The Exchanges

Q So your dad was running this hotel, and were you guys involved with it at all? Like, did you have to To go there on the weekends and like change sheets and, and, you know, mop the floors?

A Well, remember, you know, Pat, I think it was, Pat was probably four, uh, when they started, I, I was two, uh, and so, you know, there's only, you know, a two-year-old can only be so useful, uh, in the operations of the, uh, of the hotel. I think my favorite memory is the, uh, you know, the, the ballroom floor, the highly polished surface. Uh, that was awesome as a kid for, uh, for kind of getting a, you know, kind of a length game in terms of who can slide the furthest, but, uh, Much in all is I'd like to imagine that we were extremely useful in, in running the hotel. I think we were primarily a hazard.

AI assessment note: “a two-year-old can only be so useful... we were primarily a hazard.”

Q Yeah. And how about you, John? Did you, like, seeing Patrick get into coding, did you think, hey, I want to try that too?

A Yeah, that was definitely an influence, and I think I had an experience, um, that a lot of people I know who've learned to code had, which is, it's often an end result that pulls you along, uh, and you're making everything up as you go, and you don't really understand, you know, you're copying things from a book or from a website and typing them into a computer to get it to work. And it seems like the two big motivations that people often have are, uh, websites or, uh, or video games. And so in my case, the initial website I made was not very good, After I'd built it, Patrick taught me a lesson in, uh, in security. You know, I was probably 14 at the time, and I cobbled together this website, and there were vulnerabilities and issues and stuff that, uh, Patrick, uh, then hacked the site just to teach me a lesson on that.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that was definitely an influence”

Q So you guys had a couple 100,000 bucks from the sale of Octomatic, and obviously you had the coding chops and the technology chops, but you did not have any money. How were you able to, to get money to, to, you know, fuel the ambitions of this company?

A One of the things that Silicon Valley does well is it probably has the high, you know, Patrick and I now travel to a decent number of other places, and Stripe has offices around the world, and Dublin and London and Singapore and places like this. But, but I think Silicon Valley is probably the best place in terms of the risk tolerance of the investment capital that's available. If we could get people convinced of the opportunity, and if we could show people that initial early customer traction, and how much it resonated with the target market, they were actually willing to take a bet, despite the fact, I mean, when you look back on it, there was a vast amount of uncertainty in every other Aspect of the execution between would Patrick and I be able to get visas for, you know, for the United States to work here, to would we be able to hire, to what would the long-term, ah, you know, financial partnership structure, things like that look like. But people are willing to look past all of those things to the opportunity.

AI assessment note: “if we could show people that initial early customer traction... they were actually willing”

Q So, so what did Peter Thiel see in Stripe? Like, was it just easy to use? I mean, was it the kind of thing where a software developer would be like, oh my god, somebody has finally figured this thing out?

A I, I think many of the developers were just really glad that someone was finally paying attention to them at all. Now, as it happened, we paid obsessive attention to them, and we were really building for that audience, but the baseline that people were working with was very low. It was not competitive. I think what changed, and what we were fortunate to be a part of, was the fact that now, For internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience. And so basically, I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business, where it was just something that needs to be taken care of, and there was only downside, really. You could make a bad choice, but you couldn't make a great choice. Whereas now, as we've seen with companies like Amazon, like Lyft, like Instacart, They can actually win based on their product experience, and that's new.

AI assessment note: “developers were just really glad that someone was finally paying attention to them at all”

Q pay, and I've Lyft, or you guys, I guess, have my credit card, and so you have to communicate with my credit card company to, um, make sure that they are charging me Uh, so then my bank account will be able to pay the credit card company later. Um, presumably you also have to pay the credit card company, right? Like they're taking a cut of your money too.

A That's exactly right. So what's happening underneath the hood when you use any business powered by Stripe is, you know, you probably type in your credit card. You probably only type it in once and then it's saved with your profile for any time you use it in future. That is securely sent directly to Stripe. So it's not, you know, hitting, uh, or it's not being stored on other servers. And then When a business wants to actually, you know, accept money and charge your credit cards, and you know, over time, it's now more than just credit cards. There's bank transfers and different international payment methods and things like this. But the business that wants to charge your credit cards, they say, hey, I'd like to charge this card 20 dollars, and we put money in their bank account, and we handle everything that goes on between that instruction and the money arriving in their bank account. It's actually pretty complex what goes on under the hood. But again, our aim is that people did not start businesses so they could deal with the minutia of the financial system.

AI assessment note: “That's exactly right. So what's happening underneath the hood”

Q When you think of this number, last year, 9.2 billion dollar valuation, does that mean anything to you? I mean, is it abstract? Do you think Man, I'm rich, or, or do you even, does it even cross your mind? I mean, must at some level, right?

A It's been my experience that people pay a huge amount of attention to the headline numbers of, of Silicon Valley companies, and so, you know, Stripe is a company that's been valued in, in fundraising at, at, at, at, you know, 9.2 billion dollars, or, or what have you. There is an assumption baked in that Stripe continues to execute very strongly, and so it would be a very dangerous mode to slip into, to, to Becoming rearward looking and looking at everything that has happened to date because the much more relevant fact is what we release in 2018, what we release in 2019, what, what Stripe's global expansion looks like and, uh, and things like that. You don't have a valuable company unless the company continues to execute. It's very dynamic.

AI assessment note: “it would be a very dangerous mode to slip into, to, to Becoming rearward looking”