Jim McKelvey

James Morgan McKelvey Jr. is the CEO and founder of Invisibly and the co-founder of Block, Inc. (Square) with Jack Dorsey in 2009. Square was born from a $2,000 glass sculpture sale that fell apart because the buyer could not pay by card. McKelvey called Dorsey and asked if they could fix the payment problem. They did — and Square grew into a fintech company powering millions of small businesses. By the time Dorsey stepped down as CEO in 2008, Square had become one of the most influential fintech companies in history, and McKelvey's net worth reached an estimated $2 billion by July 2023.

Before Square, McKelvey earned bachelor's degrees in economics and computer science from Washington University in St. Louis, then worked as a contractor for IBM in Los Angeles and St. Louis. He also worked as a glassblowing instructor and founded Disconcepts, a CD-cabinet manufacturer. In 1989, he established Mira Conference Inc. in St. Louis with a team that included a young Jack Dorsey as a summer intern. In 2002, he co-founded Third Degree Glass Factory with Doug Auer — a St. Louis glass studio and gallery that remains his most personal creative outlet.

McKelvey is also a serial builder outside Square. In 2013, he co-founded LaunchCode, a nonprofit pairing tech companies with paid apprenticeships for people without traditional credentials — LaunchCode was named the Best Thing to Happen to St. Louis by the Riverfront Times in 2014. In June 2016, he founded Invisibly, a company exploring how consumers could profit from their own data. In January 2017, he was appointed independent director of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and named chair in January 2022. A $15 million gift to Washington University's engineering school in 2016 led to its renaming as the McKelvey School of Engineering in 2019. His book The Innovation Stack (2020) draws on the Square story to lay out the decision-making principles behind companies that build genuinely defensible advantages.