John Collison: Putting Startup Success in Perspective [Entire Talk]

I'm going to be using my iPad for notes, I promise. I'm not on Yik Yak most of the time, so I'm a huge nerd for startup history. I spent a fairly considerable fraction of my leisure time over the past year reading histories of Oracle and Microsoft and Facebook. It was really exciting. But there's this phenomenon where if you're interested in startups or if you're thinking of starting a company, you don't quite get the full picture, because companies want to put the best face forward, they want to whitewash things a little bit, and so you don't end up seeing the really interesting detail and the uncertainty from the early days of a company. And so what I'm going to try to do over the course of talking to you today is give you a little bit of insight into that uncertainty, into what it's like in the early days. And if I don't do a good job of that in this part, we'll be going into questions maybe half an hour in, and you can ask the tricky questions. So maybe we should start off with what is Stripe? And this is not maybe as easy a question as it sounds. So one answer is that Stripe is a really easy way to accept payments online. This is why we started it back in 2009 when we had been developing web products, we had been developing apps. The two options you really had if you wanted to turn your product into a business where one, you could send your users off site to PayPal, that experience kind of sucked, or two, you could sign up for a merchant account and go through the weeks of work and building out your own payments infrastructure that that entailed. Neither option is really good. And so one way to look at Stripe is that a better way that came along to accept payments, but if you zoom out a little bit, you can look at as a platform for running your online business. So we've seen, thanks to the Internet, an explosion of not just new businesses, but new kinds of businesses, new business models. You look at software that previously was sold on a license basis is now all delivered by the cloud as software, as a service, it's all subscription services. Or you see that services that were previously kind of offline, delivered on an ad hoc basis, are being delivered by marketplaces that can help with discovery and liquidity and trust and safety. I'm talking about Airbnb for travel or Lyft and Uber in the transport segment. And it goes into every vertical like home cleaning or errands. And so as all these new business models emerge, to actually to run the business, if you're a subscription business, to keep track of how much everyone is paying you and actually build them, or if you're a marketplace, to run the pretty complex operations and move all the money around in a variety of different companies to make that happen. This was hugely challenging for people and they were all building it themselves. And so what Stripe really does is gives them a platform so that they can use Stripe for all that and not have to build it themselves. So maybe that's another definition, but if you zoom out even further, maybe Stripe is just better economic infrastructure for the Internet. Thanks to the way the Internet has emerged. We have this global system that lets anyone share information, but money definitely doesn't work that way. In the us, we have credit cards and we think of them as pretty global, but they're not. In Kenya, everyone uses a mobile money system called M? Peza, which is on feature phones. It's really far advanced. 43% of Kenyan GDP flows through M? Peza, and no one really uses a credit card. Or in China, everyone uses Alipay, the payment arm of Alibaba. And so we've erected this kind of Tower of Babel when it comes to money on the Internet, where we have a bunch of different systems, none of which interoperate. And our idea with Stripe is that by using Stripe, you should just not be able to have a system for processing credit cards, but a way to accept money from anyone, anywhere. And so neither one of these answers is more correct than the other. They're just all different answers at a variety of zoom levels. And one phenomenon I think is really interesting about startups is they tend over time to get higher and higher up in how they describe themselves. And that's ok. And that makes sense. But the sneaky thing they do is they pretend that that's how they viewed themselves all along. And so you have this great Silicon Valley phenomenon of the founding myth that we set out to revolutionize app discovery. I mean, what does that even mean? And one of my favorite examples of this is I saw an interview with Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is clearly an incredible entrepreneur and he's someone I respect a lot. But he was giving this interview and the interviewer was asking him, payments, electric cars, space travel, what connects these? And Elon looked very thoughtful. And he's like, well, when I was in college, I thought the three biggest opportunities for mankind were the Internet, interplanetary space travel and clean energy. It's like really that visionary. And so what that means is as you're trying to think, is this a valid startup idea? Maybe you've identified a problem, but it seems very tactical. You don't know what the broader vision is. One stark counterexample here is I really enjoyed Travis Kalnick in describing Uber recently. Uber's latest tagline is transportation as reliable as running water available to everyone. But Travis, I remember in a while ago described in an interview, someone asked him why he started Uber and he said it was a lifestyle thing. Me, my co founder and our 100 friends could roll around San Francisco like ballers in Mercedes s classes. So that's maybe a little before the transportation as reliable as running water. And so I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that you don't always know in the early days what the largest thing is. For me and Patrick, when we started Stripe, the market research we did was we knew this was something we really wanted as developers and we had one or two friends who wanted us. And that seems like an addressable market right there. And over time we've come to realize that, that this is in fact a really large and meaty problem that we can be tackling. The other challenge in the early days of startups. Well, that sounds kind of trite. There's a lot of challenges. Let's talk about another challenge. One of my favorite media tropes is the multi year overnight success. People talking about how quickly startups get to scale. I mean, even in Stripe's case, I've seen a lot of newspaper articles that literally describe it as an overnight success. It's like, hey, you weren't there. In our case, we spent a really long time in the early days building out the product and trying to figure out would it work and what the right thing was. And so to give you a sense of scale here, we started working on Stripe in the fall of 2009. And we launched Stripe in September 2011, which was around about two years later. I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it, I said to Patrick, yeah, let's do it. How hard can it be? Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And then the answer was two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that. And when we launched two years later, does anyone want to take a guess how many users stripe had? 10. Close 50. So we had spent two years building out the early product and acquiring those 50 users. And you know, when you're spending two years getting 50 users, it doesn't feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going Pretty slow. And this is the challenge. If you're working on a startup that's a bad idea, it's going to feel like slow going. But also if you're working on a startup that's a good idea, it may feel like slow going too. I think the thing that really allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users, since we were hyper focused on building out a great product, and since we weren't dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to really build a product that we wanted. One of the cultures that set in really early on was taking almost abnormally good care of those early users. And so I think someone wrote a blog post about this, but we set up the Stripe API to email us anytime someone ran into a bug. So, you know when you run into a bug on any site and it shows the error message or something, in that case on the Stripe, it would email us and occasionally phone call us because we figured when you're there as a developer integrating this product that you expect to be reliable. Running into that bug is a terrible experience and we wanted to fix it. And so it would alert us. We would often, I mean, we weren't doing anything else at the time. We would often open our laptop, start fixing it, and send the user a friendly email of, hey, that bug you discovered just there, it's now fixed. And people's minds were blown by this. Sometimes they even found it a bit creepy. We set up a campfire room that any of our customers could come into at really any hour of the day or night. Even if people were based in the Bay Area, we would let them come by the office and we would just sit over their shoulder and help them integrate Stripe. We had in the bottom right of the Stripe dashboard a little prompt that would change on every page load. It would say, the thing you guys should improve here, or a feature I really want is, or the worst thing about this page is. And people would fill it out and hit Enter. And again, because there were so few users, we would reply within 10 minutes. People find it a little odd. What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days, it actually had a really surprising viral effect where people had a really good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word of mouth. Even to this day, we actually baked viral mechanics into the product. So for the longest time it was available in invite only beta mode. And I guess you don't really think of payment processing as a really viral social thing. But the only way for the longest time to get access to Stripe was to get invited by someone who knew it. And so again, you had this phenomenon where people were not only signing up for Stripe, but being recommended to us by someone who was already using it, who knew how to use it. And it really helped, not just with user growth, but user engagement. The other challenge you'll face as you go through that early stage with those early customers is really figuring out what is core to the product and what is not. Maybe another way to phrase this is what should be part of your vision and what will need to change as you hit obstacles with customers. You can even probably define vision as the things that you're not willing to change. There tends to be a lot of debate over the lean startup methodology where you should have a product, show it to some customers, rapidly iterate based on their usage and their feedback, versus the very vision driven product of I know what this is and I know where it should go. To me that's not really a trade off at all in that you need some small set of things, the vision that you're not really willing to compromise on. And then with the remainder, if the market is telling you that you're wrong, you really need to listen to that data. In Stripe's case, I think we were really focused on an instant onboarding experience, building a developer friendly tool as our path to market. And I think that was stuff we were really willing to compromise on. If that wasn't a valid way to build this company, I'm not sure we would have been able to pivot out of that. But in every other area we, we explored the market, we just kept running into feedback from customers that ended up being really critical to allowing the product to succeed. So it's not a vision versus iteration trade off. It's a selection of the things that you really believe in and then being willing to contort yourself to make it work around that. Related to that in the vision category is that there will be things in the early days of a startup that make sense in the early days that don't scale later on. And so it's not just a question of, it's more of a continuum. There aren't just things that you should not change and things that you should be willing to change on a regular basis. There will be things that you should not change for the first two years and then gradually need to be unwound as you grow. And so in the early days of a company, it's probably really critical that they focus on the US market. Trying to win all markets is a distraction, but clearly over the long term, focusing solely on the US market is wasteful and they should go international or Facebook. For the longest time they had the mantra of move fast and break things and this really made sense for them. They were trying to have a really fast product cadence, but at a certain size you get so big and so interconnected that moving fast and breaking things probably isn't your motto. And so they recently explicitly acknowledged that that they were moving past this. Startups end up having a really powerful path dependence where it's not just a question of arriving at the final answer. And if you had found that final answer earlier, you could have gotten there much quicker. It's a question of building a set of assumptions, following those and continually revisiting them. You're not just trying to arrive at the final form for your product, you're trying to get all the intermediate forms and the chemical reaction that get you there. A good example of this is Microsoft. They started out in the hobbyist market building basic compilers. They couldn't have stayed there and could never have become the company they are today. As a result of building compilers, they had to move upstream and they're now basically an enterprise company. But at the same time, they couldn't have started as an enterprise company because no one would have bought from them. These two random college kids. And so again, there's this path dependence to Microsoft's growth where they had to become each one of their stages to allow them to jump to the next level. Maybe another example of this is going back to Uber. If they had just started out with their UberX model today doing ride sharing, they probably would have been shut down pretty quickly. It required them to succeed. They needed to start with the limo business, get to such a scale that it was a well known and well liked service, and then they could start doing ride sharing in some cities and prove that it was a popular model. The last thing I briefly want to touch on on this topic is that of startup opportunities. People often ask this question of where do I find the idea for a startup? And I think in Stripe's case, in hindsight it makes a lot of sense. Building an online business was really, really hard pre Stripe and starting a service to make that easier would seem to make a lot of sense. And that goes for a lot of other companies as well. Anyone who had ever taken a cab in San Francisco should have had the idea for Uber or In the case of Slack, we internally were struggling with the problem of team chat. And not only that, everyone we knew was struggling with the problem of team chat. So the idea to build a company to tackle that seems obvious in hindsight, but that obviousness in hindsight doesn't really help you, right? Because if you only realize these opportunities after they've come along and someone has shown you the path, that doesn't really help you get anywhere. I don't know if any of you guys have read David Foster Wallace's commencement speech called this is Water. It's really, really good and you should check it out if you haven't read it. But in it he uses the story of a big fish passing two little fish. And the big fish says to the little fish, hey guys, how's the water? And they swim along and pass him and one says, turns the other and he's like, what the hell is water? And he used this anecdote to then go on and explain about being mindful in the day to day lives that we live. And they're sort of a little bit like that in as you think about opportunities on a day to day basis. We live in a world that's completely broken in lots and lots of small or big ways and we've come to just work around them, we've come to take them for granted. And so to spot opportunities requires you to jump out of that mode briefly and question how things work and be unreasonable in suggesting that it's not valid for them to work this way. It should be interesting to note that the companies that are often successful in changing an industry are often not started by insiders because the insiders know too much about that industry. They've been swimming in that water for too long. Certainly it was the case in Stripe's case. As we came to learn more about how the payments industry worked, we could see the reasons why everything worked the way it did before Stripe to get set up with payments online generally took a few weeks and was a whole bunch of paperwork. And as you get more into the banking industry and people say, oh well, we need to collect that information to run our underwriting checks and fulfill our KYC BSA requirements, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it requires you to stand back and say, no, no, no, wait a second, this is not how the Internet works. And so I think there's a certain practice you have to get into in how you look at the world to stop accepting everything is reasonable in how it works. We are all swimming in opportunity, but it's often really, really hard to see it. And with that I think we might take a break there and move to questions.

Right, perfect. So this is the way it's going to work. I'm going to ask a first couple of questions, but I'm going to open it up to you so you can be noodling on the type of questions that you want to ask. John, you mentioned several times starting this with your brother. Is that a good idea? Talk about, I mean, obviously it's been very successful, but tell us about what it's like and what the opportunities and the challenges of starting a business with a family member.

Yep. So I get this question all the time, often from reporters or whatever, and generally my response is to say that yeah, we got all our disagreements out of the way when we were five and then tried to move the conversation along, but now that I've told you that. So that won't work here. You know, I think starting a company with someone is, I mean one just on the face of it, it's hard. It's often 7 hour or 7 day weeks and 14 hour days again and again and again and going through a lot of uncertainty, a lot of setbacks. But also in the actual work you're doing, in the working style, you're probably the group of people starting the company are learning a huge amount as they go along. They're wrong a lot and discovering they're wrong a lot. And all this adds up to you need to have a really good working connection. If you already know the person, you need to have a really good working connection with them. And if you don't know the person, you need to develop that really fast. And so I think we were lucky in that Patrick and I, not only had we grown up together, but we had worked in a startup before, we had worked on projects before. And so all the time the meta issues of working style and how we work together were out of the way and we could focus squarely on the task at hand. I think if you look at a lot of successful teams, generally they had a history of working together. You often see people who had worked together for a long time at previous jobs starting a company together. I'm not saying that's a necessary requirement, but I think if you actually look at the data, you have this phenomenon where it requires you to either get lucky in finding someone that you work really well with or pick someone where you know that's the case.

Did you have very clear division of labor from the beginning or is that something that's Evolved.

It was totally unclear in the beginning in that, you know, there was this huge amount of work and we both just tackled it.

Great. And you chose to go to Y Combinator. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and how it influence the evolution of the company?

Yeah, I think YC is really valuable, especially for people like us, where we were fairly new to the Valley. We were working in a business that required us to understand how. How the Valley operated and worked. It would have been very useful to have a network for hiring, for business development, for raising money, things like this, and we didn't. Most investors will say on their homepage that they don't accept cold pitches. You have to be in that network already to be able to participate in this system. YC is quite cool and unusual in the way that there's a standard application form on the site and that's actually the only way that they accept pitches. Anyone from anywhere in the world can fill that out and get a spot. And so I think what was valuable for us was the fact that we were pretty new to this. It helped us get into this world. And to give you a concrete example, in the early days of Stripe, it was a lot of work convincing people to use it. It was this new unproven tool that you are going to build your whole business on. I mean, it's kind of a scary undertaking. And so it was. A lot of our early customers were YC companies who we knew through that they knew we weren't going to disappear in the morning and they were willing to integrate Stripe.

Fabulous. So anyone in the room want to start out with the first question? Okay.

I want to know your childhood related with entrepreneur. Sorry, childhood?

Childhood.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, today I'm childhood.

Was the question asking about his childhood as an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

Okay.

Grew up in the middle of nowhere in Ireland in a small town in County Tipperary and read a lot of books, used the Internet a lot. I mean, childhoods, pre Internet and post Internet do seem to be very different in that pre Internet, you're mostly limited to a very local circle, and post Internet, you're making friends with people all over the world and learning a new thing. I first coded when I was first 14. I built a website that Patrick subsequently. Patrick's my brother. Subsequently comprehensively hacked, which I guess was a good lesson in never try anything. I'm not so bitter about that one. But, Yeah, I think 20 years ago, would it have been as easy for, you know, me to come out here from. To come out here from there and do Something like Stripe, it seems unlikely.

So clearly you're someone who has a lot of ideas, right? Starting at a very young age, you were building things. How did you pick this as the thing that you said? I know I'm going to put all my energy behind this problem to solve because this is a huge problem for a lot of us, right? It can be an interesting dinner table conversation or hanging out with a friend saying, this is a problem someone should solve.

This.

This, which is the one you say, this is the one I'm going to solve.

Yeah, I think that's a really hard problem. And it sort of comes back to the bad ideas take a long time and never quite achieve escape velocity. But good ideas often take a really long time to achieve escape velocity too. In the case of Stripe, it was actually for the first few months we were also working on this series of iPhone apps. It was one of the projects we were working on, but we were also in college at the time, so we were juggling class on these iPhone apps and Stripe. And so it was definitely not our exclusive focus. I think the thing that really convinced us in the early days was, and this might be specific to more developer business focused companies rather than consumer, which can get to scale really quickly. But I think in our case what really convinced us was the fact that the users we had were so, so passionate. This was not just for them something marginally better, but they thought that it was life changing and revolutionary and they wanted to tell all their friends, they wanted us to build a way for them to invite their friends to it. That seemed to really get, that got our attention. And so I guess most of the metrics that people talk about day to day, like revenue or user numbers, those are all lagging metrics. And you as the person actually working on the product, you have access to leading metrics. And so apparently with Snapchat, one of the most compelling metrics in the early days was the number of times per day each person used it in that even if this wasn't really big yet, it was growing very quickly and it seemed to have a really deep connection with each of its users. And similarly for us, I think the passion that the early users had about the product was that leading metric that indicated to us that something was there. But I think in each case that leading metric is going to be different, but you want to find what that leading metric is, to be able to judge whether this is going to take off or not.

So this is a space that has become very, very busy with lots of other companies, how do you think about your competition? Is this something that you think of it as a cat and mouse game with features? Do you say, I don't pay attention to them. We've got our own path. Talk a little bit about competitors.

Yeah, it's sort of funny. In the early days when we started Stripe, people would say to us, really, Payments? Why would you start a payments company? And then in 2012 there were all these payments companies and people would say to us, man, Payments, that's like a super hot space. That was a great idea, you guys starting that. The whole time you're kind of nonplussed by all these reactions. I think there's, it's important to be really clear in your own mind and as time goes on, be good at communicating what is unique about what you're doing. And so, you know, in the early days people would always ask us, they're like, so payments and like with the design focus and it starts with S. So it's sort of like Square. Right. And actually when you think about it, they're two entirely different businesses in that Stripe is a technology product. Using it more or less always involves code. We are interested in what you can build using this toolkit we've developed for you in a really leveraged way online. Whereas Square is entirely offline, almost entirely aimed at the small business segment, all for face to face transactions. And I think similarly with lots of competitors, people who only have a surface level understanding of your business will tend to want to lump you into some category. And it's very important that you be able to get across what it is that not just happens to be different today in the feature set, but what's different about where you're going and in the asymptotes of these two companies where they end up. And I think that's not only important to be able to explain it, but it's important in an existential sense in that hopefully you are doing something different.

So speaking of doing something different, I understand you now deal in Bitcoin as well. That's obviously something that's very interesting and a little bit controversial. Maybe you can talk about what you see as the future of alternative currencies like Bitcoin.

Yep. So, You know, I mentioned earlier the Tower of Babel effect, where online we have all these different payment systems that are completely non interoperable. And so we in the west happily use our credit cards. People in Africa use a variety of mobile money systems. Same in various parts of Asia. People in China use their Alipay accounts. You have this perfectly connected online world and then this perfectly balkanized economic landscape. And it's really harmful because it means then the products we use are artificially limited by. You have the US Internet and you have the Chinese Internet as a result. And so I think bitcoin is. What is most exciting for me about Bitcoin is that global aspect. It's the fact that everyone's bitcoins are the same. Everyone's bitcoins work together with each other and that no one has to come along and enable Bitcoin for a certain currency. There's no committee that decides that bitcoin is going to South Africa in 2018. It's just there. That's how it works. You know, we recently added Bitcoin to Stripe, and it's one of the instruments you can accept. And from a product point of view, one of the things that we have always thought is really important is moving beyond this. You know, I render a credit card form on my site that works for a very small set of people to being that universal connector for people that you just say, I want to accept money. And Stripe lets you accept money from anyone, no matter what they're doing, be it Bitcoin or whatever. The other thing I'll say about Bitcoin is, I think with that original Bitcoin paper that is phenomenally prescient in retrospect, it is a truly great standalone paper that appeared out of nowhere and still people aren't quite sure who even wrote it. And what that's done is, one, it's kicked off a bitcoin movement, but two, it's kicked off a whole cryptocurrency movement that has got people thinking about this space in a way they weren't before. And so people are arguing about what is the. The perfect consensus algorithm and what are the right constants in the hashing functions. If you're going to use hashing or proof of work or whatever, you have people arguing about every detail. And you have some people bemoaning the fracturing that's happening where you have all these altcoins like Litecoin and zerocoin and things like this. But to me, that's really exciting in that people are not only saying, this is a really cool technology, but this is a really cool technology space and we should explore all the possibilities that are in it. Stripe funded a nonprofit called Stellar, which is developing a cryptocurrency. It's very interesting. It lets you trade not just with bitcoin, the currency is Bitcoin, whereas with Stellar. You can actually trade dollars or euros or pounds, things denominated in the actual currency. And it doesn't have. It doesn't use hashing for consensus or proof of work. It uses kind of a more CA like model. And so I think cryptocurrencies are totally in line with this general mission we believe in, which is the Internet economy should not be the us, it should be the world. And we need to fight really hard to make that happen.

Seriffic, who has a question? Yes.

So you spoke at how to start a Startup course last quarter and that pretty much went into depth about everything that's relevant to startups to a great extent. We have this amazing amount of information now available from the Valley on what we should do. But it seems like some of the best founders out there, the ones who've been most successful, didn't have this information at all. So how do you attribute this ability to find out what's the right thing to do in terms of culture in hiring when no one's really told you about it?

So I'm going to repeat the question, I'm going to see if I've got it, is that, listen, there's all this how to start a company information out there. You didn't have access to it. What's the difference between those people who read all the books, watch all the videos, are listening right now, and the people like you who did it by the seat of your pants?

Well, I think it's maybe giving us a, a little bit too much credit to say that we succeeded entirely of our own accord and had no one helping us. There's the old quip about libertarians being mostly rich people and believing in the power of the free market to get them to where they are. But, but I think in our case we were very lucky to have a lot of advice from people who had done it before. It would be people via the YC network. Peter Thiel was a very early investor in Stripe. That was a fun one. He was actually our first significant investor. Going into the office of Peter Thiel and saying online payments are totally broken, who caused this mess. But he knows an awful lot about building companies, not just through PayPal, but being the first outside investor in Facebook and co founder of Palantir. A variety of these other successful companies, same with Sequoia, things like this. Or studying what various companies, you know, emerged in the 70s, 80s, 90s did, and, you know, trying to draw out the conclusions of what made them successful. Like I said, you know, if you, if any of you Guys, want to join my fun startup history reading club? You're, you're welcome to, but yeah, I don't think we were, we were on our own at all. There's always been a pretty good source of advice and you know, going back to the point of whitewashing and you know, the corporate history is always tending to be a bit more of an official history. For me, the best advice has always been someone who is there firsthand, who in a one on one context is willing to tell you not only the official sanitized version. And here's the time we nearly lost everyone's data, which actually happened for a major consumer Internet company.

Great. Yes. What worries you most at strike and.

What challenges the company trying to overcome today?

So the question is, what worries you the most right now and what challenges are you trying to overcome?

Probably two things. And you know, I think the things we worry about and the challenges are sort of the same. So I'll answer them together. I think one is that. Product strategy, product prioritization, product planning, whatever you want to call it, is always going to be really hard. And I think people think it's going to be hard if things aren't going well, but it's even hard if things are going well because you're trying to model the future and see the knock on effects of doing things with huge amounts of uncertainty. And so in our case, we have a very successful subscription product that we really believe in and we're expanding and we're also expanding internationally and there's only a finite amount that we can work on. And so you're at a certain point faced with a choice, should we be investing in subscriptions or expanding internationally? And the answer is both. And you have to always be making these calls and constantly revisiting your calls when it comes to what you should be working on. And it's so, so hard to predict up front what actually ends up being kind of a major part of your business.

So I just want to build on this. How often do you revisit your strategy because you can't do it every day. It's sort of like digging up the seed every day to see if it's sprouted right. Okay. But you also can't do it till it's an oak and you go, oh my gosh, I really wanted a cherry.

Yes. I think the strategy you revisit all the time. I think what companies have to get good at is being willing to let things take the time to being willing to give them a chance to actually go somewhere or not. Because especially as the company grows, you have all this pressure, not just externally, but the pressure you all set on yourselves internally. And one of the tougher things is saying, look, I know that the needle hasn't moved on this yet, but we said initially that we believe this is going to be really important going forward. We still believe that, and it's just going to take time. I think, say Bitcoin is a perfect example. I think if you go ask anyone who's accepting Bitcoin, is it a significant fraction of their transaction volume? The answer will be no, because the consumer demand isn't there yet. And so you're in this chicken and egg situation. And so is it irrational for these people to have Bitcoin on their sights? I mean, no, it's just that they want to give it that time. And so they're probably constantly revisiting their strategy of should we be investing in bitcoin? But the secret sauce is in the patience to know when you should be giving things time. And that's an art. That's like, really hard to.

You can be patient when it's your company and there aren't investors, but you now have a lot of investors who probably have a strong opinion. So you've got a board and you meet with them. Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship with your board and how maybe how you manage the board, how the board manages you?

You got to find patient investors. I think the good investors get that this is how this works. And they, you know, the good investors have also seen it some amount before. And so, you know, in Facebook's, you know, in Facebook's case. Does anyone remember that Facebook in the very early days used to have banner ads? They're just going to sell ad space on Facebook that you could buy the banner at the top of the page, but it took them a few iterations before they found a really good revenue model that's now doing well. And so I think, again, in that collective amnesia that we all have where we only really remember the successful stuff, it's easy to view it as, why can't you just be like Facebook and quickly arrive at the correct answer? And it's important that the investors you find be able to understand that part of the creative process.

Great question. Yes.

Can you speak to the personal transition you've had going from when you were just an engineer working in the early days to now being CEO? You enjoy being CEO or. I don't actually know if you're the CEO, but co founder? Do you enjoy that role more. Do you miss coding? Do you still code? Sometimes? Yep. I'm not the CEO, I'm the president. But I'll take the suggestion to the board and I agree, for what it's worth. No, I'm kidding. I mean, you definitely do operate in a different way at every stage of the company. In the early days when it's just two of you. We spent the very early days in Stripe, the first few weeks working on it from Buenos Aires. It was a January break in college and we didn't want to work in the US because we had student visas and not work visas. We didn't want to go home to Ireland because it'd be super distracting or whatever. So we did the logical thing and went to Buenos Aires and it was awesome. That is like a city that works on a hacker schedule. Everything is open until 5am and has wi fi and it's great. That's a slightly different experience to a 200 person company now. And I think what you need to not guess, you hear these stories of people who kind of want to stay coding to the detriment of other things. At a certain point you have to acknowledge that the productive thing for me is not going to be directly doing this myself or directly coding, but working on something different. You have to get out ahead of that. I think the other thing that you have to get good at is pretty quickly learning new skills because you're going to be doing things like recruiting or running a board meeting or running a staff meeting or running an all hands or all this kind of stuff that you probably haven't done before. And I think it takes a. It requires you to be willing to be not good at things in front of a large group of people and be pretty open to feedback to actually get good at those things.

So on that note, when you look back, imagine you're starting all over again. It's a few years ago because it's really only a few years. Are there any very specific things that you go, wow, I wish I had really done something differently that would have been really meaningful. Help us understand so that everyone here can learn from that?

Yeah, I think the reassuring thing and one pattern in a lot of the if you read these histories of companies is just how much stuff they screwed up. And that should be a really heartening lesson. You can still screw up that much stuff and get away with it. There was this. They talk about in the early days of Google how they had this one machine. I think it was the script that Sergey wrote doing all the indexing of the entire web. And at a certain point, they just couldn't keep up with the growth of the web. And everything was slowing down. Search results took, you know, multiple seconds to actually respond. And this is when Google was getting reasonably large and, you know, they fixed it. And it's now, you know, they're now hyper focused on speed, but it really was quite broken there along the way. And, you know, the same with, you know, Facebook, who stumbled through lots of different revenue models before arriving at the one they wanted, things like this. And so it's. The reassuring thing is you can screw up a lot of stuff, but you didn't, right? No, no, no. Luckily we got everything right. I think the two things you really can't screw up are product direction, where, I mean, if you go down the wrong road, that's really hard to pull back from. And the other thing is hiring. Just because a bad mistake when it comes to hiring is so demotivating, it can spread so badly to the rest of the company that you really have to get a lot of hires. Right. I think the other thing is, as you grow, the correct way to view hiring is not I am filling someone to do this role and fill this slot. It's the correct way to view hiring is branches of a tree that when you hire this person, you're not only bringing them, but you're bringing their effect on the culture and all the other people they're going to bring in with them and the norms and the working style they have that will spread throughout the company. And as time goes on, those hires have. You have less and less influence on the company and all the new people you're bringing in have more. And so hiring, you can't really screw up. Great. Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about how you're going to scale that kind of hiring you're doing now? So you and Patrick still interview everyone sometimes. If people go through projects before you decide to work with them, how do you do that as the company goes from 200 to 500 to 1000? So the question is, how do you scale the hiring process to know you've got the right person as you get so big?

That's a very relevant question. It's a discussion we're having internally right now. I think a lot of it is as you go from. And speaking of these questions of scaling, let's be clear, stripe is 200 people. Right now. We're in the process of growing loss. We'll probably grow. We'll add a significant number of people this year. But if we've messed it all up, you won't see the results until a few years down the road. And so take all my advice on scaling with a pinch of salt. But with scaling in particular, I think it's moving from things being at a gut level. This doesn't feel right, I'm not so sure about this. To making things very explicit. And so in the early days, I think companies spend a lot of time talking about culture fit, and hopefully the various people at the company know what that means and know what set of traits that they believe are important in hires. But as the company grows, you have to make that explicit and you have to say, this is the set of things we believe makes someone succeed at Stripe. This is the set of traits we believe are important. This is the set of skills we think someone needs to come in in that role. And that feels kind of weirdly artificial in the early days. And it's inefficient in the early days because if you're being so explicit about everything in a fast moving environment, you'll get weighed down. But as the company grows, it will end up in this complete game of telephone unless you are really explicit about something like hiring. What is important in a hire.

So clearly every single person contributes to the culture, but that's one of the variables that affects the culture, do you think about the culture of the company? And what other things do levers do you pull to influence the culture? The organization?

Yeah, so everyone does. And I think, you know, some people pitch that as a, you know, as a thing to be kept in check or, you know, restrained or whatever. And, you know, people often ask the question like, how do you keep the culture from changing? I guess to me that question suggests a huge amount of hubris in that to suggest that that initial kernel of culture that you had is the perfect culture that any company could have and does not deserve any improving. Something seems off there. The correct question is not how do you keep the culture from changing, it's what culture do you want to have and how do you get there? And sometimes you'll believe that you have that culture already and you want to teach new hires that. But I think oftentimes, if you're being really thoughtful about it, it's about recognizing a deficiency in your culture and how do we inculcate that? And I think I can identify various points throughout the history of Stripe where the culture actually improved from someone coming in and then bringing in some new culture with them as an example of this. I think in the early days, Startups tend to be very fly by night, shoot from the hip, not at all metrics driven. Maybe that's necessary in that maybe you need to have a clear idea of where you're going and ignore the data to some degree. But it's really important as they grow to become more metrics and actually look at usage, look at how people are using the product and bake that into future product development. And we definitely started off not very metrics driven and we have become much more metrics driven over time. And I think that was a good example of a concrete place. I can identify the culture as having improved.

There are other factors that always come into play, like the physical space, different rewards, incentives. Do you think about that as part of the culture as well?

It is though. It's a bit more, you know, I think the, hopefully the physical space is, you know, a manifestation of something different or, sorry, a manifestation of something larger rather than, you know, the culture itself. And that, you know, if your culture is, you know, we have foosball, it's a bit like, cool, okay, great. But you know, if your culture is, you know, at Stripe, for example, we serve meals at the company and rather than having kind of cafe style seating with the round tables, we have long dining room tables, kind of Hogwarts style. And we think that's really valuable because it means that, you know, in a fast growing team, people get the chance to meet each other that they mightn't otherwise. And we very much don't want Stripe to become these silos where you have the finance people and the marketing people and the engineers and they're all in their kind of cliques. We want it to be the case that people at Stripe have a lot of empathy for how different parts of the company work and are pretty well rounded. And so that's an example I would point to where the space is hopefully an indication of some larger cultural thing rather than, you know, it feels about it.

Great, that's exactly what I meant. Great. Thank you. Please stand up and speak really loud. What would be your advice for working or not with a person or a team? Can you repeat it?

Yeah.

What would be your advice for working or not with a person or a team? What would be your advice for working or not working with a person or a team?

You mean as a co founder or when it comes to hiring? I guess the two things to think about are one, I think the quality and tenor of your personal interactions actually matters a lot. There are some things that are absolutely table stakes, like honesty and integrity. And if you see any bad signs there, you should run away at 100 miles an hour. But then there's deeper things about your interaction and your working style. I think one interesting question that you should really think about is how much should you argue with someone you're working closely with because it's not obvious that you want to be in. You clearly just don't want to be two of the same people. That's kind of wasteful. You hopefully have some conflict and some diversity of opinion such that you're both bringing different perspectives to the table. But at the same time, you probably don't want to be too far too diverse in opinions. Where Max Levchin describes how when they merged X.com and PayPal, PayPal were all Unix people and Windows and X.com were all Windows Server people, and they kind of smushed them together and it was bedlam because you had these two people who had red team, blue team, two completely different ways of doing things, and it's unclear whether one was better than the other in that context, but they certainly didn't work together. And so if it's productive disagreement that results in a better product, then that's great. If it's kind of stylistic disagreement that you can't get past, and you do just have two different approaches for doing something, then that's maybe a sign that you're not going to be able to work that well together.

I'm sure that you would agree this was absolutely fascinating. Please join me in thanking John Collison.