In February 2009, Jim McKelvey, who’d left the technology business and became a glass blower, lost an order because he couldn’t accept a credit card from a customer who wanted to buy his creation. He called his friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The two talked about lost opportunities in the current payment ecosystem that is dominated by giants such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Within days McKelvey left St. Louis, moved to San Francisco to team up with Dorsey and Tristan O’Tierney and start working on what would eventually become Square. It took them a month to cobble together a working prototype. Dorsey worked on the back-end server, O’Tierney on the iPhone app and McKelvey worked on the hardware and on establishing relationships with payment partners.

“We went through the whole payments process and worked on designing a brand-new (person-to-person) payment system,” said Dorsey in a conversation earlier today. The San Francisco-based startup today came out of stealth with a tweet by Dorsey.

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One month from idea to prototype.

Probably 10 years, if they win, to get their vision truly established.