Shares of payment processor Square (SQ) took a big hit after CFO Sarah Friar announced she would be stepping down as CFO in December to become the next CEO of local social network Nextdoor. She also sits on the boards of Slack and Walmart.
Friar was a major part of Square since joining in 2012, and led the company through its 2015 IPO. She long had ambitions to run her own company, but that apparently wasn’t in the cards at Square. That means Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter (TWTR) as well as Square, will be on the hunt for a new deputy. David Viniar, a board member and former Goldman Sachs CFO, will lead the search for Friar’s replacement.
Friar will be replacing Nextdoor co-founder Nirav Tolia, who said in July he wanted to move into an active chairman role after eight years as CEO. It will be a big change for Friar: While Square has more than 2,000 employees and a market value of over $30 billion, Nextdoor has just 225 full-time employees and a valuation of about $1.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Square’s stock price dropped more than 10% yesterday and tumbled further in after hours trading. Of course, Wednesday was a bummer of a day for the U.S. Stock market as a whole. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped about 3.2% yesterday, with the selloff intensifying in the last minutes of trading. Every single stock in the Dow was down, and in the S&P 500, only 17 stocks made gains for the day.
Coins2Day‘s Adam Lashinsky wondered recently exactly why it seems to be turnover season for the tech industry.
Square is known for point-of-sale systems and mobile payments but mostly flies under the radar. Earlier this year it acquired website creation platform Weebly for $365 million in cash and stock, hoping to make inroads in online commerce. Back in June, Square won approval from New York State to buy and sell cryptocurrencies through its Cash app. Dorsey is a big fan of Bitcoin and even wrote a children’s book about it.