet. But there are several new mobile phones that claim “NFC” as a feature.

So what does NFC mean, how does it work and will it finally catch on? These are questions that many consumers will have as they hear more and more about this technology — and here are some answers.

What is NFC, in a nutshell?



NFC, which stands for Near Field Communication, is a type of communication that involves wirelessly transmitting data from one hardware device to another physical object, provided that the devices are in short range (within 10 centimeters) of one another.



In order for NFC to work, both devices — say, for example, your smartphone and a payment terminal at your local CVS — have to have NFC chips and antennas embedded in them.

Though NFC might be new to you, the technology isn’t. The industry standard for it was established between 2003 and 2004. Over the past few years, NFC has become more prominent, but it’s still a long way from mass adoption. 


So … what is it used for? 



Some practical uses include bumping your phone against someone else’s to wirelessly (and paperlessly) exchange your contact information. You can also tap your phone against a laptop or computer to share photo files.



NFC is also used in marketing. You can, for example, tap your phone against an NFC-equipped movie poster or sticker, as long as the paper is embedded with an NFC chip, and more details about the movie will pop up on your phone’s Web browser.

One of the more interesting use cases I came across in my research was a beer dispenser created by a Google employee. It uses an NFC tablet to scan a person’s badge and determine if he or she is authorized to drink the beer. 

But, so far, the most prevalent use of NFC has been in payments.



But I can already tap my credit card to pay for things. Why is NFC any better than that?

You’re right: Consumers can already use a tap-to-pay method with some newer credit cards. But proponents of NFC on mobile argue that it’s even faster and easier to use the device that’s likely already in your hand — your smartphone — rather than digging around for the wallet that holds that credit card. 


Another big NFC pitch is that your smartphone could simultaneously store loyalty cards, coupons, tickets and boarding passes, so you could use your NFC smartphone to transmit and receive data in those accounts, too. 



However, that idea of the “mobile wallet,” or moving your credit cards and rewards cards to your phone, doesn’t necessarily require NFC. In fact, the mobile payments industry in the U.S. is pretty divided — there are those who are pushing NFC, and those relying instead on software solutions to make mobile payments.

The former includes Google Wallet, and a wireless industry venture made up of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. The latter includes companies like Square, PayPal and even Apple, which offers a digital wallet app with the iPhone’s Passbook, though this mostly holds purchased tickets for things like flights and movies. 



Let’s say I’m into this idea of NFC. Which phones should I look for? 



Apple’s iPhone isn’t equipped with NFC, but here are some, though not all, of the newer NFC-equipped phones available in the U.S.: Samsung Galaxy Note and Galaxy S III, Google Nexus 4 and Nexus S, Nokia Lumia 820 and Lumia 920, Sony Xperia Ion, Motorola Droid Razr M and Droid Razr Maxx HD, LG Intuition, HTC Evo 4G LTE, BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 (as well as many older models of BlackBerry).

Okay, I ran out and bought an NFC phone. Where can I use it? 



It’s impossible to know how many NFC “tags” are floating around out there, and it’s unclear exactly how many retailers will accept payments from your NFC phone. The roll-out of these NFC solutions has been slow.

Google Wallet can be used to pay at some CVS, Duane Reade, Old Navy, Radio Shack and Macy’s stores. Isis, the mobile wallet app from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, could theoretically be used at 200,000 retail locations across the U.S. That sounds like a lot, but Isis right now has an actual presence in just two cities: Salt Lake City and Austin.

Which of these phones has NFC?





And let’s say you have an NFC smartphone and you’ve found a store nearby that will accept it. It still might not be a super simple tap-to-pay solution at first.

In my experience, I had to tap my NFC smartphone against the payment terminal a few times before the transaction went through, and got dubious looks from a couple cashiers who weren’t familiar with the process. I’m positive that swiping my credit card would have been easier.

But at the same time I think that paying with smartphones will get smoother. 



Tapping to pay sounds easy … almost too easy. Is NFC secure? What if I lose my NFC phone?

Fraudsters are always trying different ways to tap into sensitive data. NFC technology has varying layers of security, depending on the use case and the hardware. 

When you link your NFC smartphone to your credit card, your data is actually stored in a tiny part of the hardware — like a little lock box within your phone. In some cases, this is in the SIM card, but it could be elsewhere in the phone, too. But note: this data is encrypted.

On top of that, you often have to punch in a personalized PIN on the phone in order to make a payment.


If your NFC phone is stolen, you can freeze or disable your payment account by calling the services or visiting a website. You can also call the credit card issuers directly and cancel your cards — just as you would if you lost your leather wallet.

So will NFC really catch on this time?


Some industry experts and analysts say NFC is still “three to five years” away from being mainstream — the same thing many were saying, well, three to five years ago. It has gained traction in parts of Europe and Asia, especially in Japan, where the wireless carriers have collaborated to push the technology.

NFC proponents say a mandate requiring retailers to update their payment terminals by 2015 could help nudge the technology along. And NFC is expected to be in more and more phones. All eyes are on Apple right now, to see whether NFC is included with the next iPhone.

But even with all of the tech infrastructure in place, there’s still the matter of changing consumer behavior — your behavior — one tap at a time.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130218/nfc-what-you-need-to-know/feed/ 27 http://allthingsd.com/20130125/exclusive-interview-keith-rabois-talks-about-sexual-harassment-claims-becoming-a-distraction-at-square-and-whats-next/ http://allthingsd.com/20130125/exclusive-interview-keith-rabois-talks-about-sexual-harassment-claims-becoming-a-distraction-at-square-and-whats-next/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:15:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=288811

Sitting in front of a spectacular view of San Francisco at his home this afternoon, former Square COO Keith Rabois looks spent.

He is just recovering from a bout of pneumonia, which would be bad enough, but it’s clear from his tense and unusually — for him — disheveled appearance that the sexual harassment claim made by a current male employee at the San Francisco payments startup has taken its toll on the typically hard-charging exec who is not known for suffering fools.

But, now, given a judgement he made to continue in a personal and physical relationship with that unnamed junior staffer after he was hired at Square, Rabois feels both foolish and also angry.

“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

It appears as if he wanted to stay — he shrugs when directly asked about it, though he will not say so explicitly. But, Rabois finally agreed with Square’s top management, including CEO and founder Jack Dorsey, that is was better that he leave.

“It was very clear once this outrageous demand was made, instead of building great products, it would be all about that,” he said.

That said, after an internal investigation, the company is backing him in the expected filing of a lawsuit from the employee, who has threatened a panoply of explosive allegations against him and the company that Rabois said again are a “fiction.”

He declined to show me any texts or emails between the two, but did recount the relationship in a blog post on Tumblr earlier today.

Richard Curiale, outside counsel for Square and also Rabois, said that the company had been approached about two weeks ago by New York lawyer Steven Berger, claiming the company knew of and did nothing to stop sexual harassment by Rabois and demanding a multi-million dollar settlement.

Curiale said he found no evidence in his investigation so far of anything except a “welcome” relationship that ended. He had even agreed to make Rabois available for a deposition with Berger, but the offer was refused.

I have an email into Berger for comment, which has thus far been unanswered. But Square has said it will fight any lawsuit filed and is currently supporting Rabois.

“I have not as yet found any conduct that is illegal and therefore there is no adverse relationship between Keith and Square,” said Curiale. “We don’t pay for claims that have no merit to them, because it amounts to extortion.”

Perhaps so, but it also amounts to a very juicy story — the second such major blowup in Silicon Valley in a year. The other — now a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination and retaliation, and a countersuit — between the well-known venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, and former partner Ellen Pao, is ongoing.

The particulars of the Rabois situation, per his side of the story, which he claims is supported by much evidence, is of a social and physical relationship with a man he met several years ago.

While he would not call their relationship dating, it was close and personal, including taking this man out with him to social events.

The problem came when he recommended this man for a job at Square and he was hired. The company was much smaller then, about 30 people, but as it grew Rabois insists he had no direct oversight of the employee and also did not treat him differently from others he managed at the company.

Rabois claims he gave him advice, as he did other employees, but neither helped or hindered the man in his efforts to advance.

The man and Rabois were still seeing each other socially until December, when the relationship cooled.

And then came the lawsuit threat two weeks ago, which Rabois said “stunned” him.

Square says that it was not aware of the personal relationship until the threat of the lawsuit; the employee has never made any complaints about Rabois to management.

Spokesman Ricardo Reyes said that “what we have here at most is bad judgement and we will defend ourselves.”

In this Rabois agrees, as he fields emails of support from his wide range of friends and colleagues in tech, where he is well known as an entrepreneur and angel investor.

“I have several good ideas of what I want to do next,” he said.

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