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Transcript

John Collison · The David Rubenstein Show

0:03
Speaker 1: One of the most valuable tech startups that's still private
0:06
Speaker 1: is Stripe. It was started about a decade ago by
0:08
Speaker 1: two brothers, both of them dropped out of college to
0:11
Speaker 1: start the company. The company is reimagining the way people
0:14
Speaker 1: make their payments and had a chance to sit down
0:16
Speaker 1: with one of the founders, John Collison, in his offices
0:19
Speaker 1: in New York City.
0:20
Speaker 2: So tell me what Stripe actually is.
0:23
Speaker 3: So Stripe makes it easy for businesses to accept payments online.
0:28
Speaker 4: We got the idea.
0:29
Speaker 3: When we actually had started our own internet business and
0:32
Speaker 3: we found this so much stuff is getting better, you know,
0:34
Speaker 3: the tech is getting better at programming, language, is cloud hosting.
0:37
Speaker 3: But when it actually comes to running a business and
0:39
Speaker 3: taking payment from people all over the world, that was
0:42
Speaker 3: something that was really challenging. And so today, if you're
0:44
Speaker 3: setting up a business online, if you decided that you
0:46
Speaker 3: wanted to, you know, start a media company and charge subscriptions,
0:51
Speaker 3: you know, twenty dollars a month to access all the
0:53
Speaker 3: back catalog, how do you actually go and do that
0:55
Speaker 3: and take people's you know, credit card details or bank
0:57
Speaker 3: account details.
0:58
Speaker 4: Stripe provides the infant structure to do So.
1:01
Speaker 2: Where did the name Stripe come from?
1:04
Speaker 4: We okay.
1:05
Speaker 3: Stripe was originally called slashtev slash payments like with the
1:09
Speaker 3: you know, forward slashes in there, which was kind of
1:11
Speaker 3: a wry software engineering joke, and you can imagine it
1:17
Speaker 3: just like baffled everyone. You know, people in the flang
1:20
Speaker 3: industry thought we were some kind of dodgy fraud thing,
1:22
Speaker 3: and so okay, it was clear that this would work.
1:24
Speaker 4: So we went through the entire.
1:25
Speaker 3: Company went through a renaming exercise where you tried to
1:29
Speaker 3: come up with, you know, the best names we could
1:31
Speaker 3: and find out domain names were available. You know, we
1:33
Speaker 3: consider the name paid Demon for a while. Again, you know,
1:36
Speaker 3: we attracted a bad names for some reason, but we
1:38
Speaker 3: settled on Stripe.
1:39
Speaker 1: Before you started the company, how did people get this
1:42
Speaker 1: service in? Otherwise, there was business being done long before Stripe,
1:45
Speaker 1: So how did people deal with this problem?
1:47
Speaker 4: The most common way is people went to banks.
1:50
Speaker 3: You would go to Bank of America or Chase or
1:53
Speaker 3: someone like that, and you would get a merchant account
1:56
Speaker 3: from them. But you can kind of imagine banks didn't
1:59
Speaker 3: really understand internet companies that well, this is much more
2:03
Speaker 3: about providing the software to plug into your website. They're
2:06
Speaker 3: not in the software business. And honestly it was a
2:08
Speaker 3: bit of a hobby. It's a sideline from them. You
2:10
Speaker 3: won't hear when you hear a bank ceo talk about
2:12
Speaker 3: their business. This will never be front and center as
2:14
Speaker 3: something they really care about. And so there was no
2:16
Speaker 3: one who really specialized in making life easy for internet businesses.
2:19
Speaker 1: So your company was started, was doing business with a
2:22
Speaker 1: lot of entrepreneurial companies, but then you started doing business
2:25
Speaker 1: with Fortune five hundred, Fortune one hundred, Fortune fifty companies.
2:28
Speaker 2: Was that a transition?
2:29
Speaker 1: You have to wear a coat and tie when you
2:31
Speaker 1: go see the CEOs of Fortune fifty companies, And how
2:33
Speaker 1: did that work?
2:34
Speaker 4: You might.
2:36
Speaker 3: Association, you know, a Fortune one hundred company, but like
2:38
Speaker 3: the tech is a bit out of date and the
2:40
Speaker 3: user experienced a little bit clunky. If you talk to
2:42
Speaker 3: people inside those businesses, that's obviously not what they want.
2:45
Speaker 3: And so what we found is large companies coming to
2:49
Speaker 3: us because they want to offer a really compelling user
2:52
Speaker 3: experience that's as good as all the tech guys might do.
2:55
Speaker 3: And so you know we're talking to Forward about you know,
2:58
Speaker 3: they obviously want to make it where you can just
2:59
Speaker 3: buy a car online. You know, you don't have to
3:02
Speaker 3: necessarily go through the dealership. You know, we're working with Hurts.
3:05
Speaker 3: They want to modernize the car rental experience, like why
3:08
Speaker 3: can't you have everything within the Hurtz app and have
3:10
Speaker 3: that be the payment experience rather than having to wait
3:13
Speaker 3: in line at the car rental counter. You know, Amazon
3:15
Speaker 3: similarly making it easy for people all around the world
3:18
Speaker 3: to pay urban outfitters. They want to make it easy
3:21
Speaker 3: to you know, buy something online a return store or
3:23
Speaker 3: vice versa. And so we found all these large companies
3:27
Speaker 3: tended to almost kind of look at the startups and
3:30
Speaker 3: what they're doing and say, we want to be able
3:32
Speaker 3: to deliver that caliber of customer experience. And so I
3:35
Speaker 3: think our foundations in the tech world and the startup
3:38
Speaker 3: world we are actually quite useful as we went to
3:40
Speaker 3: go talk to the large companies.
3:42
Speaker 1: Now, there's a phrase in the Silicon Valley world called unicorn,
3:45
Speaker 1: which means a giganic companies come from nowhere, got it
3:48
Speaker 1: a lot of value. I guess you were about the
3:51
Speaker 1: biggest unicorn out there because one time you raise money
3:54
Speaker 1: at evaluation of about ninety some billion dollars more recently
3:58
Speaker 1: a little bit lower than that, but ninety billion dollars valuation.
4:02
Speaker 1: Many times people would say, if company's worth ninety billion,
4:04
Speaker 1: now maybe less than that, want not take a public
4:07
Speaker 1: You're a privately owned company.
4:08
Speaker 2: Why have you not taken in public?
4:11
Speaker 4: I get the sense that.
4:15
Speaker 3: Some tech companies, maybe a lot of tech companies, go
4:18
Speaker 3: public a bit too early. And what I mean by
4:21
Speaker 3: that is in Strip's case, I mean we still see
4:25
Speaker 3: tons of opportunity to change and.
4:28
Speaker 4: Grow the business quite a lot.
4:30
Speaker 3: We're still constantly inventing new products and developing new business lines,
4:34
Speaker 3: and also you can do that in the public markets.
4:37
Speaker 4: But I think culturally we have ended up.
4:40
Speaker 3: You know, you look at analysts following public companies and
4:42
Speaker 3: obsessing over guidance and what will be this quarter and
4:45
Speaker 3: things like that.
4:46
Speaker 4: Culturally we've ended up.
4:47
Speaker 3: I think in a bit more of a world where
4:49
Speaker 3: public companies are suited for the extract stage of the
4:53
Speaker 3: sigmoid curve rather than the expand stage. And Stripe is
4:57
Speaker 3: still growing very quickly reinvesting in new products. I don't
5:01
Speaker 3: think it's actually better in terms of how you can
5:02
Speaker 3: compensation employees, where you can give a better instrument for
5:06
Speaker 3: employee compensation and attracting the top talent as a private
5:09
Speaker 3: company because a public company one, it's an instrument that
5:13
Speaker 3: everyone else has access to. You know, a public company stock,
5:15
Speaker 3: you can just buy it in the public markets if
5:17
Speaker 3: you want.
5:18
Speaker 4: There's no rarity to us.
5:20
Speaker 3: But also you see various public companies that go through
5:23
Speaker 3: a kind of hype cycle and then spend you know,
5:25
Speaker 3: a long period of time with you know flat or
5:28
Speaker 3: evaluation going down, whereas I think as a you know,
5:30
Speaker 3: a private company or less likely to run into that.
5:33
Speaker 1: So you had a CFO who retired and when she
5:36
Speaker 1: did so you became her successor acting CFO. What was
5:40
Speaker 1: that like to be the CFO as well as the president.
5:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, luckily now we have a real CFO, a
5:46
Speaker 3: fellow named Stephen Thomlinson who joined last year. But as
5:50
Speaker 3: your reference, for the best part of a year, I
5:53
Speaker 3: was our interim CFO.
5:56
Speaker 4: It's actually very useful experience.
5:57
Speaker 3: Where I think all founders should be a CFO of
6:01
Speaker 3: their own businesses for you know, a period, because it
6:03
Speaker 3: really lets you get a quite hands on sense of
6:07
Speaker 3: the business. But you know, that was during twenty twenty three,
6:10
Speaker 3: which was a funny time where you know, we did
6:12
Speaker 3: this kind of large fundraise in the beginning of the year.
6:17
Speaker 3: It was a quite large, you know, private market fundraise,
6:20
Speaker 3: and it was a weird time. Like you remember the
6:22
Speaker 3: start of twenty twenty three, everyone was nervous. Everyone's hiding
6:25
Speaker 3: under their desks. They didn't want to invest money, and
6:28
Speaker 3: so I think we had to kind of draw people
6:30
Speaker 3: out and be willing to make investments. And then that
6:32
Speaker 3: was a year where we also had to kind of
6:35
Speaker 3: tighten up a loss on kind of expenses and things
6:38
Speaker 3: like that, because everyone is battling down the hatches a
6:40
Speaker 3: bit for a recession. The recession didn't end up coming,
6:42
Speaker 3: but I think that was useful prep regardless.
6:44
Speaker 1: So you had a point at some point where you
6:45
Speaker 1: had to say, lay off some employees.
6:47
Speaker 2: Was that difficult to do well?
6:49
Speaker 3: Of course, I think in particular because you know, the
6:52
Speaker 3: company's fault at some level where we had been trying
6:55
Speaker 3: to project forward how many people we'd need and and
7:01
Speaker 3: you know at something that we've gotten that wrong, especially
7:03
Speaker 3: as it looked like things were looking kind of quite
7:05
Speaker 3: a bit weaker for twenty three and twenty four.
7:07
Speaker 4: So this was in twenty twenty two. But you have
7:09
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of people who are very good and yes.
7:14
Speaker 3: Just like it's not the right kind of structure for
7:16
Speaker 3: the company to have them, and so of course it's
7:18
Speaker 3: going to be hard.
7:18
Speaker 1: Now, sometimes the companies in Silicon Valley, they're seen as
7:21
Speaker 1: having postpone an IPO if they wait four years, five years,
7:25
Speaker 1: six years, ten years, waiting fourteen years is a long time.
7:29
Speaker 1: Is something like an IPO ever on your horizon, or
7:32
Speaker 1: it's just something you don't even think about or don't
7:33
Speaker 1: talk about.
7:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, look, presumably at some stage, but.
7:38
Speaker 3: I think the kind of broad narrative gets very transaction focused,
7:43
Speaker 3: because that's like the interesting media moment or something like that.
7:46
Speaker 3: If you were to look at Amazing inside of Stripe,
7:49
Speaker 3: you can probably imagine themb it is. We're very focused
7:51
Speaker 3: on is the product working well for customers, How is
7:53
Speaker 3: new customer growth growing?
7:54
Speaker 4: How are kind of.
7:55
Speaker 3: The fundamental financials of revenue growth and even for the business.
8:00
Speaker 3: We don't spend a lot of time on kind of
8:02
Speaker 3: transactions and kind of those.
8:04
Speaker 1: So when you get some professional investors, and many of
8:06
Speaker 1: them are among the leading venture capital firms in the
8:09
Speaker 1: United States, like Sequoia for example, at some point venture
8:13
Speaker 1: capitalists say, well, this is a great product.
8:16
Speaker 2: You're doing a great job.
8:17
Speaker 1: We'll give you more money, but we would like to
8:19
Speaker 1: actually get our money back at some point. You don't
8:22
Speaker 1: get any pressure from them saying after ten years or
8:24
Speaker 1: so you should get public or get our money back.
8:29
Speaker 3: I mean all of our venture investors kind of own
8:33
Speaker 3: a stake in the company that is compounding and continue
8:37
Speaker 3: to appreciation intrinsic value. And so I think that is
8:40
Speaker 3: the business they're in. That's what they're excited about. And
8:42
Speaker 3: you have to remember, you know, someone like a Sequoia.
8:44
Speaker 3: I don't think it's an open question as to whether
8:46
Speaker 3: Sequoia is a good venture investor. I think that they're
8:49
Speaker 3: not worried about having to prove themselves to okay.
8:52
Speaker 4: I think that's a known thing.
8:53
Speaker 1: So I think at the peak of the tech I
8:56
Speaker 1: won't say bubble, but the frenzy on tech companies, your
9:00
Speaker 1: company was valued I thought around ninety five billion or
9:02
Speaker 1: something like that. So ninety five billion dollars for a
9:05
Speaker 1: startup is pretty impressive. But then they melt down the
9:08
Speaker 1: tech world occurred. I think your last valuation was probably
9:11
Speaker 1: something closer to sixty billion, So is that depressing when
9:15
Speaker 1: you're from ninety five to sixty or sixty is still
9:17
Speaker 1: very high, and where people upset or you say, this
9:19
Speaker 1: is just the tech world and it'll go back up.
9:22
Speaker 4: Yeah.
9:22
Speaker 3: Look, people have a funny relationship to prices. Where first off,
9:28
Speaker 3: in the entirety of the public market space, you had
9:32
Speaker 3: a lot of enthusiasm in twenty twenty one, especially for
9:35
Speaker 3: things like you know, SaaS and fintech and things like that.
9:37
Speaker 3: If you look at companies in a similar space to
9:40
Speaker 3: Stripe but that are public vius, you know, Shopify or
9:45
Speaker 3: Square or anyone like that, they also had kind of
9:47
Speaker 3: much higher valuations in twenty twenty one. Then those came
9:49
Speaker 3: down because interest rates changed, the environment change, and so
9:53
Speaker 3: of course.
9:54
Speaker 4: That should flow through to valuations.
9:55
Speaker 3: But we find in the private market world people get
9:58
Speaker 3: very funny about you and I see other companies trying
10:00
Speaker 3: to preserve evaluation.
10:02
Speaker 4: That doesn't make sense anymore.
10:04
Speaker 3: Like prices are based on you know, you're at the
10:06
Speaker 3: midpoint of supply and demand, and they're kind of the
10:10
Speaker 3: imputed value of all the future cash flows. But I
10:13
Speaker 3: don't think it serves anyone to be in denial about
10:15
Speaker 3: lot of prices.
10:16
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's suppose somebody came to work at your
10:18
Speaker 1: company the very beginning. They don't own as much as
10:21
Speaker 1: you do, but presumably they own some and they're not
10:24
Speaker 1: going to be maybe as wealthy as you and your
10:26
Speaker 1: brother might be, but they might say, I'd like to
10:27
Speaker 1: sell some stock. I don't have as much reserves as
10:31
Speaker 1: other people. How do they get to sell their stock
10:33
Speaker 1: if you're not going public? You buy their stock back
10:35
Speaker 1: from them.
10:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what we've done twice now is tender offers
10:39
Speaker 3: where we match together you know, investors, and you know,
10:46
Speaker 3: sometimes they also use the kind of company's own cash
10:48
Speaker 3: that it generates, and you know, do a buyback program
10:51
Speaker 3: for people at the opportunity to sell their shares. And
10:53
Speaker 3: so we did that last year, we did that this
10:54
Speaker 3: year again. I think we'll probably do it again in
10:56
Speaker 3: the future.
10:57
Speaker 1: So let's suppost somebody's watching this and says, this is
10:59
Speaker 1: a very't man.
11:00
Speaker 2: I've heard of Stripe. It's a great company.
11:02
Speaker 1: Evaluation might be sixty seventy eighty billion, whatever the next
11:06
Speaker 1: roound round might be, I'd like to invest in it.
11:08
Speaker 1: How does somebody invest in Stripe other than going through
11:10
Speaker 1: the venture firms you already have.
11:13
Speaker 4: I mean, they don't.
11:14
Speaker 3: In some cases, they might have exposure because they're you know,
11:17
Speaker 3: a shareholder in you know, some entity that owns a
11:21
Speaker 3: stake and strike and so you know, Fidelsy owns some
11:24
Speaker 3: shares and Stripe, and so maybe people have looked through
11:26
Speaker 3: exposure based on that. But remember also we are not
11:30
Speaker 3: The business does not do kind of primary equity raiss anymore.
11:34
Speaker 3: The business generates cash, and so the only shares the
11:38
Speaker 3: trade hands are just in the secondary markets where we want.
11:40
Speaker 4: To give employees liquidly.
11:42
Speaker 3: But you haven't sold his shares and I've you know,
11:44
Speaker 3: showed sold shares at some point in the past and
11:46
Speaker 3: you know, the tender offer or something like that, but
11:49
Speaker 3: certainly we're not.
11:50
Speaker 4: We're along the company now.
11:51
Speaker 1: You are the co founder and president. Who is the
11:54
Speaker 1: other co founder and CEO?
11:57
Speaker 3: So our CEO and my co founder is my brother Patrick.
12:00
Speaker 3: So we've been working together for a long time. We
12:04
Speaker 3: started the business fourteen years ago, and we actually started
12:07
Speaker 3: a business together previously. That was part of how we
12:10
Speaker 3: got the idea for Stripe.
12:11
Speaker 1: You've heard the phrase sibling rivalry, So do you have
12:14
Speaker 1: a sibling rivalry with your brother as a year older brother.
12:16
Speaker 4: He's my older brother.
12:18
Speaker 3: No, it's nice, you know, it mightn't work that well
12:20
Speaker 3: if we were particularly rivalrous.
12:23
Speaker 4: I actually think it's quite valuable for us.
12:26
Speaker 3: Look, everyone's co founders relationships are different. View of co
12:30
Speaker 3: founders at Carlisle in our case, in Silicon Valley broadly,
12:37
Speaker 3: co founder relationships can be.
12:41
Speaker 4: Unstable inherently.
12:43
Speaker 3: You know, you look at all of the large companies
12:46
Speaker 3: you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, you know, pick your example, and.
12:51
Speaker 4: You know Facebook.
12:52
Speaker 3: In a lot of cases the original co founding team
12:56
Speaker 3: did not stick together. And again in Stripe's case, we
13:00
Speaker 3: get really excited about this idea of growing the GDP
13:02
Speaker 3: of the Internet, expanding the Internet economy, and fourteen years in,
13:06
Speaker 3: we actually like we now are at the you know,
13:09
Speaker 3: the table stakes part. We feel like we've done some
13:11
Speaker 3: good groundwork, but we can do some really interesting stuff
13:13
Speaker 3: over the next ten or twenty years.
13:15
Speaker 4: I think that's much more fun.
13:18
Speaker 3: And you have much more opportunity to work on it
13:21
Speaker 3: with a long term perspective. If you have very trusting
13:25
Speaker 3: co founder relationships, it makes us, I think, more stable,
13:28
Speaker 3: more enjoyable, So you're more likely to stick at doing this,
13:30
Speaker 3: and so I feel pretty fortunate for the relationship that Patrika.
13:34
Speaker 1: Let's talk about your background and how this came about,
13:36
Speaker 1: so I can tell prem er accent.
13:38
Speaker 2: You're not from New York City exactly. Yeah, so originally
13:41
Speaker 2: you're from where.
13:42
Speaker 3: I'm from, Ireland, and I grew up there and then
13:44
Speaker 3: I ended up coming to the United States for college.
13:46
Speaker 1: You grow up in Ireland, Limerick, I assume you did
13:50
Speaker 1: okay in school what you got into Harvard, which is
13:53
Speaker 1: probably not that easy to do from Ireland. So why
13:55
Speaker 1: did you go to Harvard and why did you drop
13:57
Speaker 1: out of Harvard?
14:00
Speaker 4: I went to Harvard's I don't know. At that time.
14:02
Speaker 4: I just had some wonderlust. I wanted to get out
14:04
Speaker 4: and explore the world.
14:06
Speaker 3: As you say, I was pretty academic, like, I liked school,
14:09
Speaker 3: I liked studying, and I just really wanted to get
14:13
Speaker 3: out to somewhere else. And I think that's sometimes for
14:16
Speaker 3: people who grew up somewhere kind of small, in a
14:19
Speaker 3: small community. That's a common sentiment. And so that's why
14:24
Speaker 3: I ended up at Harvard. We actually started stripe when
14:27
Speaker 3: we were in college, so I was at Harvard, Patrick
14:30
Speaker 3: was down the road at MIT.
14:31
Speaker 4: We had been talking about this idea.
14:33
Speaker 3: And again this was two thousand and nine, where there
14:36
Speaker 3: were a huge number of Internet businesses. But if you
14:38
Speaker 3: talk to any internet entrepreneur again, they would tell you
14:42
Speaker 3: that this was their biggest frustration. But we were, you know,
14:45
Speaker 3: nineteen and twenty one at the time, we were not
14:49
Speaker 3: experienced in the industry.
14:50
Speaker 4: And I think what's interesting is.
14:51
Speaker 3: Stripe is obviously regulated financial services firm. It was probably
14:56
Speaker 3: helpful that we had no idea of what it would
15:00
Speaker 3: because you know, it's actually pretty complex to build something
15:03
Speaker 3: like Strip.
15:03
Speaker 4: But we gradually got into it.
15:05
Speaker 2: All right, So you did one year at Harvard and
15:07
Speaker 2: you dropped down.
15:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and did you say to your parents, I'm going
15:10
Speaker 1: to be the next Bill Gates from Mark Zuckerberg or
15:13
Speaker 1: they didn't say anything about the importance of going and
15:15
Speaker 1: getting your degree.
15:17
Speaker 3: Quite the opposite of what I said to my mom,
15:19
Speaker 3: who I was leaving Ireland for colleges. You know, she said, okay,
15:22
Speaker 3: because Patrick had dropped out previously. She said to me,
15:25
Speaker 3: you know, if you're going, you're going for four years.
15:26
Speaker 3: You got to do the whole thing.
15:27
Speaker 4: I said, yes, absolutely, I'm going four years. I will graduate.
15:30
Speaker 3: And that was about two months before we started writing
15:32
Speaker 3: the code for Strip.
15:33
Speaker 1: So where did you get your initial money to get
15:35
Speaker 1: the company started?
15:37
Speaker 4: So we did like a lot of people.
15:39
Speaker 3: We did, you know, a little bit of kind of
15:41
Speaker 3: friends and family fundraising from anyone we could get connected to.
15:44
Speaker 3: And then the very first investors were Paul Graham, Sam Altman,
15:50
Speaker 3: and then Peter Teel.
15:51
Speaker 2: Okay, so they came in early.
15:53
Speaker 1: At that point, you had no revenue, You had nothing
15:55
Speaker 1: but an idea.
15:56
Speaker 3: We had a few customers, and so I guess we
16:00
Speaker 3: had a little bit of revenue, but minimal wouldn't be
16:02
Speaker 3: impressive to you, right.
16:03
Speaker 1: So you get the company off the ground, and at
16:05
Speaker 1: what point do you get some enough customers to go
16:08
Speaker 1: to a professional venture capital firm and say.
16:11
Speaker 2: We have a real business here.
16:12
Speaker 3: I think with the early stage investors, they're very much
16:14
Speaker 3: focused on the found and team, the product, things like that.
16:17
Speaker 3: And so when you look at those early early investors
16:19
Speaker 3: to Stripe, I think basically what they looked at is
16:23
Speaker 3: they saw the product. We might have had, you know,
16:25
Speaker 3: fifty customers at the time or something. We are quite
16:27
Speaker 3: compelling demo showing how quickly you could get started accepting payments.
16:31
Speaker 3: And this is still like if I want to sell
16:33
Speaker 3: someone on Stripe today, I just showed them, you know,
16:36
Speaker 3: you go to Stripe dot com, You log on and
16:38
Speaker 3: you can be set up to start accepting payments from
16:40
Speaker 3: customers all around the world in a matter of five minutes.
16:43
Speaker 3: You know, that's kind of the demo now, and it
16:44
Speaker 3: was the demo back then. And then we would encourage
16:47
Speaker 3: investors to talk to any kind of tech entrepreneurs they
16:52
Speaker 3: know and just ask them how the experience of dealing
16:54
Speaker 3: with payments was. And so, you know, we talked to investor,
16:57
Speaker 3: we'd show them the product whatever, and then they would
17:00
Speaker 3: maybe go call on their portfolio companies and you know, say,
17:02
Speaker 3: you know, hey, do you guys have any problems accepting payments?
17:04
Speaker 3: They have to hold the phone away from their ear.
17:06
Speaker 3: They got so much yelling at the other end about
17:08
Speaker 3: how crummy the existing providers were. But I think that's
17:11
Speaker 3: really what they were underwriting in the airly investments was
17:13
Speaker 3: just this seems like a good idea, This product seems good,
17:16
Speaker 3: and it seems like it's addressing a real problem that
17:18
Speaker 3: people have.
17:19
Speaker 1: Many companies struggle with a couple issues like ESG DEI
17:23
Speaker 1: let's talk about that. Yeah, do you care about ESG
17:25
Speaker 1: at stripe? But is that a major focus or not
17:27
Speaker 1: your major focus?
17:28
Speaker 3: There are a number of mission oriented cause and ideas
17:34
Speaker 3: that we care about. You know, firstly the overall mission
17:39
Speaker 3: of Stripe, where we're broadening access to entrepreneurship and making
17:41
Speaker 3: kind of global e commerce easier. And so there is
17:44
Speaker 3: a real social good that we care about at Stripe.
17:48
Speaker 3: And then there are other things we care about. We
17:49
Speaker 3: have this part of the business called Stripe Climate where
17:52
Speaker 3: we're funding carbon removal technologies and offering that to our customers,
17:57
Speaker 3: and we can go into that. However, I think think
18:00
Speaker 3: curious what you think just the whole ESG movement has
18:03
Speaker 3: gotten into a very kind of check boxy exercise and
18:06
Speaker 3: you know, an excuse for people to focus on things
18:09
Speaker 3: other than being good fiduciaries for their shareholders and ended
18:13
Speaker 3: up with a loss of lawful Basically.
18:15
Speaker 2: What about the EI.
18:16
Speaker 1: Are you all a bunch of white tech engineers who
18:19
Speaker 1: are all man or not?
18:21
Speaker 3: The case that's similarly here, I think the if you
18:24
Speaker 3: were to kind of go walk the hallways and Stripe
18:27
Speaker 3: and meet people, it's a very diverse group of people
18:29
Speaker 3: who kind of make up the constituency that is Stripe.
18:34
Speaker 3: But the public debate about that has gotten kind of funny.
18:37
Speaker 1: Now you're pretty well known in the tech world. So
18:40
Speaker 1: if you walk down the streets in New York City
18:41
Speaker 1: where we are today, I don't know whether people recognize you.
18:44
Speaker 1: But if you go into a restaurant in Silicon Valley,
18:47
Speaker 1: I assume everybody comes up and says, here's my resume
18:49
Speaker 1: or something like that. Can you go in Silicon Valley
18:52
Speaker 1: and not be bothered by people trying to get something
18:54
Speaker 1: from you?
18:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's still fine actually, because I remember, we sell
18:59
Speaker 3: to businesses. You know, we're not on you know, TV
19:02
Speaker 3: all the time, and people just I think, aren't that
19:05
Speaker 3: interested in the payments industry, which we like it.
19:08
Speaker 4: You know, it's nice to be in a boring part
19:11
Speaker 4: of the industry.
19:11
Speaker 1: How old are you now, I'm thirty three, thirty three, Okay,
19:14
Speaker 1: well pretty young. So let's suppose when you're forty three,
19:17
Speaker 1: fifty three, or sixty three, what.
19:19
Speaker 2: Do you want to be?
19:19
Speaker 1: You want to be a wealthy entrepreneur, build another company,
19:24
Speaker 1: be a great philanthropist, art collector. What is your ambition
19:26
Speaker 1: ten twenty thirty years from now?
19:30
Speaker 3: Well, first off, I'd be very happy running stripe. I
19:33
Speaker 3: expect to be running Stripe twenty years from now, because again,
19:37
Speaker 3: this is just the kind of problem that has returns
19:42
Speaker 3: to time spent on the problem. And the payments industry
19:48
Speaker 3: is actually changing quite a bit at this very moment
19:51
Speaker 3: in time, where we're seeing, for example, more global heterogeneity
19:55
Speaker 3: in payment systems, like you know, fifteen years ago everyone
19:58
Speaker 3: maybe just paid online with the credit cards, is now
20:00
Speaker 3: every different country has a different unit.
20:02
Speaker 4: You' see the growth of.
20:03
Speaker 3: Upi in India or alipay, and we chat in China
20:06
Speaker 3: and things like this, and so you need something like
20:08
Speaker 3: stripe to miss all these together. And we're just very
20:11
Speaker 3: early in the digitization of commerce broadly. And so again
20:14
Speaker 3: this is to me a very fulfilling, satisfying problem that
20:17
Speaker 3: I'd very happily be working on in twenty years. However,
20:21
Speaker 3: we're also kind of getting more interested in philanthropy and
20:23
Speaker 3: I think trying to learn about that and do us
20:26
Speaker 3: in a more bottoms up way. And so we have
20:28
Speaker 3: a biomedical institute that we helped the star at ARC,
20:31
Speaker 3: and there's various other kind of projects that were back.
20:33
Speaker 2: So is Bill gatespin after you to sign the giving pledge.
20:36
Speaker 4: I have not talked to himbout it really.
20:38
Speaker 2: I'm sure after this interview he'll be calling you.
20:40
Speaker 4: We're doing a bunch of givings, so we're already on
20:42
Speaker 4: the program.
20:43
Speaker 1: So sometimes people that are entrepreneurs say, I have one
20:45
Speaker 1: great idea, but actually I'm really smart.
20:47
Speaker 2: I can have two great ideas. So I have one
20:50
Speaker 2: great idea.
20:50
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to start another company because I'm also
20:52
Speaker 1: so smart, I can think of another great thing. So
20:55
Speaker 1: is that a burning ambition to start another company or
20:57
Speaker 1: this one is? Basically this is going to be a
20:59
Speaker 1: life's passion.
21:01
Speaker 4: You know, it's hard enough to have one good idea.
21:03
Speaker 3: And you know, Charlie Munger had the you know, great
21:06
Speaker 3: quote about you know, taking a simple idea and taking
21:09
Speaker 3: it really seriously. I think maybe people don't take the
21:13
Speaker 3: core idea seriously enough. Where the idea behind Stripe is
21:18
Speaker 3: we think that there could be more internet commerce, more
21:21
Speaker 3: successful internet companies created, if we lowered the cost of
21:25
Speaker 3: doing so, if we made it easier to do so.
21:27
Speaker 3: And we're taking that core idea really, really seriously.
21:30
Speaker 1: So if somebody is watching this and they want to
21:33
Speaker 1: take away from this interview something about Stripe, and you
21:37
Speaker 1: could summarize in a paragraph or two what you would
21:39
Speaker 1: want somebody to know about Stripe, What would it be,
21:41
Speaker 1: How would you summarize what somebody should know when you'd
21:44
Speaker 1: like somebody to know about Stripe.
21:46
Speaker 3: One could be this idea of you know, taking an
21:51
Speaker 3: idea and taking it seriously. And again we started with
21:55
Speaker 3: we want to make it easy for Internet businesses to
21:57
Speaker 3: accept money, and we just kind of kept running with that.
22:00
Speaker 4: Good thing maybe is that within the look.
22:03
Speaker 3: I think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to try to in retrospect,
22:11
Speaker 3: go back and tidy up the story and make it
22:15
Speaker 3: seem like they had everything figured out on day one,
22:20
Speaker 3: and you know, our mission we set out, you know,
22:25
Speaker 3: go solve you know xy Z. I think the way
22:28
Speaker 3: it tends to actually happen is that there's.
22:32
Speaker 4: A bit of experimenting.
22:33
Speaker 3: You don't know where it's going to go, but the
22:36
Speaker 3: domain teaches you as you go if you're paying attention.
22:39
Speaker 3: And so with Stripe, we never thought that there'd be
22:42
Speaker 3: as much of an opportunity to be a global payments
22:45
Speaker 3: infrastructure as we did, but we got to learn from
22:47
Speaker 3: our customers. Similarly, we never thought large businesses would use
22:50
Speaker 3: Stripe like some of the companies I mentioned, like Amazon
22:52
Speaker 3: and Hurts and those folks using us on day one
22:54
Speaker 3: of the business We never thought that would happen, but
22:56
Speaker 3: we noticed that larger and larger businesses were reaching out
22:59
Speaker 3: to us sudden, you know, needed the services or the
23:01
Speaker 3: business on on Stripe.
23:02
Speaker 4: We're growing.
23:02
Speaker 3: We also have companies like door Dash and instacars who
23:04
Speaker 3: started with very small companies and obviously are now very
23:07
Speaker 3: successful public companies.
23:10
Speaker 4: And so I think the thing that maybe people.
23:11
Speaker 3: Underrate is being in a domain teaches you about that
23:16
Speaker 3: domain if you're willing to pay attention, and a lot
23:18
Speaker 3: of business success can come from listening to what the
23:21
Speaker 3: market is trying to tell you.
23:24
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews.
23:26
Speaker 1: You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple,
23:31
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen