The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Patrick Collison: Tech hubris fails; financial infrastructure requires traditional banking partnerships
“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. Whereas we thought that Stripe would only be possible, and it would only …”
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…”
High-growth companies like Stripe and SpaceX no longer need IPOs
“Companies like Stripe, SpaceX they've gone to a hundred billion plus valuations as private companies, so you don't need to go public anymore.”
John Collison: Payments has shifted from tactical vendor decision to product strategy
“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…”
Best: First publisher Bill Bishop made six figures on day one
“Bill's launch happened. And we had no, I had no idea what to expect, but he made like six figures his first day through this like duct taped, like stripe setup that I had built in the preceding weeks.”
Peter Thiel invested $200,000 in Stripe on the spot
“But 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.”
Patrick Collison: Scaling a startup never gets easier, challenges just change form
“And it kind of feels like that in the startup, where every day now, the problems and challenges are, and, you know, visceral pain is just as acute as when we were starting out. The problem is just of a different form.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Patreon launched securely storing credit cards but without actual payment processing logic
“We couldn't, for example we couldn't process all the payments at that time yet. I hadn't hooked any of that up. We could accept your credit card. And so that would get saved, you know, very securely by the way, because we were working at Stripe, but we hadn't …”
Patrick Collison: Early investors rejected Stripe's business model, not its team
“Most investors said no, but the reason was much more, or reasons were much more because they just thought it was a bad idea rather than the kind of bad people to execute it.”
Patrick Collison: Developers consistently integrated Stripe in an afternoon and launched next day
“We had lots of stories of people integrating payments in an afternoon or an evening, and then launching their business the next day. And that just worked consistently. That was a big break from what had prevailed before.”
Patrick Collison's serious projects have always been tools creating leverage
“I mean, from a very early stage, I was interested in sort of working on tools or just kind of building things that created leverage for others, and that basically the whole point of working on this programming language was to provide a tool that would make it …”
Collison: Stripe Co-Developed Payout Tech to Help Lyft Pay Drivers
“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…”
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.”
Guy Raz: John Collison was world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2017
“In 2017, John Collison was the youngest self-made billionaire on earth.”
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,…”
Raz: Stripe is valued at more than $9B seven years after founding
“And today, barely seven years after its founding, Stripe is valued at more than nine billion dollars.”
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…”
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.”
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.”