 Well, let's talk first about something that I think precedes the innovation stack, which is getting comfortable with discomfort. Oh, yeah. Wow. I think that's a big part of not only the success of the innovation stack, but just a big part of your life in general in the story that's woven through the book. How have you developed the wherewithal and the ability to deal with discomfort when it's talking about breaking laws, chasing ideas that everyone said is impossible? Well, at least in my case, and I'm not saying this is a prescription that everyone should follow, but in my case, it started by being sort of an outsider when I was growing up and then sort of that trend continuing, and it just never stopped. Most people get back on track either to college or after college when they get a job. I didn't actually do that. I became a glassblower, and then I started a company that I didn't know anything about. I've always had this weird sort of outsider status, and so when I was more of an outsider, it didn't shock me as much as some people who were used to fitting in. But I couldn't, I wouldn't recommend that as a path. I would just say that if you're comfortable as an insider, if you're comfortable, if everything is working well for you, then entrepreneurship is probably not something you want to do. Just because, look, if everyone's getting along and everything is going well, you probably don't want to risk it. Let me ask you, in that feeling of being an outsider and as long as you have felt like that and realized that about yourself, is there any signaling that you could see and others that immediately allow you to know that you're dealing with one of you? I know. I haven't figured out the secret handshake yet. I wish I did. You don't know it because sometimes, well, let me relate this back to innovation because I see this, there's an interesting parallel here. It's sort of a last resort. People think, oh, I should be innovative. I should do new stuff. No. No, you don't need to do that. You shouldn't probably be innovative. Do stuff that you know works. Copy as much as you can. I wrote a book on innovation, but I'm not preaching it. I'm saying, look, innovation is a last resort. If you have to read my book, okay, things have gotten pretty bad. If you get to the point where you're actually in a position where you have to innovate, you're probably forced there. That's the sort of way I feel about entrepreneurship, which is that most people in good times behave very well. You can't tell who the strong ones are until they're in tough times. A lot of people who you think are not cut out for it turn out to be. There's no way to tell because a lot of the bravado and a lot of the stuff, a lot of the sort of signaling that we try to give to the world to show how tough we are, or how innovative we are, or how bold we are. That's just all crap. I've never been able to differentiate. Maybe there are people who can, but I'm not one of them. I've been fooled many times. In the book, you make a distinction between a business person and an entrepreneur. In your career, you were seeking out entrepreneurly advice from business people. That was a disaster. What is that differentiator for you? Obviously when it comes to business, many of us claim to be entrepreneurs. You can use the word today, entrepreneur, to describe anyone who's got a business. It's a totally legit use of the word. As a matter of fact, that's what the word has come to mean. It originally started off meaning something different. The original use of the word entrepreneur meant somebody who was doing something different, something that hadn't been done. The word was coined because Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who basically popularized that word's use, was in need of a way of describing this different set of people. He had these people over here that were doing stuff that was totally weird and different. He couldn't call them business people because the business people terms didn't apply. He coined the word entrepreneur. I tried to get advice for years from business people about stuff that I was doing that was fundamentally entrepreneurial. The advice was terrible. It wasn't that these people were trying to give me bad advice or trying to undermine what I was doing. It's just that they were giving me good advice for their world. In their world, there were processes and formula and credentials and experts and consultants and trade shows and competitors, by the way. If they didn't know something, they'd just steal one of their competitors and employees and he or she would bring over the knowledge. None of that stuff worked for me. I was like, well, but I'm doing something that I thought was the same as what they were doing, but I wasn't. I was, in many cases, being an entrepreneur and not a business person. Now, everyone has ideas. 99.999% of them never become a billion-dollar idea. How do you know which idea is worth pursuing and even building an innovation stack around? To me, it's not the billion-dollar idea. It's the billion-person idea. Is this something that's likely to impact a lot of people? In the case of Square, it was reasonably easy to infer that there were a lot of small business people. It was reasonably easy to infer having been a small business person that if I liked something, there might be other people who would like the same thing. But of course, you can't prove that. One of the dangers, and I don't know that there's a solution for this, but one of the dangers of doing something new is that nobody may care. You may build it and they go, oh, well, I don't want that, right? You're a weirdo and you have this thing you want, but nobody else does. And that was a definite danger when we started Square. Jack and I made a bet at the beginning of the company that we would meet and either have hot dogs or champagne on the one-year anniversary, depending on whether or not we were successful. And it turns out we had champagne, but that was not known at the beginning. And, AJ, it's a really good question because wrapped in your question, there's sort of a sub-question, okay? Which is the please give me a formula, please give me a guarantee, please tell me that if I follow this checklist that I will be successful, right? You want this checklist. There are no checklists in my book. There are no checklists. Like if you're going to do something that hasn't been done before, like there can't be a checklist baked into your question, which was a serious, legit question, is this sort of thing that says, please give me the formula that's going to guarantee success and something that's never been done. And what I'm telling you is while there is no formula for that, the best we can do, I think, is sort of discuss what it feels like and what others have experienced as they go through that process and then draw those parallels out, not because it's going to give you a checklist. But because if you find yourself in that situation, one of the things that will almost certainly happen, and it certainly happened to me, is you will start doubting yourself. You will deeply, deeply doubt what you're doing. Because all your friends who care about you will be telling you, don't do this, your physiology will feel weird because you're separating from the herd and people are comfortable when they're together. And when you start separating too much, humans get nervous. That's how we're wired. And if you see at least that there is a pattern of success that other people have followed in the past and you recognize you're on that path, you may not quit as quickly. Well, that's your argument around the business person versus the entrepreneur. Yeah. The business person wants the checklist so they can follow the path that's carved out for them and make sure that they have processes around exactly each step so that they can succeed. What I recognize in the book was this blend of audacity but humility. Because you had to be audacious to take on banks, break laws, dive in headfirst to merchant processing. And not only that, really envision a market that no one else saw. Like as you were talking about the pyramid and adding that other layer to the pyramid that no one was servicing, no one was talking about merchants who were doing less than $10,000 a year as an opportunity to get to the billion, to get to the level that you guys had put together. I wonder, is that part of your personality, both of those? Or is that a combination of you and Jack teaming up together? Is one of you audacious and one of you is more humble? Or how did that work to have the chutzpah to chase after this? At the same time, admit, I don't know everything. We're going to break stuff along the way. And just to add to that question, I remember the first time I had seen Square and it was, it was mind-blowing. And my first thought was, how is this, how is that legal? Well, you probably saw the early version and you wouldn't have liked the answer. So in reading this, I kept thinking back to when I had first seen it and what that meant. And I mean, immediately, when I had seen it, how it worked. And I also have a history in the music industry. And it might have been the first time I've seen it was a merch person for a local band or a band that was just touring through town. And they took cards. And I was mind-blowing. And I just couldn't believe it. And of course, it wasn't too long after that before I saw it everywhere. So just to bring that stunning visual and what it meant for all of us who've seen it for the first time, what you had to accomplish to make that happen. Well, I mean, so the audacity and humility are, they're kind of opposites, but not really. The audacious is like, that's the impulse that gets you going. And then from that point, you better be humble, right? So you sit there and say, I'm going to go here and that's the audacious part. I'm going to do this thing that hasn't been done. And if you commit to that, if you sort of say, well, I'm going to do this no matter what it takes, then the rest of the journey is probably, it's humble up to the point where you quit and you don't quit, right? So it's, and I talk about this in the book, I've got terrible motivation problems. Like I'm a guy who will sleep in. I'm really, in my mind, very lazy and very unmotivated and very undisciplined. But I'm also not willing to die. Like I'm also like a survivor. I'm not somebody who's going to just roll over. So I put myself in situations where that survival instinct gives me the motivation. And I find that actually easier for me to behave is that little bit of audacity to say, I'm going to do something that hasn't been done. And then once you've committed to it, just don't quit. But in the process of doing it, you better admit that you're probably not right. So you're not going to just come in one morning and have the exact solution. And it's going to work on the first try or the 20th try or the 50th try. I mean, there's that, like if you think you're infallible, that's a bad way to be. I mean, there are probably some professions where that's a good thing. Entrepreneurship is not one. Yeah. Obviously there were certainly moments, and we can talk a little bit later about Amazon entering the ring, where quitting seemed like the viable option, it can't be done. Was there a counterbalance between you and Jack in those moments of questioning the idea and pushing forward? No, it's funny. Jack and I are not alike in a lot of ways externally because I'm pretty bombastic and I talk a lot and Jack's very quiet. And he appears more thoughtful because he doesn't speak and I appear more impulsive because I'll say the first thing that comes into my mind. But we're remarkably similarly aligned when it comes to the problems that we choose to face and the way we think about them. So, like for me, things got exciting at the company when I realized that what we were doing broke a bunch of laws and was therefore going to be really difficult to do and Jack was similarly motivated. So it was not, I won't speak for Jack or his motivations, but I didn't sense any discord any time along the way. And certainly he didn't quit when on the first day I said, guys, what we're doing is illegal. Now we talk a lot about relationships and networking and building connections on the show. And in reading the book, I felt like there was multiple moments where relationships played a key role outside of the innovation stack when you were getting the meeting with MasterCard, attempting to get in front of Steve Jobs even. What is your view on relationship building and growing your network as it being such a key part of building any business? So, and again, you're talking to somebody who doesn't use social media. So I'm not somebody who has a lot of sort of acquaintances. I have a few really good friends and a few people that I trust and hopefully trust me. And I think that might have been the deal because if I think about, well, you know, Jack's all famous now, but he was not famous in 2008. He was a guy I knew and liked, but they just kicked him out of Twitter. And if you look at the stories back then, Evan Bizz had basically written him out of the story. They had deleted his name along with another guy from the Twitter history. He was being erased. So he wasn't a big shot back then. But there was something about working with him that was appealing to me. And I guess that's something about working with me that was appealing to him. And that was a relationship that it was surprising because, I mean, he was not living in St. Louis. It wasn't like we were hanging out all the time. He just came into town and asked me to start a company. And that was, I don't know why he made that decision. But he didn't ask anybody that was in his circle in California. So and look, I think obviously relationships are super important. And I guess they can be cultivated over social media and, you know, tweets and winks and stuff like that. But I've not chosen to do things that way. I would much rather sit down with a person. Right. And in getting the pitch together and practicing it and you guys tag teaming it, there's a part in the book where you talk about having the pitch down so well that all you really had to do was focus on the reaction. Yes. Oh, that was important. People. Yeah. And that's a skill set in of itself. And I know we talk about it in our coaching programs. How important it is to understand what it is that your pitch is inside and out. Understand yourself inside and out to be better and more present in conversation. But then really it's the focus is not on you. It's it's on the person who's receiving the message, receiving the pitch, receiving the conversation and being able to read them and their reactions is such a key part of the equation. How have you developed that skill in yourself? Repetition is the answer. So what I do is if I have something that's important to do well, I'll have to do it a hundred times. So in our case, we'd pitched square, maybe not a hundred times, but well, actually, you know, if you count all the informal ones easily a hundred times. By the time we got to this one critical meeting with MasterCard, which was going to make or break the company. And by that time, we were so good at the pitch that it was unconscious, like Jack had his part and I had my part and we were both so comfortable that it wasn't even like we felt comfortable. It just it was this thing that was going to just magically happen. And and so our attention was out into the room into the, you know, reactions of the people around us. And I think that's that's super important. I don't know a way to get there, except through repeating. But one, I guess, I guess one piece of advice I would offer. If you know you're in a situation where you have to perfect something, you know, don't start on the top prospects. You know, walking across the parking lot today, I saw a tennis ball that was all chewed up and a dog spit all over it. And I almost grabbed it, right? Because I like, you know, I'm trying to learn how to play tennis a little better. And like I need crappy tennis balls because I will hit them over the fence into the creek. I mean, like I like a dog spit covered tennis ball to me is still something I can whack a couple of times with a racket. And it's it's crazy to think of people who, you know, prioritize their top, you know, their top can say they start at the top of the list. I mean, if you prioritize it, like start at the middle or the bottom and get your pitch down when it doesn't matter, like whack the dog spit covered tennis balls into the creek and then, you know, wait the new bouncy one straight out of the can until your game is actually good. Well, I think a lot of it has in people's minds. They don't see a reason to be motivated to get their pitch down unless they do have the meeting with their number one guy. Where the reality is that you need to be motivated within and and for the product itself and the pitch itself in order to get good so that when you do have those opportunities, you're going to knock them out of the park. It's you're going to make time to do the things that you want to do. And for somebody for AJ and I, who've been doing this for 15 years, we tend to throw ourselves in the in the way of the car to just to practice what we're going to do about it for those moments. And I I guess I guess the part is for the people who are looking for for that motivation or what would you tell them in that in that position, whether they're waiting for these opportunities? Well, I would just say this, that you don't get to plan your opportunities. You don't get to schedule opportunity. You don't even necessarily get to prepare for it. But that some total of your preparation is going to be valued at some point, right? You just don't get to choose when that moment is. So it wasn't like we knew that we were going to have this big meeting a year and a half into the company that was going to make or break us. OK, but we were preparing as if that was happening. But it wasn't even a conscious prep. It was just like this crafting what we were saying and what we were doing. And a lot of it was more doing than saying like our pitch was mostly visual, like what we I will never describe something that I can show. OK, and I will never show something that I can let the other person do by themselves. Right. So my best pitch is I hand a product and I sit back and I go there. And I'm totally silent. There's this awkward moment where the person has to realize to do it themselves. And then usually they do. And then it's awesome. That led to 147 reasons that this could fail. Yeah, those practice repetitions, the list went from 100 to 101 and allowed you to see other angles and get the idea to a place that VCs would say, take my money, let's go. Oh, yeah, I mean, the VCs were. Getting pissed off when we didn't take their money, like they were they were fighting to get into the round, which was really, you know, that's that's what everybody wants, right? But the way you do that is by at least the way we did it. Again, there's a lot of people who do it differently. The way we did it was by confronting all the problems that we were likely to have head on and I'm a VC now. I, you know, spend one day a week sort of doing that stuff. But I'm baffled at the number of pitches that I hear where they don't admit that there are any problems at all. I can just flabbergasting and I would say 90% of the stuff that I hear is just sunshine and graphs moving up into the right. And I like, like it's, it's a disaster. I, I, I, it's still baffles me why people don't honestly discuss the problems they expect. And when they're going to be looking for them immediately, soon as I start to tell you about something great that I have that you need, your first thought is to push back or look for the holes or look for where it's incomplete. So by addressing those out of the gate, you can focus on, you can get those out of the way that you could allow the person that you're pitching to concentrate on your pitch and the product rather than looking for those, those points, those holes. Yeah, it's, it totally changes the dynamic of a pitch to be completely candid about all the things that could go wrong. And it speaks to a level of confidence in your idea that I think can't be faked. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, but, but more than that, it changes the whole tenor of the conversation. Because to admit that you don't know something, I guess, okay, so back to your question about humility, that's the humility. Okay. It's, it's, it's a tangible example of us as a team admitting here things that we don't know that we can solve. Here's some of the things that could, that could wipe us out and hear a risk that you're going to have to acknowledge if you want to work with us. And, and that level of honesty sets a totally different tone for a conversation about somebody who's about to give you a bunch of money. Um, then one, which says, Hey, it's going to be great. There are no problems. Right. And you introduce a concept in the book that I'd never heard before that I would love to unpack for our audience because I think it's so powerful. And it's this concept of linguistic gravity and, and how important it is when explaining ideas, we talk about framing a lot on the show. And for some in our audience, they use it without realizing. And I thought you really broke it down well in the book. So could you introduce that concept to the audience and how it played a role in the growth of square? So linguistic gravity is this concept that I use to help me understand why people don't understand my new ideas. So I've got a new idea. And I have to then use a word to describe that idea. And if I use a word that somebody else understands that word comes with a bunch of extra baggage. Um, and so, um, I'll give you an example of, um, I think if there's one I use in the book, I'd talk about a submarine. Like, so let's say I'm trying to describe a submarine to you. And I say, well, it's like an underwater car. Okay. Which is not really what a submarine is, but if you've never seen a submarine before, it's not like an underwater boat. It's like a car seems more like a boat because the boat's kind of open at the top and a car is kind of, you know, but, but it's like, like, it's not a car. But if I say car, like the second I think car, you're picturing something that sort of rides around the bottom of the ocean and you're sitting there picturing something that would, you know, like ride around the bottom, as opposed to sort of move through the ocean more like a fish does. The, the words we use come with all this extra baggage. And one of the problems that the entrepreneur has is just communicating this new idea. So I talk about tricks in the book to sort of combat this, but one of the things you better recognize is that if you're going to describe your new thing as with the word like, which is probably the most overused word in the language right now, but it is this, if you're going to say this thing that I'm trying to build is like this other thing that you understand, the sooner, as soon as you say like their brain shuts off. Oh, something I already understand, boom, done. And therefore, they are not going to hear the rest of what you're saying. Now, the problem, of course, is that you will think they're hearing it because they're looking at you and they're nodding or they're, you know, in some way, you know, giving you these, these sort of weak signals that they understand, but, but almost certainly they will not. So it's, it's a danger and it's even more dangerous if you, if you don't even recognize that the phenomenon happens. I think when we're trying to articulate a new idea that we're excited about, it's easy to fall into that trap. Because what we want more than anything is someone to understand it and get excited too. Yeah. And, and, I mean, and there, there are different sort of parts of this. The other thing you have to really recognize, and I talk about this as well, is that you are not qualified to evaluate your own idea. So I was, it was funny before we set up this podcast, I was deleting, I was turning off all the Microsoft products on my desktop because they crashed my computer. And I have this, you know, sort of love, hate relationship with Microsoft, but I have friends that work there, right? And some of my friends used to work on Word. And one of the things that I learned about Word back, this was back in the 90s, was that Word had all of these features that had, that Microsoft had so many features in this product that when they surveyed their users, all the features that the users were requesting were already in there. The users just couldn't figure out where they were. And if you look at Word, especially the early versions, it was so unbelievably complicated to use all this stuff. But then I talked to my friends at Microsoft and I said, why is your products so damn difficult to use? And they go, oh, it's not. Well, it makes perfect sense. Well, of course, it makes perfect sense to you because you work for Microsoft on this product, you're, you know, 10 hours a day. And of course it makes perfect sense to you, you know, like, you know, if you're a quantum physicist, the idea of, you know, multiple states of simultaneous being is perfectly normal for the rest of us humans, it isn't. So one of the things that happens if you're, if you're building something is you get so close to that product that all of a sudden things that would totally intimidate or confuse a user seem totally fine to you. So you have to keep in mind that past the first day or two of product development, you yourself are no longer good at it. I think that's such an important concept to understand. And Johnny and I have been way too close to the problem for many years and it takes an outside perspective, someone completely green to the industry to ask the question that allow you to start to see things from a different perspective. And when your tunnel vision on that product that you or idea that you want to succeed, you often are too close and too in the weeds. And of course, in that first moment where you grab a CEO's credit card and magically swipe it through something plugged into the headphone jack and understand that only 80 percent of the time it works. So there's a little nuance to the jiggle and all the stress that goes along with that. You know, that makes for exciting parts of the story, but there's so much trial and error before that. Yeah. I think many people don't realize in that journey. And when we think about Square, we think about it as this world changing merchant app that everyone's familiar with. But 10 years ago, everyone thought it was just a crazy idea. Why enter the space that's so arcane, that has fees that no one can understand and you guys persevered. Yeah, we didn't quit. It was it was never a question of quitting. There was never a discussion of do we give up? I mean, even when Amazon attacked us, we were not we were not entertaining those thoughts. And I don't know why, I guess. That brings up an important piece that really stuck out to me that I felt I really wanted to ask about this, which is. Everyone knew that Amazon was gunning for you. They liked your idea. They wanted to get there first. They wanted to do it better. Of course, we all understand the gigantic power that they that they willed financially and and mentally. And yet you kept everyone, the culture in the office, calm, cool, at least it appeared to be in the book, calm, cool, collected and everyone focused on moving forward. No one wrecking anything. No one backpedaling. No one second guessing what you guys were doing. And so is there anything you could speak to there of how you were able to do that? Or am I totally misreading that? It was absolutely pandemonium. Well, I would say yes to both, OK, because it was pandemonium, but it was not more pandemonium. OK, so what happened when when Amazon attacked us, when Amazon copied our product and cut our price, we were already in a in a frantic state of growth. OK, so at the Times Square was growing 10 percent week over week, which means the company was doubling in size every other month. So just think of the strains on all systems like the bathrooms to the servers, to like every like people are stressed out. So so now add to that level of stress. Oh, and Amazon's gunning for you. OK, now you may sit there and go, oh, crap, OK, but the question is, can you be more stressed out? Like is is is the fact that on top of all that, now we have Amazon chose chasing us. Does that does that take the absolute level of stress up a notch? And the answer is not really in our case because we were so darn busy with stuff that we knew we had to do for our customers and we had, you know, hundreds and thousands of them, if not millions by that time. It really didn't affect what we did that much. So there wasn't a state change. The second thing about the Amazon attack was we didn't know what to do. And, you know, when when Amazon did that, the first thing I did along with some of the executive team was we started looking for other companies that had beaten Amazon as startups and found there were none. Like it was just a null set. There was no no company had as a startup had taken on Amazon at one. And so we can't be a good feeling. Well, it was terrible. But like we were probably lucky because we would have been strongly tempted to copy what they did as opposed to do what we knew we should be doing. And but because we didn't have any, you know, instruction manual on how to get out of this mess and then we started looking at what we were doing couldn't think of anything different to do. And then our conclusion was, well, I guess we'll just keep doing the same stuff. Yeah, like we're not we're not going to change anything. So I would say Square did not react externally at all to the Amazon attack. And and yet we still want. And that that actually and I tell this at the beginning of the book that was the reason I wrote the thing was because even after we won it was gnawing away at me to answer the question why, you know, it's like you know, you read these stories about these guys that, you know, fall out of planes and their parachutes don't open and they fall to the ground and live, right? You know, a guy falls out of a plane, splats. OK, we expect them to die. But like if you fall out of plane from 30,000 feet, we expect you to die. Like that's that's the expectation if you live. Now we have to have an explanation. Like what the heck happened? What like what squirrel DNA do you have? Or what, you know, soft tree did you land? Like I don't know what happened to allow you to live, but I felt like a survivor. I felt like somebody had fallen out of a plane 30,000 feet and walked away from it. And and I had to spend basically two years of my life answering that question because it was it was just gnawing away at me. And then I found this thing that I call an innovation stack that turned out to be this this sort of pattern that other companies throughout history have had. And I was like, oh, OK, now that makes sense. Now it doesn't seem random. I think, OK, it's a rare event. OK, but it's not a random event. Let's unpack innovation stack for our audience and walk through what Square's innovation stack was because I think, again, innovation is such a loaded word. And when many people think of innovation, they think of fireworks, explosion, this huge aha moment. And what the book really articulates is a systematic adjustment to the facts and data in front of you and solving the problems as they arise instead of sitting there for days with a blank whiteboard trying to come up with your Eureka moment. So what do you mean by innovation stack? And I'd love to unpack how you're using this now with your new venture launch code. So an innovation stack is a series of reactions. And I say reactions because I don't believe that most innovation is voluntary. Like most innovation is, if you sit there and say, I need to be creative and innovative, that's probably not gonna work. What works is I'm not gonna die and I need to do something different because nothing that I have right now works, so I have to figure out something new. And the dirty little secret about doing something new is that's probably not gonna work either. So you're gonna have to try multiple new things and some of those things will work, but then they'll cause other problems. So now you're gonna have to have new solutions to those other problems, assuming you can't copy the solution for that. And this process repeats and repeats and repeats. And if you look at these companies that I study in the book, all of them made these choices to create new offerings, affordable furniture, low-cost travel, banking open to normal people, credit card processing for small merchants, including individuals, electric cars. There are literally thousands of examples of these, but if you look at the process that these companies go through, it's building a lot of different innovations and then those innovations themselves affect each other. So the thing you do, let's say that your fifth innovation if you wanna start counting, well, that may affect the third and the second. So now you gotta go back and tweak those two and now one of them isn't working correctly because it's something you have to, and it gets this snarly mess. In Square's case, we ended up doing 14 things that were completely unique in the market. And some of them were not a big deal. Like I could explain one of them, flat pricing, like a straight flat price. And you think, oh, well, that's pretty simple. And I think, yeah, it is pretty simple, but A, nobody in the industry had ever done it before. And B, we still had to connect to that industry and since they didn't have flat pricing, we would actually lose money on some transactions. So if you're gonna lose money on some of your transactions, well, that's not a very good business. So you have to do other things to make it a good business. And in our case, it was volume. So we had to get volume through a bunch of other things that we did that had never been done before. And I mean, just could ramble on forever, but like what an example of volume is we want people to be able to sign up easily. Well, we have a user agreement that you can click online. And at the time, no bank or credit card processors would allow an online sign up. So yeah, we're gonna give you a simple one-click contract, but the financial institutions won't accept that. So now we have to build our own financial intermediary that does have signed contracts and is acceptable. We had to re-plumb the entire system. And that was what made Square Square. And these 14 things were ultimately unique in the world. And what I found with not just Square, but all these other companies that I studied is that this is the pattern that repeats. Is that step one, you pick a problem that's never been solved before. And step two, you do whatever you have to do to solve it. And then step two, a side effect of step two is you get an innovation stack. You get these dozen things or 20 things or however many you need that turn out to be this unique solution. And then step three, which is the interesting thing is you become the dominant player in the world. And in every case where I found a company with an innovation stack, they always ended up dominating their market. But not in a way that displaced other companies from that market. It was just they made the market so much bigger. So it's not like Square put a bunch of credit card processors out of business. We just took a bunch of people who had never been processing credit cards and made them Square customers. Yeah, in reading it and recognizing through the examples, it's so customer centric. Understanding that all of these are frictions that potential customers and growing a new market are going to face everything from the application process to making it so user friendly. I remember the first time I used Square, it was just a beautiful interface. And it was so intuitive. I wouldn't need to get on the phone with someone and explain and fax the document. It just made everything easier for me, the customer. And of course it had a benefit to the businesses who were using it because it was new and nifty and then it became viral and you didn't have to spend on marketing. But I think so many of us when we're proofing out our idea and trying to grow things, we're just focused on our idea and not how the customer, the potential customer, is going to interact with it, use it and ultimately solve their problem. Well, again, this comes back to that humility. You are not the customer. And you can't experience your product the way a customer can because you're too close to it. And Word 95 makes perfect sense to you but to some poor guy who wants to write a letter to his boss and make a couple of spelling corrections, no, it's overwhelming. So that humility has to come from somewhere and I think that's where learning to shut up is really a great skill set. And both Jack and I have that. Neither one of us ever interrupts anybody. And even as bombastic as I am, you will notice if you guys start talking, I will always stop. And I never talk over people and up to and including if I'm listening to a customer and they say something wrong about my product. Like I will not correct them. I will just let them go because a lot of times they will at the end tell me something that I might not want to hear, but I need to hear. Well, I remember that moment in the MasterCard meeting where it's obvious to everyone in the room that you're breaking the two of them. Yeah. Of course, that's a moment of stress where many of us would be like, it's okay, try to rationalize it and you just let the executive realize it, turn to his team, realize what you just accomplished and that exact moment changed the course of Square and getting MasterCard and Visa on board. Yeah, that was a good moment to shut up. And Jack, oh my God, it was funny because it wasn't like we rehearsed it, right? I just knew he was not gonna say anything and I was damn sure I was not gonna say anything. I was like, I will not say anything. And I just, I had total faith that Jack was just gonna be monk-like in his silence and we let the, you know, cause that's the other thing. If you interrupt somebody, you only ever get their superficial ideas. Cause if you think about a real thoughtful response to an insightful question or even a dumb question, but like a thoughtful response of any type, it's not gonna come out some sort of instantaneous platitude cause like there's no thought to that. But if you actually think about it, there's gonna be a pause, there's gonna be that, you know, that, well, it's a moment like I'm having right now, like I'm sitting here trying to get this thought out and I'm formulating the thought as I, so now if one of you guys interrupts me, like we never get to the conclusion, right? You know, if AJ's shot is like, oh yeah, I would have been dead, right? So if you can just be quiet enough, especially in a selling situation to let the other person catch up, a lot of times they will catch up. And this guy who was at MasterCard, you know, Ed McLaughlin was brilliant. But I was explaining to him a completely new idea. And even somebody who's brilliant is gonna take, what, six, seven, 10 seconds to grok the idea, like, but to interrupt him there or to talk past it would have killed it. I think many of us find silence to be awkward and want to fill it. At the same point, so much magic as you just talked about happens in that silence. Because when you are pitching something, of course you've thought everything through and of course it makes sense to you. But with these new and novel ideas, you need that room to let people catch up and think through it themselves. Because when they think through it, they're gonna buy in. They're not gonna buy in when you are selling them and talking at them. Yeah, it's another danger knowing your product too well. You will speed through the stuff that should be walked through or sat on. And it's a real skill to not say anything. And recognize when people saturate. You're not gonna get more than, I mean, I look for about five minutes of attention per hour. Like if I'm interacting with somebody, I'll try to think about, okay, like maybe if I'm really good, I'll get five minutes of attention this hour where the person's actually paying attention. Well, I think in the innovation stack and looking at not only Square's case study, but the other innovation stacks, so much of it is grounded in the core values of the company. And your core values were so strong that you survived an attack from Amazon. Without changing, without bucking, without all of a sudden this pandemonium around Amazon. How did those core values come to be? And how important are they when you think about new ventures like launch code and the culture you wanna build? So the core values are obviously critically important, although I will say that we did not specifically enunciate them at Square. It wasn't like we had a core value meeting and said, this is what we value. It was just sort of baked into the culture. There was a respect for the small merchant. I mean, I was a small merchant. Jack's mom and dad were both small merchants. So like we didn't have to say anything, right? There was a value of design. There were these certain values, respect for how difficult it is to run a business. That was sort of baked into the culture. And I don't think that any company is going to make a meaningful change in the world unless they've got values that align with what the customers want. But that's okay. That's a completely worthless statement that I just made. It was like, duh, okay, fine. You know, align your values with the customers. The real question is, at what point do you abandon them? Okay. And one of the things that I do in the book is an interesting pricing study where I take a look at how core values, which are sort of ethereal and hard to measure, can be seen in pricing, which is a number and that's easy to measure. And if you look at the way a lot of these companies who have these phenomenal innovation stacks and end up dominating the markets eventually lose their dominance, it's they start taking every last penny they can from their customers when they don't have to, when they've got no competition. And I go through a bunch of mathematical examples of how that's bad. Now it's not bad short-term, you make a lot more money short-term, but long-term you end up creating a big opening for competitors who will comment eventually, you know, beat you into the ground. And when we look at the innovation stacks articulated in the book, I think, again, it's this integration across all of them. And when you look at competitors and concern about other people entering the market, it's how they all interplay and assemble together to give you that advantage. And as you talk about it in Amazon, you know, they were doing some of those things that you guys were doing, but it becomes mathematically near impossible to clone these super successful businesses because of the interplay around the innovation stack itself. And much like you said earlier, designing a checklist and a framework that anyone could just go and operate is not actually gonna create the innovation stack that unlocks these insanely successful businesses. Yeah, and again, I don't wanna make it seem like you've, you know, read my book, you're gonna get some checklist on how to do it, but I will tell you how the process works. And what I also wanna tell people, and this is probably more important than the process itself, is how accessible this is. So one of the things that I note, but I don't really make a big point of is how literally everybody who I studied was unqualified to do what they did. Okay, so start with Jack and me. Neither one of us knew anything about payments. Zero experience in the payments industry. Jack had never run a small business. You know, I at least had a little experience there, but I mean, Jack was at zero. Like, so two wholly unqualified people in the world of payments. Biggest bank in the world, starting by a guy who was a produce vendor, you know, kid dropped out of school at age 15, you know, builds the biggest bank in the world, biggest bank in the world by a someone who never finished high school and wasn't even in the financial world for his first 30 years. So Kelleher, I mean, no cred as an airline executive. He was a lawyer, right? And you get these examples afterwards again. And you think, oh, well, what does that mean? And the answer is, it's that if you want to be successful under most systems, you need to get qualified, become an expert, and then there is a path that you walk that path and you become successful. And that works, but not in entrepreneurship. If you're doing something that has never been done before, by definition, there is no expertise. You can't be an expert. The Wright brothers were not qualified to fly the first airplane because no human had ever flown. Now, if I want to go out and fly a plane this afternoon, I got to go pass an FAA test. I got to go get a medical. I got to go have a check ride. I got to have all this stuff. 40 hours of training, ground school, like to be qualified today is possible to be qualified the first time is not possible. And the reason I wrote the book and I'm trying to get people to buy it, I'm not even trying to get the people to buy it. How do I put this? I don't care if you steal my book. I don't care if you steal the ideas. I don't care if you, I just want you to find somebody who needs to hear the message that nobody's an expert the first time. That's it. Because you come into a situation in your life and you will get a couple of these where you got a big problem, nobody knows what to do. And what I want you to do is at least consider the possibility that you could be the one to build something that's totally new, even though you're not qualified to do it. And I tell you these stories about all these unqualified people who built these multi-billion dollar behemoth companies, not to sort of show off about how cool it is to build these companies, but to basically say, look, these people were not special. They were not different. They were just in a situation where the only solution was to build something new and they did it anyway. And here's what that looks like. Because I don't want all our talent sitting on the sidelines with their new problems. That's the thing. The point of the book is, yeah, it's for you to read it, but really what you want to do because everybody knows somebody they should hand a copy to and say, get off the sideline next time you feel like you're unqualified because you'll always be unqualified to do something that's the first in human history. We work with so many clients who want to wait till they get their MBA to start their business. They have this idea, but to your exact point, they want to become the expert when in reality, what we're talking about here with the innovation stack is you become the expert along the way, failing, iterating and understanding the interplay in these complex systems that can't be taught by passively sitting in a classroom and listening how other people did it. Yeah, and don't blame those people because that's how we're all raised. Like we are all raised to worship expertise, right? You have to be qualified to do these things. And if you're not, society says, well, go back to school or go take this course or go on YouTube and look at somebody else teaching you how to do it. Well, it's not always possible. I think it also lends itself to flawed thought patterns. I mean, of course, if we're going to take on something, we want to think about why shouldn't I do this? What would be in my way? What would stop me? And of course, if that's the way you're thinking, you're going to put a list together of all these reasons why you shouldn't be doing it. And then you'll finally get to a point where like, yeah, I got enough stuff on there that allows me to feel good about not moving forward. And unfortunately, if you're going to be in this line of work and with all this free technology that you can use to build your own business, all the, you can find just enough, many reasons as to why you should start as reasons why you shouldn't, but to go along with that. Yeah, it's, we're going to see what we're looking for. Yeah, Johnny. And you like to just sort of riff off that, one of the biggest reasons is I'm not that person. I'm not Herb Kelleher. Like I'm not a total badass, chain-smoking, you know, wild turkey drinking in Maverick. I'm an introvert, you know? We tend to tell these success stories as hero stories. And this I think is one of the reasons Herb didn't want me to write a graphic novel, is that I would be too tempted to portray the protagonist as like Superman or Wonder Woman or like these are heroes and they're wearing capes and you know, like that's not how it's really done. These people first of all were not heroes when they did it, when they started off, when they did the significant stuff and built the innovation stacks. Like none of these people were anything but normal. They were just, but once you build one of these stacks, you then sort of harness this power that creates this massive growth and then you become the hero, but the actual qualities are present in so many people. And by telling hero stories, I think we discourage people from, you know, we give them one more reason, as you would say to disqualify themselves. And that just breaks my heart because I think, I think there are a lot of problems that could be solved by folks who unfortunately have just been trained their whole lives to be experts before they do anything. Well, doesn't work that way. So I'd love to hear obviously looking back at Square and understanding now the reason behind the book and the battle with Amazon and getting a greater understanding how you're bringing this innovation stack to you new ventures. And tell the audience a little bit about what you're doing with launch code because I think there's a lot of valuable lessons in the next venture with all of this understanding that you have. So first of all, it's very humbling to start something new if you're doing something again that hasn't been done because you're right back at zero with everybody else. So the fact that you've been successful doing it before is only valuable up to the point where you help, where you recognize some of the stuff again. You start seeing the same problems or similar types of problems and maybe a little bit less intimidated. But aside from that, it's not like you've got any new answers. So five years after starting Square, I started a nonprofit called Launch Code. I guess it was three years after starting Square, three or four. But I was concerned that we had a huge problem with opportunity inclusion in St. Louis. We had one of the most segregated cities in the country. We had people that lived on one side of the street that had basically no opportunity. And at the same time, I knew we had a huge shortage of programmers. So I thought, wonder if we could train up 100,000 programmers, which is a number of people that live below the poverty line in my hometown, about 100,000. And so I started this nonprofit called Launch Code and we began by placing people who knew how to program into jobs. And that doesn't sound hard, but it turns out that it's really, really difficult to place programmers with weird credentials. People want to hire you as a programmer if you've got two years of experience and a degree. And if you don't have that or if you don't look like what they expect you to look like, you will not get a job, even though you've got the skill. So Launch Code started as a placement program and we quickly evolved an innovation stack of our own, which allowed us to take people who didn't have traditional credentials and get them jobs. That then led to another problem, which is that, well, we quickly ran out of people that had the skills. So then we had to open up a training program, but we didn't do that normally either. We did a training in very, very different ways, mostly to allow volume because our training is free. And it turns out that free is really magic because if your program is free, you can maintain the quality standards for graduation that you can't if you're taking somebody's money. So, I mean, let's say AJ wants to be a programmer and he pays me $10,000 for a bootcamp or something. Okay, and let's say he's almost good enough to pass. Almost, but not quite. Am I gonna say, oh, sorry, AJ, you didn't make it? Or am I gonna say, hey, thanks for the 10 grand, here's a piece of paper? It turns out that most of the paid education that happens in programming has this way of getting slowly undermined by the fact that the students are actually customers. And because our system is free and open to everybody, we are able to keep a very, very high quality in the graduates because we never have to apologize for making it tough. We'll say, well, if you don't like it, drop out. Like, because there are 50 guys that will take your seat, but we don't have to, we don't have to lower our standards ever because we're not charging you anything. So it turns out that works really well. But then the hard part is you gotta figure out how to pay for it. So launch code is this thing. We're still evolving an innovation stack, but it's trained thousands of people and gotten them jobs. It's not just the training, it's the fact that we've gotten several thousand people who would not be programmers today working as programmers. So we're pretty happy with that. Yeah, and I know many in our audience, especially with what's going on with COVID are probably dabbling, thought about coding or career change. And it's an awesome opportunity that you're providing for people to take that leap. I know when it comes to the coding boot camps, especially the cost, they're pretty expensive. And to serve the clients and the prospective students that you are, many of them would be priced out of your typical coding boot camp. Launch code, like if you finish the launch code program, we will get you a job flat out. I think our placement rate, it used to be 100%, but it's now like 95%. But that's 95% on the first try. If we don't place you the first time, we'll come through again, we'll get you on this. So I've never told anybody, if you can get through launch code, I'm not saying you can, but thousands have. And if you're one of them, you're employed, period. Before we wrap, we love asking all of our guests what their X factor is. When a skill set and a mindset come together to make you unique and successful, what do you think your X factor is? I think I vastly underestimate how difficult something is gonna be. Like, I think it's no problem. You tell me something we need to do. I'm like, yeah, we can do that. Like, that's not, and I'm always wrong. I'm woefully underestimate how difficult stuff is. And I know this, I know this is my, I've seen the trade again and again and again. But like the other day, the other day, I was sailing through my day and I got everything done and I got home. I was like, something was weird. And what was weird was that I accomplished everything that I thought I was gonna accomplish that day. And that almost never happens to me. I almost always underestimate how difficult something is to do, which perversely gives me the ability to start journeys that are tougher than they think, or than I think. I was in the Grand Canyon last week with my son, he's 10, and we're walking down into this canyon, right? And the hard part about walking into a canyon is walking out, right? Cause down is easy. And you're going down and you're going down and you're like, oh, okay. And at some point, you gotta go up. And my son didn't think that he could make it, right? Cause he's 10 and he was 100 and something degrees. And, but it's amazing, you have to make it. Like you can't stay down here, much of, you know, sandstone and one dead snake. We saw one dead snake, but I mean like, so the ability to think that the walk is easier than it actually is, is what makes you take the journey. I love that. And it's a valuable lesson for audience. Johnny and I are excited to check out the graphic novel. So where can we in our audience find that? Oh, yes, yes. It's, so it's free and it's at JimMckelvey.com. You could download a free copy. Actually, I think there's even a way you can like mail me your mailing address and I'll mail you a copy, but they're printed books and they're, and they're also just, there's a PDF version. But it's chapter nine, and it deserves to be a graphic novel. There's a murder, there's a guy in a cape, there's a destruction of a major city, looting, horses, gunshots. I mean, it's just like, yeah, better to tell it with pen and ink. Yeah, quite the salesmanship. Thank you so much for joining us, Jim, it was a pleasure. AJ, Johnny, thanks so much, this has been super cool.