Stripe

“I think our most recent public investment, most recent investment in a private company that, that, that's been publicly disclosed is Stripe, which is a revolutionary company in the payment space with an extraordinary team and traction that's quite unlike what …”

“So if you think of messaging as with Twilio, or if you think of Stripe with payments, think of HyperTrack for location-based services, and it's exciting to me because it becomes a mechanism to imagine or to build all these great new services that if you think …”

“So for example, a few years ago, I invested in a set of companies based solely on the fact that I would have used them at my first startup. I would have used Stripe for payments. I invested in Stripe. I would have used Mailgun for email, and so I invested in M…”

“I think there's merits to all of them, but I would now lean more toward go to that medium-sized growth company. You know, if you can get in today at a company like Stripe or Slack, for example, I think you get incredible growth opportunities, and if you know, …”

“Patrick Collison from Stripe often says this, which is for every senior exec role that he decided to Hired. He first spent time with five or six execs in that role to really understand and establish what is best in class.”

“Luckily, my first investment ended up being Stripe because I had met the Colisons while I was teaching at MIT.”

“And I think that every executive or potentially every manager Should basically write up the one page description of how to engage them, how to work with them. What are the things that work well or don't work with well with them?”

“The pedigree of what people look for as a signal of talent now has shifted where if you are, you know, it doesn't even matter where you went to high school or college. If you were working for five years on the infrastructure team at Stripe in the early days, o…”

“It was John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe. And this was in the relatively early days of Stripe before it was the massive success that it was today. John was a pilot. I met him through a friend and we went out to dinner or talking about what we were doing …”

“In 2011, Gumbert actually launched before Stripe launched”

“I think that Stripe is absolutely inspirational on this topic. And I personally, I think they've done it the right way, which I think they are willing to deal with the pain of not filling a spot because they respect that spot so much that they're only going to…”

“At the time, Patrick and John at Stripe, when all they had was an idea and not a single line of code, because they were remarkable and they were daring.”

“Having been, you know, part of the five-person executive team at PayPal through its, you know, dogfight Existence of survival or death. I knew all the landmines in the payment industry. So they came to me and said, hey, we've got this deal, which is, you know,…”

“Without him, we might still be working on it. So, well, we'd probably be out of business at this point, but we probably would have worked on it for another year or two.”

“The only case where I know this might potentially have worked was I think it was paloaltodelivery.com or something, which then became DoorDash. I think it's the only sort of recorded case of this ever actually working, but if you look at all the other sort of …”

“If you take the three leaders today, which are ID and Stripe and Checkout, we're literally scratching the surface of what's possible. This is mathematical. All the revenue is still sitting in the incumbents”

“Stripe, which is cloud number one on our private cloud 100 list today with Snowflake's graduation, most likely.”

“They're certainly one of Stripe's largest customers, if not the largest, and yet it's a great relationship. And at any point, of course, Shopify could have brought that in house.”

“To date, Eric has raised over three hundred and ninety million dollars for the company from some of the best, including Thrive, Stripe, Founders Fund, Code Two, and Box Group, to name a few.”

“Looking back four or five years, it sure Stripe's most recent round was a ninety five billion dollar valuation.”

“So I, you know, co-led Stripe Series D investment in 2016. And at the time that, you know, that was a nine billion dollar valuation back in 2016.”

“We've invested multiple times in many of our companies. So Coinbase, we invested three times. Roblox, twice. Databricks, three times. Stripe, four times. TripActions, four times.”

“Early on at Ribbit, we had the opportunity to invest in, in Stone, in Adyen, in Stripe, you know, in a number of companies that are relatively early stage. And we said, we're not doing payments right now.”

“One of the hardest things I've found in tech investing is updating your priors. You know, one point you can only see Stripe as a billion-dollar company, and then you got comfortable with as a It's a ten billion dollar company, but how do you get over that view…”

“We do monetize all of the payments flowing through the e-commerce platform. Long ago, we made a, we were one of the, I think, first large companies to do it. We partnered with Stripe to enable the, our merchants to get online and to accept payments. And as par…”

“So a great rep typically would come to me in a one-on-one and say, you know, Jean, my target is X. I'm going to need to close 20 deals to hit that. You know, here are, at this point, the ones that I think are likely to help me get to that number. Here are the …”

“And then what we did at Stripe was also, we started with team-based quotas. You know, you're learning. We also started with lower leverage. So again, you're not, don't have as much at risk. And as we got better about understanding what was achievable, you know…”

“You know, we're thoughtful around having some level of gating so that, you know, whether it's me or another leader is, is deciding when we're pulling product in.”

“Honestly, like, we're hyper growth, and I think our, the underlying tool systems operations haven't scaled as quickly as we've Scaled salespeople. Data, rigor, velocity, those all hold us back.”

“That's one of the things we've also done at Stripe, right, is you have a homework assignment, something that's very reflective of what you're going to ask that person to do on day one when they show up. And it's a good way to test whether or not they're going …”

“One of the things actually we do is like deal premortems, and we actually call it that, where before you've lost the thing, you know, your mid-cycle, you actually go through a review to think through all the ways in which you could lose this so that you can pr…”

“So this is like the key challenge, particularly as companies move more and more to consumption based models, the sale is really not done when you sign a contract. Actually at Stripe, we just call it deal signed because that's all it is. We got a piece of paper…”

“So at Stripe, as an example, product-led growth, sort of like the online self-search channel was awesome for, let's call it a series A, series B company. The minute you get past that, it doesn't work anymore. You're not like, if you build it, they will come. P…”

“And then, you know, day two, I think we would all get thrown into the support cues. And so that was really great at teaching our users first orientation and getting hands-on experience with customers and learning the product.”

“And then you often find when you've reviewed the losses and you can put in Salesforce loss reasons, those types of things you wind up with like clear go to market challenges where our messaging, our strategies off, as you think about positioning yourself relat…”

“I always get nervous about sales reps who think they've got it all sorted out, and want to keep you at arm's length, because the best ones typically know where they can leverage other people in the org, and really want to do that.”

“And so we really pull those things forward into the technical validation stage. To make sure somebody can actually deploy.”

“A savvy salesperson can talk to somebody actually knowing very little about the product they're selling because what great salespeople do is ask good questions. And so if you can teach folks what questions to ask out of the gates, they actually can run calls p…”

“I have never once witnessed a mob attack by Stripe or any sort of organized criminality of any type, I'll tell you.”

“Having Stripe as an investor isn't what killed our company. Having too high a burn is what killed our company. There's just no other way to put it.”

“I've only led in nine years of investing three late stage rounds later stage rounds, series C co-led with Stripe fares series C. I led a founder's fund. And then I invest a lot of money in two late-stage rounds in a company called Ultima”

“And so for us, like we're not targeting to be that one coin based outcome, that one stripe outcome, like we're saying over time, how do we get LPs to know that we can consistently generate three to five X net returns.”

“I had played around with Stripes APIs maybe a week or two prior. And I was quite frankly, not terribly impressed. I was like, you can take a credit card payment. Like, why is this the most hyped up company in the world?”

“John is interesting in that, like you know, he is He's one of the rare people who can do, I think, who kind of can do, and I've seen him do all three really well. In fact, there were many times when like John was managing certain teams on an interim basis at S…”

“I started leading it when you know, the product was already being used by quite a few of Stripe customers. The team was only four engineers at the time.”

“My assessment would be that Patrick is very much a visionary craftsperson type person, so, you know, every time I've interacted with him, and I learned a lot from, you know, about product from interacting with him. That's been the conversation is, is the visio…”

“There is nothing more than, more important than empowered engineers. And if you look, you know, if you look at companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Amazon, Stripe, Apple, that's the foundation of every one of those companies, empowered engineers.”

“They get somebody from Amazon, they get somebody from Stripe, somebody that's clearly experienced what good looks like. But then they assume that just because they were successful there, that they're going to be successful in our company. And that's not a true…”

“Like Stripe, Amazon, they believe think deeply to really. So for example, the written narrative is a way to force you to really think Think things through and then you're gonna move a lot faster.”

“You're Plaid, you're doing, or Stripe, or whatever you're doing, banking and payments thing, like you're not, you can't move fast and break things. You have to move fast, as fast as you can while not breaking things.”

“At Segment, there was a lot of pressure, and we did also in a positive way, learn lots of lessons from Stripe, but we were very different to Stripe, even though we would develop a sole product. And too much of the Stripe lesson was Detrimental actually to bein…”

“But I think it's going to be longer. Like, you know, it, you'll see it in the update coming out this weekend, but it's like, you know, data breaks, stripe, it's not going to be enough to actually crack open the IPO markets like we think it will be, I don't thi…”

“I don't expect Stripe or SpaceX to go out next year, and Databricks alone won't be enough to crack open the IPO windows.”

“You have person leave stripe or leave open AI or hugging face, and they raise 20 on a hundred. And that's happening more and more.”

“Whether it's like Facebook trying to enter the B to B space, whether it's Stripe trying to actually go from like developers and SME to finance teams in, in, in the enterprise. It's hard. And we actually haven't seen that much success.”

“I think so. I think 2024 is the year of you might as well go public.”

“If you had the one, if you had, if you were the lead in Datadog or Stripe or whatever, if you had one true epic outcome, it was just true when I started to say that carries you, because then people, they believe you can do it again, right? That you have the se…”

“At the time at KV, when we invested in Stripe Series C, it was an order of magnitude more expensive than the entry price for any investment in the history of KV.”

“We're less liquidity constrained now than we were say at the beginning of last year, but the major issue still continues to be that there's all these big companies like Stripe, for instance from the last cycle that have not had liquidity events yet. And so unt…”

“I don't think Stripe or Databricks will go out in 24.”

“If you look at any of the big outcomes across our portfolio, whether it's you know, Spotify, Stripe, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX, Andrel stem centric. So if you look at all of these big outcomes for us, every single one of them, there was someone on the team bang…”

“Unbundling Stripe and going up against the Collison's Seems like a really stupid idea.”

“We invested a hundred million bucks into Stripe in 2020. We extended the series G round”

“If Shopify caused businesses to get started because it lowered the barrier to being able to sell online, if AWS caused applications to get started because I was like, oh, I could just build an app and run it in the cloud. I don't have to think about servers an…”

“I think Stripe will still be private in four years time.”

“Stripe is a, is an incredible company in that they can be incredibly profitable and so they can accomplish all their core financial goals without needing to go public.”

“I think we've both exited close to 50% or just on 50% of our holdings in Stripe to date.”

“I don't think Stripe is a good business because you compete against ad yen and checkout and your biggest customers will compete.”

“Most of the near banks in the world use WISE. Google Wallet is powered by WISE, Stripe uses so platforms use us too”

“And this Stripe-Shopify relationship Is likely the most value creating relationship in the history of software. It would have been Intel, Microsoft before Intel and Microsoft had had divorce is too hard a word, but had like the thing they did.”

“If Stripe and Shopify ever get to a point where, like, we don't think about the world the same way, then we'll have a conversation.”

“When I did that deal, I remember talking to lots of other investors and the pushback would be it's in a commodity market. It's valued too high. There's not real differentiation.”

“2017 when we invested in them, nobody, or I would say lots of people didn't believe that they could compound and continue to grow at such a strong rate that actually the valuation multiple that we were paying into was more than fair because they would compound…”

“They're raising, Databricks is raising most of that to deliver secondary to employees, including to deal with some tax issues, and I know that's what Stripe did, and Josh, I think, is doing most of these.”

“I got pitched early in stripe and square, and I Didn't do the investments because I knew how hard payments was from PayPal.”

“And I think a lot of the greatest products or companies of our generation have been usage based, right? I think Stripe is a great example of this.”

“Stripe did this seed. It was the, I think was the very first deal that Stripe did as a seed investment.”

“I think Stripe will be massively more valuable. In a world that we now enter, because I think there will be so many people who are enabled to create stores, entrepreneurial endeavors, and will inevitably use the default of Stripe as their payments mechanism th…”

“Stripe is priced even, even less than Adyen. If you just look at it on a multiples basis, and it's growing quicker.”

“I think that was a mistake. I think we should have put more in them.”

“We first invested in Stripe at about a thirty billion dollar valuation but we didn't take part in the down round that they did whenever that was, 20, 22?”

“Stripe, Figma Chime, the list of folks north of five hundred million, ok, Canva, three billion, that are gonna IPO in the next 18 months.”

“But some of our best portfolio companies like Stripe aren't listing anytime soon, and they're finding ways to deliver liquidity.”

“We invested in Stripe in 2017, and one of the things that struck me is the Collinson brothers were tracking a KPI. They were tracking the number of series A companies that That transact online that they actually, you know, that are using Stripe and the number …”

“If on the other hand, if those keep pushing out, then at some point it becomes really hard to have all this money in private illiquid assets when you have pressures on your endowment and all that. And then at that point you would see the money go down.”

“And it's a massive public policy failure because what's happened here is this. It is more attractive for companies to stay private and access capital from GPs who are paid two and 20 plus to make those investments than it is for those same companies to go publ…”

“The check size was only 17,000 dollars back then for six percent, not whatever it is today, I think it's a couple 100,000 dollars, so 17 grand bought them six percent of Stripe, which is pretty, pretty impressive.”

“If there's not four exits, Above sixty five billion in the next five or seven years, then the people who bought Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, OpenAI and Antropic are screwed. So I don't think they're screwed. So I think there's going to be, this trend is going t…”

“If you're a Klarna, if you're a financial player where access to capital is really important, you know, you are fundamentally a lender. I think being public and having access to money in all its different ways makes sense. If you're a high growth AI company or…”

“It's surprisingly only one people wanted to sell. Like literally like, 90% of people said, you know, they think we can build a bigger business.”

“Patrick just like said to me that he's going to build Stripe for the next 2030, 40 years.”

“Essentially it's a complicated deal construct. Essentially it's eight hundred million on the cap table, and three hundred fifty million to me and my co-founders, and I think it's a fifty million dollar I think twenty-five million dollar to the employees, of th…”

“Will Gabrick, the CFO at the time I think now he's CPO, he reached out through Sequoia and he said, just want another, have a conversation to see what you guys are up to.”

“If I know Stripe gonna get to a hundred billion, I mean, I will probably make, like, at least three billion dollars.”

“My guess is it totally makes sense for them to get a great IPO under their belt. In a way that, and not do the strike thing of stay private for another three or four years.”

“Look, the window is, was, and always has been open for Databricks and Stripe. They just don't want to go through the window, right? There's no, like, The windows open and shut for the two billion dollar market cap IPO. The window is always open for the fifty b…”

“The very biggest, when Stripe finally goes public, they can do whatever they want. They can do a direct listing and not raise any primary capital. They could do the Google type option, and no matter what, it'll all be fine.”

“I've shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, oh, well, we're just a small Irish family company. Please don't tokenize my shares.”

“We might get the next wave of IPOs that are even better very quickly, and the amount of froth that that could create in the ecosystem, the amount of just returns to LPs could create a bubble on top of a bubble, because times might just get much better in the n…”

“I have heard whispers that a lot of their product portfolio is not really contributing to the business. It really is the core business, which is, you know, pretty common. I'd say probably the same of, you know, largely the same of Twilio too, right? It's a, it…”

“Our best companies that, you know, like Livongo and Circle and others, you know, Stripe and others, our first rounds were not 25 X. They were, you know, hundreds of X in terms of returns.”

“Stripe. You know, it's about a billion dollars.”

“You know, we'll, we'll have a 25 year kind of hold probably on, on Stripe in some form or the other.”

“I think Stripe's gonna be a trillion dollar company. He's gotta give it 10 years, you know, so I'm, we're, it's a compounding business that, you know, Patrick and John always say infrastructure is hard, but it also compounds, and they're sort of steadily just …”

“Cause I asked him who are your ideal customers? And he said, they haven't been born yet. And he was talking about the developer movement. Remember this is 2010, right?”

“When I invested in Stripe, all the guys that I called the new payments were like, this is a niche thing, like why are you doing it? I kid you not.”

“I lost a Series A of Stripe. I lost a Series A of Samsara. I lost a Series A of Snap. And the first one I won was a Series A of Gusto.”

“I think for the very best companies, private markets behave like public markets. There's a secondary market, you can liquidate, so your shareholders can take liquidity, employees can take liquidity, you have access to credit, you can do M&A, your stocks value,…”

“I mentioned earlier in Stripe, I've invested 14 times.”

“GC should be running with the same rigor these companies run. And I think we still run pretty good. We're still a very messy company, but the aspiration is we want to run with the same rigor as, you know, companies like Stripe do.”

“Giving people access to SpaceX and Stripe, you're not gonna regret it. It'll, it'll do right by them. You'll feel proud of it. What you don't want to do is, Take retail and put it into you know, the bottom quartile of the venture capital funds that lose money …”

“I mean, look, our best returns have come from seeding companies like Stripe and Andurl or Creating companies like Kayak and Livongo and Camille and others, and so.”

“I think you would have to give that to Stripe still.”

“The competitor I think that I respect the most is probably Stripe. They've obviously been going for longer than us, but they've built an amazing product that people love using with a great go to market. It's very slick. Yeah, I think they're a really impressiv…”

“I think we've like for years have been trained to know an incumbent as a shit company that's large. That's basically like the definition. And I just don't know that that's the case right now because you have a bunch of companies that came up in an era of moder…”

“The only time Stripe will go public, we've said this on a call before, is when the capital available in private markets is towards ransom.”

“I think the biggest advantage is the avoidance of volatility in your stock price and sort of employee management. And so, you know, I think You know, if you can kind of steadily grow or control your stock price in the private markets, even if it's a slight dis…”

“Founders Fund, deploying three billion in under 12 months, but deploying it into Stripe, SpaceX, and Anduril.”

“I think Stripe, least likely, take it off the table. My gut would be Antropic gets it done.”

“There really are two different late stage businesses now. It used to be late stage was, I remember Meritech would say, beyond 10 Million is late stage, and you'd think 10 to a hundred million was quote late stage. Now, late stage is 10 to four hundred million,…”

“Obviously I passed on doing the seed round of Stripe, because I'm a genius. It was called Dev Payments at the time.”

“He personally owns two percent of Stripe.”

“By the way, that might change in twenty-twenty-six, in big way, in a big way, because there are a host of a host of huge, unprecedented size IPOs in the works now. You know, companies like SpaceX, and Stripe, and Databricks, and, you know, and others. So there…”

“We have been trying to compete with Stripe and Adyen for five years, and we were like losing it. Like they were just, you know, crushing us. And we were like, this is it. And Adyen had just signed with Daniel X, Spotify, my neighbor. And I was like, this is ov…”

“I mean, I think, we said it in one of the shows earlier on, Thrive has done an amazing stock picking job of backing Stripe, of backing Databricks, of backing OpenAI, and of backing them at scale.”

“So I'm going to bet on Stripe on this one, just because I think you have more flexibility today to respond to change.”

“Stripe's doing five billion plus or minus, Addians doing A two billion, right? So it's half the size. So two and a half times the size.”

“If you look at Stripe and Adyen, I think Stripe have an inherent advantage in being private that Adyen don't have because they're public in what they can do, how aggressive they can be, how they approach product, you name it.”

“With that said, I think that applies to like the 10 best private companies in the world. Like Databricks can do those things. Stripe can do those things. There's a lot of companies that just do need to get public.”

“Founders Fund are closing in on six billion dollars of new funds. They invested the last 3.3 in 11 months in amazing businesses like SpaceX and Stripe and Anduril.”

“Over, over the weekend my nine nine six project was I built an agentic API grader where we went, I just had Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini together take the top 120 APIs and grade which ones they thought were the best, which tools I thought, 11 Labs everything on …”

“I think they are really bad proxy for what you should be doing. Because most people aren't. So I think it's a much saner strategy to, like, do the flip to public as a minor financing.”

“Yes. But I think Stripe has plenty of places that they can differentiate. And I think it's a better world where everyone has documentation as good as Stripe's.”

“They both process kind of 1.8 trillion dollars a year, right?”

“Stripe supports revenue net, which is around six billion plus or minus.”

“It's between 20 and 30, so it's not that much bigger, Jason.”

“So it's probably just a dance from 28 to 35. And then it gets parked with advent to while they figure out antitrust and capital issues.”

“The board rejected it, right? And the fact that the board rejected it means to me that they're going to accept it.”

“They basically signed up all the AI companies that are selling shit online, right? And they shouldn't be getting anything like the money they're probably getting from the open AI and entropics in terms of interchange fees. But who's got time to optimize that s…”

“On a TAM basis, a plus or minus a hundred bill, there's just more compounding in those five hundred million exploited Europeans.”

“From a business model perspective, in other words, the kind of front-end API to aggregate a lot of complexity, What Open Router does for LLMs, what Stripe does for money, and what Twilio does for telecoms.”

“I've been on the other side of Stripe deals. They do what you would expect. They offer an acceptable but mediocre price from a venture perspective, right?”

“It's a niche, it's a wonderful niche product, but in the world of routing, Which everybody does. Databricks does. Replit does it. Lovable does it. Vercel does it. It's a niche product with two really good niches, but this is the risk to Stripe, is that they en…”

“I think it'll be like the scale acquisition. It will be the start of something that gets bigger, whether this brand exists or whether even this product exists five years. I don't even think this product will exist in five years, but I think it will be, I think…”

“I'm willing to bet Stripe will turn OpenRouter into money probably quicker than OpenRouter could do on a standalone basis.”

“And billing's up 71%.”

“Their share count is down on three years ago, four years ago, which means they've been buying back stock.”

“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”

“I won't be surprised to see a huge wave of M&A of these businesses, because they're still good businesses fundamentally, or you can make them good businesses, And they just aren't going to be, like, Stripe, or these massive things that capture fundamental piec…”

“Smart deal to try and do, but they're clearly not willing to overpay as they see it.”

“I don't find it crazy, honestly. Like I think when I was at Plaid and we were competing with talent for like Stripe, that felt like no harder than what I'm doing now.”