Speaker 1: One of the most valuable tech startups that's still private
Speaker 1: is Stripe. It was started about a decade ago by
Speaker 1: two brothers, both of them dropped out of college to
Speaker 1: start the company. The company is reimagining the way people
Speaker 1: make their payments and had a chance to sit down
Speaker 1: with one of the founders, John Collison, in his offices
Speaker 1: in New York City.
Speaker 2: So tell me what Stripe actually is.
Speaker 3: So Stripe makes it easy for businesses to accept payments online.
Speaker 4: We got the idea.
Speaker 3: When we actually had started our own internet business and
Speaker 3: we found this so much stuff is getting better, you know,
Speaker 3: the tech is getting better at programming, language, is cloud hosting.
Speaker 3: But when it actually comes to running a business and
Speaker 3: taking payment from people all over the world, that was
Speaker 3: something that was really challenging. And so today, if you're
Speaker 3: setting up a business online, if you decided that you
Speaker 3: wanted to, you know, start a media company and charge subscriptions,
Speaker 3: you know, twenty dollars a month to access all the
Speaker 3: back catalog, how do you actually go and do that
Speaker 3: and take people's you know, credit card details or bank
Speaker 3: account details.
Speaker 4: Stripe provides the infant structure to do So.
Speaker 2: Where did the name Stripe come from?
Speaker 4: We okay.
Speaker 3: Stripe was originally called slashtev slash payments like with the
Speaker 3: you know, forward slashes in there, which was kind of
Speaker 3: a wry software engineering joke, and you can imagine it
Speaker 3: just like baffled everyone. You know, people in the flang
Speaker 3: industry thought we were some kind of dodgy fraud thing,
Speaker 3: and so okay, it was clear that this would work.
Speaker 4: So we went through the entire.
Speaker 3: Company went through a renaming exercise where you tried to
Speaker 3: come up with, you know, the best names we could
Speaker 3: and find out domain names were available. You know, we
Speaker 3: consider the name paid Demon for a while. Again, you know,
Speaker 3: we attracted a bad names for some reason, but we
Speaker 3: settled on Stripe.
Speaker 1: Before you started the company, how did people get this
Speaker 1: service in? Otherwise, there was business being done long before Stripe,
Speaker 1: So how did people deal with this problem?
Speaker 4: The most common way is people went to banks.
Speaker 3: You would go to Bank of America or Chase or
Speaker 3: someone like that, and you would get a merchant account
Speaker 3: from them. But you can kind of imagine banks didn't
Speaker 3: really understand internet companies that well, this is much more
Speaker 3: about providing the software to plug into your website. They're
Speaker 3: not in the software business. And honestly it was a
Speaker 3: bit of a hobby. It's a sideline from them. You
Speaker 3: won't hear when you hear a bank ceo talk about
Speaker 3: their business. This will never be front and center as
Speaker 3: something they really care about. And so there was no
Speaker 3: one who really specialized in making life easy for internet businesses.
Speaker 1: So your company was started, was doing business with a
Speaker 1: lot of entrepreneurial companies, but then you started doing business
Speaker 1: with Fortune five hundred, Fortune one hundred, Fortune fifty companies.
Speaker 2: Was that a transition?
Speaker 1: You have to wear a coat and tie when you
Speaker 1: go see the CEOs of Fortune fifty companies, And how
Speaker 1: did that work?
Speaker 4: You might.
Speaker 3: Association, you know, a Fortune one hundred company, but like
Speaker 3: the tech is a bit out of date and the
Speaker 3: user experienced a little bit clunky. If you talk to
Speaker 3: people inside those businesses, that's obviously not what they want.
Speaker 3: And so what we found is large companies coming to
Speaker 3: us because they want to offer a really compelling user
Speaker 3: experience that's as good as all the tech guys might do.
Speaker 3: And so you know we're talking to Forward about you know,
Speaker 3: they obviously want to make it where you can just
Speaker 3: buy a car online. You know, you don't have to
Speaker 3: necessarily go through the dealership. You know, we're working with Hurts.
Speaker 3: They want to modernize the car rental experience, like why
Speaker 3: can't you have everything within the Hurtz app and have
Speaker 3: that be the payment experience rather than having to wait
Speaker 3: in line at the car rental counter. You know, Amazon
Speaker 3: similarly making it easy for people all around the world
Speaker 3: to pay urban outfitters. They want to make it easy
Speaker 3: to you know, buy something online a return store or
Speaker 3: vice versa. And so we found all these large companies
Speaker 3: tended to almost kind of look at the startups and
Speaker 3: what they're doing and say, we want to be able
Speaker 3: to deliver that caliber of customer experience. And so I
Speaker 3: think our foundations in the tech world and the startup
Speaker 3: world we are actually quite useful as we went to
Speaker 3: go talk to the large companies.
Speaker 1: Now, there's a phrase in the Silicon Valley world called unicorn,
Speaker 1: which means a giganic companies come from nowhere, got it
Speaker 1: a lot of value. I guess you were about the
Speaker 1: biggest unicorn out there because one time you raise money
Speaker 1: at evaluation of about ninety some billion dollars more recently
Speaker 1: a little bit lower than that, but ninety billion dollars valuation.
Speaker 1: Many times people would say, if company's worth ninety billion,
Speaker 1: now maybe less than that, want not take a public
Speaker 1: You're a privately owned company.
Speaker 2: Why have you not taken in public?
Speaker 4: I get the sense that.
Speaker 3: Some tech companies, maybe a lot of tech companies, go
Speaker 3: public a bit too early. And what I mean by
Speaker 3: that is in Strip's case, I mean we still see
Speaker 3: tons of opportunity to change and.
Speaker 4: Grow the business quite a lot.
Speaker 3: We're still constantly inventing new products and developing new business lines,
Speaker 3: and also you can do that in the public markets.
Speaker 4: But I think culturally we have ended up.
Speaker 3: You know, you look at analysts following public companies and
Speaker 3: obsessing over guidance and what will be this quarter and
Speaker 3: things like that.
Speaker 4: Culturally we've ended up.
Speaker 3: I think in a bit more of a world where
Speaker 3: public companies are suited for the extract stage of the
Speaker 3: sigmoid curve rather than the expand stage. And Stripe is
Speaker 3: still growing very quickly reinvesting in new products. I don't
Speaker 3: think it's actually better in terms of how you can
Speaker 3: compensation employees, where you can give a better instrument for
Speaker 3: employee compensation and attracting the top talent as a private
Speaker 3: company because a public company one, it's an instrument that
Speaker 3: everyone else has access to. You know, a public company stock,
Speaker 3: you can just buy it in the public markets if
Speaker 3: you want.
Speaker 4: There's no rarity to us.
Speaker 3: But also you see various public companies that go through
Speaker 3: a kind of hype cycle and then spend you know,
Speaker 3: a long period of time with you know flat or
Speaker 3: evaluation going down, whereas I think as a you know,
Speaker 3: a private company or less likely to run into that.
Speaker 1: So you had a CFO who retired and when she
Speaker 1: did so you became her successor acting CFO. What was
Speaker 1: that like to be the CFO as well as the president.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, luckily now we have a real CFO, a
Speaker 3: fellow named Stephen Thomlinson who joined last year. But as
Speaker 3: your reference, for the best part of a year, I
Speaker 3: was our interim CFO.
Speaker 4: It's actually very useful experience.
Speaker 3: Where I think all founders should be a CFO of
Speaker 3: their own businesses for you know, a period, because it
Speaker 3: really lets you get a quite hands on sense of
Speaker 3: the business. But you know, that was during twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: which was a funny time where you know, we did
Speaker 3: this kind of large fundraise in the beginning of the year.
Speaker 3: It was a quite large, you know, private market fundraise,
Speaker 3: and it was a weird time. Like you remember the
Speaker 3: start of twenty twenty three, everyone was nervous. Everyone's hiding
Speaker 3: under their desks. They didn't want to invest money, and
Speaker 3: so I think we had to kind of draw people
Speaker 3: out and be willing to make investments. And then that
Speaker 3: was a year where we also had to kind of
Speaker 3: tighten up a loss on kind of expenses and things
Speaker 3: like that, because everyone is battling down the hatches a
Speaker 3: bit for a recession. The recession didn't end up coming,
Speaker 3: but I think that was useful prep regardless.
Speaker 1: So you had a point at some point where you
Speaker 1: had to say, lay off some employees.
Speaker 2: Was that difficult to do well?
Speaker 3: Of course, I think in particular because you know, the
Speaker 3: company's fault at some level where we had been trying
Speaker 3: to project forward how many people we'd need and and
Speaker 3: you know at something that we've gotten that wrong, especially
Speaker 3: as it looked like things were looking kind of quite
Speaker 3: a bit weaker for twenty three and twenty four.
Speaker 4: So this was in twenty twenty two. But you have
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of people who are very good and yes.
Speaker 3: Just like it's not the right kind of structure for
Speaker 3: the company to have them, and so of course it's
Speaker 3: going to be hard.
Speaker 1: Now, sometimes the companies in Silicon Valley, they're seen as
Speaker 1: having postpone an IPO if they wait four years, five years,
Speaker 1: six years, ten years, waiting fourteen years is a long time.
Speaker 1: Is something like an IPO ever on your horizon, or
Speaker 1: it's just something you don't even think about or don't
Speaker 1: talk about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, look, presumably at some stage, but.
Speaker 3: I think the kind of broad narrative gets very transaction focused,
Speaker 3: because that's like the interesting media moment or something like that.
Speaker 3: If you were to look at Amazing inside of Stripe,
Speaker 3: you can probably imagine themb it is. We're very focused
Speaker 3: on is the product working well for customers, How is
Speaker 3: new customer growth growing?
Speaker 4: How are kind of.
Speaker 3: The fundamental financials of revenue growth and even for the business.
Speaker 3: We don't spend a lot of time on kind of
Speaker 3: transactions and kind of those.
Speaker 1: So when you get some professional investors, and many of
Speaker 1: them are among the leading venture capital firms in the
Speaker 1: United States, like Sequoia for example, at some point venture
Speaker 1: capitalists say, well, this is a great product.
Speaker 2: You're doing a great job.
Speaker 1: We'll give you more money, but we would like to
Speaker 1: actually get our money back at some point. You don't
Speaker 1: get any pressure from them saying after ten years or
Speaker 1: so you should get public or get our money back.
Speaker 3: I mean all of our venture investors kind of own
Speaker 3: a stake in the company that is compounding and continue
Speaker 3: to appreciation intrinsic value. And so I think that is
Speaker 3: the business they're in. That's what they're excited about. And
Speaker 3: you have to remember, you know, someone like a Sequoia.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's an open question as to whether
Speaker 3: Sequoia is a good venture investor. I think that they're
Speaker 3: not worried about having to prove themselves to okay.
Speaker 4: I think that's a known thing.
Speaker 1: So I think at the peak of the tech I
Speaker 1: won't say bubble, but the frenzy on tech companies, your
Speaker 1: company was valued I thought around ninety five billion or
Speaker 1: something like that. So ninety five billion dollars for a
Speaker 1: startup is pretty impressive. But then they melt down the
Speaker 1: tech world occurred. I think your last valuation was probably
Speaker 1: something closer to sixty billion, So is that depressing when
Speaker 1: you're from ninety five to sixty or sixty is still
Speaker 1: very high, and where people upset or you say, this
Speaker 1: is just the tech world and it'll go back up.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Look, people have a funny relationship to prices. Where first off,
Speaker 3: in the entirety of the public market space, you had
Speaker 3: a lot of enthusiasm in twenty twenty one, especially for
Speaker 3: things like you know, SaaS and fintech and things like that.
Speaker 3: If you look at companies in a similar space to
Speaker 3: Stripe but that are public vius, you know, Shopify or
Speaker 3: Square or anyone like that, they also had kind of
Speaker 3: much higher valuations in twenty twenty one. Then those came
Speaker 3: down because interest rates changed, the environment change, and so
Speaker 3: of course.
Speaker 4: That should flow through to valuations.
Speaker 3: But we find in the private market world people get
Speaker 3: very funny about you and I see other companies trying
Speaker 3: to preserve evaluation.
Speaker 4: That doesn't make sense anymore.
Speaker 3: Like prices are based on you know, you're at the
Speaker 3: midpoint of supply and demand, and they're kind of the
Speaker 3: imputed value of all the future cash flows. But I
Speaker 3: don't think it serves anyone to be in denial about
Speaker 3: lot of prices.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's suppose somebody came to work at your
Speaker 1: company the very beginning. They don't own as much as
Speaker 1: you do, but presumably they own some and they're not
Speaker 1: going to be maybe as wealthy as you and your
Speaker 1: brother might be, but they might say, I'd like to
Speaker 1: sell some stock. I don't have as much reserves as
Speaker 1: other people. How do they get to sell their stock
Speaker 1: if you're not going public? You buy their stock back
Speaker 1: from them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what we've done twice now is tender offers
Speaker 3: where we match together you know, investors, and you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes they also use the kind of company's own cash
Speaker 3: that it generates, and you know, do a buyback program
Speaker 3: for people at the opportunity to sell their shares. And
Speaker 3: so we did that last year, we did that this
Speaker 3: year again. I think we'll probably do it again in
Speaker 3: the future.
Speaker 1: So let's suppost somebody's watching this and says, this is
Speaker 1: a very't man.
Speaker 2: I've heard of Stripe. It's a great company.
Speaker 1: Evaluation might be sixty seventy eighty billion, whatever the next
Speaker 1: roound round might be, I'd like to invest in it.
Speaker 1: How does somebody invest in Stripe other than going through
Speaker 1: the venture firms you already have.
Speaker 4: I mean, they don't.
Speaker 3: In some cases, they might have exposure because they're you know,
Speaker 3: a shareholder in you know, some entity that owns a
Speaker 3: stake and strike and so you know, Fidelsy owns some
Speaker 3: shares and Stripe, and so maybe people have looked through
Speaker 3: exposure based on that. But remember also we are not
Speaker 3: The business does not do kind of primary equity raiss anymore.
Speaker 3: The business generates cash, and so the only shares the
Speaker 3: trade hands are just in the secondary markets where we want.
Speaker 4: To give employees liquidly.
Speaker 3: But you haven't sold his shares and I've you know,
Speaker 3: showed sold shares at some point in the past and
Speaker 3: you know, the tender offer or something like that, but
Speaker 3: certainly we're not.
Speaker 4: We're along the company now.
Speaker 1: You are the co founder and president. Who is the
Speaker 1: other co founder and CEO?
Speaker 3: So our CEO and my co founder is my brother Patrick.
Speaker 3: So we've been working together for a long time. We
Speaker 3: started the business fourteen years ago, and we actually started
Speaker 3: a business together previously. That was part of how we
Speaker 3: got the idea for Stripe.
Speaker 1: You've heard the phrase sibling rivalry, So do you have
Speaker 1: a sibling rivalry with your brother as a year older brother.
Speaker 4: He's my older brother.
Speaker 3: No, it's nice, you know, it mightn't work that well
Speaker 3: if we were particularly rivalrous.
Speaker 4: I actually think it's quite valuable for us.
Speaker 3: Look, everyone's co founders relationships are different. View of co
Speaker 3: founders at Carlisle in our case, in Silicon Valley broadly,
Speaker 3: co founder relationships can be.
Speaker 4: Unstable inherently.
Speaker 3: You know, you look at all of the large companies
Speaker 3: you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, you know, pick your example, and.
Speaker 4: You know Facebook.
Speaker 3: In a lot of cases the original co founding team
Speaker 3: did not stick together. And again in Stripe's case, we
Speaker 3: get really excited about this idea of growing the GDP
Speaker 3: of the Internet, expanding the Internet economy, and fourteen years in,
Speaker 3: we actually like we now are at the you know,
Speaker 3: the table stakes part. We feel like we've done some
Speaker 3: good groundwork, but we can do some really interesting stuff
Speaker 3: over the next ten or twenty years.
Speaker 4: I think that's much more fun.
Speaker 3: And you have much more opportunity to work on it
Speaker 3: with a long term perspective. If you have very trusting
Speaker 3: co founder relationships, it makes us, I think, more stable,
Speaker 3: more enjoyable, So you're more likely to stick at doing this,
Speaker 3: and so I feel pretty fortunate for the relationship that Patrika.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about your background and how this came about,
Speaker 1: so I can tell prem er accent.
Speaker 2: You're not from New York City exactly. Yeah, so originally
Speaker 2: you're from where.
Speaker 3: I'm from, Ireland, and I grew up there and then
Speaker 3: I ended up coming to the United States for college.
Speaker 1: You grow up in Ireland, Limerick, I assume you did
Speaker 1: okay in school what you got into Harvard, which is
Speaker 1: probably not that easy to do from Ireland. So why
Speaker 1: did you go to Harvard and why did you drop
Speaker 1: out of Harvard?
Speaker 4: I went to Harvard's I don't know. At that time.
Speaker 4: I just had some wonderlust. I wanted to get out
Speaker 4: and explore the world.
Speaker 3: As you say, I was pretty academic, like, I liked school,
Speaker 3: I liked studying, and I just really wanted to get
Speaker 3: out to somewhere else. And I think that's sometimes for
Speaker 3: people who grew up somewhere kind of small, in a
Speaker 3: small community. That's a common sentiment. And so that's why
Speaker 3: I ended up at Harvard. We actually started stripe when
Speaker 3: we were in college, so I was at Harvard, Patrick
Speaker 3: was down the road at MIT.
Speaker 4: We had been talking about this idea.
Speaker 3: And again this was two thousand and nine, where there
Speaker 3: were a huge number of Internet businesses. But if you
Speaker 3: talk to any internet entrepreneur again, they would tell you
Speaker 3: that this was their biggest frustration. But we were, you know,
Speaker 3: nineteen and twenty one at the time, we were not
Speaker 3: experienced in the industry.
Speaker 4: And I think what's interesting is.
Speaker 3: Stripe is obviously regulated financial services firm. It was probably
Speaker 3: helpful that we had no idea of what it would
Speaker 3: because you know, it's actually pretty complex to build something
Speaker 3: like Strip.
Speaker 4: But we gradually got into it.
Speaker 2: All right, So you did one year at Harvard and
Speaker 2: you dropped down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and did you say to your parents, I'm going
Speaker 1: to be the next Bill Gates from Mark Zuckerberg or
Speaker 1: they didn't say anything about the importance of going and
Speaker 1: getting your degree.
Speaker 3: Quite the opposite of what I said to my mom,
Speaker 3: who I was leaving Ireland for colleges. You know, she said, okay,
Speaker 3: because Patrick had dropped out previously. She said to me,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're going, you're going for four years.
Speaker 3: You got to do the whole thing.
Speaker 4: I said, yes, absolutely, I'm going four years. I will graduate.
Speaker 3: And that was about two months before we started writing
Speaker 3: the code for Strip.
Speaker 1: So where did you get your initial money to get
Speaker 1: the company started?
Speaker 4: So we did like a lot of people.
Speaker 3: We did, you know, a little bit of kind of
Speaker 3: friends and family fundraising from anyone we could get connected to.
Speaker 3: And then the very first investors were Paul Graham, Sam Altman,
Speaker 3: and then Peter Teel.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they came in early.
Speaker 1: At that point, you had no revenue, You had nothing
Speaker 1: but an idea.
Speaker 3: We had a few customers, and so I guess we
Speaker 3: had a little bit of revenue, but minimal wouldn't be
Speaker 3: impressive to you, right.
Speaker 1: So you get the company off the ground, and at
Speaker 1: what point do you get some enough customers to go
Speaker 1: to a professional venture capital firm and say.
Speaker 2: We have a real business here.
Speaker 3: I think with the early stage investors, they're very much
Speaker 3: focused on the found and team, the product, things like that.
Speaker 3: And so when you look at those early early investors
Speaker 3: to Stripe, I think basically what they looked at is
Speaker 3: they saw the product. We might have had, you know,
Speaker 3: fifty customers at the time or something. We are quite
Speaker 3: compelling demo showing how quickly you could get started accepting payments.
Speaker 3: And this is still like if I want to sell
Speaker 3: someone on Stripe today, I just showed them, you know,
Speaker 3: you go to Stripe dot com, You log on and
Speaker 3: you can be set up to start accepting payments from
Speaker 3: customers all around the world in a matter of five minutes.
Speaker 3: You know, that's kind of the demo now, and it
Speaker 3: was the demo back then. And then we would encourage
Speaker 3: investors to talk to any kind of tech entrepreneurs they
Speaker 3: know and just ask them how the experience of dealing
Speaker 3: with payments was. And so, you know, we talked to investor,
Speaker 3: we'd show them the product whatever, and then they would
Speaker 3: maybe go call on their portfolio companies and you know, say,
Speaker 3: you know, hey, do you guys have any problems accepting payments?
Speaker 3: They have to hold the phone away from their ear.
Speaker 3: They got so much yelling at the other end about
Speaker 3: how crummy the existing providers were. But I think that's
Speaker 3: really what they were underwriting in the airly investments was
Speaker 3: just this seems like a good idea, This product seems good,
Speaker 3: and it seems like it's addressing a real problem that
Speaker 3: people have.
Speaker 1: Many companies struggle with a couple issues like ESG DEI
Speaker 1: let's talk about that. Yeah, do you care about ESG
Speaker 1: at stripe? But is that a major focus or not
Speaker 1: your major focus?
Speaker 3: There are a number of mission oriented cause and ideas
Speaker 3: that we care about. You know, firstly the overall mission
Speaker 3: of Stripe, where we're broadening access to entrepreneurship and making
Speaker 3: kind of global e commerce easier. And so there is
Speaker 3: a real social good that we care about at Stripe.
Speaker 3: And then there are other things we care about. We
Speaker 3: have this part of the business called Stripe Climate where
Speaker 3: we're funding carbon removal technologies and offering that to our customers,
Speaker 3: and we can go into that. However, I think think
Speaker 3: curious what you think just the whole ESG movement has
Speaker 3: gotten into a very kind of check boxy exercise and
Speaker 3: you know, an excuse for people to focus on things
Speaker 3: other than being good fiduciaries for their shareholders and ended
Speaker 3: up with a loss of lawful Basically.
Speaker 2: What about the EI.
Speaker 1: Are you all a bunch of white tech engineers who
Speaker 1: are all man or not?
Speaker 3: The case that's similarly here, I think the if you
Speaker 3: were to kind of go walk the hallways and Stripe
Speaker 3: and meet people, it's a very diverse group of people
Speaker 3: who kind of make up the constituency that is Stripe.
Speaker 3: But the public debate about that has gotten kind of funny.
Speaker 1: Now you're pretty well known in the tech world. So
Speaker 1: if you walk down the streets in New York City
Speaker 1: where we are today, I don't know whether people recognize you.
Speaker 1: But if you go into a restaurant in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: I assume everybody comes up and says, here's my resume
Speaker 1: or something like that. Can you go in Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: and not be bothered by people trying to get something
Speaker 1: from you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's still fine actually, because I remember, we sell
Speaker 3: to businesses. You know, we're not on you know, TV
Speaker 3: all the time, and people just I think, aren't that
Speaker 3: interested in the payments industry, which we like it.
Speaker 4: You know, it's nice to be in a boring part
Speaker 4: of the industry.
Speaker 1: How old are you now, I'm thirty three, thirty three, Okay,
Speaker 1: well pretty young. So let's suppose when you're forty three,
Speaker 1: fifty three, or sixty three, what.
Speaker 2: Do you want to be?
Speaker 1: You want to be a wealthy entrepreneur, build another company,
Speaker 1: be a great philanthropist, art collector. What is your ambition
Speaker 1: ten twenty thirty years from now?
Speaker 3: Well, first off, I'd be very happy running stripe. I
Speaker 3: expect to be running Stripe twenty years from now, because again,
Speaker 3: this is just the kind of problem that has returns
Speaker 3: to time spent on the problem. And the payments industry
Speaker 3: is actually changing quite a bit at this very moment
Speaker 3: in time, where we're seeing, for example, more global heterogeneity
Speaker 3: in payment systems, like you know, fifteen years ago everyone
Speaker 3: maybe just paid online with the credit cards, is now
Speaker 3: every different country has a different unit.
Speaker 4: You' see the growth of.
Speaker 3: Upi in India or alipay, and we chat in China
Speaker 3: and things like this, and so you need something like
Speaker 3: stripe to miss all these together. And we're just very
Speaker 3: early in the digitization of commerce broadly. And so again
Speaker 3: this is to me a very fulfilling, satisfying problem that
Speaker 3: I'd very happily be working on in twenty years. However,
Speaker 3: we're also kind of getting more interested in philanthropy and
Speaker 3: I think trying to learn about that and do us
Speaker 3: in a more bottoms up way. And so we have
Speaker 3: a biomedical institute that we helped the star at ARC,
Speaker 3: and there's various other kind of projects that were back.
Speaker 2: So is Bill gatespin after you to sign the giving pledge.
Speaker 4: I have not talked to himbout it really.
Speaker 2: I'm sure after this interview he'll be calling you.
Speaker 4: We're doing a bunch of givings, so we're already on
Speaker 4: the program.
Speaker 1: So sometimes people that are entrepreneurs say, I have one
Speaker 1: great idea, but actually I'm really smart.
Speaker 2: I can have two great ideas. So I have one
Speaker 2: great idea.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to start another company because I'm also
Speaker 1: so smart, I can think of another great thing. So
Speaker 1: is that a burning ambition to start another company or
Speaker 1: this one is? Basically this is going to be a
Speaker 1: life's passion.
Speaker 4: You know, it's hard enough to have one good idea.
Speaker 3: And you know, Charlie Munger had the you know, great
Speaker 3: quote about you know, taking a simple idea and taking
Speaker 3: it really seriously. I think maybe people don't take the
Speaker 3: core idea seriously enough. Where the idea behind Stripe is
Speaker 3: we think that there could be more internet commerce, more
Speaker 3: successful internet companies created, if we lowered the cost of
Speaker 3: doing so, if we made it easier to do so.
Speaker 3: And we're taking that core idea really, really seriously.
Speaker 1: So if somebody is watching this and they want to
Speaker 1: take away from this interview something about Stripe, and you
Speaker 1: could summarize in a paragraph or two what you would
Speaker 1: want somebody to know about Stripe, What would it be,
Speaker 1: How would you summarize what somebody should know when you'd
Speaker 1: like somebody to know about Stripe.
Speaker 3: One could be this idea of you know, taking an
Speaker 3: idea and taking it seriously. And again we started with
Speaker 3: we want to make it easy for Internet businesses to
Speaker 3: accept money, and we just kind of kept running with that.
Speaker 4: Good thing maybe is that within the look.
Speaker 3: I think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to try to in retrospect,
Speaker 3: go back and tidy up the story and make it
Speaker 3: seem like they had everything figured out on day one,
Speaker 3: and you know, our mission we set out, you know,
Speaker 3: go solve you know xy Z. I think the way
Speaker 3: it tends to actually happen is that there's.
Speaker 4: A bit of experimenting.
Speaker 3: You don't know where it's going to go, but the
Speaker 3: domain teaches you as you go if you're paying attention.
Speaker 3: And so with Stripe, we never thought that there'd be
Speaker 3: as much of an opportunity to be a global payments
Speaker 3: infrastructure as we did, but we got to learn from
Speaker 3: our customers. Similarly, we never thought large businesses would use
Speaker 3: Stripe like some of the companies I mentioned, like Amazon
Speaker 3: and Hurts and those folks using us on day one
Speaker 3: of the business We never thought that would happen, but
Speaker 3: we noticed that larger and larger businesses were reaching out
Speaker 3: to us sudden, you know, needed the services or the
Speaker 3: business on on Stripe.
Speaker 4: We're growing.
Speaker 3: We also have companies like door Dash and instacars who
Speaker 3: started with very small companies and obviously are now very
Speaker 3: successful public companies.
Speaker 4: And so I think the thing that maybe people.
Speaker 3: Underrate is being in a domain teaches you about that
Speaker 3: domain if you're willing to pay attention, and a lot
Speaker 3: of business success can come from listening to what the
Speaker 3: market is trying to tell you.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews.
Speaker 1: You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen