The Ledger
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Harry Stebbings Argues Stripe Is Not a Good Business Due to Competition
“I don't think Stripe is a good business because you compete against ad yen and checkout and your biggest customers will compete.”
Insight Partners invested in Checkout.com on a handshake without a term sheet
“I mean, you've got to be at checkout. I mean, we did that deal on a handshake. We never signed a term sheet.”
Checkout.com has never spent a single dollar of its raised venture capital
“We have never spent a single dollar of the money that we have raised. So I mean, all the money is sitting on the balance sheet.”
Managing by financial models distracts from employee happiness and positive outcomes
“The more happy people you have and the more good outcomes you get. And I think, you know, quite often, if you try to run a company with business plans and financial models and everything, You kind of deviate from that.”
CEOs should focus on five-year roadmaps, not two-year execution
“I basically have, like, three roadmaps, a two-year roadmap, a five-year roadmap, and a ten-year roadmap. The two-year roadmap is more or less decided already now, so it's basically executing against this, and I'm not involved. And I make my decisions on the fi…”
Pousaz relies on gut feeling and instinct over formal decision frameworks
“I don't have a framework. I make a lot of gut feel decisions and instinctive decisions, and by that, what I mean is that, of course, as a CEO now, I mean, I have a CEO office, I have a great leadership team, and I do have access to data, but I don't think that…”
Five great engineers outperform 100 average ones
“Five good engineers are better than a hundred average ones.”
No business sector compounds as effectively as payments
“I think nothing compounds like payments, so it's kind of hard to say, but I think it's going to be more growth, more people, more merchants, more products, more geographies.”
Pousaz limits all meetings to 15, 30, or 45 minutes
“If you want like, you know, factual tips, I have three types of meeting. I have the 15 minute meeting, the 30 minutes meeting, and the 45 minutes meeting. You have to choose between these three, and I always keep 15 minutes in each hour to do emails and WhatsA…”
Checkout.com is a value-driven company, not a mission-driven one
“We are a value-driven company. So you have certain companies that are mission-driven. That's not us. We're a value-driven company.”
Pousaz conducts weekly meeting audits to eliminate non-essential commitments
“What I do at the end of the week, every single week with the team that actually helps me manage my time, is that we raise the meetings. Was that a good meeting? Yes or no? Was that a meeting where I needed to be there? If I didn't need to be there, then we kil…”
Most payment processing revenue still sits with legacy incumbents
“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”
Pousaz relies on a group of mentors with no equity in Checkout.com
“Fundamentally I have a good group of mentors that really like look after me, that are people that don't have any vested equity or equity in the company.”