September 19, 2024 • 23 mins
John Collison cofounded of one of the most valuable private companies in the country: Stripe. Together, John and his brother Patrick took what seemed like a simple idea - making it frictionless for Internet companies to accept payments online - and built a fintech company that once fetched a $100 billion valuation. Though that valuation has fallen to a still-stratospheric $70 billion, Collison and his team are still expanding the company and its offerings - while continuing to shrug off the question of an IPO. In this episode of "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations," David sits down with John Collison, Cofounder and President of Stripe. This interview was recorded June 11 in New York.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
One of the most valuable tech startups that's still private
is Stripe. It was started about a decade ago by
two brothers, both of them dropped out of college to
start the company. The company is reimagining the way people
make their payments and had a chance to sit down
with one of the founders, John Collison, in his offices
in New York City.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
So tell me what Stripe actually is.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
So Stripe makes it easy for businesses to accept payments online.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
We got the idea.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
When we actually had started our own internet business and
we found this so much stuff is getting better, you know,
the tech is getting better at programming, language, is cloud hosting.
But when it actually comes to running a business and
taking payment from people all over the world, that was
something that was really challenging. And so today, if you're
setting up a business online, if you decided that you
wanted to, you know, start a media company and charge subscriptions,
(00:51):
you know, twenty dollars a month to access all the
back catalog, how do you actually go and do that
and take people's you know, credit card details or bank
account details.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Stripe provides the infant structure to do So.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Where did the name Stripe come from?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
We okay.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Stripe was originally called slashtev slash payments like with the
you know, forward slashes in there, which was kind of
a wry software engineering joke, and you can imagine it
just like baffled everyone. You know, people in the flang
industry thought we were some kind of dodgy fraud thing,
and so okay, it was clear that this would work.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
So we went through the entire.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Company went through a renaming exercise where you tried to
come up with, you know, the best names we could
and find out domain names were available. You know, we
consider the name paid Demon for a while. Again, you know,
we attracted a bad names for some reason, but we
settled on Stripe.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Before you started the company, how did people get this
service in? Otherwise, there was business being done long before Stripe,
So how did people deal with this problem?
Speaker 4 (01:47):
The most common way is people went to banks.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
You would go to Bank of America or Chase or
someone like that, and you would get a merchant account
from them. But you can kind of imagine banks didn't
really understand internet companies that well, this is much more
about providing the software to plug into your website. They're
not in the software business. And honestly it was a
bit of a hobby. It's a sideline from them. You
won't hear when you hear a bank ceo talk about
(02:12):
their business. This will never be front and center as
something they really care about. And so there was no
one who really specialized in making life easy for internet businesses.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
So your company was started, was doing business with a
lot of entrepreneurial companies, but then you started doing business
with Fortune five hundred, Fortune one hundred, Fortune fifty companies.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Was that a transition?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
You have to wear a coat and tie when you
go see the CEOs of Fortune fifty companies, And how
did that work?
Speaker 4 (02:34):
You might.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Association, you know, a Fortune one hundred company, but like
the tech is a bit out of date and the
user experienced a little bit clunky. If you talk to
people inside those businesses, that's obviously not what they want.
And so what we found is large companies coming to
us because they want to offer a really compelling user
experience that's as good as all the tech guys might do.
And so you know we're talking to Forward about you know,
(02:58):
they obviously want to make it where you can just
buy a car online. You know, you don't have to
necessarily go through the dealership. You know, we're working with Hurts.
They want to modernize the car rental experience, like why
can't you have everything within the Hurtz app and have
that be the payment experience rather than having to wait
in line at the car rental counter. You know, Amazon
similarly making it easy for people all around the world
(03:18):
to pay urban outfitters. They want to make it easy
to you know, buy something online a return store or
vice versa. And so we found all these large companies
tended to almost kind of look at the startups and
what they're doing and say, we want to be able
to deliver that caliber of customer experience. And so I
think our foundations in the tech world and the startup
(03:38):
world we are actually quite useful as we went to
go talk to the large companies.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Now, there's a phrase in the Silicon Valley world called unicorn,
which means a giganic companies come from nowhere, got it
a lot of value. I guess you were about the
biggest unicorn out there because one time you raise money
at evaluation of about ninety some billion dollars more recently
a little bit lower than that, but ninety billion dollars valuation.
(04:02):
Many times people would say, if company's worth ninety billion,
now maybe less than that, want not take a public
You're a privately owned company.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Why have you not taken in public?
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I get the sense that.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Some tech companies, maybe a lot of tech companies, go
public a bit too early. And what I mean by
that is in Strip's case, I mean we still see
tons of opportunity to change and.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Grow the business quite a lot.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
We're still constantly inventing new products and developing new business lines,
and also you can do that in the public markets.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
But I think culturally we have ended up.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
You know, you look at analysts following public companies and
obsessing over guidance and what will be this quarter and
things like that.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Culturally we've ended up.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
I think in a bit more of a world where
public companies are suited for the extract stage of the
sigmoid curve rather than the expand stage. And Stripe is
still growing very quickly reinvesting in new products. I don't
think it's actually better in terms of how you can
compensation employees, where you can give a better instrument for
employee compensation and attracting the top talent as a private
(05:09):
company because a public company one, it's an instrument that
everyone else has access to. You know, a public company stock,
you can just buy it in the public markets if
you want.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
There's no rarity to us.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
But also you see various public companies that go through
a kind of hype cycle and then spend you know,
a long period of time with you know flat or
evaluation going down, whereas I think as a you know,
a private company or less likely to run into that.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So you had a CFO who retired and when she
did so you became her successor acting CFO. What was
that like to be the CFO as well as the president.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, well, luckily now we have a real CFO, a
fellow named Stephen Thomlinson who joined last year. But as
your reference, for the best part of a year, I
was our interim CFO.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
It's actually very useful experience.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Where I think all founders should be a CFO of
their own businesses for you know, a period, because it
really lets you get a quite hands on sense of
the business. But you know, that was during twenty twenty three,
which was a funny time where you know, we did
this kind of large fundraise in the beginning of the year.
It was a quite large, you know, private market fundraise,
(06:20):
and it was a weird time. Like you remember the
start of twenty twenty three, everyone was nervous. Everyone's hiding
under their desks. They didn't want to invest money, and
so I think we had to kind of draw people
out and be willing to make investments. And then that
was a year where we also had to kind of
tighten up a loss on kind of expenses and things
like that, because everyone is battling down the hatches a
(06:40):
bit for a recession. The recession didn't end up coming,
but I think that was useful prep regardless.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So you had a point at some point where you
had to say, lay off some employees.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Was that difficult to do well?
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Of course, I think in particular because you know, the
company's fault at some level where we had been trying
to project forward how many people we'd need and and
you know at something that we've gotten that wrong, especially
as it looked like things were looking kind of quite
a bit weaker for twenty three and twenty four.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
So this was in twenty twenty two. But you have
a whole bunch of people who are very good and yes.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Just like it's not the right kind of structure for
the company to have them, and so of course it's
going to be hard.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Now, sometimes the companies in Silicon Valley, they're seen as
having postpone an IPO if they wait four years, five years,
six years, ten years, waiting fourteen years is a long time.
Is something like an IPO ever on your horizon, or
it's just something you don't even think about or don't
talk about.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Yeah, I mean, look, presumably at some stage, but.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I think the kind of broad narrative gets very transaction focused,
because that's like the interesting media moment or something like that.
If you were to look at Amazing inside of Stripe,
you can probably imagine themb it is. We're very focused
on is the product working well for customers, How is
new customer growth growing?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
How are kind of.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
The fundamental financials of revenue growth and even for the business.
We don't spend a lot of time on kind of
transactions and kind of those.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
So when you get some professional investors, and many of
them are among the leading venture capital firms in the
United States, like Sequoia for example, at some point venture
capitalists say, well, this is a great product.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
You're doing a great job.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
We'll give you more money, but we would like to
actually get our money back at some point. You don't
get any pressure from them saying after ten years or
so you should get public or get our money back.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
I mean all of our venture investors kind of own
a stake in the company that is compounding and continue
to appreciation intrinsic value. And so I think that is
the business they're in. That's what they're excited about. And
you have to remember, you know, someone like a Sequoia.
I don't think it's an open question as to whether
Sequoia is a good venture investor. I think that they're
(08:49):
not worried about having to prove themselves to okay.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
I think that's a known thing.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So I think at the peak of the tech I
won't say bubble, but the frenzy on tech companies, your
company was valued I thought around ninety five billion or
something like that. So ninety five billion dollars for a
startup is pretty impressive. But then they melt down the
tech world occurred. I think your last valuation was probably
something closer to sixty billion, So is that depressing when
(09:15):
you're from ninety five to sixty or sixty is still
very high, and where people upset or you say, this
is just the tech world and it'll go back up.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Look, people have a funny relationship to prices. Where first off,
in the entirety of the public market space, you had
a lot of enthusiasm in twenty twenty one, especially for
things like you know, SaaS and fintech and things like that.
If you look at companies in a similar space to
Stripe but that are public vius, you know, Shopify or
(09:45):
Square or anyone like that, they also had kind of
much higher valuations in twenty twenty one. Then those came
down because interest rates changed, the environment change, and so
of course.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
That should flow through to valuations.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
But we find in the private market world people get
very funny about you and I see other companies trying
to preserve evaluation.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
That doesn't make sense anymore.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Like prices are based on you know, you're at the
midpoint of supply and demand, and they're kind of the
imputed value of all the future cash flows. But I
don't think it serves anyone to be in denial about
lot of prices.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Okay, so let's suppose somebody came to work at your
company the very beginning. They don't own as much as
you do, but presumably they own some and they're not
going to be maybe as wealthy as you and your
brother might be, but they might say, I'd like to
sell some stock. I don't have as much reserves as
other people. How do they get to sell their stock
if you're not going public? You buy their stock back
from them.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, So what we've done twice now is tender offers
where we match together you know, investors, and you know,
sometimes they also use the kind of company's own cash
that it generates, and you know, do a buyback program
for people at the opportunity to sell their shares. And
so we did that last year, we did that this
year again. I think we'll probably do it again in
(10:56):
the future.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So let's suppost somebody's watching this and says, this is
a very't man.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
I've heard of Stripe. It's a great company.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Evaluation might be sixty seventy eighty billion, whatever the next
roound round might be, I'd like to invest in it.
How does somebody invest in Stripe other than going through
the venture firms you already have.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
I mean, they don't.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
In some cases, they might have exposure because they're you know,
a shareholder in you know, some entity that owns a
stake and strike and so you know, Fidelsy owns some
shares and Stripe, and so maybe people have looked through
exposure based on that. But remember also we are not
The business does not do kind of primary equity raiss anymore.
(11:34):
The business generates cash, and so the only shares the
trade hands are just in the secondary markets where we want.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
To give employees liquidly.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
But you haven't sold his shares and I've you know,
showed sold shares at some point in the past and
you know, the tender offer or something like that, but
certainly we're not.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
We're along the company now.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
You are the co founder and president. Who is the
other co founder and CEO?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So our CEO and my co founder is my brother Patrick.
So we've been working together for a long time. We
started the business fourteen years ago, and we actually started
a business together previously. That was part of how we
got the idea for Stripe.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
You've heard the phrase sibling rivalry, So do you have
a sibling rivalry with your brother as a year older brother.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
He's my older brother.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
No, it's nice, you know, it mightn't work that well
if we were particularly rivalrous.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
I actually think it's quite valuable for us.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Look, everyone's co founders relationships are different. View of co
founders at Carlisle in our case, in Silicon Valley broadly,
co founder relationships can be.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Unstable inherently.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
You know, you look at all of the large companies
you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, you know, pick your example, and.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
You know Facebook.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
In a lot of cases the original co founding team
did not stick together. And again in Stripe's case, we
get really excited about this idea of growing the GDP
of the Internet, expanding the Internet economy, and fourteen years in,
we actually like we now are at the you know,
the table stakes part. We feel like we've done some
good groundwork, but we can do some really interesting stuff
(13:13):
over the next ten or twenty years.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
I think that's much more fun.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
And you have much more opportunity to work on it
with a long term perspective. If you have very trusting
co founder relationships, it makes us, I think, more stable,
more enjoyable, So you're more likely to stick at doing this,
and so I feel pretty fortunate for the relationship that Patrika.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Let's talk about your background and how this came about,
so I can tell prem er accent.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
You're not from New York City exactly. Yeah, so originally
you're from where.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I'm from, Ireland, and I grew up there and then
I ended up coming to the United States for college.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
You grow up in Ireland, Limerick, I assume you did
okay in school what you got into Harvard, which is
probably not that easy to do from Ireland. So why
did you go to Harvard and why did you drop
out of Harvard?
Speaker 4 (14:00):
I went to Harvard's I don't know. At that time.
I just had some wonderlust. I wanted to get out
and explore the world.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
As you say, I was pretty academic, like, I liked school,
I liked studying, and I just really wanted to get
out to somewhere else. And I think that's sometimes for
people who grew up somewhere kind of small, in a
small community. That's a common sentiment. And so that's why
I ended up at Harvard. We actually started stripe when
(14:27):
we were in college, so I was at Harvard, Patrick
was down the road at MIT.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
We had been talking about this idea.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
And again this was two thousand and nine, where there
were a huge number of Internet businesses. But if you
talk to any internet entrepreneur again, they would tell you
that this was their biggest frustration. But we were, you know,
nineteen and twenty one at the time, we were not
experienced in the industry.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
And I think what's interesting is.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Stripe is obviously regulated financial services firm. It was probably
helpful that we had no idea of what it would
because you know, it's actually pretty complex to build something
like Strip.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
But we gradually got into it.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
All right, So you did one year at Harvard and
you dropped down.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, and did you say to your parents, I'm going
to be the next Bill Gates from Mark Zuckerberg or
they didn't say anything about the importance of going and
getting your degree.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Quite the opposite of what I said to my mom,
who I was leaving Ireland for colleges. You know, she said, okay,
because Patrick had dropped out previously. She said to me,
you know, if you're going, you're going for four years.
You got to do the whole thing.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
I said, yes, absolutely, I'm going four years. I will graduate.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
And that was about two months before we started writing
the code for Strip.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
So where did you get your initial money to get
the company started?
Speaker 4 (15:37):
So we did like a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
We did, you know, a little bit of kind of
friends and family fundraising from anyone we could get connected to.
And then the very first investors were Paul Graham, Sam Altman,
and then Peter Teel.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Okay, so they came in early.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
At that point, you had no revenue, You had nothing
but an idea.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
We had a few customers, and so I guess we
had a little bit of revenue, but minimal wouldn't be
impressive to you, right.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
So you get the company off the ground, and at
what point do you get some enough customers to go
to a professional venture capital firm and say.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
We have a real business here.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
I think with the early stage investors, they're very much
focused on the found and team, the product, things like that.
And so when you look at those early early investors
to Stripe, I think basically what they looked at is
they saw the product. We might have had, you know,
fifty customers at the time or something. We are quite
compelling demo showing how quickly you could get started accepting payments.
And this is still like if I want to sell
(16:33):
someone on Stripe today, I just showed them, you know,
you go to Stripe dot com, You log on and
you can be set up to start accepting payments from
customers all around the world in a matter of five minutes.
You know, that's kind of the demo now, and it
was the demo back then. And then we would encourage
investors to talk to any kind of tech entrepreneurs they
know and just ask them how the experience of dealing
(16:54):
with payments was. And so, you know, we talked to investor,
we'd show them the product whatever, and then they would
maybe go call on their portfolio companies and you know, say,
you know, hey, do you guys have any problems accepting payments?
They have to hold the phone away from their ear.
They got so much yelling at the other end about
how crummy the existing providers were. But I think that's
really what they were underwriting in the airly investments was
just this seems like a good idea, This product seems good,
(17:16):
and it seems like it's addressing a real problem that
people have.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Many companies struggle with a couple issues like ESG DEI
let's talk about that. Yeah, do you care about ESG
at stripe? But is that a major focus or not
your major focus?
Speaker 3 (17:28):
There are a number of mission oriented cause and ideas
that we care about. You know, firstly the overall mission
of Stripe, where we're broadening access to entrepreneurship and making
kind of global e commerce easier. And so there is
a real social good that we care about at Stripe.
And then there are other things we care about. We
(17:49):
have this part of the business called Stripe Climate where
we're funding carbon removal technologies and offering that to our customers,
and we can go into that. However, I think think
curious what you think just the whole ESG movement has
gotten into a very kind of check boxy exercise and
you know, an excuse for people to focus on things
other than being good fiduciaries for their shareholders and ended
(18:13):
up with a loss of lawful Basically.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
What about the EI.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Are you all a bunch of white tech engineers who
are all man or not?
Speaker 3 (18:21):
The case that's similarly here, I think the if you
were to kind of go walk the hallways and Stripe
and meet people, it's a very diverse group of people
who kind of make up the constituency that is Stripe.
But the public debate about that has gotten kind of funny.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Now you're pretty well known in the tech world. So
if you walk down the streets in New York City
where we are today, I don't know whether people recognize you.
But if you go into a restaurant in Silicon Valley,
I assume everybody comes up and says, here's my resume
or something like that. Can you go in Silicon Valley
and not be bothered by people trying to get something
from you?
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, it's still fine actually, because I remember, we sell
to businesses. You know, we're not on you know, TV
all the time, and people just I think, aren't that
interested in the payments industry, which we like it.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
You know, it's nice to be in a boring part
of the industry.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
How old are you now, I'm thirty three, thirty three, Okay,
well pretty young. So let's suppose when you're forty three,
fifty three, or sixty three, what.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Do you want to be?
Speaker 1 (19:19):
You want to be a wealthy entrepreneur, build another company,
be a great philanthropist, art collector. What is your ambition
ten twenty thirty years from now?
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Well, first off, I'd be very happy running stripe. I
expect to be running Stripe twenty years from now, because again,
this is just the kind of problem that has returns
to time spent on the problem. And the payments industry
is actually changing quite a bit at this very moment
(19:51):
in time, where we're seeing, for example, more global heterogeneity
in payment systems, like you know, fifteen years ago everyone
maybe just paid online with the credit cards, is now
every different country has a different unit.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
You' see the growth of.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Upi in India or alipay, and we chat in China
and things like this, and so you need something like
stripe to miss all these together. And we're just very
early in the digitization of commerce broadly. And so again
this is to me a very fulfilling, satisfying problem that
I'd very happily be working on in twenty years. However,
we're also kind of getting more interested in philanthropy and
I think trying to learn about that and do us
(20:26):
in a more bottoms up way. And so we have
a biomedical institute that we helped the star at ARC,
and there's various other kind of projects that were back.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
So is Bill gatespin after you to sign the giving pledge.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
I have not talked to himbout it really.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I'm sure after this interview he'll be calling you.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
We're doing a bunch of givings, so we're already on
the program.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
So sometimes people that are entrepreneurs say, I have one
great idea, but actually I'm really smart.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
I can have two great ideas. So I have one
great idea.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Now I'm going to start another company because I'm also
so smart, I can think of another great thing. So
is that a burning ambition to start another company or
this one is? Basically this is going to be a
life's passion.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
You know, it's hard enough to have one good idea.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
And you know, Charlie Munger had the you know, great
quote about you know, taking a simple idea and taking
it really seriously. I think maybe people don't take the
core idea seriously enough. Where the idea behind Stripe is
we think that there could be more internet commerce, more
successful internet companies created, if we lowered the cost of
(21:25):
doing so, if we made it easier to do so.
And we're taking that core idea really, really seriously.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
So if somebody is watching this and they want to
take away from this interview something about Stripe, and you
could summarize in a paragraph or two what you would
want somebody to know about Stripe, What would it be,
How would you summarize what somebody should know when you'd
like somebody to know about Stripe.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
One could be this idea of you know, taking an
idea and taking it seriously. And again we started with
we want to make it easy for Internet businesses to
accept money, and we just kind of kept running with that.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Good thing maybe is that within the look.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
I think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to try to in retrospect,
go back and tidy up the story and make it
seem like they had everything figured out on day one,
and you know, our mission we set out, you know,
(22:25):
go solve you know xy Z. I think the way
it tends to actually happen is that there's.
Speaker 4 (22:32):
A bit of experimenting.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
You don't know where it's going to go, but the
domain teaches you as you go if you're paying attention.
And so with Stripe, we never thought that there'd be
as much of an opportunity to be a global payments
infrastructure as we did, but we got to learn from
our customers. Similarly, we never thought large businesses would use
Stripe like some of the companies I mentioned, like Amazon
and Hurts and those folks using us on day one
(22:54):
of the business We never thought that would happen, but
we noticed that larger and larger businesses were reaching out
to us sudden, you know, needed the services or the
business on on Stripe.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
We're growing.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
We also have companies like door Dash and instacars who
started with very small companies and obviously are now very
successful public companies.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
And so I think the thing that maybe people.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Underrate is being in a domain teaches you about that
domain if you're willing to pay attention, and a lot
of business success can come from listening to what the
market is trying to tell you.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple,
or wherever you listen
One of the most valuable tech startups that's still private
is Stripe. It was started about a decade ago by
two brothers, both of them dropped out of college to
start the company. The company is reimagining the way people
make their payments and had a chance to sit down
with one of the founders, John Collison, in his offices
in New York City.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
So tell me what Stripe actually is.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
So Stripe makes it easy for businesses to accept payments online.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
We got the idea.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
When we actually had started our own internet business and
we found this so much stuff is getting better, you know,
the tech is getting better at programming, language, is cloud hosting.
But when it actually comes to running a business and
taking payment from people all over the world, that was
something that was really challenging. And so today, if you're
setting up a business online, if you decided that you
wanted to, you know, start a media company and charge subscriptions,
(00:51):
you know, twenty dollars a month to access all the
back catalog, how do you actually go and do that
and take people's you know, credit card details or bank
account details.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Stripe provides the infant structure to do So.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Where did the name Stripe come from?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
We okay.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Stripe was originally called slashtev slash payments like with the
you know, forward slashes in there, which was kind of
a wry software engineering joke, and you can imagine it
just like baffled everyone. You know, people in the flang
industry thought we were some kind of dodgy fraud thing,
and so okay, it was clear that this would work.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
So we went through the entire.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Company went through a renaming exercise where you tried to
come up with, you know, the best names we could
and find out domain names were available. You know, we
consider the name paid Demon for a while. Again, you know,
we attracted a bad names for some reason, but we
settled on Stripe.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Before you started the company, how did people get this
service in? Otherwise, there was business being done long before Stripe,
So how did people deal with this problem?
Speaker 4 (01:47):
The most common way is people went to banks.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
You would go to Bank of America or Chase or
someone like that, and you would get a merchant account
from them. But you can kind of imagine banks didn't
really understand internet companies that well, this is much more
about providing the software to plug into your website. They're
not in the software business. And honestly it was a
bit of a hobby. It's a sideline from them. You
won't hear when you hear a bank ceo talk about
(02:12):
their business. This will never be front and center as
something they really care about. And so there was no
one who really specialized in making life easy for internet businesses.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
So your company was started, was doing business with a
lot of entrepreneurial companies, but then you started doing business
with Fortune five hundred, Fortune one hundred, Fortune fifty companies.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Was that a transition?
Speaker 1 (02:29):
You have to wear a coat and tie when you
go see the CEOs of Fortune fifty companies, And how
did that work?
Speaker 4 (02:34):
You might.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Association, you know, a Fortune one hundred company, but like
the tech is a bit out of date and the
user experienced a little bit clunky. If you talk to
people inside those businesses, that's obviously not what they want.
And so what we found is large companies coming to
us because they want to offer a really compelling user
experience that's as good as all the tech guys might do.
And so you know we're talking to Forward about you know,
(02:58):
they obviously want to make it where you can just
buy a car online. You know, you don't have to
necessarily go through the dealership. You know, we're working with Hurts.
They want to modernize the car rental experience, like why
can't you have everything within the Hurtz app and have
that be the payment experience rather than having to wait
in line at the car rental counter. You know, Amazon
similarly making it easy for people all around the world
(03:18):
to pay urban outfitters. They want to make it easy
to you know, buy something online a return store or
vice versa. And so we found all these large companies
tended to almost kind of look at the startups and
what they're doing and say, we want to be able
to deliver that caliber of customer experience. And so I
think our foundations in the tech world and the startup
(03:38):
world we are actually quite useful as we went to
go talk to the large companies.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Now, there's a phrase in the Silicon Valley world called unicorn,
which means a giganic companies come from nowhere, got it
a lot of value. I guess you were about the
biggest unicorn out there because one time you raise money
at evaluation of about ninety some billion dollars more recently
a little bit lower than that, but ninety billion dollars valuation.
(04:02):
Many times people would say, if company's worth ninety billion,
now maybe less than that, want not take a public
You're a privately owned company.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Why have you not taken in public?
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I get the sense that.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Some tech companies, maybe a lot of tech companies, go
public a bit too early. And what I mean by
that is in Strip's case, I mean we still see
tons of opportunity to change and.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
Grow the business quite a lot.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
We're still constantly inventing new products and developing new business lines,
and also you can do that in the public markets.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
But I think culturally we have ended up.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
You know, you look at analysts following public companies and
obsessing over guidance and what will be this quarter and
things like that.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Culturally we've ended up.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
I think in a bit more of a world where
public companies are suited for the extract stage of the
sigmoid curve rather than the expand stage. And Stripe is
still growing very quickly reinvesting in new products. I don't
think it's actually better in terms of how you can
compensation employees, where you can give a better instrument for
employee compensation and attracting the top talent as a private
(05:09):
company because a public company one, it's an instrument that
everyone else has access to. You know, a public company stock,
you can just buy it in the public markets if
you want.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
There's no rarity to us.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
But also you see various public companies that go through
a kind of hype cycle and then spend you know,
a long period of time with you know flat or
evaluation going down, whereas I think as a you know,
a private company or less likely to run into that.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
So you had a CFO who retired and when she
did so you became her successor acting CFO. What was
that like to be the CFO as well as the president.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, well, luckily now we have a real CFO, a
fellow named Stephen Thomlinson who joined last year. But as
your reference, for the best part of a year, I
was our interim CFO.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
It's actually very useful experience.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Where I think all founders should be a CFO of
their own businesses for you know, a period, because it
really lets you get a quite hands on sense of
the business. But you know, that was during twenty twenty three,
which was a funny time where you know, we did
this kind of large fundraise in the beginning of the year.
It was a quite large, you know, private market fundraise,
(06:20):
and it was a weird time. Like you remember the
start of twenty twenty three, everyone was nervous. Everyone's hiding
under their desks. They didn't want to invest money, and
so I think we had to kind of draw people
out and be willing to make investments. And then that
was a year where we also had to kind of
tighten up a loss on kind of expenses and things
like that, because everyone is battling down the hatches a
(06:40):
bit for a recession. The recession didn't end up coming,
but I think that was useful prep regardless.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So you had a point at some point where you
had to say, lay off some employees.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Was that difficult to do well?
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Of course, I think in particular because you know, the
company's fault at some level where we had been trying
to project forward how many people we'd need and and
you know at something that we've gotten that wrong, especially
as it looked like things were looking kind of quite
a bit weaker for twenty three and twenty four.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
So this was in twenty twenty two. But you have
a whole bunch of people who are very good and yes.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Just like it's not the right kind of structure for
the company to have them, and so of course it's
going to be hard.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Now, sometimes the companies in Silicon Valley, they're seen as
having postpone an IPO if they wait four years, five years,
six years, ten years, waiting fourteen years is a long time.
Is something like an IPO ever on your horizon, or
it's just something you don't even think about or don't
talk about.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Yeah, I mean, look, presumably at some stage, but.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I think the kind of broad narrative gets very transaction focused,
because that's like the interesting media moment or something like that.
If you were to look at Amazing inside of Stripe,
you can probably imagine themb it is. We're very focused
on is the product working well for customers, How is
new customer growth growing?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
How are kind of.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
The fundamental financials of revenue growth and even for the business.
We don't spend a lot of time on kind of
transactions and kind of those.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
So when you get some professional investors, and many of
them are among the leading venture capital firms in the
United States, like Sequoia for example, at some point venture
capitalists say, well, this is a great product.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
You're doing a great job.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
We'll give you more money, but we would like to
actually get our money back at some point. You don't
get any pressure from them saying after ten years or
so you should get public or get our money back.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
I mean all of our venture investors kind of own
a stake in the company that is compounding and continue
to appreciation intrinsic value. And so I think that is
the business they're in. That's what they're excited about. And
you have to remember, you know, someone like a Sequoia.
I don't think it's an open question as to whether
Sequoia is a good venture investor. I think that they're
(08:49):
not worried about having to prove themselves to okay.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
I think that's a known thing.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
So I think at the peak of the tech I
won't say bubble, but the frenzy on tech companies, your
company was valued I thought around ninety five billion or
something like that. So ninety five billion dollars for a
startup is pretty impressive. But then they melt down the
tech world occurred. I think your last valuation was probably
something closer to sixty billion, So is that depressing when
(09:15):
you're from ninety five to sixty or sixty is still
very high, and where people upset or you say, this
is just the tech world and it'll go back up.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Look, people have a funny relationship to prices. Where first off,
in the entirety of the public market space, you had
a lot of enthusiasm in twenty twenty one, especially for
things like you know, SaaS and fintech and things like that.
If you look at companies in a similar space to
Stripe but that are public vius, you know, Shopify or
(09:45):
Square or anyone like that, they also had kind of
much higher valuations in twenty twenty one. Then those came
down because interest rates changed, the environment change, and so
of course.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
That should flow through to valuations.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
But we find in the private market world people get
very funny about you and I see other companies trying
to preserve evaluation.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
That doesn't make sense anymore.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Like prices are based on you know, you're at the
midpoint of supply and demand, and they're kind of the
imputed value of all the future cash flows. But I
don't think it serves anyone to be in denial about
lot of prices.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Okay, so let's suppose somebody came to work at your
company the very beginning. They don't own as much as
you do, but presumably they own some and they're not
going to be maybe as wealthy as you and your
brother might be, but they might say, I'd like to
sell some stock. I don't have as much reserves as
other people. How do they get to sell their stock
if you're not going public? You buy their stock back
from them.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, So what we've done twice now is tender offers
where we match together you know, investors, and you know,
sometimes they also use the kind of company's own cash
that it generates, and you know, do a buyback program
for people at the opportunity to sell their shares. And
so we did that last year, we did that this
year again. I think we'll probably do it again in
(10:56):
the future.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So let's suppost somebody's watching this and says, this is
a very't man.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
I've heard of Stripe. It's a great company.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Evaluation might be sixty seventy eighty billion, whatever the next
roound round might be, I'd like to invest in it.
How does somebody invest in Stripe other than going through
the venture firms you already have.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
I mean, they don't.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
In some cases, they might have exposure because they're you know,
a shareholder in you know, some entity that owns a
stake and strike and so you know, Fidelsy owns some
shares and Stripe, and so maybe people have looked through
exposure based on that. But remember also we are not
The business does not do kind of primary equity raiss anymore.
(11:34):
The business generates cash, and so the only shares the
trade hands are just in the secondary markets where we want.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
To give employees liquidly.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
But you haven't sold his shares and I've you know,
showed sold shares at some point in the past and
you know, the tender offer or something like that, but
certainly we're not.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
We're along the company now.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
You are the co founder and president. Who is the
other co founder and CEO?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So our CEO and my co founder is my brother Patrick.
So we've been working together for a long time. We
started the business fourteen years ago, and we actually started
a business together previously. That was part of how we
got the idea for Stripe.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
You've heard the phrase sibling rivalry, So do you have
a sibling rivalry with your brother as a year older brother.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
He's my older brother.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
No, it's nice, you know, it mightn't work that well
if we were particularly rivalrous.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
I actually think it's quite valuable for us.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Look, everyone's co founders relationships are different. View of co
founders at Carlisle in our case, in Silicon Valley broadly,
co founder relationships can be.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Unstable inherently.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
You know, you look at all of the large companies
you know, Apple, Microsoft, Google, you know, pick your example, and.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
You know Facebook.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
In a lot of cases the original co founding team
did not stick together. And again in Stripe's case, we
get really excited about this idea of growing the GDP
of the Internet, expanding the Internet economy, and fourteen years in,
we actually like we now are at the you know,
the table stakes part. We feel like we've done some
good groundwork, but we can do some really interesting stuff
(13:13):
over the next ten or twenty years.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
I think that's much more fun.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
And you have much more opportunity to work on it
with a long term perspective. If you have very trusting
co founder relationships, it makes us, I think, more stable,
more enjoyable, So you're more likely to stick at doing this,
and so I feel pretty fortunate for the relationship that Patrika.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Let's talk about your background and how this came about,
so I can tell prem er accent.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
You're not from New York City exactly. Yeah, so originally
you're from where.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I'm from, Ireland, and I grew up there and then
I ended up coming to the United States for college.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
You grow up in Ireland, Limerick, I assume you did
okay in school what you got into Harvard, which is
probably not that easy to do from Ireland. So why
did you go to Harvard and why did you drop
out of Harvard?
Speaker 4 (14:00):
I went to Harvard's I don't know. At that time.
I just had some wonderlust. I wanted to get out
and explore the world.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
As you say, I was pretty academic, like, I liked school,
I liked studying, and I just really wanted to get
out to somewhere else. And I think that's sometimes for
people who grew up somewhere kind of small, in a
small community. That's a common sentiment. And so that's why
I ended up at Harvard. We actually started stripe when
(14:27):
we were in college, so I was at Harvard, Patrick
was down the road at MIT.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
We had been talking about this idea.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
And again this was two thousand and nine, where there
were a huge number of Internet businesses. But if you
talk to any internet entrepreneur again, they would tell you
that this was their biggest frustration. But we were, you know,
nineteen and twenty one at the time, we were not
experienced in the industry.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
And I think what's interesting is.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Stripe is obviously regulated financial services firm. It was probably
helpful that we had no idea of what it would
because you know, it's actually pretty complex to build something
like Strip.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
But we gradually got into it.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
All right, So you did one year at Harvard and
you dropped down.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, and did you say to your parents, I'm going
to be the next Bill Gates from Mark Zuckerberg or
they didn't say anything about the importance of going and
getting your degree.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Quite the opposite of what I said to my mom,
who I was leaving Ireland for colleges. You know, she said, okay,
because Patrick had dropped out previously. She said to me,
you know, if you're going, you're going for four years.
You got to do the whole thing.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
I said, yes, absolutely, I'm going four years. I will graduate.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
And that was about two months before we started writing
the code for Strip.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
So where did you get your initial money to get
the company started?
Speaker 4 (15:37):
So we did like a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
We did, you know, a little bit of kind of
friends and family fundraising from anyone we could get connected to.
And then the very first investors were Paul Graham, Sam Altman,
and then Peter Teel.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Okay, so they came in early.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
At that point, you had no revenue, You had nothing
but an idea.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
We had a few customers, and so I guess we
had a little bit of revenue, but minimal wouldn't be
impressive to you, right.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
So you get the company off the ground, and at
what point do you get some enough customers to go
to a professional venture capital firm and say.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
We have a real business here.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
I think with the early stage investors, they're very much
focused on the found and team, the product, things like that.
And so when you look at those early early investors
to Stripe, I think basically what they looked at is
they saw the product. We might have had, you know,
fifty customers at the time or something. We are quite
compelling demo showing how quickly you could get started accepting payments.
And this is still like if I want to sell
(16:33):
someone on Stripe today, I just showed them, you know,
you go to Stripe dot com, You log on and
you can be set up to start accepting payments from
customers all around the world in a matter of five minutes.
You know, that's kind of the demo now, and it
was the demo back then. And then we would encourage
investors to talk to any kind of tech entrepreneurs they
know and just ask them how the experience of dealing
(16:54):
with payments was. And so, you know, we talked to investor,
we'd show them the product whatever, and then they would
maybe go call on their portfolio companies and you know, say,
you know, hey, do you guys have any problems accepting payments?
They have to hold the phone away from their ear.
They got so much yelling at the other end about
how crummy the existing providers were. But I think that's
really what they were underwriting in the airly investments was
just this seems like a good idea, This product seems good,
(17:16):
and it seems like it's addressing a real problem that
people have.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Many companies struggle with a couple issues like ESG DEI
let's talk about that. Yeah, do you care about ESG
at stripe? But is that a major focus or not
your major focus?
Speaker 3 (17:28):
There are a number of mission oriented cause and ideas
that we care about. You know, firstly the overall mission
of Stripe, where we're broadening access to entrepreneurship and making
kind of global e commerce easier. And so there is
a real social good that we care about at Stripe.
And then there are other things we care about. We
(17:49):
have this part of the business called Stripe Climate where
we're funding carbon removal technologies and offering that to our customers,
and we can go into that. However, I think think
curious what you think just the whole ESG movement has
gotten into a very kind of check boxy exercise and
you know, an excuse for people to focus on things
other than being good fiduciaries for their shareholders and ended
(18:13):
up with a loss of lawful Basically.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
What about the EI.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Are you all a bunch of white tech engineers who
are all man or not?
Speaker 3 (18:21):
The case that's similarly here, I think the if you
were to kind of go walk the hallways and Stripe
and meet people, it's a very diverse group of people
who kind of make up the constituency that is Stripe.
But the public debate about that has gotten kind of funny.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Now you're pretty well known in the tech world. So
if you walk down the streets in New York City
where we are today, I don't know whether people recognize you.
But if you go into a restaurant in Silicon Valley,
I assume everybody comes up and says, here's my resume
or something like that. Can you go in Silicon Valley
and not be bothered by people trying to get something
from you?
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, it's still fine actually, because I remember, we sell
to businesses. You know, we're not on you know, TV
all the time, and people just I think, aren't that
interested in the payments industry, which we like it.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
You know, it's nice to be in a boring part
of the industry.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
How old are you now, I'm thirty three, thirty three, Okay,
well pretty young. So let's suppose when you're forty three,
fifty three, or sixty three, what.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Do you want to be?
Speaker 1 (19:19):
You want to be a wealthy entrepreneur, build another company,
be a great philanthropist, art collector. What is your ambition
ten twenty thirty years from now?
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Well, first off, I'd be very happy running stripe. I
expect to be running Stripe twenty years from now, because again,
this is just the kind of problem that has returns
to time spent on the problem. And the payments industry
is actually changing quite a bit at this very moment
(19:51):
in time, where we're seeing, for example, more global heterogeneity
in payment systems, like you know, fifteen years ago everyone
maybe just paid online with the credit cards, is now
every different country has a different unit.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
You' see the growth of.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Upi in India or alipay, and we chat in China
and things like this, and so you need something like
stripe to miss all these together. And we're just very
early in the digitization of commerce broadly. And so again
this is to me a very fulfilling, satisfying problem that
I'd very happily be working on in twenty years. However,
we're also kind of getting more interested in philanthropy and
I think trying to learn about that and do us
(20:26):
in a more bottoms up way. And so we have
a biomedical institute that we helped the star at ARC,
and there's various other kind of projects that were back.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
So is Bill gatespin after you to sign the giving pledge.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
I have not talked to himbout it really.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I'm sure after this interview he'll be calling you.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
We're doing a bunch of givings, so we're already on
the program.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
So sometimes people that are entrepreneurs say, I have one
great idea, but actually I'm really smart.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
I can have two great ideas. So I have one
great idea.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Now I'm going to start another company because I'm also
so smart, I can think of another great thing. So
is that a burning ambition to start another company or
this one is? Basically this is going to be a
life's passion.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
You know, it's hard enough to have one good idea.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
And you know, Charlie Munger had the you know, great
quote about you know, taking a simple idea and taking
it really seriously. I think maybe people don't take the
core idea seriously enough. Where the idea behind Stripe is
we think that there could be more internet commerce, more
successful internet companies created, if we lowered the cost of
(21:25):
doing so, if we made it easier to do so.
And we're taking that core idea really, really seriously.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
So if somebody is watching this and they want to
take away from this interview something about Stripe, and you
could summarize in a paragraph or two what you would
want somebody to know about Stripe, What would it be,
How would you summarize what somebody should know when you'd
like somebody to know about Stripe.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
One could be this idea of you know, taking an
idea and taking it seriously. And again we started with
we want to make it easy for Internet businesses to
accept money, and we just kind of kept running with that.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Good thing maybe is that within the look.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
I think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to try to in retrospect,
go back and tidy up the story and make it
seem like they had everything figured out on day one,
and you know, our mission we set out, you know,
(22:25):
go solve you know xy Z. I think the way
it tends to actually happen is that there's.
Speaker 4 (22:32):
A bit of experimenting.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
You don't know where it's going to go, but the
domain teaches you as you go if you're paying attention.
And so with Stripe, we never thought that there'd be
as much of an opportunity to be a global payments
infrastructure as we did, but we got to learn from
our customers. Similarly, we never thought large businesses would use
Stripe like some of the companies I mentioned, like Amazon
and Hurts and those folks using us on day one
(22:54):
of the business We never thought that would happen, but
we noticed that larger and larger businesses were reaching out
to us sudden, you know, needed the services or the
business on on Stripe.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
We're growing.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
We also have companies like door Dash and instacars who
started with very small companies and obviously are now very
successful public companies.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
And so I think the thing that maybe people.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Underrate is being in a domain teaches you about that
domain if you're willing to pay attention, and a lot
of business success can come from listening to what the
market is trying to tell you.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple,
or wherever you listen
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