Jim McKelvey Quotations

I don't run any of my companies. I always partner with somebody who wants to operate.

In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.

I've been totally replaced by people who are superior. I was doing, like, 15 different things. It's very gratifying to watch your job done better.

This entrepreneurial energy that we have in the Midwest doesn't have to go out to the coasts to get fed and watered.

Art is what can't be proven mathematically, right, it's where science ends. It's the part that makes you feel good, but you don't know why.

I'm not particularly good at running things when once they get to a certain level. Once it gets routine, get me out of the way.

Glass really rewards risk. A lot of times with glass, you're just waiting for the piece to cool down or for some temperature to adjust, and there's split seconds where you've got a fraction of a second where you get to make a move a particular way, and you don't get to repeat it if you do it wrong.

It's hard to shape glass. It took me years of practice, and as a result, I've never gotten bored with it. It's difficult. Every time I come into the studio, I've got some sort of new challenge. And something that I would like to learn how to do better, and the material never disappoints me.

St. Louis is a customer- and partner-rich environment for any financial tech startup.

At Square, we got our tech up and running in three weeks, but it took us 18 months to get licenses, banking relationships and everything else we needed to be able to move money. We had to partner up with major companies to do it.