The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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…”
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 learned his value was making superior engineers more productive
“And that's probably the thing I learned best in college, which was I can go into a group of people who are way better than me, and I can make them more productive.”
McKelvey funded his first startup using his glassblowing studio profits
“Well, I mean, I, that's allowed me to start my other company. My venture capital came out of the studio.”
Square was originally named Squirrel and had an acorn-shaped card reader
“Originally the company was called Squirrel, because we thought squirrels, you know, were cute and saved nuts and thought that was a good payment name. Turns out it was a good payment name, and another company had a payment system called Squirrel, so we pivoted…”
Square received dozens of term sheets with only three investor rejections
“We had several dozen term sheets. I mean, I don't think we had More than three pitches that didn't result in offers.”
McKelvey wrote 'The Debugger's Handbook' as a freshman spite project
“So freshman year, out of stubbornness, I wrote what was basically a spite book. I rewrote the textbook for my intern to computer science class from the perspective of a student, and that book turned out to be pretty popular and actually got me a publisher.”