By his own account, a St. Louis glassblower named Jim McKelvey lost a sale of roughly two thousand dollars because his studio could not take an American Express card. He called a friend from back home in Missouri — Jack Dorsey — and the two of them set out to fix the specific, stupid problem that had just cost him a faucet.

The banks told them what they wanted to do was, in effect, not allowed. They did it anyway, and built the reader that turned a phone into a cash register.

Then in August 2014, Amazon launched Local Register: a ten dollar reader at two and a half percent against Square's two seventy-five, undercutting them by a full point. Square's response was to do nothing at all. On the thirtieth of October 2015, fourteen months later, Amazon announced it was shutting Local Register down — and mailed its own customers a Square reader.

This is the story of why doing nothing was the right answer, and what the S-1 actually said about a company everyone had decided was failing.