Jim McKelvey

Co-Founder of Square.

COFOUNDER & CEO, INVISIBLY. FOUNDER, LAUNCH CODE.

Jim McKelvey speaker, keynote, square, conferencias

Named one of Inc. Magazine´s "15 entrepreneurs to watch"

English
Digital and Social Media · Futurist and Technology · Innovation and Creativity

Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of Square, a mobile payment platform that changed the world. A revolutionary service that allows anyone to accept credit cards anywhere. Square is based on hardware, created by McKelvey and Jack Dorsey, that connects to mobile devices, making it possible to make card payments anywhere through them.

 

So far, the Square company has built a business of over 2,500 employees and is currently valued at $30B.

 

After founding Square, Jim McKelvey created LaunchCode, a nonprofit organization, which makes it possible for anyone to learn to code and get a full-time job in less than six months, for free. LaunchCode is an open model that can be freely copied by anyone and aims to solve the global shortage of programmers.

Likewise, Jim Mckelvey is co-founder (with Peter Thiel) and CEO of Invisibly, a company that tries to build a future in which people can be in control of their data and their attention is not manipulated or directed. A system whose design puts people first and sets a new ethical and efficient benchmark for every company in the big data space.

His book, “The Innovation Stack” is an exciting business narrative that is much bigger than the Square story. It is a first-person look into the world of entrepreneurship and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unresolved issues.

On the other hand, Jim McKelvey is recognized in some circles as an author and master glass artist. His work “The Art of Fire” is the most widely read text in the world on this subject. His industrial design work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

 

His glass studio, Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis, is one of the leading centers of glassblowing arts in the United States.

 

In his talks, Jim McKelvey combines his energy and his experience working with diverse executives and companies to offer all audience members real solutions to real business problems. The main theme of it is the future of mobile payments, online advertising and strategic thinking around innovation.

Conferences

The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time.

Just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product, marketed it aggressively, and undercut Square on price. For most ordinary startups, this would have spelled the end. Instead, less than a year later, Amazon was in retreat and soon discontinued its service. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet?

Square co-founder Jim McKelvey reveals the strategy that led to the company’s success: the Innovation Stack.

McKelvey's fascinating and humorous stories of Square's early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable.

The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems--one crazy idea at a time.

The future of mobile payments and online advertising.

Strategic thinking.

Online security and privacy.

Customer-Driven Innovation.

Reinventing an industry.

Connecting the sciences and arts with the world of business.

Books

The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time.

From the cofounder of Square, an inspiring and entertaining account of what it means to be a true entrepreneur and what it takes to build a resilient, world-changing company

In 2009, a St. Louis glassblowing artist and recovering computer scientist named Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn't accept American Express cards. Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. With no expertise or experience in the world of payments, they approached the problem of credit cards with a new perspective, questioning the industry's assumptions, experimenting and innovating their way through early challenges, and achieving widespread adoption from merchants small and large.

But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product, marketed it aggressively, and undercut Square on price. For most ordinary startups, this would have spelled the end. Instead, less than a year later, Amazon was in retreat and soon discontinued its service. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet? Was it just luck? These questions motivated McKelvey to study what Square had done differently from all the other companies Amazon had killed. He eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack.

McKelvey's fascinating and humorous stories of Square's early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable.

The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems--one crazy idea at a time.

The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time.

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