Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Departs Google for Square
Google Wallet co-founding engineer Rob von Behren has left the Web giant for payments startup Square, following former colleague Jonathan Wall in departing the Web giant. — Von Behren disclosed the move today in his LinkedIn profile …
Context & Ripple Effects
The departure lands two weeks after Bloomberg reported that Google was rethinking the Wallet strategy amid slow adoption, and months after Google folded Checkout into Wallet — a consolidation that now reads as the backdrop for its co-founding engineer walking out the door. Von Behren is explicitly following Jonathan Wall, who already made the same jump to Square.
There is a precedent inside Google's own history: when the last Dodgeball employee left for Foursquare in 2009 (Silicon Alley Insider covered it then), it marked the moment an abandoned Google social product seeded its rival. The pickup here is unusually broad for a single-hire story — Bloomberg, AllThingsD, The Verge, TechCrunch and Business Insider all ran it on the day — which says the market is treating it as a signal about both companies' payments trajectories rather than one résumé line.
First-order effects
- Square gains two engineers who built Google Wallet from scratch, deepening the team behind a consumer push that just saw Card Case rebranded as Pay With Square with merchant discovery features and a hardened new card reader.
- Google Wallet loses founding-level engineering talent days after reports of an internal strategy rethink, handing critics of its slow adoption a concrete data point.
Second-order effects
- Square is mid-expansion — pitching New York's taxi regulator on equipping 50 cabs despite analyst skepticism about visible merchant adoption — and senior payments hires directly support scaling that merchant-side bet.
- Every competitor and partner evaluating NFC wallets now weighs whether the team defections confirm Google's commitment problem, raising the cost for Google to recruit into Wallet.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Dodgeball's last employee seeding Foursquare, Wallet's builders moving to Square — Google's ambitious consumer products risk becoming talent feedstock for focused startups, a structural challenge to retaining founding teams once a project loses executive momentum.
The trend: Mobile payments talent is flowing from big-company wallet projects toward startups betting on merchant-side adoption, with each high-profile defection repricing both sides' credibility.