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Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company

2026-02-23 00:00:00 +0000 UTC ·1h 11m ·by Guy Raz / NPR
Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a …
How I Built This
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About this episode

Most entrepreneurs think the hardest part of building a company is the product. For Jim McKelvey — co-founder of Square — the hardest part was the system around the product. Because Square wasn’t just competing with other startups … It was competing with regulations, middlemen, entrenched networks,