On this episode of the Playbook, I have the incredible entrepreneur, Jim McElvy,

co-founder of Square, and we're going to talk about the innovation stack, building an

unbeatable business, one crazy idea at a time. How are we going to do it? Through ignorance.

It's not a problem. Join me for all this and more on the Playbook.

This is Entrepreneurs the Playbook. For each week, I bring you some of the greatest athletes,

celebrities and entrepreneurs to talk about their personal and professional playbook to success,

and what made them champions on the field and in the boardroom. I'm your host, David Meltzer.

I have the incredible entrepreneur, Jim McElvy. He's the co-founder of Square,

and he's also an author of a book that's completely aligned with my philosophy in life. Jim,

welcome to the Playbook. Thanks, David. It's going to be fun. It's going to be great. You know,

let's start with the book. You had a new book in 2020 called the Innovation Stack,

building an unbeatable business, one crazy idea at the time, at a time. What was the crazy idea

that you built Square on? This idea that normal people with small businesses should be able to

accept credit cards. It was radical for 2009, and now it's become commonplace, but at the time,

it was sort of nuts. What was just to, you know, there's a lot of younger people that'll be watching,

and you know, they don't even remember not having cell phones. So, you know, what were the

critical business issues for small businesses? Why couldn't they take credit cards back then?

Well, basically, if you didn't have a $100,000 or more of volume, you were priced out of the

credit card market. The merchants at the time. Yeah, they just didn't want to service anybody

that small, and the companies that were small, and these were still, you know, sub-million-dollar

businesses, were paying huge rates. So, there was this inefficiency in the system, which actually

didn't need to exist. You know, if you look back 30 years when credit cards were basically

...