Stripe

“So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over twenty billion dollars, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.”

“I'm specifically thinking of Stripe. I mean, they built that product because it was a pain in the ass for themselves. They were solving something for themselves.”

“The head of a bank is going to take a nineteen-year-old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.”

“It's easier than ever today to build your e-commerce store online. You don't have to be a developer. There is less upfront cost because you don't need to invest into a physical retail location. Everything's online. You get Shopify, you get Stripe, you get. Lik…”

“I had a landing page on Squarespace, signups and feedback forms were done through Typeform, Stripe handled the payments, I did scheduling via Google Calendar, communication with SMS, and my database was Excel.”

“I remember, like, in 2000, I guess it was 2010 I invested in Stripe, and I had, like, 17,000 dollars in my bank account at the time, maybe 2009, and I invested, like, 15,000 of that into Stripe, and, you know, it was, like, for a meaningful percentage of the c…”

“And so I thought that was just a brilliant onboarding tool that perhaps any executive joining a high growth company or any manager joining a high growth company should issue so that people just understand this is the fastest, best way to interact with me and j…”

“This is super powerful in terms of, like, your influencer status, but really, really hard to track. So this would be later down the road, but it is effective, and because it's hard, most people aren't going to do it, so you can really stand out.”

“I don't think we ever actually just showed up. Although, you know, perhaps we should have, but no, we tried to be kind of at least semi invited.”

“We got our first user, like first production user, just kind of three months in, ah, and then kind of every month we tried to add at least kind of a handful of users, ah, and so by the time we publicly launched, ah, we did have, You know, about a hundred users…”

“Between say, five and 50 people. I think we are much too consensus-oriented. We, of course, weren't completely consensus-oriented. I mean, we couldn't have gotten anything done if we were, but I think we kind of biased too much in that direction. And again, I …”

“It's oddly hard to fake being intellectually honest and sort of the characteristic of kind of being able to see multiple sides of a debate or an argument. Like, there are so many kind of complicated questions where sort of the only thing that I'm really skepti…”

“On the day we launched, we handled sort of, 22 payments in the previous hour, which again sort of seemed huge to us back then.”

“And when we launched we were basically immediately bottlenecked on sort of being able to serve user demand rather than generating user demand. And I think sort of directionally that's kind of the sort of the inversion that happens where sort of, you know, in t…”

“Sort of our kind of dispute resolution framework is kind of much more around which of us cares more than kind of which of us holds this title or that.”

“And so, people, like, really self-censor a lot in most organizations because they don't want to look stupid, and they don't want to be sort of associated with just having all these, like, wacky, bad ideas and so on, and so we try to be fairly firm that if you …”

“And actually a lot of cool things that we've subsequently gone on and done first came from that process Stripe Atlas you know, being one of them and also we sort of helped Stellar get off the ground this sort of cryptocurrency back a few years ago, and sort of…”

“Aaron Levy had Facebook messaged John and we'd never heard of him, and we hadn't heard of most people in Silicon Valley but he'd Facebook messaged us, like, very early on asking to invest in Stripe and I think John didn't know who's this random guy and so we n…”

“Us going and sort of accosting them in person sort of helped, you know you know, people talk about in sales, it's always like a, you know, a why you, and a why this, and a why now, and these kinds of questions and going in person kind of created a why now mome…”

“And so, Jeff told us that we should hire Billy, and if it didn't work, Or for the first few months or whatever, that if it didn't work out, Jeff would sort of go back and pay his salary, so it was kind of a zero risk move for us.”

“And so I think, and you know, language is squishy and it's not, you know, completely specifically defined, but I think kind of generally speaking, kind of a better utility function and kind of gradient to try to climb is that of fulfillment.”

“Generally speaking, I think that sort of pre product market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful. I think you sort of, you really want to bias very strongly towards kind of as much sort of inspection and kind of high throughput qualitative feedback as…”

“Yeah, so I don't think I did it especially well, and I think it kind of, you know, fortunately, sort of, you know, it worked out, but I think if I was doing it all over again, I think we could have sort of accelerated ourselves by a year or two if we'd sort of…”

“We hired Billy and that was sort of an immediately trajectory changing event where, you know, previously when we'd gone and talked to a bank, I mean, I don't know if they were literally doing this, but it certainly felt They were kind of pushing the security b…”

“When we launched publicly in September of 2011 you know, we kind of rebuilt significant components of Stripe kind of multiple times in response to user feedback, like we're kind of on the third version of our dashboard, and the second or third account major ve…”

“So in the last 12 months more than 80% of American adults have bought something from a Stripe business. At least one thing from a Stripe business. Which is cool, and you know, it's not just the case in the US, like in Singapore, where it was last week, you kno…”

“It was, I think one year and 11 months from sort of first line of code to public launch. Which to be clear, I don't recommend, ah, that is not a good idea, ah, it's just we had to, because we had to kind of get all these other things in place”

“That's one of the reasons why just thinking about that series A, we had to think about companies that have figured out skill. Companies like Stripe, companies like Visa. Like if there's a company, the companies that have thought about moving payments from one …”

“We just raised a Series A million dollars from Stripe and Visa.”

“So, like, that was how, like, the very early Stripe installs, Patrick Collison would show up and integrate Stripe into your code. Right? He would just show up and do the work.”

“For each of these companies, there was a pre-existing product. Pre-existing competitor, dominant, you might say, but there was an opportunity to make something that was 10 X better than what existed.”

“Most people, founders and investors thought these ideas were horrible, either because they were too hard to execute or because they just were bad ideas.”

“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”

“Some of the best companies we've ever funded happened when either there was a full downturn or at least a blip.”

“It also turns out that three of the YC top 10 are transactional businesses too. So these are companies like Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex.”

“So while most of their competitors were actually charging around three percent per transaction, Stripe decided to set their price at five percent per transaction, nearly double what their competitors were charging.”

“Some of the early ones like Amplitude, Stripe, Front, they were doing up on sales emails, just like the one we described to get started. Those founders were doing those sales emails as they get started.”

“The thing that did not scale, it was literally the founders processing every manual request and filling bank forms to process the payments at the beginning, and that was good enough to get them to launch sooner.”

“The Collison brothers famously charged more for Stripe in the beginning than their competition did. The fact that they were able to sell their product anyway was compelling evidence that they were onto something.”

“Be super careful about, you know, the details in your grammar and your casing. So give your TV superpowers. I don't know why superpowers is capitalized. It's like a kind of hybrid between title case and sentence case. So sticking to that consistently. So get s…”

“We purposely are, you know, about exuberant color because we're about positivity, and we're about progress, and we want to look optimistically at the world, and so that hopefully communicates through what we do”

“We identified what are the, you know, top 17, you know, most important user flows that many of our users go through, you know, daily. and it's not a comprehensive list by any means, but we just needed something kind of digestible. And so there's 17, And we ha…”

“These organizations that worked with us, one of them was Lyft for early days, for example. They, you know, came upon this need. They wanted to pay out drivers, and so they built the product with us.”

“Like, frankly, unfortunately, you know, the gravitational pull is to mediocrity. You know, there are, you know, I would imagine most companies on this planet want to do great work, and they want to say that they will say they want product quality. But what it …”

“We worked with Slack and Notion on, you know, how to make that product Better every day. And so we are doing prototyping and iterating and they are giving us feedback almost on a weekly basis.”

“We do think about craft and beauty is definitely not a nice to have. It's a must have and, you know, thinking about those details, making sure that there is no defects that somebody might start to question whether or not the product is working overall”

“You should be looking at it as if you know something is wrong with the plane. You're just trying to find it. And so that mindset is really helpful because it really requires you to take a different posture of that, like, there's something here and I'm going to…”

“Doing that increased product conversion by 20% from this email, which is pretty huge.”

“You know, design certainly does make, you know, business sense, but even if it didn't, they would still do it, and I think that, that, that's that x factor. That's the thing that's gonna make, you know, hard decisions along the way possible. And certainly wort…”

“So we really leverage betas as a way of getting something out there and most importantly, getting feedback. Because if you're just, like, sitting there, like, crafting it all day long and taking your sweet time, but never actually learning from folks, then you…”

“The other advantage of these runtime ideas Is usage. Because the more your customers are going to grow, usually the more they are going to use your product. So your incentives are aligned.”

“Early on, the Stripe team were going to their customers, small startups, and they helped them implement their own product, sitting side by side in front of the computer coding with them.”

“We had, I think, like, over 11 VC firms offer to invest. We actually chose to do the round with no VC firms. It was all angels, so we raised from, you know, twenty-plus CEOs and founders. It was, you know, the CEOs and founders of, you know, PayPal and Stripe …”

“On the payments one, we emailed Patrick directly and he responded. Like, within an hour, he sorted us out.”

“We also do this every Friday where the founders do it in front of the whole company, where they're walking the store.”

“Usually, well, for something like this, Patrick was definitely a part of the decision-making process, and so usually, you know, with the team, we will look at quite a large range, then we will down select to, you know, a subset of those, and say, like, okay, t…”

“When we endeavored to change it was because the business had just evolved beyond the point of what this story was being told on this site.”

“So you don't need to accept slop and you shouldn't accept slop. You should, you know, hunt for, fight for the right solution.”

“When you're building a website like this, you are either, you know, both directly and indirectly expressing your company's manifesto. So one of the things that we're trying to express is the care that we put into the work that we do, because If you see the car…”

“I think AI can, you know, give us opportunity to keep the base, like to raise the floor essentially, to create baseline products, maybe like the seven out of 10, Really quickly. Really easily.”

“The reality is, and I think we may have even talked about this last time we talked, like the gravitational pull is to mediocrity. Like it is just so easy to accept good enough. And I think it really, really takes intentionality and you really have to think abo…”

“Over 78% of the Forbes AI-fifty use Stripe, and they are using our products to help them scale”

“Well, what's also interesting is it's this section that the site didn't launch. In December. So we ended up launching in January, and, ah, we were at a stage with this where, like, we had something good, like, we had, you know, all four animations, but they di…”

“When people are coming to this site, they're in a more of a lean back mode. They're in more of a browse mode, so the idea that you're going to put your most important messages a click away is going to be tough, and so that's where the Bento kind of won at the …”

“I mean, I would say the goal is as quickly as possible to get it into a state that would be like the way a user would experience it. Because it is really hard to judge anything in isolation in a way that isn't like the user would be.”

“Another way is like, you know, the actual enormous impact that we have had the privilege and the responsibility of serving in that can actually be quantified in the GDP.”

“I think if we leapt people off the page, you know, when it might be too early for them to have made their decision on what they're actually going after. So this is really just a bit more of a browse experience, and it gives them a bit more of a chance to explo…”

“The gradient wave that's at the top was certainly an element, but it didn't really scale well.”

“So I think what AI is helping us do is it's helping us speed up our process and certainly helping us explore more. We can look at, you know, 20 ideas in the time it normally would have taken to look at two. However, the, you know, it doesn't replace craft. It …”

“I met Greg Brockman my co-founder, OpenAI, because I was a very early investor in Stripe when I was, like, I don't know, 22 or something, and they were, like, this was before they had, you know, like, real investors that could really help them, and they said, …”