The Square IPO

The hosts frame Square’s IPO through a story about Jim McKelvey, a St. Louis glass artist who could not accept credit cards for his $2,000 faucets. In the familiar account, McKelvey called Jack Dorsey, his former teenage intern, after Dorsey had left Twitter, and the two began exploring mobile payments. The episode later qualifies this origin story with Robert Morley’s claim that his card-reading research helped spark the company’s product idea.

The backstory begins well before Square. McKelvey studied computer science and glassblowing, worked at IBM, and founded Mira Digital Publishing. After its early product failed to compete with Adobe Acrobat, he shifted the company toward conference publishing. Jack Dorsey, then a 15-year-old summer intern, was one of the few people who supported the pivot. Their earlier relationship later gave McKelvey a trusted person to call when he faced a business problem of his own.

McKelvey’s difficulty was practical: he made the faucets before selling them, but without card acceptance he was limited to cash or checks. A missed sale could matter greatly to a small artist, especially after investing the labor in handmade glass. The hosts use this problem to explain why Square’s early story resonated: it gave a concrete face to a small-business customer whom the existing payment system had not served well.