Opinion
Collison: PayPal was designed for consumers, not scalable business integration
“So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building, you know, a website, if you're building a new marketplace, something like this, PayPal works okay for sending, you kn…”
Opinion
Collison: Tech companies often have an insular go-it-alone mentality
“Technology companies, I think, often have a sort of go it alone mentality. We'll build it all in-house. We'll do it all ourselves. We can do things better than ever in the outside world.”
Opinion
Collison: Google possessed every advantage and should have beaten Facebook
“Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had you know, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, more of kind of any of the obvious inputs, and yet somehow there was something missing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Collison: Around 2009, banks acted as gatekeepers for online businesses
“Again, oftentimes they would tell you it was the single hardest thing about getting their business off the ground, because the providers that exist at the time, it was often through banks, they were the gatekeepers. They were the people that said, yes, you can…”
Insight
Collison: Startups tend to avoid problems spanning multiple complex domains
“Technology companies, startups tended, and still tend, I mean, for understandable reasons, to kind of shy away from things, from problems that sort of, ah, where you have to solve a lot of hard problems, In multiple domains.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Collison: Post-2008 tech pessimism drove the investor bear case on Stripe
“You know, we were sort of starting Stripe in the wake of the financial crisis, and it's kind of hard to, ah, remember this, or kind of, ah, internalize it now, but people were actually fairly pessimistic about technology in some ways back then, and that was in…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Collison: Peter Thiel invested $200,000 in Stripe on the spot
“Peter being such a, sort of, you know, an inveterate contrarian was quite sympathetic to this case, and decided on the spot to make, you know, a fairly material investment of 200,000 dollars.”
Insight
Collison: Payments shifted from tactical decisions to strategic product advantages
“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 tak…”
Insight
Collison: Tech companies cannot mechanically convert capital into great products
“This is one of the great facts about our industry is that you cannot turn Money into great products as a kind of mechanical operation.”
What-if
Collison: Selling Auctomatic early spared him the standard career treadmill
“Had we been, or had I been kind of on just the treadmill of, you know, you go to college, and you get your degree, and then it's your first job, and so on, such that, you know, I can certainly imagine sort of a different version of, you know, my life or my car…”
Disclosure
Collison: Early investors rejected Stripe due to the idea, not founders
“The, you know, the thing that has, I mean, this is not to suggest that investors, you know, rushed with enthusiasm to invest in Stripe. Most investors said no, but the reason was much more, or reasons were much more because they just thought it was a bad idea,…”
Assertion Supported
Collisons: Stripe co-developed driver payouts because no product supported Lyft's needs
“So in Lyft's case, for example, they wanted to not just charge their customers, but they wanted to pay their drivers and there was no product that enabled a really good driver payment experience, and so we've kind of co-evolved with them to enable the best
End…”
Disclosure
Collisons: Stripe chose percentage pricing to align revenue directly with customer growth
“Yeah, we really wanted kind of clarity in the alignment of interests where we would only make more money when the businesses we served made more money.”
Assertion Supported
Collison: Stripe partnered with banks and financial institutions pre-launch
“From the very beginning, even before we launched, we partnered closely with banks, and now we work with banks in, you know, many different countries. And not just banks, but sort of other financial institutions besides.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
John Collison: Patrick Collison hacked his first website to teach security
“After I'd built it, Patrick taught me a lesson in 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 Patrick then hacked the site just to teach me a lesson on that…”
Assertion Partly supported
Collison: Stripe took almost two years from full-time work to launch
“Like, from when we started working on it full-time to when we publicly launched was almost two years.”
