#64 How to Build an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time: Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey

What this episode is about

Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, shares insights into entrepreneurship, highlighting the serendipitous origins of Square and his collaboration with Jack Dorsey. He discusses the importance of innovative thinking, the strategy of embracing inaction when necessary, and offers key takeaways from his own experiences in building a successful business that has significantly disrupted the payment processing industry.

Key takeaways

• Entrepreneurs are rare: Most prefer copying to the innovation required to create something truly unique.
• Doing nothing can be a powerful strategy; sometimes the best move is letting the market unfold on its own.
• Square's unique pitch? Highlighting all the reasons their idea might flop—real honesty can win over investors.
• Innovation isn't just about new ideas; sometimes it's fixing what's right in front of you, like a mobile payment system.
• Being labeled 'crazy' was once an insult, but in entrepreneurship, it's often the badge of honor for genuine innovators.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Tommen (Host) · 13 min speaking
• Jim McKelvey (Guest) · 19 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: The Innovation Stack, Apple Inc.
2. 5:00 – 10:00: The Innovation Stack
3. 10:00 – 15:00: The Innovation Stack
4. 15:00 – 20:00: The Innovation Stack
5. 20:00 – 25:00: Invisibly
6. 25:00 – 30:00: Federal Reserve, Invisibly
7. 30:00 – 31:27: The Innovation Stack

Notable quotes from "#64 How to Build an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time: Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey"

• Founded several other companies and is square co-founder Jack dorsy went on to found Twitter Jim recently wrote a book on entrepreneurship which is wonderful called The…

  about The Innovation Stack · at 0:51

• First employee and he was starting in two weeks because he'd given notice at Apple he was quitting and he was coming to join us and so we had to have something for him to do so…

  about Apple Inc. · at 3:09

• We've trained thousands and thousands of people but more to come so I'm still super interested in that the other area that I'm working a lot on is a company called invisibly…

  about Invisibly · at 23:36

• Audience with today is there anything else you would like to mention that you haven't already discussed I'd like to put a plugin for the Federal Reserve because and I know…

  about Federal Reserve · at 25:18

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

Books & papers

• The Innovation Stack — Book · Primary recommendation · 6 mentions · first at 1:02
  Book authored by Jim McKelvey, discussed as a framework for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Companies & orgs

• Federal Reserve — Company · Referenced expert · 2 mentions · first at 25:25
  Discussed in the context of its role in the economy and its independence from political influence.
• Invisibly — Company · Case study · 3 mentions · first at 23:44
  Company founded by Jim McKelvey, focusing on reclaiming online identities.
• LaunchCode — Company · Case study · 2 mentions
  Non-profit founded by Jim McKelvey, focused on training programmers.
  Garage so Jim what is next for you there are two problems that I'm working on right now one launch code this is a non-profit that I started that's mission is to create…
• Apple Inc. — Company · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 3:14
  Mentioned as the former employer of Square's first employee.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with Jim m he's the co-founder of square the Payment Processing Company that lets anyone accept credit cards Square went public in 2015 for $9 per share and today the stock is worth around $250 per share and the company is worth over a hundred billion in addition to square Jim has founded several other companies and is square co-founder Jack dorsy went on to found Twitter Jim recently wrote a book on entrepreneurship which is wonderful

1:02 called The Innovation stack I'm excited to learn from Jim how he successfully created and built Square how is a startup Square beat Amazon and what other tips he has for our listeners one idea of Jims that I'm fascinated by is that sometimes doing nothing is the best strategy welcome Jim and thanks so much for being here today thanks Lyn this is going to be fun I'm looking forward to it as well can you tell us how you came to start Square it was sort of serendipitous Jack dorsy and I had known each other for years and he had actually just been kicked out of Twitter right before he came to St Louis for Christmas and so we were talking about what he was going to do and he said well Jim why don't you join me and we'll start another company and I said great what do you want to do and he's like I really don't know what do you want to do and I was like well I don't know there so we flew out to

2:02 California brainstormed for a couple of weeks and came up with a couple of other ideas none of which we were that excited about but then I went back to my glass studio because I was a glass blower and I used to try to sell my work whenever I could and I lost to sale because I couldn't take a payment with an American Express card and I was holding one of these things I had one of these in my pocket when I lost this sale and I was so angry and I looked at my iPhone and I thought why didn't this thing magically turn into a credit card reader because my attitude towards the iPhone is that it's this thing that becomes whatever I want it to become it becomes a phone book if I want to look up a number or a TV if I want to watch a show or it turns into a map if I want it just magically transforms into whatever I need it to be but it wouldn't transform into a point of sale terminal it wouldn't transform

2:53 into a credit card reader and I thought well we should fix that so I called Jack and I said hey I think I know we should do and that's what be came square and you had already hired somebody to work for you yes yes we had already hired our first employee and he was starting in two weeks because he'd given notice at Apple he was quitting and he was coming to join us and so we had to have something for him to do so on his first day at the office we basically pulled the switcheroo and said well I know we were going to work on this other thing that we talked about when we hired you but now we're going to work payments get busy the word entrepreneur is used all the time what is an entrepreneur and how common are they well the way I use the term is they're very rare and I had to dust off a hundredy old definition of the word entrepreneur in order to write the Innovation stack because when I started to write the book I mean page

3:55 one I was like okay I need a word to describe this type of business where you don't get to copy from a known working business model and I thought there has to be a way for me to describe that and it turns out there is no word in the English language to differentiate a business person who is following a fairly known Playbook from somebody who is making that place up as they go along but in my research what I discovered which was really interesting was that that was the original meaning of the word entrepreneur so if you go back to what shumer said was a long since dead Economist but he was the guy who needed this word to describe this class of behavior that was not typical business and so to write my book I in the first chapter basically say look we're going to use an archaic definition of entrepreneur and an entrepreneur by my definition or I should say shum's definition is somebody who is doing something that probably

4:55 won't succeed has no precedence and is likely considered crazy and that's why the word crazy is in the subtitle of the book is that crazy is not really a compliment some people will say oh I'm crazy but you're not that crazy right it's got this little bit of a sting to it if somebody says oh you Lynn's crazy that's not a compliment same way 100 years ago I said oh well Linds an entrepreneur they'd be like oh watch out so that's the way I use it and it's a very rare thing partially because most people are unable to resist the urge to copy everything and we talk about this throughout life we are really well trained to be copiers of everything and it's what education does for us it's what our DNA does human beings and all animals all living things are really good at copying we are not good at experimenting we are not good at trying new stuff and so I wanted to be able to discuss that new stuff and that's why I

5:53 had to dust off the definition of entrepreneur so by that definition of entrepreneur entrepreneurs are very rare and you applied that crazy approach all throughout square and I was fascinated for example by your fundraising pitch to venture capitalist you did the one thing that nobody does can you tell us about that yeah we told them why it wouldn't work we actually put this slide right in the middle of our pitch right when people start getting excited we just depress Everybody by putting up this pitch where we literally listed 140 reasons why we thought Square would fail we listed everything that could possibly go wrong and we were very candid about it now a couple of them were humorous but most of them were very serious and it totally changed the tener of the pitch because most VC pitches are like one of these there's this Kabuki theater going on you've got the attackers which are the entrepreneurs and the Defenders

6:53 which are the VCS and the attackers are going to tell you everything's great and this is the best company in the world and the VCS are going to try to pull coales in it and it creates this sort of adversarial tension in the room by basically dropping our masks and walking over to the defender side and say look here's everything you could criticize us for because we don't know if this is going to work and by the way it's never worked before and hear a bunch of stuff that we're breaking all these laws and blah blah blah it just changed everything instead of having the investors or I should say potential investors fight us what they did was they started pitching in and they would say well like I had one guy said cuz we said Amazon attacking us was one of the things we put on the slide and he's like oh oh I'm on the board of Amazon and if you take our money I'll get Jeff to back down so it was very interesting to watch

7:44 how that just admission of what you don't know changed the way the presentation went you have called your approach to Innovation at Square an innovation stack can you explain what that means it wasn't just Square it was this pattern that I found throughout all these other companies because what happened we liveed through this really dark time at Square when Amazon was trying to kill us and when Amazon tries to kill a startup they always win at least that had been 100% true when they copied square and were looking like they were going to kill us amazingly it didn't work and I say amazingly because we were the only company that I know of that survived an attack by Amazon while they were still a startup I was happy we won but I couldn't explain why and so what I did was I started looking for other examples and I couldn't find many until I started going back in history and when I mined history then I found

8:45 all these examples and the examples started to fit this pattern and the pattern had this thing and I didn't know what to call the thing but the thing was this messy conglomeration of new inventions that all worked with each other and enhanced each other and sometimes conflicted with each other and it was this messy thing and so I started calling it an innovation stack because if you live through the creation of this it does seem like you're piling one brick on top of another and so that was sort of how I visualized it but it's not just this thing at Square it was this thing that I found that literally was present in all of these companies that later went on to dominate their Industries and it's a very easy concept I'll save your listeners 15 bucks here right you don't have to buy the book you just listen to this the basic concept of the Innovation stack is that Innovation is this really messy iterative process

9:43 that requires not one or two or three but usually a dozen or 20 or 50 different inventions all of which piled on top of themselves create this new thing and that new thing once you get it running is amazingly powerful power powerful enough to protect a startup from the attack of an Amazon powerful enough to protect another startup from attacks by governments I've seen the Innovation stack weather these cataclysms which you would think would just wipe these companies out and it turns out these companies Thrive and I think it's an important concept to understand let's talk more about some of the elements of your Innovation stack one of the key ones is Simplicity Jim can you tell us about that yeah and I'll try to make my explanation simple look we're all overwhelmed and there is a danger that we all fall into when we become deeply immersed in a product so if you're building something by the second or third day of working on

10:46 that thing you already understand it so well that you're almost incapable of understanding how confusingly complex it is to somebody else and some of my friends who worked for Microsoft in the 90s and worked on Microsoft Windows told me a story about how they surveyed Their audience and asked for new features to put in the next release of I'm sorry it wasn't Windows it was Microsoft Word they asked for the new features that the people would want in word and it turns out that every feature that they asked was already in word but people just couldn't find it because it was so cumbersome the interface was so difficult to use and I said to my friend I was like well of course like Words impossible got 15 menus and Macos all this stuff you know and he was like no it just makes perfect sense no it's perfectly logical well it makes perfect sense if you're an engineer who works at Microsoft but we

11:33 all as product creators get too familiar with our products and we create things that only experts can use and so the trick when you're building a product is have the humility to make it not as cool as you know it could be but make it so beautifully simple that people don't expend any energy worrying or waiting and Simplicity in Square's case was a massive competitive advantage and one to this day that we still really harp on when we release a new product there is actually a whole process that removes complexity from what we're about to launch we keep stripping it down to the point where you should be able to open it up without a user's manual and make it work for you and we're talking about money here so people really care if you screw up with their money and we don't you know there's no consultant that shows up when you sign up for square you're on your own but fortunately the journey is pretty

12:31 simple you also made it easy with free signups and no contracts yeah so it turns out that doing the easy in the financial world is really difficult and since you mentioned contract I'll tell you about the contracts when we started the contract that I signed to get our first merchant account was 42 pages long 42 pages of like sixo type and it was so offensive to sign that contract knowing that there was some clause in there where I was signing away some right that I probably would need in the future if there was a problem but I was giving it away and there was nothing I could do so at Square we basically simplified all that stuff and we put that contract online so it's just one of those user agreements and look we know you don't read them but you're supposed to but even if you don't you click accept good turns out that's illegal turns out according to the banking laws of 2009 2010 you're not allowed to have that

13:31 sort of contract and the question is wait a second why is it legal in the software world and illegal in the banking world and the answer is the banking world was 20 years behind the tech world and so one of the things we had to do which was very difficult was to catch the banking world and the money World up to where technology had been for the last 15 years and so as something as simple as an easy user agreement was impossible before we did it you also had no Live support which is just about unheard of in the financial industry how were you able to do that that was a conscious choice at the beginning because we wanted a system that was so easy to use that you didn't need to have support you didn't need to have somebody on the other line and again people thought that was crazy but Jack and I had an answer for them which is do you use Gmail right I use Gmail you use Gmail have you ever called

14:30 Google about your Gmail account I've never met anyone who's made a text report call to Google about their Gmail account there is this precedent this wonderful precedent for people who use a product that's very complex like Gmail but never call you so that was our model and we didn't have tech support actually we had tech support but it was all email and we wouldn't answer the phone and it turns out that that was a very good way to start because it forced us to keep our product so simple that you didn't have to call us and it also I think drove away the people who really wanted to talk there was a certain type of user that just was never going to be a Square customer in the early days before we had support because they wanted to talk nowadays we have support so I should tell you this if you're a current Square customer yes we'll talk to you on the phone we might even call you but the philosophy of making

15:23 something that's so simple you don't need the users's manual or any support still survives to this day you also have beautiful software and hardware and you essentially sacrificed functionality in favor of beauty and simplicity can you tell us about that this was my fault or my decision I should say so I was the guy that built the hardware that little white Square Reader that was me and actually I've got one here I can show you the problem because it's easier if this is a video to demonstrate it okay so here's a square reader Pretend This is a credit card it's actually my Square ID but if you are swiping a card through a reader it tends to wobble it tends to do this and as a result it screws up the read so if you're trying to read a magstripe on something that's this small it doesn't work very well and as a result only 80% of the reads will go through on the first try on this device now I was a guy

16:19 that built this device I was a guy that designed its size and I tested the second version that was wider it was about twice the width and in that case the card wouldn't wobble and it worked perfectly so the question is why did we release a piece of Hardware that didn't work as well as it could have and the answer was not to say plastic or anything or because it was square or anything like that the answer is when I tried The Big Unit and I tested it on my friends they were still pretty much asleep they' go okay you read my credit card well big deal when I read their credit card on something this size and actually our early reader was even smaller than this when I read it on the Square Reader they were like what what is that it got their attention it was so small that it woke them up for a second and it got us noticed it also had an interesting side effect and that it people had to practice their swipes it takes about 10

17:13 tries till you get your move down and then once you got your move down you're proud because you acquired a new skill and what do you do with a new skill where you show off right so people were actually showing off how good they were at reading by showing our products proudly to their friends and boy that was great marketing you also decided to offer square at a low price but not the lowest possible price how did you think about price our idea with the price was to charge as little as we could and still keep the company running and it was interesting because we picked a price that was not profitable for the company but we could become profitable if we kept growing so we basically looked at a price we said well this is absolutely the lowest we could go and still have a chance of being a profitable company someday and so we launched with that price and we kept that price and interestingly enough

18:07 we didn't even lower that price when Amazon came in a couple years later and undercut our price when Amazon came in and undercut our price by 30% which is a lot of money we looked at it and we said how are they doing that and again part of it was like well they're Amazon I guess they figured something out you know they're smarter than we are because they're Amazon we're this little startup in California we thought that they knew some magic that we didn't but we didn't understand what the magic was and we certainly didn't have that magic and so we didn't lower our price when Amazon came after us and it turns out they didn't have any magic turns out that what they used to do and I think still do is they would take a competitor they wanted to kill and they would undercut them by 30% even if it meant they lost money right and so they were probably I'm guessing because I don't work at Amazon losing millions of dollars to

18:58 their rates and I think that's one of the reasons they eventually gave up but Amazon did not affect us on the low side and I think pricing so I studied pricing this is really interesting because I want you to know the Innovation stack is not about Square it's about this pattern that occurs in other companies and I found really great examples of pricing strategy practiced in a couple of different ways and the best example I have is from Southwest Airlines and Southwest for years pursued a low low price strategy and when I say low price I mean they charged as little as they could but still kept the planes in the air there is another pricing strategy called lowest price and in a lowest price scenario what you do is you first look over both of your shoulders to see what your competitors are charging and then you match their price maybe you're a little higher maybe you're a little lower but you're basically pricing along

19:51 with the rest of the pack this works if you're a pack animal and a lot of companies are pack animals and probably should be but if you're a company with an innovation stack it's a really huge mistake and so one of the great case studies I cite from the book is Southwest Airlines which pursued this low price strategy up until herb kellerer retired and when herb left Southwest the new management decided that they could make way more money by charging more to their customers and Southwest had never done that before so we had this perfect example of an innovation stack company doing it one way for 20 years and then doing it another way for 20 years and the results are Stark Southwest is still a great company it's still one of the biggest Airlines but they are not nearly as dominant as they were they're not nearly as competitive as they were they're just not so far ahead of the pack so pricing

20:50 really impacts how a company endures long term and it's a choice you make if you want to take that excess value and capture it this quarter you can certainly do so but I think in many cases you're undermining the decades long potential that you have if you keep pricing correctly Jim square has become so successful and you've become a billionaire how has that changed your life more people ask me for money now here's the weird thing I always thought I was rich before I started Square because there was one morning I was driving into my glass studio and there was this radio station that was giving away 10,000 bucks and the radio announcer came on and said just think how $10,000 would change your life I thought about it for a minute I was like you know really wouldn't it's not that I didn't want 10 grand it's just if somebody gave me $10,000 it wouldn't change where I ate lunch like it wouldn't change any of the things I'm

21:42 going still I mean I live in St Louis Missouri it's a cheap town I blow glass I drive a beater car I had an old airplane you know what I still have today I got the same old airplane it was 40 years old then now it's 50 years old what I realized then was that money wasn't going to change me that much and even though I didn't have much money by Silicon Valley standards it was like well it is going to make any difference so I guess I'm rich and I wasn't Rich by any conventional definition I just realized that oh wait a second money's not going to improve anything so stop chasing it so hard and then I started Square so now we're in the weird situation of we've got this almost toxically large amount of family wealth and my wife and I trying to figure figure out how to give it away so that's the new challenge and I think we can do a lot of good with it and I'm happy that we get that chance but it has not been

22:36 lifechanging for me it's been life affirming because nowadays when I see something that here before I might have said oh I want to get that someday now I got to go well you can get that tomorrow and probably have three of them delivered no I really don't want that I just there's a lot of this stuff I just you want a 20,000 sare foot house it you want your own basketball court I mean look you play for the NBA maybe but like you're some white guy who drives a midlife crisis Harley-Davidson and you got your own basketball court I don't want to be him so I got a two-car garage so Jim what is next for you there are two problems that I'm working on right now one launch code this is a non-profit that I started that's mission is to create thousands and thousands of programmers and we train you for free so you can come and get a free education at launch code and then we'll place you into a job and the job training and job

23:34 placement part is just fantastic and we've trained thousands and thousands of people but more to come so I'm still super interested in that the other area that I'm working a lot on is a company called invisibly and I'm actually wearing their t-shirt today invisibly is an effort for us all to reclaim our online identities because it turns out that your eyeballs are being bought and sold without your consent without your direction without even your self-interest being considered and so when you use a product for free what they're really doing is they're selling your attention probably in ways that you don't want and this is having all sorts of terrible effects and we see it in journalism we see it in demise of Journalism there's a Litany of problems and so invisibly is an experiment and I'm not claiming this working yet but the experiment is if we allow people to take control of their identities in other words you

24:32 basically give us permission to really get a good picture of who you are and then you know what we're going to do we're gonna go we're gonna sell that but we're g to sell it the way like a Hollywood agent represents a movie star which is we're going to try to get the most money for your eyeballs the most money for that minute of attention and there are some really interesting things that happen when the attention is consensual when it becomes something where the person is participating willingly and we don't know if it's going to work but so far it's been working pretty well and we're just in the early stages of launching invisibly but that's my new thing that's so important Jim before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today is there anything else you would like to mention that you haven't already discussed I'd like to put a plugin for the Federal Reserve

25:27 because and I know we're in a hot time for the FED it always seems to be a hot time to the FED I came into the fed and Janet was there and we were doing QE and now we got this multi-trillion dollar balance sheet I just want to say that you are lucky as us residents to be in a country that has a good Central Bank Run by people who aren't political and I didn't realize this until I joined the fed and when you join the fed you have to basically renounce your political allegiance and that was so important and so insightful to me because we just lived through the Trump Administration I came in under the Obama Administration and now we're in Biden and during that whole time I've been politically neutral and I have learned so much from listening to people who disagree with me and I've also learned so much by watching these people who are running the economy not just for the us but for the world make really good decisions and

26:20 the independence of the FED is something that I don't think people appreciate the fact that we've got this bank that can't be pushed around by Congress that can't be pushed around by a president that's a really good thing and I don't think people appreciate that so you gave me a freebie there's my freebie it's a plug for the Central Bank there we go and you're a member of the board of the St Louis fed is that right yes I'm uh Deputy chair soon to be chair of the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank last question what are the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with first is to understand that innovation is a last resort it is not something that you should probably aspire to I see a lot of people say oh I want to be Innovative we're not going to do the same things that everybody else does and I'm like why not it usually works to find somebody who's figured it out beforehand and do whatever he or she did

27:17 that's usually a very good formula Innovation I think should be a last P for it and if you're willing to think of it as this last resort it's very liberating because then you don't feel pressured to put blue Flex in the laundry detergent I use a washing powder it's got it's mostly white crystals but these blue crystals I'm what the hell is the blue stuff and I find out that no no no the blue stuff is not from the chemistry Department it's from the marketing department somebody thought blue Flex in the laundry makes it look cleaner okay great I don't want that type of innovation I don't want somebody say we need to put new on the box so come up with something different I want people to go oh no I have to innovate so that's takeaway one Innovation should probably be a last resort the second thing I really want people to understand is it should be a resort it should be something that you're capable of doing

28:11 and here's the reason I wrote the book and I'm spending all these time doing podcasts and speeches and trying to get this message out it's not to make another 12 bucks okay or I actually don't make that a copy I think I make 90 cents or something but the point is steal the book If you have to buy it from a friend I don't care stream it down I don't care but the idea I want you to get is that most of your life you have been taught to not do anything that hasn't already been proven to work and that if you find yourself on that edge of what Humanity has figured out and the only way to walk past that edge is to innovate to try something new all of your training all of your friends all of your systems all of the things that have supported you are going to very quickly turn against you and try to pull you back over onto the safe side of the line and the safe side of that line is the line where we know how it all works and

29:04 I just and this is the reason I had to write the I was gonna say the damn book I guess I just did the reason I wrote the book is because I don't want everybody when they come up to that line to say I can't cross it you don't have to but I want you to understand that it is possible for some people to cross it successful and and I guess the final thing that I would tell your listeners is that if you step across the line get ready for stuff to work differently the physics in the world of innovation stacks and Entrepreneurship is absolutely different we talked about price a little bit but there are dozens of other examples and you should understand that well you should understand not to make the mistakes I made when I was a young entrepreneur I would have a problem and I would call my friend who had a very successful company and I would say how did you solve this problem and she would tell me oh Jim I did this and so I go

30:04 back to my compan oh thank God and I did that and it blow up in my face and the reason was I was copying from a different world where the physics worked differently in the world of business There are rules and practices that have been well proven and they work if you take those same rules and you move them into the world of innovation and Entrepreneurship often times they work backwards and that was a real revelation and actually a revelation that I didn't fully appreciate until I finished the research for the book and I was like oh my god what have I doing for the last 20 years it just woke me up and I was like oh at least I now respect the fact that they're different behaviors and they're appropriate in different circumstances those are the three takeaways Jim this has been fascinating thank you so much I really enjoyed your book The Innovation stack and I look forward to seeing you in person likewise ly it be a pleas to

30:58 meet in person and nothing wrong with zoom but boy let's get together if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that three takeaways decom is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaway.com

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#64 How to Build an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time: Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey"?

Lynn Tommen (Host), Jim McKelvey (Guest).

What is "#64 How to Build an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time: Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey" about?

Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, shares insights into entrepreneurship, highlighting the serendipitous origins of Square and his collaboration with Jack Dorsey. He discusses the importance of innovative thinking, the strategy of embracing inaction when necessary, and offers key takeaways from his own experiences in building a successful business that has significantly disrupted the payment…

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

5 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including The Innovation Stack, Federal Reserve, Invisibly, LaunchCode, Apple Inc.. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#64 How to Build an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time: Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey"?

The episode runs 31 min; the transcript is about 5,918 words in 34 timestamped sections.

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