Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison explain to Guy Raz why technology companies historically avoided tackling payment infrastructure.
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…”
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.”