During the same session that yielded a heated debate about Whisper, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha shed some light on Square – a company for which Botha is a board member – and shared some insights into the current state of mobile apps. Botha’s part of the discussion was really insightful, but seemed to be overshadowed by the Whisper debate between Michael Arrington and Whisper CEO Michael Heyward.

On Square

There have been widespread claims that Square – the mobile payment company – is going through a rough time financially, and was even in talks to be acquired by Google. Botha, however, explained that the company has never been in discussions about selling. Botha went on to argue that there is a lot of misinformation circulating about Square right now, whether it be rumors of an acquisition, or rumors of a stalled IPO. Regarding an IPO, Botha argued that planes were never shelved because there was never any intention of filing for one. When going public, Botha noted, a company needs to be incredibly diligent, and weigh all options as it is irreversible. It not something you do on a whim.

Square today, Botha said, is a strong as it has ever been. Today, square not only handles payments, but offer their own point of sale software to merchants, their own CRM (Customer relationship management) software, and much more. Further, Botha speculated that the sheer amount of rumors and misinformation may indicate that someone has an ax to grind with the company.

On Mobile Apps

Lately, there has been a trend of smaller and narrower apps; a shift towards single-purpose apps. This is an interesting dilemma, said Botha, and has dynamic components. The slimming down of apps seems to be confined to the US market. Elsewhere, specifically in China he noted, there is a reverse trend going on, a shift to more fully featured, fatter apps.

Botha argued that this U.S. shift has something to do with the setup and search in the various app stores. There is no deep-linking within these stores. Evernote, he pointed out, is a great example of this. Inside of Evernote – a massive, full featured app – is one of the best document/PDF scanners available. However, not many people are getting to it because Evernote is nowhere to be found when searching for “PDF scanner,” in the stores.