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'm not going to talk somebody out of going to college. I mean, my father was a Professor, he's a dean of the engineering school. College is, that's the family business.”
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, no, it's web publishing, but I mean, like the core tech is still, you got to collect these. Papers and verify them and jury them and rank them and publish them. And yeah.”
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 was absolutely clear to me that the World Wide Web was going to wipe out the CD-ROM trade show business. And so I told the whole company, well, look, we need to pivot into conference publishing, using the same tools that we have, but instead of publishing trade show literature, we're going to do boring technical papers. And everyone was like, yes, Jim, yes, yes, yes. And they all said yes. But none of them did anything differently. And so the only person who would listen to me was Jack Dorsey. So his second summer at Mira, I took Jack aside and I said, look, none of these other people are going to be here in six months. You and I have to go off and save the company in the meantime.”
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, 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. And so finally, we started doing some more serious work together. And then I saw the train coming to hit the company, which was the internet. So this was 95.”
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 then, what I discovered was that whenever I gave Jack a project, he would always do it better than I was expecting. And I got curious about how deep that river ran so I kept giving him harder and harder projects. And he kept delivering every one of them. And I was like, oh my God, what can this kid 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
“3,000 times in a row. But what I quickly noticed was Jack came to work for us then afterwards, I mean, after he got out of trouble with his mom.”
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, he wasn't doing a program, he was running a scanner. It was take this page, scan it, save this file name correctly, and do 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
“Was probably 10, but that weekend it was probably 20. It was everyone we could find. And one of my colleagues went in to buy some chocolate covered espresso beans to keep the workers awake. And Marcia says, well, what do you guys do? And he's like, oh, we work with computers. And she's like, oh, my son loves computers. And he's like, well, how do you like to make $50 the hard way? So this 15-year-old kid comes over middle of the afternoon and he introduces himself and he's like, hi, I'm Jack. Jack pulled it all night or with us that first day.”
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 a lady named Marcia Dorsey who owned a coffee shop called Shenandoah Coffee. And we were building a trade show disc and had screwed it up so badly that we were in a fire drill to redo probably 200 hours of 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
“On one $70,000 of profit, and that was with the trade association actively suing me and trying to stop me. So imagine how much I could make if we cooperated with the trade associations Which is what we did for the next two years, we made friends. I'm not going to pick a fight. So we did all the other trade shows.”
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. It was a reason to go to their booth. I mean, it was the best thing. And again, I charged them for that. Like, we made so much money on that.”
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, in the first trade show, since we were prohibited from attending it ourselves, we had to get companies who wanted more booth traffic to distribute it. So I got all the major companies to distribute for 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
“And then the trade association tried to stop me from doing it because they said, well, this is our trade show, you can't do it. And I was like, well, I'm hard to kill and you can't stop me. And so then they sent the lawyers after me, but I laughed at them because, what are you going to do? Take my car. Like, good luck trying to start it. But the problem guy was that I made so much money putting my competitor's literature on my CD. I was like, why am I trying to sell software when I just made 70 grand producing a trade show CD?”
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
“Physical literature Yes, okay. So I came up with this idea. What I wanted to do was take all my competitors' products and charge them to put their brochures on my software. So we did use my software to create the first CD-ROM for the imaging trade show”
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 Mira's dead, but we had attended one trade show when we had a product. The trade show was the Association for Image and Information Management. I don't know if they're still around, but they were the trade show for imaging. And I was struck by the irony of people leaving the imaging trade show with bags of literature on how to have a paperless office.”
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 did. Yeah. I had the capital, but it was more than just the capital. I'm also cheap. I can live on air. My budget was $25 a week. Food, clothing, and transport. That was what I lived on.”
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
“Exactly, yes. You know, it seemed like this visual thing was going to be important on computers that they weren't going to be just text. So we started building this thing that was very similar to Adobe Acrobat, except that there was then Adobe Acrobat, which kind of wiped the floor with our product.”
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 I looked at what my mother got to see. And she saw her son as this kind of mediocre weirdo. At least that's how I saw it. And then I thought, well, this is not who I want to be. So I quit IBM. I closed my CD business and I stopped glass blowing. I just, I said, I'm going to focus. And what am I going to focus on? Well, I'm going to focus on the thing that creates fortunes, you know, computers, because I've got a computer degree. So my friend and I started a company called Mira.”
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, this is correct. And it made money. But it was a mediocre business. And I was a mediocre glassblower, and I was a mediocre IBM employee. And then my mom died. And I realized that my mother has seen nothing but mediocrity out of her son.”
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, carpentry. Although I had a factory do these things, it was mostly marketing and sales. I see. We were in premium catalogs and whatnot.”
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
“The point is, it just woke me up. And all of a sudden, I started seeing. Pain in people, like pain in my friends. I was trying to make up for 24 years of obliviousness by just Being in touch with people who are suffering. And my God, they're everywhere. We are everywhere. It's not they. It's a we.”
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, it depends what you mean by pick yourself up. What it did was it put me in touch with this entire world that I didn't know. So here I am thinking I've got this idyllic existence with no problems. I've never even had a cavity. Okay. I've never even had a tooth filled. That's how easy my life was. And then all of a sudden this happens, and I lose mom. And I mean, it was all of a sudden as if... Somebody turned on black light on the hotel room and you see what stuff's on the bedspread.”
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, yeah. I mean, that's, but that's like. You don't know, if you try and it doesn't work, well, you tried. But if you don't try Well, that seems wrong. If I care about something and I don't try to fix it, I question whether or not I really cared”
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, yeah, it is. But it's, I mean, it's. Losing my mom completed my education. Maybe didn't complete it, but it voided it. It was. There was so much that I would not know For having to deal with the sudden death of my mom. I mean, A lot of the energy that I have comes from the feelings that our startup when I think about what I could have done to save my mother. Part of me knew that mom was in trouble and that I could have done more. And I didn't. Hell, I could have just gone home and taken a walk with my mother every night. That could have saved her life. I didn't do that To this day, I regret the inaction And so when I find myself in a situation where I think something needs to be done, I no longer sit there and say, well, someone else will probably do it. My attitude is like, you got to be the one to do 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
“I had a great job. I never knew anything was wrong with my mom. You know, and then towards the end, she had been through a bout of depression, which she had sort of fought through. Like there was, it was not a situation where my mother attempted suicide and failed. My mother's suicide was so well planned that nobody could have caught her or stopped it. And she did not telegraph her punch at all. She planned it. My dad and I were just caught by total surprise. And it just destroyed my world.”
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 no. Yes, she had struggled with it. I did not know this severity. She never got over the postpartum with my brother and struggled with it, electro convulsive therapy, like a lot of heavy stuff that I had no idea was happening. Mom hit it very, very well.”
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, no, it was IBM in Los Angeles. So this was the original remote work. I'd met some people at WashU who knew about my book and they needed some writing done at IBM. So they hired me temporarily at IBM in Los Angeles. But I was living in St. Louis and I impressed them enough that they said, hey, can you just stay on and keep working with us? And then I quickly realized that IBM didn't know when I did the work so I could work in the glass studio during the day and then do my IBM work at night.”
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
“Line, you know, I want to make some car, and I don't know what it is. So there was none of that until these two guys in Ohio basically created this small furnace. And we had one at Washu, but it was this little junkie furnace. And so nobody was doing it. It was a completely open field, which means there was no competition. So I could sell work. Because even if my work was garbage, it was the only glass in the gallery.”
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
“The thing that captivated me about glass was the material itself. It is this amazing material, and especially when it's hot, it's like it's alive. So, the glass blowing is sort of like dance, except it's this technical dance where you have to manage heat and you got to manage. But what was also super interesting about glass at the time that I got into it was that nobody was doing it. Because glass factories, which are these big industrial furnaces, did not let artists come in and just play with the stuff. This was like going into Ford Model company and saying, hey, can I borrow the assembly line? I want to make some.”
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
“Good at explaining stuff because I have a pretty simple brain. And I don't understand things that are too complex. But to your original question, which was, did I have any job offers after school? So I actually had its job possibly working for a giant accounting consulting firm. And I thought about it. I was like, oh, this is like death because they had this thing called method one, which was this massive multi-ring binder tome of how to solve every problem. And it was like, you didn't have to think, you just had to go to method one. And I was like, I can't do that. So I had this computer science degree, but nobody was hiring programmers at the time. So I didn't really have the ability to just go out and get a job. But I had this glass blowing skill. And I thought, well, maybe I could sell my work. I became a glassblower, basically.”
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, I there was one interesting side effect because I was published. I ended up having a reputation that I didn't really deserve as a good programmer, as a good engineer So, what I learned was that as long as I shut up and always associated with people who were actually better than me, I could sort of hide in this crowd of super achievers. 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.”
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
“They were insane. It was like 10 cents a page, and it was this thing that the computer science department had one of. And if you were a senior professor, you could like print five pages a day. And one of my professors actually gave me his passcode so I could print my book on this magic device that made it look like a book. Like it didn't look like I'd typed it out. It looked like some publisher had published it. Whereas in fact, I was publishing it myself for the first rounds until I got a real publisher.”
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, yeah. The problem with these early languages was that they were poorly implemented and the products had a lot of gotchas. They had a lot of mistakes. And if you encounter one of these, unless you knew this sort of trick, well, you were stuck. And so I spent many hours unnecessarily stuck because nobody would explain these tricks to me and you just had to know somebody who knew the trick. You don't think you'd fix it. And I thought, well, this is stupid. Somebody should write down all these tricks. And that was my book. I mean, it wasn't so much a how to program. It was how to fix every mistake that you're about to encounter.”
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 took a beginning computer science class and it And I was mouthing off because I've always sort of a hard guy to shut up So, I was saying that, you know, I could write a better book than this piece of crap. And one of my buddies said, well, why don't you? So freshman year, out of stubbornness, I wrote what was basically a spite book. I rewrote the textbook for my intro 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.”
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 They have no idea. So the game is sort of attack and defend. You're attacking they're defending. We changed 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.”
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
“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. 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