#59, Jim McKelvey, Co-Founder of Block (formerly Square)— Building a team of missionaries, what true innovation takes, and the importance of timing

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Startup to Grown up, the podcast. My name is Alyssa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. Welcome to From Startup to Grownup. My guest today is Jim McKelvey. Jim is pretty eclectic. He's a glassblower, he's the chair of the fed Reserve of St. Louis, and he's the co founder along with Jack Dorsey of Block, formerly called Square. Jim is also the author of a pretty great book, the Innovation Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time. Jim and I had an amazing conversation and we covered quite a bit, including the founding insight of Square, how he learned about the payments business, and the surprising tactics Square used to counter Amazon's attack. We discussed Jim's framework for innovation, when you should copy and when you should innovate, and why true entrepreneurs tend to feel alone. We also talk about the difficulties of founding a startup, including the panic attacks Jim got on a regular basis while he was founding Square, and how he handles and counteracts his imposter syndrome. This is a fantastic conversation and you're going to love it. So please enjoy this great conversation with Jim McKelvey, co founder of Square, now called Block. Jim, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Alyssa, I'm so excited to have you here. My goodness, I want to dive right in. So, Jim, people who don't know you don't realize that you are a glassblower, that you are the chair of the Federal Reserve, and that you're the co founder of Square Block, which is formerly known as Square. And so I want to just give you that as a. As a multifaceted introduction.

Some people only know me as a glassblower. I mean, the people in my studio are kind of like, what's this other stuff I know? Although they kind of know Square now because they all use it.

Right? I can imagine. The thing is, and I want to get into all the things, but like, in all the research I did about you, I actually don't even know how you became a glassblower. I don't understand that.

How did you.

Money.

I needed money.

Okay.

I. I was a. I graduated from college, I took a job with a startup before it was cool and before startups were well funded, my startup was run by a guy who was a crook. And I quit without having another means to support myself. So I woke up one morning and I was like, how Am I going to pay the rent? And I didn't have that many skills that were marketable at the time. I mean, I had a degree in computer programming or computer science, but there was not this huge demand. So I thought, well, actually I'd taken some glassblowing classes in college.

Because you were just interested?

Yeah, just for fun. And then I thought, well, maybe I could make work and sell it. And I soon discovered that the answer was no. My work was terrible, but it's amazing how quickly you can learn a skill. So I've always said it doesn't matter what the skill is. If you had to be a banjo player in a month, you would be pretty damn good if that's the way you fed yourself. Like, so I just woke up one morning, I was like, all right, I've got nothing preparing me for this, but I better be an artist and I better be a good artist, which to me didn't mean making good art, it meant selling enough to pay the rent. So it was commercial success that I was looking for, not some sort of artistic outlet.

I see. Okay.

I was a mercenary.

Well, I think everyone glorifies a starving artist.

Look, I eat a lot.

You're not starving.

I need a lot of food, so, yeah, I don't want to starve.

Although, listeners, he is thin.

I am thin. I am thin and I'm always thinking about food.

That's interesting.

Yeah, always.

So you were a glassblower and you had a startup and this guy named Jack was your intern.

He was my intern at the company.

Tell us about Jack. Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey was my intern. Hired him when he was 15 years old. A company that actually I still to this day own. Mira Digital Publishing, was a early competitor to Adobe Acrobat, so you can imagine how well that went. And then Jack was a high school kid. We met him because we were buying chocolate covered coffee beans from his mother who ran a coffee shop.

That was your drug of choice.

That was. Well, you know, Ridland wasn't widely available then and, you know, method. Despite the, you know, rumors about Missouri, we were not a meth capital back then. So if you wanted to stay awake, Marcia Dorsey sold us some pretty good stuff. And we met our son and we hired him and he was fantastic. So Jack and I, you know, became sort of friends. And then years later, when they kicked him out of Twitter, the first time he came back to St. Louis and asked me to start a company with him, which was sort of weird because I would have expected him to ask somebody in Silicon Valley. Yeah, But I don't think he trusted those people. There's. There's something about the Midwest ethic that, you know, there's a lot more permanence to relationships. So I don't know. I honestly don't know why Jack asked me.

But you never asked him?

No.

It seemed inappropriate, so he just said, let's start. He just came back after Twitter and said, let's start a company together. And then you were searching out what you wanted to start a company around?

Yes. So we'd chosen the idea of a mobile device. So the iPhone had just been released, and we were going to make something for the iPhone, but we didn't know what, and we'd already hired our first programmer. And then I went back to St. Louis to pack up my stuff and was in my studio trying to sell a piece of glass at the last minute before I got out of town to a lady who only had an American Express card. And I don't take Amex at my studio. So I was like, well, don't you have a visa or MasterCard? She's like, no, I don't. I guess I can't buy this thing. And she was actually Panamanian. It was a phone order. And I was so upset because I was about to unload this really expensive and pretty ugly piece of glass that I'd had sitting on the shelf for several years, and I lost the sale. And so I called Jack on my iPhone and I said, man, we should turn my iPhone into a credit card reader so I never lose another sale. That was the whole idea for Square. That was the. You know, the. The end result was, could we make this thing into a credit card reader? Because my iPhone magically transformed into anything that I wanted it to be. It became a book, it became a map, it became a tv, but it didn't become a credit card machine. And that's what I wanted to do. So that's how Square started.

Amazing. You do have this book. It's called the Innovation Stack. Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time. And there is a passage in this book that's so good that I interrupted my boyfriend.

Oh, my God.

To read it to him.

Oh, God. Oh. Meet Bob.

Brings us to Bob.

Bob.

Bob is an important character in the Square story. You go on to say how not just you are losing sales, but Bob and, like, and his ilk can't even make a living as a small merchant. So talk more about Bob, but also the data that you uncovered about small merchants.

So Bob was a friend of Mine. And in addition to driving this Beater Corsica, he sometimes had to live in the back of the thing. And that's kind of heartbreaking because Bob and I were both glassblowers, and I was actually making a pretty good living as a glassblower. And Bob is a better glassblower than me. I've said this publicly for years, but, like, his stuff is better than my stuff. It's more creative. It's just. I mean, it's just better. And so you would think that he would be able to earn at least as much money as I was earning with a better skill set. But in fact, no. I made a bunch of money blowing glass and he didn't. And the reason was Bob's kind of a weirdo and he doesn't get along with bankers. And he once cut off his ankle bracelet because it was itchy. He's sort of a goofball, but he shouldn't be prevented from making a living just because he was a goofball. But if you're a goofball and you can't deal with banks, then you can't take credit cards. And if you can't take credit cards and you sell something as useless as glass art, then, well, good luck getting cash. So people don't carry that much cash anymore. They don't carry checks. And so Bob was really sort of the poster child for Square in my mind. As a matter of fact, there was a photo of his beater 92 Corsica on my desktop when we were starting the company, because he was the inspiration, and it was to make a system that worked for Bob. Making a system that worked for me was sort of the original team goal. But I'm fairly good with bankers. Like, I'm actually now on the Federal Reserve.

I know.

So I'm wearing a. You're one of them, you know. Yeah. So I get along with bankers just fine, but Bob doesn't. And so the question is, could we build a system that, like, anybody could use? And by anybody, I meant my buddy who was living in the back of his car.

Right. I love that and I love how that was, like your founding insight on this. I think what I appreciated about your story is that you dove into it and found out the data and the sort of exploitation of small merchants. And also you went after it. As in, we are not going to hire experts to tell us about a broken system. We're going to figure it out ourselves.

Oh, yeah.

So talk about all those things.

So the first thing to know is that neither Jack nor I knew Anything about payments.

Right.

Except that I was frustrated. Jack wasn't even frustrated because he had never been a merchant. He'd worked for people, but he'd never literally sold things directly. But I was deeply frustrated and deeply ignorant. And so we thought, oh, this will be easy to build. And then we discovered that, no, no, no. The system was sort of not just rigged, but designed to prevent people like us from doing what we wanted to do. And so we built the system. Took us three weeks. We had a completely illegal, hacked together system that would read your credit card and put the money in my bank account. Like that was this thing. And in doing so, it broke 17 laws. Incredible. Okay. Like, I stopped counting at 17. It may actually been more. But there were so many rules against what we were doing that it was pretty clear that the industry specifically forbade what we were doing. And then the question was, should we quit? And the answer was, well, no, because what we're building seems reasonable. It seems reasonable that I, as a small merchant, should be able to get paid just like a big guy does. Like, it seems reasonable that I should have the tools at my disposal that big people have at their disposal. And that just seemed reasonable. So we just kept running towards that end. And it took us a year and a half to get either compliant with those 17 laws or in some cases, get them changed. So it was not clear that Square would ever exist.

Yeah.

And that was sort of a big risk. And I really respect the founding team because there was no guarantee that it was going to work because we could point to things that were specifically saying we couldn't do what we were doing.

Right.

And as far as industry experts, which was the other part of your question, they were telling us it was impossible or stupid or. Or both. So there was this one dude who ran a company called Veriphone and Verifone still around, but he's not. But he took me out to dinner once and downed a couple of martinis and then for like two hours told me I was an idiot for trying to serve the riff raff. The people who, if they defaulted, you couldn't sue. The people who were so small that, you know, they weren't worth anything. And it was a sort of deeply offensive, but. But he was running a $4 billion company and I had this startup, so I listened to him, but I got pretty pissed. But we didn't hire experts because actually, that's not true. We hired one expert and his advice was so laughably bad that we said never again. Everything he said we should do, we Ended up just doing the opposite. And that turned out to work. But, like, why pay for that advice?

Yeah, exactly. You can feel it yourself. So I think that's when, you know, as you sort of pulling this all together, I guess I am curious. When did you realize this is actually gonna work?

The moment hit me when I was in New Orleans and a taxi driver just at random started pitching me on square because he could take credit cards for the first time in his life.

Wow.

So I'm in the back of this taxi, and this guy's telling me, he's like, I could take a credit card. He's like, you can pay me with a credit card. He's like, I got this thing. It's fantastic. And. And he was telling me about score. And I was like, oh, well, do tell. You know, and so you know how, like, when you first meet somebody, there's that little period of time where you can get away with not being truthful, and then after a while, you have to just sort of go with the lie. Well, that was it. I. I had, like, a minute where I could have said, hey, I'm the guy that invented that. And I didn't. So then I had to just play along. And he was getting most of it wrong. He was saying. He was like, oh, it's totally free. And I was like, no, actually not. We take a discount on the his, and you don't have to do that. And I was like, well, that's actually not true either, you know, but he had the spirit, right? And he was so enthusiastic. And this was a random occurrence in a city that I almost never been to. And I thought, oh, my God, this is. This is going to be significant.

Yeah. Because you had your customer right there singing your praises, even though they're getting it all wrong.

Yeah. I mean, he got the main things right. You know, red credit cards. And it was basically free to sign up.

Yeah, yeah.

Still is today.

Yeah. Tell me about the $8 million counteroffer.

The $8 million counteroffer.

You had a guy who came to join you and his company. Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. So we had. We somehow upset the Google hierarchy when we were hiring engineers and people would want to come work for us for some reason. And we were, you know, we were offering, like, $100,000 of salary and equivalent amount of stock, and that was our typical offer to an engineer. And Google got sick of us poaching their engineers. So we interviewed one guy and made him an offer, and Google counter offered $8 million. Eight. Like it was now. It was not 8 million into the lump sum. It was 2 million a year for four years. Yeah, but still, like, that adds up to $8 million. And. And this guy didn't take it like, he turned down an $8 million offer. Now, it turns out in his case, it was actually financially rational because the Square stock has done so well that, yeah, he's probably fine, but I never found out why he did it because it just seemed insane. And of course, you know, I'm not going to ask him because, like, what the hell are you doing, Stan? Like, I mean, I can't do that. But, yeah, it was an $8 million counteroffer, which just goes to show how much money these platforms make. Like, if you own Search or, you know, Social or some sort of vertical where you're just this market dominator. Yeah, there's a lot of money there.

Yeah, for sure. And you say he made a rational decision. That's true. From expected value. But in that moment, you were how big?

No, I thought his decision was crazy. Like, there was no way at that time that that was an economically rational decision, given the odds of Square succeeding the way it did.

Right.

It turned out, in hindsight to be a good call. But that's like, you know, somebody playing the Powerball. Right, Right. You can. The odds are not in favor. You can still win, but the odds are not in your favor.

Yeah.

So I was amazed. But the reason I use that story is that people didn't work for Square for money. They worked for Square because we were on this mission to empower small business people. And, you know, I don't know why this person did it, but we had a lot of people who said, you know, I remember my dad or my mom or my uncle having a small business and getting the shaft.

Yeah.

Or not being able to sell their stuff. Like, there were a lot of people who were deeply passionate about what they were doing because either, you know, they personally or a family member had been through some trauma where, you know, they were shut out. And I don't know if you're an insider or an outsider. I think everybody's sort of an outsider at some point in their lives, and it's just a very angry, lonely feeling, and that motivates people to fix that. And so that's sort of one of the things that we latched onto was this deep spirit in our team, and they did amazing things.

Yeah. So they were real missionaries. And you hired, it sounds like, for that missionary something that we talked about. When we saw each other that lunch a few weeks ago, is this idea of, like, culture. Like, people talk about the culture of innovation, and I think that's, like, a lot of platitudes and, like, a lot of words, and people say, oh, we like failure, but they don't really like failure.

No, most people don't.

I know. So. So. But you. It sounds like you really cultivated a culture of people who were very passionate about what you were building and were missionaries for it.

Well, yeah. I mean, the culture of embracing failure is just baked into a company that's illegal to start.

Yeah.

Right. So, like, anyone who joins that team, and we were very upfront about the hurdles that were ahead of us, Anyone that joined that early team pretty much was hoping for a miracle, that the law would change, you know, that the rules that MasterCard and Visa had would be somehow rewritten for us.

Yeah.

So it was pretty easy to get supportive employees because we didn't pay that much. And. And we had this sort of crazy impediment that everyone was aware of. And so if you joined that team, you were a special person. Yeah, yeah. So it's these. And the culture of innovation is. It's sort of baked in. Like, we didn't have any posters around the office saying, oh, be innovative or think for yourself or, you know, try fast and break stuff and disruption. Yeah. All that crap. None of that. We were just working on a problem that was so difficult that people sort of were prepared for the fight. And that culture then permeated and people were willing to try something. When you don't know what the solution is, there's this culture that bubbles up around, well, let's try something else. Let's try something else. Let's try something else. And that was just in the water at square.

Yeah. Is there an example of when a specific example where everybody had to be like, well, that's not gonna work. Well, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. And then you kept trying and iterating.

Oh, my God, there were dozens.

Yeah.

But you know, the one I was. I was responsible for the hardware.

Yeah.

So I was a guy that built all the reader. And the reason it's so small and the reason it is square and the reason it had the spring design. Like, I did all that stuff initially, you know, basically by myself, but then eventually with a team of, you know, factories in China. But the idea was very simple. And that was. I had to read a mag Stripe fast. So I had this guy, Sam Nguyen, who was a brilliant Programmer. Actually, I had lunch with him this morning. And yes, it was lunch and yes, it was in the morning.

I was wondering.

But he coded it and it was kind of Sam and me and a couple other people, but very, very small team. And we just built and built and built until we found something that worked. And what we were doing was really a hack because we were not using the dock connector, the iPhone. We were using the microphone port, which was, you know, that was pretty offensive to Apple because they charged money to use the dock connector and the microphone port. Well, you know, they never expected their device to be, you know, sort of connected through that to anything but their headset. So doing that was pretty radical. And their hardware wasn't designed for it. So we had an engineer around all these, you know, like, DC blocking filters and crazy stuff that you put in an audio signal and you don't put in a, you know, an electrical signal. But that spirit was just, go, go, go, go, go. And. And, you know, move fast. Because if you're doing something that doesn't necessarily have a high degree of success, then you better take a lot of shots. So we would cycle daily. You know, to this day, when I work on a project, like, I'm looking for daily shots on goal, if it's. If, if. If in fact we're doing something truly novel.

Right?

Yeah.

Right. So, okay, so you had built this, you know, beautiful card reader, and you had people and you had. You were doing something illegal. Right. You're trying to. Either trying to get laws changed or whatever. Meeting with visa, we didn't MasterCard. And then it was all kind of working. And you had people joining even though they were counteroffered. And then big. I think it would be proof for you that it was working because big, bad Amazon came after you.

Yes.

Tell us what that was like.

Yes. As bad as is to have Google make an $8 million counteroffer to somebody you're trying to hire. Way worse is Amazon announced a competitive product that's 30% cheaper under the Amazon brand name.

Yeah.

And when they did that.

And what year was this?

This was 2014.

Yeah.

And it was just chilling. We were a startup. We were a successful startup. We were still a startup and we were growing like crazy. But Amazon, when they do that to a startup, always wins. And that was 100% true back in 2014 when Amazon did this to us and we looked at our options and there were very few, because, of course, we're not Amazon. We don't have their scale or their servers or their talent. Or their brand name. We don't have a listening device in everybody's home. We just don't compete very well head to head with Amazon. And then on top of this, they were undercutting our price and there weren't too many moves we could make. So we did nothing. It wasn't actually, I was on a Fed call today and the discussion was, should we do nothing or should we do nothing? And our decision was to do nothing. We chose to not do something. We could have done it. So we did nothing aggressively. We aggressively did nothing against Amazon and that was sort of our only option that we think of. So we basically ignored the most vicious competitor in the world. And, and, and it worked. So the miracle, the reason I'm sitting here, the reason there's a book, the reason all this stuff is because that strategy was successful. And then the question is why? What the hell happened? Like startups don't beat Amazon. And I had statistical proof to support that. And the answer drove me nuts for probably about three years. I started well first I was very happy we won. And by the way, just as a not to knock Amazon, because I am selling a book on Amazon, they were really cool when they got out of the market because they mailed a square reader to all their customers. They said, we're done. Use square.

Yeah.

So they not only gave us a clear market, but they gave us all their customers.

Right.

They just handed them over.

That is amazing.

That was really cool. Yeah. So, you know, there's no malice for me towards Amazon, but I still remember how chilling it was to have to compete with such a great company. And so afterwards, first relief and then secondly this knowing question of why. Yeah, like what happened?

Yeah.

And so that set me on a two year research quest where I was looking for another company that had been through the same thing and I couldn't find any examples in Silicon Valley. So I started going back in time and I started doing historical research on companies that had survived a vicious attack when they were small and defenseless. And you know, this is like these nature videos where, you know, some lion attacks a squirrel and squirrel's mother, like just kicks the lions out. Like, like that's what it feel felt like. Maybe not a squirrel, but you know, there's a honey badger or two that's taken out a lion.

And you know, I mean, lions don't attack squirrels, but.

Okay, okay, yeah, they're geographically. I'm sorry, they do in the zoo. You know, I don't know. That's right. I'm from St. Louis. We have. We mix our lions and squirrels. But the point is, you're not expecting the squirrel to win, Right? Your money is on the lion. 100. And so, you know, your money should be on this big, big thing that's attacking this little, tiny thing. And so I studied all the little, tiny things at one.

Yeah.

And I saw this weird pattern, and I was like, oh, my God. This was not an accident. Like, this was not sort of. We got lucky. It was like, oh, we harnessed this very rare, but very repeatable, powerful pattern. And. And. And then. And that was it. And I was done. And I was like, okay, that's cool. But then I. And I'm a scientist by training, so I can't just let myself relax. When I think I've solved a problem, I have to ask, why, you know, what's the mechanism of action? Like, what happened? And so all the people that I studied were dead, right? So I couldn't go ask any of them, except for Herb Kelleher, and he was the founder of Southwest Airlines. So I flew down. He was very generous with his time. I flew down and sat down with Herb for an afternoon, and I said, sir, I know you don't think your airline is like, my payments company, but I think we have a lot of things in common. And I explained to him this thesis of what happens when you are basically forced to invent everything on your own as opposed to copying what everybody else is doing, which was the case of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines, even though they're sort of in a commodity business, like air travel, they weren't allowed to fly the routes that other carriers were allowed. They were prohibited by the government for that. They were prohibited by, you know, certain union rules and certain competitive rules, and, like, they were just blocked from all sorts of stuff. So they had to engineer and invent around it, just like you guys. Just like us. Yeah. And it was the same sort of brutal start, but Southwest became the dominant carrier in the United States, the most profitable airline in the United States. The biggest airline in the United States. They basically kicked everybody's ass. And I was sitting there talking to the guy who did it, and Herb started to get very excited, and he's like, well, how are you going to tell the world about this? And I was like, oh, I just got a homework assignment from one of my idols. There are very few people I idolize, but Herb Keller, he's the only person I've ever asked for an autograph in my life. I've asked for one and only one autograph. And that was Herb Kelleher. And I had him sign a pack of his cigarettes because he smoked a pack and a half of cool menthols during our meeting. And I was just blown away. But that's why the book exists, because Herb wanted me to tell the world.

I love that, but I love the non PC right of the cigarette box.

But.

So tell us. So that's really the innovation stack.

That's the innovation stack.

And I read the book and what I came away with is actually the innovation stack is like a mindset. But I want to hear from you what you're trying to tell the world. Like, what are the insights that people need to know?

You probably understood it at a deeper level than most do. So full disclosure on the book. I launched in the middle of pandemic. The day the pandemic shut the world down was the day my book dropped. And there was no way to delay it by a week or it was just. It was the worst book launch in, in Random House history. But it's had this weird popular following among entrepreneurs and people who've started businesses and people who have, have lived there. Because it tells the other part of the story. Because when I started to write this book, there weren't any. There wasn't even language in the English language to describe the phenomenon that I was describing. It was such an under discussed thing. And so there's this cult following of people who are, you know, really, they get it. But there are very few people like you who I think understand that it's not this sort of cult of personality or sort of, you know, make you feel good book. It's this thing that explains how there's this thing called innovation, which very much like a survival instinct is a last resort. Okay? So like, you don't look like somebody who would fight. You don't look like you get into a lot of fights.

I don't get a lot of fights.

No, you're like, you wouldn't wear those earrings if you did.

Exactly.

You know, you're too vulnerable. But like.

And my shoes.

But like, if you were attacked, you would fight back. Like if somebody threatened you, there would be this, you know, primal response. And we all have that. Okay. It's the same thing with innovation. Everyone's like, oh, you should be more innovative. No, you shouldn't. Innovation is stupid, okay? And if you want to be innovative, go home tonight and eat something that humans have never eaten before. Like just on your way home, find some branch of a tree or some twig or something, something on the Street. I don't care what it is, like pick it up and eat it. Right? That's innovation. All right, Try it. Maybe it's great, especially if you're the first person in, you know, human history to put this thing in your mouth and swallow. Might be fantastic, right?

But probably it sucks.

Likely it will not be okay. So innovation for innovation's sake I think is stupid, but as a last resort, it's necessary. And so my book's message to the world was that, look, these, these, these superheroes, these people like Herb Kelleher, these people who I've always admired throughout my life, they're normal folk who just got a hold of this very weird but very powerful, you know, sort of tool that then allowed them with this tool to build these massive world changing organizations. And so my point is, okay, if you, if you actually want to set down that path intentionally. So Jack and I did it unintentionally, like we didn't know we were doing. We figured out afterwards, but only because I was answering the Amazon question. If Amazon hadn't attacked us, I never would have asked a question would we wouldn't be sitting here. But this, this process is possible for everybody. And if you wanted to pursue it specifically, then the book is a good guide. But more than that, and this is the reason I really wrote it, I've seen so many people who are on the path to innovation quit early. And the most heartbreaking thing about the book was that I gave an advanced copy to a dude who lives in New York and has a picture on his wall that's worth more than everything that I own in the world. And this is still true today because it's a Rothko. And I know how much Rothko's are worth. And I know how much all my stuff, all my houses, a couple of cars, like a Beater 62 Mooney airplane. I could sell everything at full retail and still not have my stuff worth as much as that one painting on his wall. Okay, so this guy is not a failure. And he was talking to me about his, about the book. And he said, jim, it made me sad to read your book because when I was 20 years younger, I had a company that was doing exactly this and we quit because it got so hard and all the things that I described were happening to him. You know, your friends don't hate you, but they want you to be safe. So they'll tell you, you know, Alyssa, don't do that. Don't go there. Like, just he, he quit early on something that could have Been transformative for the world. He just gave up. Now he did something else and bought a Roth going, he's fine. Don't feel sorry for him. But the point is, he, if he'd had this knowledge, told me he wouldn't have quit. And that's what I want the book to do. Like, I want the book. Read the book and then forget about it. Like, you don't even have to tweet about it. I don't care. But just keep that message in your brain and then go through life. And then one of these days, you're going to find yourself maybe in a situation where humanity has not solved a problem. And you say, well, I think I could solve this problem. And you're going to set down this path where you can't go look up a YouTube video or hire some expert to tell you what the solution is. And in that case, it's going to feel really weird. And it will hopefully, if you've read my book, feel a little less weird. Or maybe it's like, I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. We have lousy weather. It gets, you know, below zero in the wintertime, it gets above 100 in the summertime, so. But I'm okay with that because I grew up with it. I expect it to be lousy weather, you know, and the spring and fall are wonderful, but I don't feel like I'm a San Diegan. You take a San Diegan who's used to 72 and low humidity year round, and you bring them to St. Louis, they're crying. So my book makes you a hearty Midwestern in your approach to the unpleasantness that goes with doing something new.

Yes. Very inspiring. I love. I love your passion. I would just add, it makes you feel like you're not so alone. I think one issue with entrepreneurs is that if they don't have the right community, you know, Paul Graham in one of his essays said, you, you have to surround entrepreneurs, other entrepreneurs, because otherwise they will just be toiling in the wilderness and not know that they can make it despite all these issues.

Is that how you felt? Cause, I mean, I wrote the thing. I have no feeling. Oh, you mean.

You mean.

When I read the.

I felt not so long. I felt okay. I felt personally like I have other. My innovative ideas. And it made me feel kind of community, like this community around, like, yes, these things are hard, and they're supposed to be hard, and you gotta keep kind of inventing your way out of it. I also thought that the story resonates with so Many entrepreneurs, because, like, what you were doing was illegal.

So that's a good start.

Yeah, it doesn't get much more dire than that, you know, and I have a number of clients who, when they started their businesses and also, you know, just colleagues and friends, what they were doing was illegal. So it's very much like, until you're able to invent something that changes the game, if you will, then you don't know it's possible. And so when you have like stories like this and people around you like this, and you know, I think books are like one way, one side of conversations with somebody who's been through it before. And I think that helps you realize, oh, other people have been through this tragedy before.

Yeah, the worst. Well, not the worst thing about being under duress is feeling like you're the only person under duress.

Right.

Like it makes it doubly bad. So, yeah, you read, read the book and hopefully you'll realize that many of us have been there. And also that if you get through it, you end up with this massive advantage that nobody else has. Like the whole point of the innovation stack, and the reason I coined the term innovation stack, is that if your company has an innovation stack, it'll survive an attack by Amazon. Like, it'll survive an attack by the federal government, It'll survive an attack by all the air carriers colluding together to block your fuel pumps access, which what happened in Southwest, like, it'll survive a attack by the Chinese. The Chinese tried to copy Ikea and failed miserably again and again. I mean, it's this magical, protective thing.

Right. Like a whole bunch of earned secrets.

It is. And they relate together in a way that's hard to understand if you've never built it, and actually impossible to understand even if you have because it's too complicated. But I worked through the math in one of the chapters, but the permutations when you start doing new things in series, in, in parallel is just profound and it's amazingly powerful.

Yeah.

So I want more people to have this power because I want more problems to be solved. And look, nothing against you doing what everybody else has proven works, but that's not interesting. The world has some unsolved problems. Like, whoever gets fusion working is going to save this planet and there are going to be a hundred separate innovations. It's going to have to be like, we know it's possible. There's the sun up there proving it, you know, but can we, can we replicate? Can we do this? Like, how do we do that? They're going to need 100 plus innovation stack.

Right.

And hopefully human. Human. You know, humanity gets there. And I want more people on this path.

I love that. But it takes a toll. And so the toll it took on you is that you got panic attacks. I mean, one thing you say in the book is, right feels early. We're talking about timing in a second.

Timing.

We're talking about timing and glassblowing in a second. But, like, the notion of the right time is everything and right feels early. And that you yourself actually had to stop the car because you thought you were having a heart attack. What was going on with you that was driving that anxiety?

Yeah. So first of all, listen to the timing from a man who launched his three work, three year, three years of work on the day the pandemic shut down the world. Okay? So. So just there's a little asterisk whenever I give advice on timing. And I did write a chapter on timing because I believe it's super important.

You also talked about luck, so.

And I talk about luck and all this stuff. I try to be very honest about, you know, what I did right and what I got lucky about. But you never really know. But I've certainly been very lucky. I just don't know what it's lucky. But timing.

We're gonna talk about your panic attacks.

Oh, timing and the panic attacks. So the panic attacks were caused because I was always feeling like my little thing was gonna die. It was always because we weren't legal. We had all these problems. We had 12 different things that didn't work simultaneously. And then God bless the Square team. But there were some anachronists in there, like the people who sign up to build things that have never been built before. These people don't sit in their cubicles and behave. Not that we had any cubicles, but, like, it was a little bit of chaos. And there was Jack and me up there, you know, sort of working with them. It got to me. And I at many occasions had these panic attacks, you know, as one does.

Yeah.

And since then, they have stopped. But.

But did you ever analyze it? Did you ever think, like, all right, what if it fails? You know, so what? I go back to glassblowing full time, which I'm sort of still doing. Yeah.

So I was fine.

What is the problem?

So I was fine personally.

Yeah.

I had this epiphany when I was way before square that I was already rich because I had more money than would change my life. Like, I lived where I wanted to live. I did what I wanted to do, like, the only thing that money would do would be I would buy a faster plane than the plane that I was flying. Like, I haven't. I have a 1966 Mooney M20, which is a $23,000 plane. When I bought it, it was 23 grand less than your car or. You don't. You live in New York.

You don't exactly.

But, I mean, like, if you had a car, it would be worth twice as much as my plane. Yeah, right. And that's what I lived. That's how I live, did everything I wanted to do. And I realized at some point that more money didn't change anything. So actually, now I'm rich and I have a faster plane, and I still have the old plane. I still have the Mooney because I love it, and it's a great little plane, and I got one that's a little faster. So what? Big deal. Doesn't matter. I have changed so little as far with the money. But. But that's. That was this realization that brought with me to Square, which was that I was already a very rich man.

Yeah, you were already all set.

Well, because I didn't. I was cheap.

Yeah, no, you didn't need all that much. You didn't have a lot of, like, possessions that you needed. But what was the pressure that was saying to you, like, oh, it best to work. What if we. What if we don't make it? What if we don't make it?

Because I deeply cared about the problem. Like, my friend was sleeping in his car. Like, I was losing sales. My. I felt ripped off. I felt like I was bullied by the banks and by the credit cards and by the ISOs, and, you know, just. There's this scummy ecosystem of people that prey on small businesses because small businesses are too busy to fight back. Maybe they even want to fight back, but you don't have the time to do that. Right. And I wanted to just, like, put my thumb in the eye of the people who've been messing with me and the other artists for, God, 15 years. So that was, you know, that was a deep sort of personal vendetta. And I cared about it, and I cared about, you know, my friends. And so I took it personally. And I think a lot of the other people that worked at Square took it personally, too, because they wouldn't have worked that hard if for just the money. Yeah, right. And so we had this. We had this sort of crazy, a warrior spirit, which is actually not my phrase. That was what Herb Kellehert described the warrior spirit of Southwest Airlines, which was literally about to go bankrupt any day if the pilots didn't pick up the litter in the plane and the flight attendants didn't wear go go boots and like, they had a bunch of stuff that they tried to keep their plane flying.

Yeah, yeah. You know, one thing you talked about, the culture of Southwest is compared to the culture of that other airline. Ted.

Oh, Ted.

Yeah, that like, like, again, sort of the innovation stack. Like Southwest had earned their right to, you know, be, be in the air as a low cost carrier. People flock to them. Whereas Ted just kind of tried to cut and paste this low price, you know, moniker on it. That's why it didn't work.

Yeah. So try something without knowing what you're doing and you know, go like, I see these people like, well, that's easy, you know. You know, I used to hear this with, you know, hip hop. Like, my people, some of my friends are like, well, well, they're just rhyming. They're not singing. Yeah. You never tried. You try, like, try it, try it. Like, you show off, dude. Right? Here's a mic. Go for it. Right? Yeah. You know, but if you look at something and you're just trying to copy what some other expert is doing, you will almost come up with a very poor replication of what you're doing. If what you're doing is because you deeply understand why you're doing every single step, your execution is way more sure footed. And so when Ted copied Southwest. So Ted was the end. Well, Ted, the joke was it stood for the end of United. Right. But Ted was United Airlines effort to displace Southwest. And United was the second largest carrier in the country. They were rich. They knew Southwest for 20 years. They'd been competing with for two decades. So they clearly knew the airline industry from the inside, probably in some ways better than Southwest. But what they didn't know was why Southwest was doing what they were doing. They thought, oh, these guys are just fun. Or oh, no, it actually turns out that that makes a difference. But they didn't know why, because they were just copying Southwest, where Southwest knew the stuff that they were doing that was superfluous and knew the stuff they were doing that was important.

Yeah.

And maybe Southwest had some tricks the United never figured out. But Ted crashed and burned.

Yeah. To use a metaphor. Yes, to use an airline metaphor. Well, I want to talk about timing, because actually, when you and I saw each other that lunch, you talked to me about timing, and I was like, what? We need to talk about this on the podcast.

Timing, Timing, Timing, Timing. I love timing.

Yeah. Because what I asked you was, what did you as a glassblower learn that like, you know, helped you as an entrepreneur? And you said timing. So explain that.

So Lino Taglia Pietra is the best glassblower in the world, widely acknowledged as such, and just an amazing guy. And 20 years ago now I got to take a class from him. And I had been blowing glass for 15 years at the time. So I studied with the master. And his class was weird because you were only allowed to ask one question in a two week class. And so students spent a lot of time formulating their questions. And the questions were always like, how do you make this crazy thing happen with glass? And Lino would always do a demonstration to show how, in fact, he was the best in the world and could make the glass do whatever he wanted anytime. And it was incredible to watch these demos. And actually a lot of them are on YouTube now, so you want to check it out? Lino Taglia Pietra. But what I did, which was crazy, I asked a really basic question to the master because I had been having trouble putting a foot on a Bowl for 15 years. And it's a very simple move. It's something that every beginning glassblower knows how to do. And I was never comfortable with it, and I could never get comfortable with it. I always get stressed out when I try to do this move. And so I asked the maestro how to. How to do this. So none of the students were paying attention when he answered, but his answer was different. He didn't show me how to do it. He said, well, make a bowl. I made a bowl. He's like, make a foot. This is all in Italian, by the way. And I was like, I made a foot. He's like, okay, now put the foot on the bowl. And I was about to do the move and he said, wait, now? And we said, now I let the foot go on the bowl and it went on perfectly. And this blew my mind because I'd been doing it right for 15 years. My technique was fine. What was wrong was my timing. And in glass, if the glass is too hot, it doesn't hold its shape, and if it's too cold, it doesn't make the shape you want. So timing is super important. And I lived with this substance. Like I was a professional manipulator of this material. And I still hadn't learned this lesson of timing. So I go home, you know, that night, I was like, oh, wow, I feel Great. And then I was like, oh wait, I feel terrible. And I was like, oh my God, where else in my life am I making the same mistake? Which is to say doing the right thing, either too early or too late. And so I became this student of when I became obsessed with timing, I became like, I would ask myself, when I failed with something, well, did I do the right thing? But not at the right moment. And especially in relationships, like anyone who's married knows this whole deal, right? Like you can say the right thing at the wrong time, get a bad result. So I put a chapter in the book on this. But you know, there's no formula. Like I don't sit there and say, the only, the only thing I now review, reveal to your listeners is that if you're doing something innovative and truly innovative and has not been done before on the planet, right, and you feel like you're too early, that's probably the right time. Because if you feel comfortable, if you say this is the right time, you feel comfortable. You think, oh, now's the time. The world needs this. I guarantee you 100 other people in the herd have also had the exact same feeling. Because we are a herd animal. Humanity is a giant herd and we think alike and we invent alike and we feel good at the same time. And we all decide to wear short socks at the same time or tall socks at the same time. Like whatever it is, that is something that we synchronize. Like, you know, bad analogy came to my mind.

But what is it?

Women who live together, they synchronize. It's just this thing.

That's true.

We all sync up. Yeah, it's how we're wired. And if you feel comfortable, if you feel good about your timing, you're too late. As soon as you're comfortable, forget it. You're just part of the herd again. That's why you're comfortable, because your nose is right in the butt of the animal behind you.

I love it. That's so powerful. And I think, you know, like you say, a student of when I think it's so, it's so powerful to step back and be that self aware and study yourself. Right? Student of when a student of yourself. One other thing that you identified in yourself is that you are not a good manager.

No, others identify that too. Everyone I, everyone I've ever managed has identified that flaw. It just took a chorus of them 10 years to get me out of the CEO role. No, look, I'm not a great manager. I won't self analyze here. It doesn't matter. I know now that I am not the person you put in charge of the team. I will join the team when the team doesn't know what it's doing. I will be a great supporter of the team, and in many cases, I'll come up with the idea. And I do that pretty regularly still. I come up with the idea and I point and I say, why isn't this possible? And we can do this. And I'm a good team member, I hope, until the problem is solved. And then I get bored and disruptive and they kick me out.

What do you mean disruptive?

Disruptive. And that is, you know, at some point, when you've built something that works, you then have a lot of work still to do to scale it, to systematize it, to get people in every seat who are truly experts. You write down how it works, you figure it out, you know, like, this invention is a very, very small part of, you know, true success, and that's the area that I concentrate in. But, like, I deeply respect and require people to join my teams who can execute and improve and refine, and that's super important. And, like, the core Square product really hasn't changed in 15 years. Well, 14, I guess now, but they're still refining. Gets better. Every day, it gets better. And that's because we have 13,000 employees pushing on those levers. And there's some invention going on, too. Don't get me wrong, the Cash app was super inventive. There are some other sor of really hot, I think, inventions coming soon, soon to this microphone. But the point is, the original idea still has not been refined to the point where we're all saying, okay, it's probably as good as we can get.

Yeah, but didn't you. Have you ever had any kind of ego or any kind of, like, I should be in charge. I should be the one in charge. Because again, when you started Square, you were comfortable having Jack be CEO.

Yeah, Jack's better. See how he wanted to do it? Like, I didn't want to do it. That was a 15 minute conversation.

Yeah.

I was like, you want to be CEO? He's like, yeah, like, okay, me too. You know, because he. Look, I want to speak for the man. He can speak for himself and probably has, but I didn't because I knew of my failings in leading people. And actually, the reason Jack and I became such close colleagues was that, you know, when I originally had a team of employees and Jack was my intern and the Internet was about to wipe out our business. And I said, well, the Internet's about to wipe out our business. It's pretty clear that no one's going to buy the stuff that we're doing once websites become popular. So we need to pivot. I didn't call it pivoting then, but I said, we need to do this other thing. And they all said, yes, Jim, let's do that. And then none of them would give up the daily thing that they did. They just kept repeating. I was like, guys, we got to stop. We have to stop, we have to change. The only person who listened to me was my 15 year old intern. So Jack and I went out and rebuilt the company by ourselves. To this day, that company still runs and makes money and it proved that I couldn't even lead a small group in a direction that I thought was important. So I leave that skill now to others.

So good. It's such good self awareness. What is your relationship like with Jack now?

Oh, I miss him terribly.

Yeah.

You know, because he's. Well, first of all, he's kind of been in hiding. You know, you take away President Trump's Twitter account, that's. I don't know what Jack, he moves around the planet a lot. He has a lot of people who want his time. I sometimes feel sorry for him because he was a very sort of shy and introverted person. Always when we were working together, he was shy. He had this sort of quiet way about him. And I think he is now so famous and so popular that he might not get the breaks that I so enjoy. Like nobody knows I walk down the street. No, nobody knows who I am. That's great. You know, now if Jack had written my book, it would have sold 10 times. Wouldn't mind it. That's okay. You know, I can still go to the, you know, go to the store.

Yeah.

And I plan to on the way out, buy, buy food and cook it for the family tonight. That's the plan.

Uh huh. So you can like live your life but you're still a billionaire. So that's pretty good.

Yeah, yeah, I think I am.

Yeah. Depends on the day.

I don't look. I seriously, I never look at the stock price. Never, never, never.

I, I am curious. I think it's really interesting because you know, you, you talked before about material things and then you made a whole pile of money and you say in the book, okay, I'm going to read this. On November 19, 2015, Square listed stock on the New York Stock Exchange. And I was suddenly taller and more interesting than I had ever been.

Yes.

Now I've only known you as this tall and this interesting, but. Okay, what's that like?

It's weird. What I've realized is that most people don't want to meet me. They want to meet my money. And this is the filter that I use when I talk to people. Do they care about my ideas or my problems or my family or, like, the things that are important to me? Or do they want to talk to this giant pile of cash? And most want to talk to the pile of cash. The sophisticated ones are smart enough not to say that, but they say it indirectly because I filtered them. And so I still like working. I still like solving problems. I still like doing all the stuff that I was doing back before Square and when I didn't have to work as a glass. I could have retired 20 years ago. So I don't really feel like that's changed, but it's a weirder world. But there is one huge advantage, and I will not willingly give this back, and that is more people listen to my ideas now, because there's been a history of pretty successful ideas, not just Square, but there's a bunch of other stuff, and it's all proven now. And so when you're somebody who comes up with ideas that have never been tried before and they're called crazy, which most of my ideas have been called, it's nice to be able to point to a success. So, like, for instance, a company I'm working on invisibly right now, which gives you control of your online attention and free access to paywalled subscriptions. I mean, it's just pretty cool thing, but it's based on micropayments, and micropayments have never worked. And people in the tech world know that, and they're like, you're an idiot. So I had to get Elon Musk or Peter Thiel to invest because only Elon and Peter have consistently made contrarian bets in the face of conventional Silicon Valley wisdom and been right. Right. So Peter's backing my company, and I took his money from Founders Fund, and also personally, because Peter's name's on it. And so if you're called crazy, sometimes they're right. Usually they're right because, look, most innovation fails, and I've certainly been there. But it's nice now to at least have people kind of go, oh, well, McKelvey, maybe we'll give him ten minutes. I still get kicked out after ten.

But, yeah, ten's enough for that. Access is helpful. That makes sense. I have just a few more questions for you, but one is, so my beau Eric, and you bonded over both being pilots.

Yes.

But then I read in the book that actually your family weirdly. Weirdly kidnapped you.

Kidnapped me? To become a pilot.

To become a pilot. So, like, what was that about?

On my 40th birthday, I was blindfolded, thrown in the back of a car, which was actually a new experience for me, by the way.

Your family's a little quirky. That's quirky?

Yes. Well, you know, you only turn 40 once.

That's how the McKelveys do it.

Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. They all drove me out to an airfield. There was a plane idling on the tarmac, and they said, get in. You're flying. Now. I had grown up around pilots. My uncle was a pilot, my grandfather was a pilot, and I always loved flying, but I was always terrified of flying. So this was not something that I was going to do on my own. But blindfolded, with your whole family sitting there yelling Happy Birthday over the sound of the engine and some dude who's been paid for the other thing is, I'm cheap. And, like, I know this is expensive. And I'm like, they paid hundreds of dollars for this experience.

They prepaid for this.

Yeah, yeah, you got to prepay. So I got in and I flew, and I flew fairly competently, and I landed, and they said, we have paid for your flight instruction. So again, I'm cheap. Like, I can't throw away anything. And so I. I became a pilot. Terrified all the time. But it turns out that I'm actually reasonably good at flying planes when I'm scared, because the several times that I've been in situations where I probably shouldn't have been, I've handled the plane competently, which is really sort of. That's what pilots are supposed to do. Flying a plane is not hard. Flying a plane with something as wrong is hard if you're the sort of person who panics. And I do panic, but I don't freak out to the point where I can't function. I panic and function. And I didn't know that about myself, but I do now because I've been in two or three situations which were kind of scary.

Like what?

Thunderstorms, mostly.

Oh, yeah.

So ATC will sometimes steer you into a thunderstorm, and once I almost did it on my own, like an idiot. But sometimes the controllers will route you into someplace that will tear the wings off a plane not recommended. Yeah, don't do that.

Right. Okay. Well. Okay, good to know. Now that's. That sort of clarifies that for me. Jim, have you ever suffered from imposter syndrome?

Yes, all the time. What's that?

Like.

I don't deserve to be here. I was literally, I was in a event in Zurich last week, and I was feeling like, wow, everyone here is so successful, and I don't deserve to be. Be here. I wish I could go away. Right. Fortunately, the guy who convened the meeting said that 80% of the people at the meeting probably suffered from imposter syndrome.

He said it out loud.

Yes. Yes, yes.

That's great.

So I don't have permission to use his name, but he was pretty famous, and the person sitting next to me at dinner was super famous. Like, everybody would know. And all these.

Was it George Clooney?

No, no, no, no. About the same age. There's your hint. But it was this crazy group of ultra successful people that I did not feel worthy to be with, but I was very interested by because, wow. You know, like, this person did that. And it's amazing stuff. Yeah, imposter syndrome's tough. I think it's tougher if you're a minority. I've heard that imposter syndrome is even worse if you're not a white male. But even as a white male, look, I often think that I'm not good enough or smart enough or diligent enough to be where I am. I mean, for God's sake, I'm the chairman of the Federal Reserve in St. Louis right now. I'm supposed to pick along with a small girl. I'm in the chair of the group that's replacing the guy who runs the economy, you know, or one of the people. And this is insane. I'm not qualified to do that. And they asked me to do it. What am I gonna say? Of course I'll try it. What the hell? But, you know, I'm not a PhD economist. I don't. I don't live and breathe, you know, macroeconomics. I do my best. When I show up, I sometimes say stuff that other people won't say. Maybe that's. Maybe that's why. Comic relief.

How do you overcome your feelings about imposter syndrome? What strategies do you have?

Obliviousness to how stupid I sound. Like, just don't. I think what happens when I care enough about a problem? I then ignore myself. And that's. I'm not trying to preach some philosophy here, but, like, I think that's sort of the pattern. Most stuff I don't care enough about to do anything about some things I do. And when one of those grabs a hold of me and I say, this is something I need to fix, then it's not about me anymore. I'm just this agent that gets, you know, I got a couple of hands and a couple hours a day when I can really do good work, and that's. That's what I throw myself into. But I don't think about myself, then all I'm thinking about is a problem. And I don't care if I'm embarrassed, I don't care if I sound stupid. I don't care if people are taking me out to dinner and telling me that my startup is going to die and that I'm an idiot for wasting everybody's money. You know that because I'm thinking about my buddy who's living in the back of his car or, you know, some poor person who was never able to get a start in business because, you know, they just weren't given access. And when I'm, you know, when I see somebody do that, then I don't think about myself the rest of the time. I do the rest of the time. Just mirrors on every wall. But when I'm pissed, it's not about me.

I love it. That's so great. Jim, what do you wish you'd known earlier on your journey?

Oh, my God. That there is, in fact this difference between copying and innovating. And you say that or I say that like it's obvious. No, it's not. At least it wasn't obvious. To me. There is a fundamental difference between doing something that has not been done and doing something that has a known solution. And I made that mistake again and again and again. And, Eliza, I would be in these terrible situations, and I would go to my friends and I would say, you have a successful company, and my company has this problem. What do I do? And they say, oh, gm, I had a. I had the same problem. Do this, and I do it, and it wouldn't work. And I'd be like, I must be a fool because they told me to do it and it worked for them and it doesn't work for me. I must be such an idiot. Well, it turns out that I was doing a different thing. I had a different team. Like, the way you manage a team of sort of chaotic innovators is totally different than a team of really good role players. I didn't know that. I didn't realize that there's this sort of invisible line between innovation and replication and we spend almost our entire lives replicating. That's your education, that's your society, that's your biology. Like your biology reacts to being safe when everybody else is doing the same thing and it reacts violently against doing something different. So all of that is just wired into us and into our lives and into our social systems. And then you violate that and you come up with this totally different set of rules. And I never recognized that there was this invisible line that separated the two. And so, so many of my mistakes, my early mistakes. It was painful to write that book because, you know, I'm pretty honest about all the screw ups and so many of them. I look back now, I was like, oh yeah, I was on one side of the line, I should have been using these rules. Or the other side of the line, which we never talk about, where nobody even talks about the rules, but there it is. And this is what you know, so the book talks about. There's this whole set of rules and behavior and like different ways to price products, different ways to manage your team, different ways to introduce, different, different ways to market. Like if it's truly innovative, you get to do these things differently. Well, I shouldn't say get to. You have to. And I didn't recognize that until, well, until Herb told. Until Herb Kelleher gave me a homework assignment.

Homework assignment. I love it. Last question. What advice do you have for other founders as they grow into leaders?

Don't listen to me about leadership. I mean, I'm not, not a good leader. Founding. Yeah, I can tell you about that. And that is fundamentally ask yourself if your problem's been solved and if it has, don't be egomaniac. I have to do it differently. Go to the trade show, hire the experts, run the machine, call McKinsey, do what everybody else has known and proven works. That'll cover 99% of the people who listen to that. There is another 1% out there. And you guys have tough problems because they have not been solved. Not because you want to be different, but because nobody's figured out how to do this thing. If you're in that situation, well, get ready for a rough ride. But understand that there are rules for that ride and if you understand those rules, then it will be easier. But I notice I didn't say possible. And this is the thing that kills a lot of budding entrepreneurs. They want to guarantee, because that's how the world works. Like, I'm not going to take this drug until the FDA says that it's safe, you know, and even then Maybe, you know, but there's a guarantee that's built into so many of the things that we're doing. I mean, Jesus, dating these days has got to get into. I always wiped right. She swiped right okay. I know she's at least interested. No go walk up to a total stranger, risk getting slapped in the face like, that's the world I grew up in. But if you have this need to be proven right before you start, there is still a world that will call you an entrepreneur. But you'll always be proven putting into practice somebody else's inventions. And you will never be like Herb Kelleher was like Jack and me. Like, there's a whole group of us who end up building something new a lot of times by accident. But doesn't matter how you build it, if you've invented something, the world is different. It's just really rough getting there.

Jim, thank you so much. So articulate. Everybody should run. Don't walk and go out and get the innovation stack building an unbeatable business one crazy day at a time. And don't just get it because it's going to teach you something. Get it because it's literally laugh out loud funny. Jim, thank you. Thank you for being here with me today.

I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Elizabeth. It's so much fun.

So fun. Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grown Up. If you like what you heard, give it a review on on Apple podcast so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alyssacone.

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