The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time - Hardcover

McKelvey, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593086732 ISBN 13: 9780593086735

Publisher: Portfolio, 2020

Synopsis

From the cofounder of Square, an inspiring and entertaining account of what it means to be a true entrepreneur and what it takes to build a resilient, world-changing company

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 cofounder 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.

About this title

About the Author

James McKelvey is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, philanthropist and artist.
He is the cofounder of Square, was chairman of its board until 2010, and still serves on the Board of Directors. In 2011, his iconic card reader design was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 2016, McKelvey founded Invisibly, an ambitious project to rewire the economics of online content.
In 2017, he was appointed as an Independent Director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Suddenly, we won.

For over a year, a giant monster had chased us through the graveyard of corporate corpses. Amazon, the scariest monster on the planet, had copied our product, undercut our price, and was going to eat our brains. Then, without warning, on Halloween in 2015, the monster stopped the at­tack and handed us a treat.

This treat was better than any bag of candy. Not only did Amazon discontinue its competing product, it also mailed the product’s existing customers a little white Square card reader in a smiling cardboard box. Happy Halloween! Was this a trick?

Square, the little company that I cofounded with Jack Dorsey back in 2009, had just done something amazing. The odds of surviving an attack by Amazon would depress a Powerball player, but there we were, still alive after going “nose‑to‑toe” against the world’s most dangerous company. Was this just luck, or had something else happened? I knew what we had done, but I didn’t have any idea why it worked. I spent the next three years answering that question, and eventually wrote this book.

This is not the story of Square. Instead, it is the story of how founding Square led me to discover a phenomenon that applies across industries and even time. Square is a good example because I can tell the story firsthand; but if this were just about Square, I would not have written this book.

What happened at Square was no accident; it fit a pat­tern. It’s a pattern that repeats in a shockingly regular man­ner; and when it does, the companies that harness it become the biggest of their kind in the world. Patterns are funny things, for you can see them your entire life without ever noticing them. But once you finally notice, they appear ev­erywhere. When I learned to notice this pattern, it was like finally seeing the world in three dimensions— was still looking at the same objects, but now everything had depth. My enhanced vision revealed even more patterns. Patterns that have changed the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Portfolio
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593086732
• ISBN 13: 9780593086735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288