Meet the billionaire who wants to help you get the most out of your personal data

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• Meet the billionaire who wants to help you get the most out of your personal data

The title entrepreneur is often used these days to describe just about anyone successful in business, but at some point, its true meaning has been lost, says Jim McKelvey. Over the years, McKelvey has founded a number of different companies, including Titan Square Payments, which is now worth around €120 billion. So we can assume that he knows a thing or two about entrepreneurship. According to McKelvey's definition, there is an important distinction between an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur copies what has already been done and copies successfully, while an entrepreneur is someone brave (or crazy) enough to forge a whole new path. "Entrepreneurs are normal people," he told TechRadar Pro. "There are no superlatives to describe them, other than the fact that they were put in a place that they weren't allowed to copy, but they carried on regardless." “When you encounter a problem that humanity has not yet solved, all your schooling, social experience, and biology will tell you to stop. We are programmed as humans to copy, not to innovate, but entrepreneurs have this extra equipment.

A problem to solve

McKelvey insists there was never a time when he didn't think about starting a business, even when he was young. “I just had to wait until I had a reason to start one,” he said. To date, McKelvey has started businesses in a wide variety of fields, from CD case manufacturing to publishing, software and payments. He even touches on the arts; McKelvey is an avid glassblower and owns a studio called Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis, Missouri. The common thread that connects these vastly different efforts, McKelvey says, is that they were all looking to solve a problem that hadn't yet been solved. Sometimes identifying these issues is hard work, but sometimes they come out like a thunderbolt. It was in his glassblowing shop that McKelvey came up with the idea for Square. He was trying to sell one of his parts, but the buyer said he could only pay with American Express, which he didn't have the equipment to accept. “Suddenly, I found out that I already had a problem close to my heart: getting paid,” he joked.

Square's iconic card reader (Image credit: Square) Coincidentally, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had approached McKelvey earlier that year asking if he was interested in co-founding a new business (at 15, Dorsey had worked with McKelvey as an intern at Mira). The duo had exchanged a few ideas, but suddenly they had one with potential. Just three weeks later, they had built a working prototype of what would later become the iconic Square card reader, a small point-of-sale system that plugs into a smartphone's audio jack. Granted, it took another year and a half before the duo managed to navigate the various legal intricacies and bring the payment operators together (Visa is rumored to have kept a filing cabinet with plans to sink Square). However, they had created a solution to the McKelvey problem, a solution shared by millions of small businesses around the world. “Our value proposition was very simple: Get paid fairly,” McKelvey explained.

Defend against a tech giant

Since 2009, Square has expanded beyond its original point-of-sale device, into areas like peer-to-peer payments and even stock and crypto trading. But that doesn't mean there weren't a few scares along the way. The biggest threat comes from Amazon, a company known for bankrupting startups. In 2014, Amazon began selling a card reader with identical features to Square's, but cut McKelvey's business by 30%. However, the number of customers using Square held steady, and Amazon eventually dropped its offering in early 2016. McKelvey has repeatedly been asked why he thinks Square is able to roll back Amazon's advances, when no other company has done it before. The closest explanation he found was that a random combination of attributes and a collection of different inventions made Square more resilient than Amazon might have expected.

Rival Amazon card reader, murdered in 2016 (Image credit: Amazon) That's the subject of McKelvey's book, The Innovation Stack, which he says is categorically not a textbook to study, but rather a exploration of the power of new ideas when they are chained, or rather stacked. “In the beginning, before Square became Square, people just didn't understand the concept. But we finally figured out how to make it work; it required a set of inventions that we call the Square innovation stack,” McKelvey said. "Part of that innovation stack was we figured out how to do something really cool quickly, and then we figured out how to do it legally." When asked how the company manages to stay agile despite its rapid expansion, McKelvey explained that culture is the second most important piece of the puzzle. “We don't see ourselves as a financial company, we are a technology company. We have great people, we don't have strong buy-in for existing systems, and we never punish failure. According to McKelvey, a company that has some of this "magic" infused into its DNA is much better equipped to deal with a crisis, whether in the form of a pandemic or a Big Tech attack.

A new problem

While McKelvey still retains control of Square through a board position, his attention is now largely invested in solving a new problem: the imbalance of power in the data economy. “We are all monetized by platforms that take our information, our digital selves, and sell it for their own benefit. And that's wrong, ”he told us. To address this hyper-modern problem, McKelvey founded Invisibility, a company that's hard to define but largely seeks to return control of personal data back to its owners. Originally, Invisibility was supposed to help reshape the economics that underpin the journalism industry in the digital age. According to McKelvey, as long as the Internet is powered by human attention, “the mathematics that creates false information will be more favorable than the mathematics that creates the truth; it is cheaper to tell an interesting lie than an exact truth. His goal was to give publications a way to generate revenue that wasn't tied to their ability to attract as many eyes as possible, or to convince people to pay for an expensive all-access subscription. The plan was to reward users with tokens for each ad they viewed, which could then be spent to access pay-per-article media content. After a rocky start, which McKelvey attributes to the failure of media brands to provide accurate data, Invisibility has since rebooted itself by focusing more on the people reading the articles than the posts themselves.

Invisible Logo (Image credit: Invisible) Invisibility now requires users to provide as much or as little personal information as they like. The company does not sell this data directly, but rather uses it to connect people with advertisements for products and services that are likely to meet their needs. Companies on the other side of the equation pay Invisibly the privilege of targeting the most relevant audience possible (and most importantly, an audience that has actively consented), with the proceeds funneled into the pockets of the people who provided the information. data. place. "We're basically acting as his agent," McKelvey explained. “We try to sell you to advertisers and we give you the money. We ask you how much you are willing to sell, bag up and sell it to the highest bidder. Another Invisibility spokesperson told us that early beta users (currently living only in the US) can expect to earn just a few dollars a month for now, but the company says this number has the potential to grow dramatically as the market grows. And really, while funds earned on the platform can be withdrawn, Invisibility is more interested in putting that money to work for its users. “Our goal is to give users many ways to use their income; it can make someone feel rich when there is a low friction way to spend small amounts,” the headline said. "Five dollars buys a lot of paid content, or it could be used to buy rideshare credits, for example." In essence, Invisibility attempts to create a multifaceted marketplace that realigns the ambitions of everyone involved, from the person providing the data to the companies paying to advertise to those whose products will be offered in exchange for the tokens people earn. .

Too good to be true?

If this all sounds a bit complex, that's because it is. The different players in the market and the number of moving parts make Invisiblely a complex proposition to understand. But perhaps a complex problem calls for an equally clever solution. Invisible is far from the finished article and there are still details to work out. For example, it's not clear why brands would bother using Invisible to target an audience when third-party cookies still exist. But McKelvey is convinced that his team has, at the very least, built the core of something that could be truly transformative. A recent cash injection from famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel and initial interest expressed by several Fortune 500 companies (although Invisibility didn't provide names) suggests he might be right. “It's still very early, but come play! It's starting to get fun,” McKelvey said, before heading off to his next meeting.

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