Jim McKelvey
Board Member, Block. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorauthorother@2000F ↗LinkedIn ↗jimmckelvey.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
In 2009, McKelvey co-founded Square alongside Jack Dorsey after missing out on a glass art sale because he could not accept credit cards, designing the original card reader. He is also the author of The Innovation Stack and founder of the non-profit LaunchCode.
2shows
2appearances
39statements
9resolved
7supported
2contradicted
78%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Jim McKelvey said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Make Magazine's first issue perfectly described Square's card reader design
“If you want to know the real story, just get the first issue of Make Magazine. It's publicly available. It describes exactly what we were building, and I knew that when I went to Bob.”
Middlemen organizations, not Visa and MasterCard, exploit small merchants with fees
“Where the crazy abuse is, is all the middlemen in those transactions. So Visa and MasterCard, they don't really abuse the merchant, but the abuse happens with all their partners. Like the independent sales organizations that work for the banks that work for Vi…”
Square's early investor prototypes broke numerous banking laws and financial rules
“Everything worked, but it was breaking many, many laws and rules.”
Venture capital pitches are adversarial games where entrepreneurs routinely lie
“If you've ever been a VC pitch, they're really weird things, because they're basically, the VCs are up there playing defense. They're like goalies. And the entrepreneurs, the people who are pitching are just lying to them.”
Amazon board member offered VC funding to stop Amazon attacking Square
“I remember one guy telling me, oh, Amazon's gonna attack you? Don't worry, I'm on the board of Amazon, and I developed Amazon Prime, and we can get them to leave you alone. Like, if you take our money, we'll guarantee that Amazon doesn't attack you.”
Interdependent 'innovation stacks' protect novel inventions from giant corporate copiers
“If you invent something truly new, you're not inventing one thing. You're inventing a stack of things, and that invention becomes its own protection. And as long as you behave properly, I mean, it turns out there are a bunch of rules that if you follow these r…”
Square intentionally sacrificed card reader reliability for attention-grabbing novelty
“We made a critical decision at the company to release a card reader that was actually too small to do the job it was supposed to do, but got your attention in a way that nothing on the market had ever done. And I believe that attention was super important. And…”
McKelvey: Put 99% of focus on feedback over protecting ideas
“So I put 99% of the emphasis on getting feedback and one percent on protecting ideas. I've literally never seen an idea stolen. Okay. I mean, I've seen ideas copied. I see it all the time. But I've never seen somebody outrun the entrepreneur. Most people who a…”
McKelvey: Apple kicked VeriFone out of Apple Stores after Square attack
“He ended up upsetting Apple, and Apple kicked them out of the Apple store.”
Early press reports actively erased Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass
“They not only kicked him out of Twitter, they tried to write him out of the history, and I know this very well because I was reading at the time The reports, and they would mention Biz, and they would mention Ev as the founders of Twitter, and they would omit …”
Pre-Square, merchants under $100K in revenue were barred from processing cards
“Basically, if you didn't have a 100,000 dollars of business, You would not take credit cards. That was sort of the cutoff. Because it was too expensive. You had to have a sponsoring bank. You had to have a certain level of accounting. You had to have a physica…”
Jack Dorsey's 2008 ousting from Twitter was 'unconscionably terrible'
“No. Absolutely not. What they did to him was unconscionably terrible, and I was very angry.”
Jack Dorsey opposed Square's iconic hardware, preferring a camera scanner
“I said, we need to build a piece of hardware, and Jack thought I was crazy because he said, we don't want to build hardware. Hardware is a terrible business, and it'll slow us down, and we can just use the camera on the phone”
Early Square contractor rejected an equity offer now worth nearly $1B
“And what we offered him was a very generous offer. It would be close to a billion dollars today. You know, if he accepted our offer, he'd probably be a billionaire. And he didn't want it.”
Amazon ruthlessly cloned Square's card reader and undercut its price
“Amazon came after us in a way that was terrifying. They copied our product, they undercut our price, and they added the Amazon brand name to that, along with some customer support that we at the time didn't have.”
McKelvey: Copying established solutions is almost always the best problem-solving method
“If you have a problem, your best way of solving it is usually to find somebody else who solved the same problem and do what they did. That is almost always the best solution, and I don't care what it is”
McKelvey plans to donate his fortune rather than build generational wealth
“We've made an absurd amount of money, which we're planning to give away, because I don't think it serves me or my family to, you know, pass on generational wealth.”
McKelvey's first trade show CD-ROM generated $70,000 in profit
“And the first one I did, I made 70 grand.
Guy Raz: On one product, on one CD.
Jim McKelvey: On one.
Guy Raz: 70 grand profit.
Jim McKelvey: 70,000 dollars of profit, and that was with the trade association actively suing me and trying to stop me.”
Jack Dorsey was not a programming genius as a teenager, says McKelvey
“No, he was very good. We called him Jack the Genius. That was his nickname. But, you know, he was not a genius. He was just very good.”
Apple's strict dock connector rules nearly killed Square's early hardware ambitions
“And at the time, it was this big port at the bottom, and you had to pay Apple for access to that port. You had to pay Apple for a special chip that allowed you to build your hardware, and then you had to Convince them to let you do it, and at the time the iPho…”
Square's early credit card readers cost 97 cents to manufacture
“And each reader cost you how much? 97 cents.”
Amazon surrendered its payment product and mailed Square readers to merchants
“And it failed so badly that Amazon gave us all their soon-to-be former customers and mailed them a Square reader and said, we're out, go to Square.”
Removing financial motivation eliminates the natural milestone to stop working
“When money's not a motivation, there's no reason to stop. Like, it used to be, oh, I'll earn enough too, and then I would say, oh, now I can take a break. Now, since money's not the goal, then I don't have any natural thing to stop me from doing the next thing…”
McKelvey: Square was inspired by losing a glass sale to an Amex card
“Jack Dorsey and I, who had been friends for years and worked together on another company that actually I still own he and I were going to start a new company. We didn't have an idea. I'm a glass blower, so I work in a grubby studio and I sell stuff that nobody…”
The other half of the tape: Jim McKelvey's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 2
2021 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jim's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Board Member, Block | 1 | 21 | 80% 4/5 | full record on How I Built This → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Board Member, Block | 1 | 18 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Top Founders → |