Patrick Collison says Stripe isn't going public because it's still early and needs long-term focus to build the "GDP of the Internet." Public markets push toward short-term thinking, though Amazon proved it's possible to resist. He wants new models that give early employees liquidity without forcing that pressure.
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How do you think about the public markets? Just generally we're going to hold off for as long as possible from partaking in them. As we think about the idea of growing the GDP of the Internet, I mean, there are so many things that we want to invest in on that front. They're just going to take a long time to come to fruition. Of course, there are some good examples of companies that I think have done a good job of maintaining really long term time horizons while being in the public markets. Amazon being the most famous and prominent example. On the other hand, if you look at Amazon's early history, they did an incredible, incredibly turbulent time for sort of their first couple of years as a public company and sort of now 2017, Amazon is up whatever, 50% per year. Exactly. It all looks great, but they really had a tough time in the beginning. This is a broader kind of structural challenge across the industry. But I think being a public company certainly does not stop you from taking a really long term time horizon. But it does make it more difficult. I think being a public company kind of makes sense when you've reached some point of stability, some plateau of you've done the stuff that you at least initially set out to. And we feel like we haven't still very early in sort of this trajectory they first established. And just because we work with startups and technology companies, you know, they themselves have lengthy trajectories. And so, you know, this is just going to have to be when you're building infrastructure, you know, there's just long time horizons involved. Slightly technical founder question, but how do you then think about liquidity for early employees, secondary sales? I think this is a big question across the industry of like, what are the points between being sort of, know, fully private with sort of no access to liquidity and kind of no trading in the stock to, I mean, obviously, you know, fully public and so on. Part of what makes this challenging is like there are so many constituencies here, right. And kind of not just the constituencies here in Silicon Valley, but also, you know, the various regulators, you know, most notably the SEC and so on. Right. Part of what I've been encouraged by is sort of, you know, I've talked to multiple people involved, including people who spent sort of a very long time analyzing this and sort of really digging into the regulatory details. I think for the first time there seems to be kind of a real appetite in many places to figure out a better model. Because ultimately, to the extent that the public markets do make it harder to take a really long term time horizon around innovation that's bad for the country overall. It's in fact even bad for investors long term. I don't presume to know how this is going to evolve. I mean, it's still very early days with the new administration and so on. But my hope, I guess, is that some new models come into existence that enable companies to sort of, on the one hand, start to sort of broaden their investor base and provide liquidity to insiders or to early investors who don't want to be late stage investors and start to kind of thread this needle.
