Jim
McKelvey

Jim McKelvey walks into rooms where people know his name from very different things. In payments, he's the co-founder of Square - the company that handed credit card acceptance to everyone who'd ever been shut out of it. In St. Louis art circles, he's the master glassblower whose studio became one of the premier glass arts centers in America. At the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, he chaired the board. At Redbud VC, he mentors founders who build from the Midwest out. At Washington University, his name is on the engineering school.

None of this started with a plan. It started with a $2,000 faucet he couldn't sell.

In 2009, a customer came into McKelvey's glass studio wanting to buy an American Express. McKelvey couldn't accept it. The sale vanished. The frustration didn't. He called Jack Dorsey - a man he'd known since Dorsey was 15, whom colleagues had nicknamed "Jack the Genius" - and described a problem that had no good solution. By the end of the year, they'd built Square: a small card reader that plugged into a phone's headphone jack and made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to accept a credit card.

What followed was 18 months of what McKelvey would later call "intermittent failure." Not failure. Intermittent failure. The engineering mindset: it doesn't work yet. Square took a year and a half to actually work. Then, once it did, Amazon arrived with its own card reader, slashed prices below what could ever be profitable, and prepared to eat Square alive. McKelvey's response? Ignore them entirely. Don't match their pricing, don't respond in kind, don't change anything. Just keep building for customers.

On Halloween 2015, Amazon killed its competing product. It turned out their discount math was always unsustainable. McKelvey later described what he'd discovered as an "Innovation Stack" - a theory about how genuinely new companies survive precisely because copycats can't replicate the full set of innovations that made the original work.

The glassblowing was never a hobby McKelvey picked up to seem interesting. He was a glassblowing instructor before he was famous for anything. He co-founded Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis in 2002 - one of the country's main centers for the craft. His industrial glass designs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington. He wrote "The Art of Fire: Beginning Glassblowing," which became the most widely read glassblowing textbook in the world. His Twitter handle, @2000F, is the temperature of molten glass in Fahrenheit. He didn't choose this detail ironically.

The same quality runs through everything McKelvey touches: he doesn't separate the things he cares about. Engineering, art, finance, community - they're all the same problem to him, approached with the same tools. The undergraduate glassblowing elective he took at Washington University changed how he thought. He's been recommending students step outside their major ever since.

LaunchCode began in 2013 with a straightforward premise that sounds radical: if you can pass the test, you get a tech job. Guaranteed. No degree required. No traditional credentials. McKelvey co-founded it after watching people around him - unemployed friends, people coming out of difficult circumstances - get shut out of an industry that needed their talent. LaunchCode partners with companies to place graduates in paid apprenticeships. The guarantee has held for years.

In 2016, McKelvey started Invisibly - an attempt to rewire the economics of online content, giving users a way to pay for what they read without surrendering their data to advertisers. It's the kind of project where the answer doesn't exist yet, which is, by his own description, exactly the kind he seeks out.

He was named an Independent Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2017 and became its Chair in 2022. He doesn't fit the usual profile for that role either. He's been public about drawing inspiration not from tech industry peers, but from unemployed friends, homeless individuals, people returning from incarceration - anyone navigating a system that wasn't built for them.

Now, as an Operator Advisor at Redbud VC - the Columbia, Missouri-based early-stage fund that closed a $25M Fund II in 2026 - McKelvey does what he's always done. He finds people building something no one has built, somewhere no one is looking, and he bets on them.