Jim McKelvey

San Francisco, California, United States Contact Info
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About

I enjoy solving problems in almost any area. My book The #InnovationStack is out now.

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Publications

  • The Innovation Stack

    Portfolio / Penguin

    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 co-founder 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…

    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 co-founder 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.

    See publication

  • The Art of Fire

    Third Degree Press (US)

    The #1 textbook for beginning glassblowing.

    See publication

Patents

  • Read head device with slot configured to reduce torque

    US PCT/US2011/055386

    A read head system has a housing and a read positioned in the housing with a slot for swiping a magnetic stripe of a financial transaction card with the slot utilized to enable a financial transaction between a buyer and seller. The read head reads data on the magnetic stripe and produces a signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe. The read head includes an output jack configured to be coupled to at least one of a audio jack or microphone port of a mobile device. The read head…

    A read head system has a housing and a read positioned in the housing with a slot for swiping a magnetic stripe of a financial transaction card with the slot utilized to enable a financial transaction between a buyer and seller. The read head reads data on the magnetic stripe and produces a signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe. The read head includes an output jack configured to be coupled to at least one of a audio jack or microphone port of a mobile device. The read head provides the signal to the mobile device. The slot is oriented and sized to reduce torque applied on the read head as the financial transaction card is swiped through slot in order to maintain accuracy and reliability of the data read by the read head. Decoding of the signal is performed in the mobile device. The decoding includes determining pulses in the signal and converting at least some of the pulses to characters.

    Other inventors
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  • Systems and Methods for Financial Transaction Through Miniaturized Card with ASIC

    US 13/010,976

    A card reader device is provided with a housing having a slot for swiping a magnetic stripe of a card to complete a financial transaction between a buyer and seller. A read head is in the housing reads data stored on the magnetic stripe and produces a signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe. An output jack is adapted to be inserted into a microphone input associated with a mobile device for provides the signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe to the mobile…

    A card reader device is provided with a housing having a slot for swiping a magnetic stripe of a card to complete a financial transaction between a buyer and seller. A read head is in the housing reads data stored on the magnetic stripe and produces a signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe. An output jack is adapted to be inserted into a microphone input associated with a mobile device for provides the signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe to the mobile device. A sourcing power device couples to an audio jack of the mobile device and sources power from the mobile device through the audio jack.

    Other inventors
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  • Systems and methods for financial transaction through miniaturized card reader with decoding on a seller's mobile device

    US PCT/US2011/055386

    A financial transaction card reader device includes a housing having a slot for swiping a magnetic stripe of a financial transaction card to complete a financial transaction between a buyer and seller. A read head is in the housing, reads data stored on the magnetic stripe and for produces a signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe. An output jack is adapted to be inserted into a microphone input associated with a seller's mobile device for providing the signal indicative of data…

    A financial transaction card reader device includes a housing having a slot for swiping a magnetic stripe of a financial transaction card to complete a financial transaction between a buyer and seller. A read head is in the housing, reads data stored on the magnetic stripe and for produces a signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe. An output jack is adapted to be inserted into a microphone input associated with a seller's mobile device for providing the signal indicative of data stored on the magnetic stripe to the mobile device. The signal is decoded in the mobile device.

    Other inventors
    See patent

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