2:37Are there more specifics that you would encourage business leaders, political leaders to prioritize, whether it is public safety, whether it's education?
4:49Louis should be copying that are doing it better?
7:07Is there anything you see, signs or something you see that hey, this is going in the right direction for us?
Welcome to Winning STL, where we have conversations about how St. Louis can best compete and win in the battle for talent, jobs, growth, and equity. Winning STL is presented by Pyina, who creates richer lives for pets and the people who love them, and is proudly called St. Louis home since 1894. Joining me today is Jim McKelvey, founder and co-founder of numerous companies including Block, formerly known as Square, Launch Code, Invisibly, Third Degree Glass Factory, and that's just a few on his innovative journey over the years. I want to move on to our hometown, my adopted hometown, but I've been here 23 years, so I'm going to claim it. How are we, would you say, as a place to do business and for entrepreneurship? Are we doing well? Are we lacking?
St. Louis is bottom third. We have a culture of conservative. We say no too well too often. And we've sort of dissuaded people from taking risks in this town. Ironically, as a result of that, St. Louis is a great place to build things because you have no competition. If you want office space, telecom, access to infrastructure, St. Louis is fantastic because there's just not a lot of competition. So if you're building things, I love building companies in St. Louis because it's like this superpower because there's just nobody competing with me for talent or space. We got WashU spitting out thousands of great graduates every year. It's fantastic. You have some of the best health care, some of the best labs in the world, number two medical school in the world. So we've got phenomenal resources. And we don't have enough people using them. So if you want to build something, it's a great place. But if you look at us statistically, we're sort of in the bottom. And that's largely because I think we have become a very conservative city.
Interesting. So right back to where we started, which is that's a takeaway that you have that we've gotten too conservative as wealth got passed down through generations and maybe us today.
Say yes. Say yes. Let them do it. Just say yes. The idea of saying yes is not a permanent situation. If you say yes to something and it doesn't work, kill it. But you can say yes to an experiment and then if it doesn't work, you go back. Start with yes.
So, okay, that's kind of a broad takeaway and a good one, I think. Are there more specifics that you would encourage business leaders, political leaders to prioritize, whether it is public safety, whether it's education?
7 more exchanges in this transcript
Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.
Mckelvey, J. (2025, March 25). Winning STL: This is why Jim McKelvey thinks St. Louis can be one of the world's safest cities (Part [Interview transcript]. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/605766/
MLA
James Mckelvey. "Winning STL: This is why Jim McKelvey thinks St. Louis can be one of the world's safest cities (Part." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 Mar. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/605766/.
BibTeX
@misc{mckelvey2025_605766,
author = {James Mckelvey},
title = {Winning STL: This is why Jim McKelvey thinks St. Louis can be one of the world's safest cities (Part},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/605766/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
