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 70 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Redesigning Stripe's post-signup onboarding email increased product conversion by 20 percent
“Doing that increased product conversion by 20% from this email, which is pretty huge.”
Stripe leverages betas to balance design craftsmanship with customer feedback
“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…”
Dill: Stripe uses exuberant color to communicate optimism and progress
“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”
Koomen: Stripe Charged More Than Competitors in Its Early Days
“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.”
Stripe founders manually processed payments and filled bank forms at launch
“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.”
Epstein: Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex are three top-10 YC companies
“It also turns out that three of the YC top 10 are transactional businesses too. So these are companies like Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex.”
Epstein: Stripe initially tested value by charging 5% per transaction
“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.”
Buchheit: Patrick Collison personally integrated Stripe code for early customers
“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.”
Paystack raised a Series A round from Stripe and Visa
“We just raised a Series A million dollars from Stripe and Visa.”
Patrick Collison: Stripe Had Around 100 Users Before Publicly Launching
“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…”
Collison: Stripe handled 22 payments in an hour on launch day
“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.”
Patrick Collison: Stripe Atlas and Stellar originated from Stripe's Crazy Ideas process
“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…”
Stripe founders ignored Aaron Levie's early investment offer on Facebook
“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…”
Collison: Stripe could have accelerated by a year or two with better discipline
“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…”
Collison: Hiring Billy Alvarado for banking partnerships changed Stripe's trajectory
“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…”
Collison: Stripe rebuilt its dashboard three times and API multiple times before public launch
“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…”
Thompson: Poppy's initial MVP was built on Squarespace, Typeform, Stripe, and Excel
“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.”
Laura Behrens Wu: Turnkey tools removed the need for custom e-commerce infrastructure
“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…”
Livingston: Stripe was built because payments were a personal pain point
“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.”
Collison brothers convinced banking executives to partner when they were teenagers
“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.”