Patrick and John Collison are the co-founders of online payments company Stripe.
Patrick and John started Stripe in 2010 while John was studying physics at Harvard. Their goal was to make accepting payments online simpler and more inclusive. Today, the 200-person Stripe team powers online businesses around the world. Prior to Stripe, Patrick and John co-founded Auctomatic, which was later acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. Originally from Limerick, the brothers reside in San Francisco, where Stripe is based.
Live in 20 countries around the world, Stripe processes billions of dollars a year for thousands of businesses such as Kickstarter, Instacart and Salesforce.
The company is the only payment start-up to have inked unique partnerships with Apple Pay, Android Pay, Alipay, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to usher in a new era of global internet commerce on mobile and social media.
What vision/lightbulb moment prompted you to start up in business? Thanks to the internet, it has become much easier to build and launch a business from anywhere in the world. Actually charging your customers money, though, remains unnecessarily onerous and prevents many businesses from ever getting started. The web is over 25 years old and yet there is still no easy way to buy and sell things wherever you are. It's shockingly Balkanised. Most people in the world are essentially prevented from participating in the internet economy. They don't have a credit card or their bank doesn't allow them to accept online payments.
We initially decided to build Stripe because it was something that we, as developers, wanted to see exist in the world. It was only later that we came to understand how deeply asymmetric the global financial system and the internet really are.
To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your plans? In every corner of the world, developers are changing the face of industries. We made a decision when we founded Stripe to put them first. Our role is to build the foundational technologies that help them create a more economically interconnected world.
Today, Stripe gives developers and businesses in 20 countries the payments sophistication of a multinational conglomerate. They can accept payments in 139 different currencies immediately and their preferred currency arrives in their bank account. We have a long way to go to be able to enable businesses everywhere and that’s a huge part of our focus today.
Describe your growth funding path We've raised about $200 million to date from investors like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.
Where would you like your business to be in three years? There are two important parts to enabling payments anywhere. First, we think Stripe should be available to any business in the world, so expect to see a great deal of international expansion.
But as the next billion come online, this means more than simply helping merchants accept credit cards. Stripe’s second lever is enabling merchants to accept any type of payment method that their customers want to pay with, whether that’s a mobile wallet in India, a direct debit system in Eastern Europe, a cryptocurrency or even a payment instrument that hasn’t been invented yet.
Ultimately we see Stripe as a technology platform that developers integrate once and Stripe evolves with them, giving them the tools they need to accept money from anyone now and in the future.
