Patrick Collison recounts Stripe's founding: he and his brother/co-founder John attended startup school in October 2009, sold apps on the App Store, and found building online payments far harder. They prototyped Stripe, worked on it as a bootstrapped internship in summer 2010 in the Bay Area, and shifted from seeing it as a small developer tool to recognizing a much larger market. They decided to leave school (take a leave of absence) and raised initial funding from investors including Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Sequoia.
Chapters
John and I, John's my co founder and also my brother. We went to startup school back in October 2009 and we've been talking about an idea around this for a while just because we'd sold some apps in the App Store and it had been incredibly easy. Right. And we're kind of reflecting on how it was so easy to sell apps in the App Store and it was so monstrously difficult to just do anything involving kind of transactions or commerce or business on this sort of broader Internet. Right. And so we're kind of chatting with this idea and then kind of walking home from dinner. I remember John turning to me and arguing that, well, we just go build a prototype of this. How hard can it be? How hard could it be to start a many billion dollar company? And so here we are again. Soon it'll be a decade later. So we weren't initially sure how seriously to take it. And I always loved the story that Facebook was not the only company they were working on. Right. There was also that peer to peer file sharing thing. Right, sure. But I mean, Facebook had sort of launched at Harvard at, in I think February of 04. And so they're working in that house that subsequent summer. And I find it very interesting that sort of call it six months later, it was kind of not obvious that Facebook was the thing to be working on. Right. Because you're pursuing multiple ideas in parallel. And sort of similarly with Stripe, even once we built this little prototype that we thought held some promise or whatever, it wasn't obviously a great idea or anything. And we still had these apps in the App Store. But anyway, I guess the point being we didn't know if we should raise money for Stripe or not because we're in school, was this going to be kind of a serious thing? And so what we actually went and did was we came out to the Bay Area again that subsequent summer, this was for us in the summer of 2010, and just decided to kind of work on Stripe as our kind of bootstrapped internship. And again, I think there's kind of maybe a lesson here where I think a lot of really good ideas really don't seem particularly great or big up front. Again, certainly speaking from personal experience, Stripe did not. But over the course of working on it that summer, instead of thinking about it and so on, we kind of came to shift from sort of thinking about it merely as this nice little tool for developers that makes their lives easier initially, which is what we started out with, to kind of realizing that, well, when you sort of survey the broader landscape. It's not just that it sucks for developers to have to integrate payments initially into their website or service or whatever, but that the whole edifice is broken. Right. We came to appreciate that what we thought was kind of this little pond was actually this much larger ocean. And so we see that summer we made two decisions to drop out of school, you know, as our mom continues to prefer we call it, to take, you know, a leave of absence. And then secondly, we had to go, you know, raise some initial money from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel and Sequoia and a couple of others.
