YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim McKelvey

lines on the record: 86
first: 2026-02-23
most recent: 2026-02-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I've been so lucky. I've been the lucky. I don't know how lucky I am. If I went to go back and relive my life, I don't know that I would change a thing because I might not get. The luck, you know, and even with stuff like mom's death, I mean. Hard as it was, it made me Without that, I would not have, I don't know. I'm enough a nerd that I read science fiction and time travel and all this stuff and the butterfly act. If I had a time machine, I wouldn't use it. I wouldn't go touch a second of the past, even though I've made so many mistakes, even though I've lost people. I wouldn't even use it to save my mom. It's just too dangerous. Maybe I tried to say the same.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I used to work for money But it's weird 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 is not the goal, then I don't have any natural thing to stop me from doing the next thing. So I tend to do more.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, my focus is drug testing. So it turns out that on a planetary scale, we've got about 30 new drugs a year. And just because the test costs hundreds of millions of dollars So, if you could lower the cost of a test from, let's say, $100 million to $10 million, you'd have a lot more tests. You would have a lot more shots on goal. You would do a lot more things that would save lives. So I've looked at this world and I've found some what I think are very inefficient processes. And since I'm completely ignorant when it comes to the world of drug testing, I am using my own money to basically demonstrate that we can do it cheaper and faster and better.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, look, uh, I have tremendous resources now. Stuff that I was never expecting to have. And my family and I live pretty modestly. So what are we going to do with it? And I mean, the answer is we're giving it away. I'm giving the money away. But I just go around and occasionally get attracted to problems. I say, well, who but a person who could afford to take tremendous risk could solve this problem? And that's... I sort of see it as a responsibility I have right now to tackle certain problems that are unsolvable if you don't have the ability to walk away from a giant buyout or to do something crazy.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing you're inventing a stack of things. And that invention becomes its own protection. And as long as you behave, I mean, it turns out there are a bunch of rules that if you follow these rules, you can preserve that monopoly for as long as you want. I mean, it is a really, really powerful, defensive thing, and it kept us alive against Amazon.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were forced to invent something that had never been invented before. And when you're forced to invent, you end up building all sorts of stuff that's not obvious. And this is what I call an innovation stack, but you end up doing a dozen things. In our case, it was 14 things that I counted. These things that you do, because you have to and you know that you have to. But the only reason you know that is you've been forced to learn that because you are the guy who invented it. And we were doing 14 things that Amazon copied about three of them. And the other 11 killed them. They didn't know what we did. And they couldn't because they hadn't built it from the ground up. They just copied it from, you know, a boardroom somewhere. Oh, let's do what Square does. We'll make some software, make a hardware device, undercut their price. Yeah, seems like it's going to work, but it turns out it's way more than that. If you invent something truly new, you're not...”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would not have lasted long. But the Amazon product 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.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, I was very concerned. And the first thing I did was I looked for companies that had beaten Amazon while they were startups. And I found none. Of the Amazon victims that I had spoken to, and there were several. Most of them were still so traumatized and so scared that I'm not allowed to use any of their names. Okay, so that's how bad it is. Step two was a pretty awkward board meeting where we said, well, what can we do? Much we could do, so we decided to not do anything.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, I mean, if you think of credit card processing as a commodity, which I think most people would, I mean, it's a logical thing to conclude that, oh, these guys give me the exact same money in my bank, except these guys will charge me less for that money in my bank. Why wouldn't I go with the lower cost alternative and the brand name on top of it? I mean, Amazon's got the brand name and lower cost. Why wouldn't you not use them?”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am not allowed to tell you. I don't know Jack is right now. I mean, I always liked my interactions with Jack. It was fun because he's really smart. And he's hard to get a laugh out of, but it's a really good laugh if you can get it. Like, he does have a sense of humor. It's just sort of buried there. And so I would always try to crackjack up. And it's wonderful to be with somebody who's quiet. Because ideas can percolate. And I talk a lot, but I'm also deeply respectful of silence. And Jack and I together had these really great conversations. And he would sit there sometimes for a minute and then say something. And I wouldn't interrupt during that minute. Fascinating. It just, it was so much fun.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm still on the board I'm basically the voice of the merchant. I am probably of the board members the most connected to people who get their hands dirty or, you know, bus tables or clean up after other people. I won't say why I'm there because that's not my choice. They have asked me and I've stayed. I love this company. I think it's really exciting what we're doing. And I like the fact that, you know, we've not just built Square, we've got Cash App, we've got these two sort of magical ecosystems that are empowering a lot of people. And now we're bringing them together, which is even cooler. So you got one that's consumer and one that's merchant, and that's really powerful.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I saw the impact, that was the thing for me. So, yeah, I guess it was surprising. I will say this, the billion-dollar threshold is sort of a magic threshold, and it was kind of cool to cross it. And then none of the daily things changed. So I think you just ignored it. Go”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moment Square became real to me was when I was in a taxi when my wife were in the back of a taxi in New Orleans and the taxi driver is using Square and he's so excited about it because he can get paid with a credit card and he's telling me about it. He's like, you got to see this thing. It's the best thing in the world. And he's pitching me my own product. And he gets everything wrong. He gets all this stuff wrong. But he is so excited. You could see how it was just this magic unlock for him and his taxi business. And I turned to my wife. I was like, hold on. This thing's big.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my son was born, and it's pretty clear to me that I can't work a 14-hour day and maintain what I consider the duties of a decent father I wasn't particularly great at any of the things that I was responsible for. Like I was, I'm not a good accountant. I can do it. Not as good as a professional. So we had professionals stepping in at every area that I was in. You know, I've stepped away from every company that I've started that's successful and left it to people who are better at running it than I am.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, he was a friend of mine. 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. Now, what I didn't do, which I probably should have done, is say, hey, Bob, help me make this thing out of Make Magazine. Bob decided that it was his idea.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a lot of fixed costs. We had a lot of employees. We had a lot of things we had to pay for, and therefore we needed a certain scale in order for the business to work. So yes, we needed it to be big.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, they knew it was like a challenge. I mean, you have to have a certain bold investor to back what we were doing. There are a lot of bold investors, and we had several dozen term sheets. I mean, I don't think we had. More than three pitches that didn't result in offers”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have no idea. So the game is sort of attack and defend. You're attacking their defending. We change the entire tenor of the room by saying, look, here's all the stuff that we don't know. Here's all the stuff that might blow up in our face. Here are legitimate reasons to not invest in this business. And so, because we put that up, instead of playing defense the entire time, most of the VCs looked at our list and said, well, we can help you with that one. And I remember one guy telling me, oh, Amazon's going to 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.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't confidence. It was candor. It was basically saying, look, this might not work. And here's all the reasons we could think of that it might not. And it changed the tenor of the room. If you've ever been in 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 Now they're telling some truths.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and yes and yes and yes. There were so many rules. From the banking rules to the hardware rules to the network rules to the money transmitter rules that vary from state to state probably to some accounting rule. There were just so much stuff that we did not pay attention to. But we built a system that worked.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would charge them the amount to which Jack disliked them. Jack had a list of VCC liked and didn't like, and depending on where you were on that list, he charged you more. One guy paid $40.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was hardware because I was the weakest programmer, so I was relegated to everything else. So dealing with the banks, Jim figured out, furnishing the office, figuring out how to incorporate the business, like everything but programming felt me.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jack was mostly working on the server. Tristan was mostly working on the iPhone client. We had a few other people that were joining and working on various components of the software stack.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And discovered something very interesting. If I tested them both together, people preferred the long track device because it worked perfectly. But if I tested them separately, which I often did because the long track device didn't fit in my pocket, whereas the short thing would fit in that, you know, that little pocket in your jeans that nobody knows what to do with, that thing on the upper right. Where my square reader lived. And I always had it with me, and I would try it with people. And if I didn't have the big device with me. Reaction I would get for the small device was just mind-blowing. Like people had never seen anything that small read a credit card. It was like this magic trick. And they were like, let me see that. Show me that. Do that again.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so originally the company was called Squirrel because we thought squirrels 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 to Square. But I designed the Square Reader to be the shape of an acorn. It was supposed to be the acorn. And if you look at the original hardware, it's designed to fit in the shape of an acorn, but it also happened to fit well within a small square device. The square device was not very good at reading cards because it was so small that cards would wobble. And I built two devices, one that had a long track and one that had a short track.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“97 cents. I'm cheap. Well, I basically lived in China until I figured out how to build everything at the absolute lowest cost that I could figure out. And I would argue about fractions of a cent with people in Chinese.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a pretty simple device. It was a readhead. And if you put a resistor in it, it sortenuated the signal to a point where it could be sort of interpreted as sound. What you tried to do was make a credit card swipe look like a sound. And then you would decode the sound.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doesn't scan the magnet He hands it back to me works perfectly. I hand it back to him. Doesn't work. And what we noticed after three or four of these rounds was that I didn't touch the reader with my finger when I swiped a card, but Jack would hold it so that it wouldn't rotate in. Microphone, Jack And because he was holding it and because aluminum is conductive and because Jack has a heartbeat, it was picking up his heartbeat and the heartbeat was screwing up the reed So it was a cardiac monitor.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or you'll piss Steve off and he'll throw at it. Like, if Steve doesn't like your product, there's a physical mark on your body from where it hits you. That's what we had been told to expect. So I'm terrified. I build this reader, and it works. And Jack's getting ready to, actually he had a demo with Michael Bloomberg before the jobs thing. So he was going to try it out on Michael Bloomberg. And I hand him the reader fresh out of the lab. And he tries it and it doesn't work.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had to show him hardware, which terrified me because he is a notorious design snob, so much that when Bill Gates tried to show him the Microsoft Zune, he refused to touch it because it was too ugly. So I've got this really ugly credit card reader, and I'm about to go in front of Steve Jobs. And I'm like, oh my God, I need to build something pretty. And I need to do it fast. And so I went to the Apple store to steal Steve's ideas. Like, well, what does Steve like? Well, there's a room full of it. It's called the Apple stores. I went down there and I looked all around the Apple store and I was like, oh, he likes aluminum.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Jack emailed Steve. Steve was a fan of Twitter. Jack got a meeting with Steve, which was canceled because of Steve's health. And you got to understand, Steve was this larger than life deity at Apple. So anything that Steve was interested in, the upper management at Apple was also interested in. So I think the fact that Steve was Willing to meet with us, even though the meeting didn't happen, may have kept their lawyers at bay.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you did and you didn't. They could have easily blocked us from the App Store. Apple could have stopped us. And if we had offended them or made them felt threatened in any way, they would have shut us down.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so fortunately, I'm a nerd. There's a magazine called Make Magazine. And if you open up the first issue of Make Magazine, there's this dude who hacked a cell phone and put a credit card reader in through the microphone jack. So I'm thinking, oh, well, we can read a reader and go through the headphone jack. And I had a friend in St. Louis who was a professor at the university who actually had done work processing credit cards and doing sort of security systems for credit cards. So I called him and I was like, hey, can you help me build this card reader? He was like, oh, we'll just go for the headphone jack. And I was like, oh, hey, good idea.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, you did need apple's permission. That was the thought of the dock connector. They had this little port at the bottom. They still do. 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 iPhone had a terrible battery, and so they wouldn't let you do anything that sucked power from the device because that just made the battery performance worse. So there was almost zero chance of us getting permission from Apple to connect a credit card reader to their device.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Amex Visa MasterCard Discover. Dinos Carl JCB. Like, you name any credit card system and they are a rulemaking brand body. Job is not to deal with merchants. Their job is not to take any risks. Their job is not to push any paperwork. Their job is to keep the system running. They're taking 25 basis points. Or 15 basis points off a Walmart transaction or a square transaction. So they're getting paid either way.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not what they do. They don't deal with the credit card networks. You say credit card companies, the technical term is networks. And what they do is maintain the brand, write the rules.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the crazy abuse is all the middlemen in those transactions. So Visa 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 Visa and MasterCard, you know, there's this chain of people. And in that chain, everyone takes a huge cut of the little merchant. Visa MasterCard were the guys who had the rules, they weren't negatively impacted by anything when Square was going to do. So it was easier to convince them to change it.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what we were doing was we were telling them basically open up the market to all these people you don't get to exploit yet. You know, we didn't say it like that, but the understanding was you guys are making so much off these little merchants. I'll bring you even more of them And we never argued with the network fees. So remember the Visa and MasterCard fees, they're fairly straightforward.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, forget it. The system was built for merchants who had $100,000 or more in transactions. It was never designed to serve the little guy. Basically, they didn't have very good negotiating positions, so they would get screwed individually. And companies like Walmart and Target, who had big departments of lawyers and lots of ability to sort of negotiate on their behalf paid lower fees.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, if you didn't have a hundred thousand 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 physical location. You had to have a business that had a certain stature. Like none of the small businesses could make those requirements.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you have to get them excited to change their rules. I mean, it was clear in the first day. That there were, I counted 17, there were probably more, but I stopped counting at 17 rules or various regulations that we were breaking in some way. Some of them were laws, some of them were network rules. Like OFAC, KYC. Like you have to know your customer. Well, we could figure that out eventually. That's a banking regulation. But we were certainly in violation of that in the early days.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, my attitude was that we're not going to get the credit card monopolies to change. They had rules specifically preventing exactly what we were trying to do among a bunch of other laws at the state and local level that were preventing what we were trying to do.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, his way makes more sense except for the fact that it doesn't work. Yeah, like you can't just tell the credit card industry to accept an image because think about it. I can take a picture and mail it to Singapore. Does that mean my credit card's in Singapore? So you can scan your card, but you don't get card present protection. All you've done is saved yourself typing 16 digits.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, hardware was my idea because Jack wanted to do software only and just use the phone. And I'm like, no, we need a piece of hardware. And then we quickly realized that there are two ways to process a card. One is called Card Present, and the other is called Card Not Present. And Card Not Present is way more expensive and way more risky for the merchant. So you want to do card present. You want to prove that the person buying the thing is there and has a credit card. Otherwise, you're vulnerable to a chargeback anytime. So it's no protection for the merchant. So the merchant needs card present. And the only way to get card present was to read the magnetic stripe. And I said, Jack, we need to read the mag stripe. And Jack said, no, you're crazy. We need to read the number using the camera that's already on the iPhone.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Amex charged too much, so we didn't take it to my studio. We'd always successfully been able to get people to have a Visa MasterCard. But this lady didn't have one. And I am sitting there talking to this lady on my iPhone. And I look at my iPhone and my attitude towards the iPhone was it was this magic device that should become anything I wanted it to. It turns into a book or a TV or a map or a flashlight or a phone or like that's what this device is supposed to do. And it didn't turn into a credit card reader. And I thought, well, that's what we should do. We should make the iPhone turn into a credit card reader.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I was fishing for other ideas, but hadn't come up with anything. And then I went back to St. Louis to sort of pack up my stuff. Okay, I'm going to move to California and take my fianc ⁇ with me. And that's how committed I was. And I was in my studio trying to sell a piece of glass. I mean, I was there and I got this phone call from this lady in Panama who wants to buy this ridiculous thing that I'd made. It was a glass bathroom faucet. $2,000. Ugly as can be. It's been sitting on the shelf for years. But I need the two grand, like $2,000 is really going to help me, you know, with the cash flow and moving out. I lost the sale because I couldn't take an Amix card.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was not fully serious. It was not fully addressed. But that was what I said. And then Jax said, well, why don't we build something new? It just can't involve social media. And I was like, okay. Well, that still leaves a lot of stuff we had to figure it out. So we decided that we wanted to do something with mobile phones because mobile phones are just, you know, the iPhone had just come out. Let's figure out what to do with it. And then off to California to come up with ideas. And then we hired Tristan O'Tierney, the first iPhone engineer, and he was going to be starting in a couple of weeks, and we didn't have. Really good idea to do with this iPhone, but Tristan was starting, so we had to come up with something.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that wasn't it. It was Jack's idea to start the company. Because my original idea was let's just go out to California and make, you know. Make war on the Twitter guys.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I was a little bored. I was comfortable, but not fully engaged. And what they did to Jack seemed wrong to me. 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 Jack and they would omit another guy, Noel Glass, I think.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gamblo and glass, and I mean, I did some other stuff. You know, I built some apartments, but I was not full-time at Mira anymore. Mirror was still paying me, but I wasn't the boss.”
2026-02-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT