Money Stuff Podcast: Stripe's John Collison

While Merryn and John enjoy a holiday break, we bring you an episode from our colleagues on the Money Stuff podcast team. Hosts Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld spoke earlier this year with John Collison, the co-founder and president of Stripe. Here is their conversation on the financial services business, why payments are hard, what's good about crypto, why IPOs don't matter and how to fly planes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hey Marin talks to money listeners. Hope you're preparing for
a lovely holiday break. We are going to be off
for a few weeks, resting up for another great year
of interviews. But do not worry. We're bringing you some
great stuff It doesn't do in the meantime. Starting with
another episode from our colleagues on the Money Stuff team,
hosts Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld spoke with John Collison,
the co founder and president of Stripe. It was a

(00:39):
really interesting conversation about the financial services business, the case
he's making for crypto, and why he doesn't think IBOs matter.
I disagree, by the way, enjoy and be sure to
catch more episodes by subscribing to The Money Stuff Feed.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
So my idea for you guys is you guys just
have like regular normal boring ads on the podcast. I
think you need to do the post read ads for yeah,
say a lot that everything in securities, frauds is having
a bad night's sleep securities for us.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
Well, like I could do like the men's shaving club
ads or something that could be fun too.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
When buying short data out of the money called out.

Speaker 5 (01:16):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
Yeah, be good.

Speaker 5 (01:18):
Hello, and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levine,
I write The Money Stuff Colm at Bloomberg.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
Opinion, and I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News
and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Katy.

Speaker 5 (01:29):
Today we're doing something new. We are doing our first
interview on The Money Stuff Podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:33):
Are you nervous, I'm pretty nervous. I'm a little bit
nervous too.

Speaker 5 (01:36):
We're recording this after it happens, and we're not really nervous.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
I'm still stressed out. To speak for.

Speaker 5 (01:41):
Yourself, I'm pretty nervous. I haven't listened to it yet.
Today our guest is John Collinson Stripe. Stripe is a
payments and financial technology company, and John and his brother
and co founder Patrick are kind of tech industry celebrities.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
Yeah, he's an Irish billionaire. He's from Limerick. That's cool.

Speaker 5 (02:00):
He's wearing her Limerick jacket, but we'll probably get into
that during the podcast.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
That's true. It's a little embarrassing that I.

Speaker 5 (02:05):
Wore this medium amount of embarrassing.

Speaker 4 (02:07):
I truly didn't mean to, but as I said to
you in our office, it was forty seven degrees. When
I left my apartment this morning pre dawn, and I
needed a top and this is my favorite medium weight jacket.

Speaker 5 (02:20):
This is the behind the scenes content that Money Stuff
podcast listeners really crave. Yeah, let's jump right back.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
Into that internetailed.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
It should do.

Speaker 5 (02:29):
Like a crashing transition to talking about striper.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, So how do you guys usually start these how
do you want? I guess you haven't done that.

Speaker 5 (02:36):
You haven't done that, you could invent the product?

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah, start by review of the advertisements I've heard.

Speaker 5 (02:41):
Yea, the podcast we start the podcast with much like this.
We walk into the room and bullshit for a bit
and then record that. Yeah, and then we eventually say
hello and welcome to the Money Stuff podcast, and we
talk about whatever the thing we're talking about today. So
now we're talking about Stripe capital markets. Yeah, okay, So listeners,

(03:02):
in podcasts with you, you talk a lot about your
interest in business history and like you've learned from the
tech companies of the past and the conglomerates of the
conglomerate wave. I have not heard you talk about the
lessons you've learned from financial services companies. And I write
about finance and think of Stripe in many ways as
like a financial services esque company here, like some evolution

(03:23):
of a financial services company. So I'm curious, like, I
don't know what you think about financial services.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, in general, we try to learn a lot from
other businesses, and Okay, one of the things I really
like is we live in a golden age of learning
about other businesses right now. And one of the reasons
I like this is because I think learning about other
businesses at some level learning about the world or certainly
the economy, because you know, you're getting sense for how

(03:50):
all the various entities work together. With financial services in particular,
you came up with the framing that you know, Stripe
is in a way kind of a new kind of
scaled investment bank.

Speaker 5 (04:00):
Was it you're framing I think I said that. Yeah, yeah,
but I would love for you to tell me that's right.
That I'm assuming you'll tell me it's wrong.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
No. I actually kind of like it because if you
think about what are the potential source of funding for
a business, Like if you want to scale up a business,
how can you fund it? There's three ways you can
fund a business. You can do it through debt, equity,
or retain earnings, and so if you just tick through
each one of those on the earning side, maybe that's
the place where a Stripe is kind of the most
directly doing this, where we're making it easier for businesses

(04:28):
to self fund their growth. And we see tons of
bootstrapped or kind of certainly airly monetizing businesses on the Stripe,
like with this customer and Stripe Photo Room, and they
do online kind of GENI powered photo editing. They're based
in France, and you know, maybe ten years ago they
would have you know, raised a whole bunch of VC
and scaled up that way. They're actually profitable within a
year and they've just kind of scaled up profitably since then.

(04:50):
Ninety eight percent of their business comes from outside France,
and so they're kind of selling this product to a
global audience and Stripes making it easy to do that.
And we've seen that in general, I guess the AI
companies in particular, where you know, during the social media boom,
maybe companies scaled up first with raising lots of VC
dollars and then later on figured out monetization. With a
lot of the AI companies, you know, open eye perplexity clause,

(05:12):
you know the photo room who I was mentioning, they
actually monetize from pretty early on using stripe, and so
that's one source of funding.

Speaker 5 (05:18):
Stripe allows early stage companies to monetize so efficiently that
like there's less need for data and equity in the
world because companies can sell fund like you're putting vcs
out of business.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, and obviously we think it's a more slightly more
healthy dynamic for the businesses. A classic trap that early
stage companies fall into is you know, and why combinators
say tries to get their companies to avoid falling into
this failure mode is kind of they raise money and
then they think kind of valuation milestones or any kind
of financial or investor milestones are the milestones that matter

(05:52):
for the business wheas obviously that's not the case. It's
are you building something of value in the world which
will generally be measured by does anyone want to buy it?
And so I think maybe it gets people on the
right lead board earlier on, where a revenue leader board
is just a much healthier leaderboard to be thinking about
than a fundraising valuation leaderboard. But we also play in
the other parts of the capital stack, where on the
debt side. I mean, you guys have probably watched this,
but banks have kind of gotten out of the SMB

(06:14):
lending space since the financial crisis, as just the compliance
costs have gone up, Like people do not go to
a bank for a five thousand dollars loan anymore. And
so we now lend through our lending partners billions of
dollars to startups. We do that entirely programmatically through amount models,
you know, cash flow based lending. So we're not looking
at the balance schee. We're not trying to do kind

(06:34):
of credit checks on the individual or something like that.
We're looking at the stream of cash flows. Is it
a healthy, reliable stream of cash flows that can support
some debt.

Speaker 5 (06:42):
So you're doing the cash flows, you can see exactly.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
We see the cash flows and people repay out of
the stripe cash flows. And so that is a new
kind of lending product that exists in the market. That
now again is you know, in the billions of dollars
in terms of the debt we're providing. It's kind of
ironic in a way. If you want to raise one
hundred million dollars of debt, that is a very competiti marks.
Lots of people are playing in that. If you want
to raise five thousand dollars of debt for your company,

(07:06):
it's actually much harder to get that than it was,
say twenty or thirty years ago. We've gone backwards there.
And then on the equity side, I think stripe atless
has actually helped make more companies investable because what a
lot of people don't realize is stripe aatleists are incorporation product.
But it lets companies where the founders might be in

(07:27):
Israel or might be you know, in Singapore or something
like that, create a US Delaware company and that makes
it much more investable. And so we've seen a lot
of foreign founders kind of virtually creating a US company,
which it just turns out foreign companies investors fim too scary.

Speaker 5 (07:43):
So I guess I'm responsible for the framing that you're
sort of in somebody's a substitute for an investment back.
So like your framing is like increase the GDP of
the Internet, but like you know, you have these businesses
like incorporating companies, like what is the principle? And like
that was like a real investment backer. I was doing
like corporate derivatives, and like I assume you would never
get into that business.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
But I am I wrong. We're certainly not planning on us.
We build products that are scalable in some way through
tech and so you know, Stripe itself. This past year
we did trillion dollars in payment through the strip platform.
That's still growing in a pretty healthy clip. The number
of businesses served is millions of dollars. And so if
there's something that is solved by just throwing an army
of people at it, I mean, you know, all the

(08:23):
investment banking firms are exceptional as recruiting armies of people,
and that is a very competitive space, whereas the space
of you know, like I was saying, with the lending
side of things, that was just an underserved marketers where
we came out it by talking to our customers and
they said, we really need growth capital. It's actually very
annoying for us to get us. And so I guess
we try to find the underserved spaces, and investment banking

(08:44):
for you know, certainly on the larger side does not
seem underserved.

Speaker 4 (08:47):
Right now, I've listened to a lot of podcasts you've
been on in the past several weeks. So sorry, no, no,
it's been really interesting. You interviewed Charlie Munger, which was I.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Much prefer interviewing to being interviewed. So we'll come back
for the second round to this, right, you guys are
put on the spot.

Speaker 4 (09:01):
That'll be a lot of fun. We'll put that on
the calendar. But at one point Charlie Munger started talking
about like banks and they're selling these sleazy products, and
of course I couldn't see if you were nodding along
and I were talking about, you know, whether you would chafe.
It's sort of the comparison to you know, an investment bank,
for example, but it sounds like you don't.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
No, I don't. Investment banking provides a useful set of
services in the world. And okay, one things I really
like about the Money Stuff newsletter is a studied detachment
from what's going on where there are people and people
respond to incentives and that creates behaviors in the world.
I like, Matt does have views and you know, just
like crypto and you know, all sorts of things, and

(09:38):
you can kind of the views that occasionally come out,
but it's mostly this very detached view of what's going
on in the world. But the way we think about it,
like for for example, we think, you know, stripes scale
and revenue are actually pretty decent proxies for the value
stripe is providing in the world. That's not always the
case with the business. You could have an extract of
business somewhere, or monopolies or rent extraction or something like that.

(09:59):
But in our case we have very inforgmned buyers and
a very competitive market. There are lots of other places
people could go for payment acceptance or billing software or
something like that. And so generally, if customers are choosing
you and paying you money for a service, it's because
you're providing something of value that you can't get elsewhere.
And similar with investment banks. I think if people are
going to investment banks for a thing, that's probably because

(10:20):
they're providing some value to them. And so that's the
frameworkuy I tend to take. I think Charlie rest in
Peace generally took a lot of offense at where he
saw people hyping things, principal agent problems. You know, there's
a set of things that bothered him, Crypto Robinhood, mutual
fund advisors, and you know you could understand, I could
construct the Steelman for those cases.

Speaker 5 (10:41):
I think there's a lot of opacity and pricing and
value in financial services that there's probably a less of
in your business, right, Like you're kind of charging a
transparent feed to people.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
Yeah, and certainly the more scaled something is, the more
price comparison they'll be, the more efficient the pricing will be.
Whereas yeah, there's more room for extracting price in the
when you get into bespoke deals.

Speaker 5 (11:02):
So one thing I think of when I think give
investment banking is just serving as an advisor to CEOs
and sort of giving them general advice on their business.
And we were talking before about you know, you are
now interacting with a lot of big companies, and you
had some views on like the ability of a big
company to CEO to sort of understand her company, and
I'm I'd love for you to talk about them.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah. I think people think that CEOs are able to
drive change in their organizations. I'm talking about organizations general,
I'm not talking about stripe. People think that a CEO
lands in a new job, they take over a company,
and they're able to just whip everything into shape and
change everything and I think the general experience of CEOs

(11:45):
and new jobs is that is not the case, and
organizations are pretty hard to change. And in fact, one
of the things that we believe strongly at Stripe is
it's very important for people to guess close to the
work or you will not be able to drive any meaningful,
useful change. And so like a bunch of different ways
in which we do that. It actually reminds me of

(12:07):
the lean manufacturing principle, you know. And they have all
these very nice aesthetic Japanese terms for things, and so
you know, there's the English equivalent permius for the Japanese terms,
but in them is gemba, which is this idea that
managers should, you know, walk the factory floor and solicit
ideas from the people who are on the production line
and things like that. And all companies, like a tech
company like Stripe, has its equivalents, and so we very

(12:27):
much encourage engineering managers to actually write code Stripe to
get the experience of what is it like working in
their corner of the code base problems our engineers running into.
I really enjoyed being CFO last year when we were
between CFOs, and one of the reasons I really enjoyed that. Again,
was getting closer to the actual numbers, the processes by

(12:48):
which we drive the business, Like we're going to hold
Stripe to a budget regardless, and aren't you interested in
how that process is actually set and how those numbers
are set and everything like that. So you know, I
say that I think every founder should be CFO their
business for at some point during its lifespan. It's it's
a very educational experienced.

Speaker 5 (13:05):
Like product ideas. Did you do that and come away
with like we need to do accounting software? No?

Speaker 3 (13:11):
No, or or? I mean, I mean maybe in an
abstract way, but again, stripes finance needs are are maybe
a little different from the broader ones. But again, I
just think for getting close to how the business actually runs,
that's maybe the thing that's hard for CEOs to do.
And you know, we try to do it from a
customer perspective a huge amount of Even some of the

(13:31):
products we're talking about, like Stripe Capital, they basically come
from us trying to spend more time with our customers
than our competitors do. And so you know, we'll start
every leadership team meeting at am Monday morning with hearing
from a customer We just asked them to come and
give us cand of feedback on the product. If you
were to sit in on those meetings, it's not an
A plus report card that we're getting. You know, there

(13:52):
are things they want us to fix. But I find
that it's easy for like product managers to overcomplicate things,
and you know, you can get in your own head
and construct some really convolutioned castle in the sky. And
there's nothing quite as grounding as hearing directly from a
customer talk about what is not working for them in
the product. And you know, we did the same on
Fridays with like an all company thing, bring customers to
talk to that. But any I think the essence of

(14:14):
this for CEOs is getting close to the actual production function,
and that is sometimes hard of them.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
So I have two points. It's interesting to hear you
say that. First of all, my brain immediately goes to
Elon Musk, like on the factory floor at SpaceX and Tesla.
But it was interesting. We had Home Depot this week
announced that they were going to require corporate employees to
work eight hour factory shifts, which is interesting, like retail shifts.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
So Starbucks did something similar.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
Right, yeah, which makes a lot of sense, I mean,
especially in brutal jobs such as that one and then
the other thing. I mean, given that you do know
so much about his business history and you know, just
love looking at companies. But those eight a m. Meetings
where you're just talking to your different companies, like, you
see so many different types of companies, which is interesting, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
And it's definitely pretty interesting time. I think the behavior
we observe is that tech has been very well covered,
and so I think everyone knows broadly kind of what's
going on in the tech world. What we find interesting
is the businesses that are the Sherwan Williams of the world,
you know, the businesses that are ten twenty fifty, one hundred,
two hundred years old, and how they are adapting to
the modern world. And generally, what we find is that

(15:21):
COVID provided a useful long term change to those businesses
because those kinds of businesses all employed a chief Digital
Innovation Officer prior to COVID, and that person had a
team of ten people, and they produced all these slides
and ideas, and the ideas were pretty good, and the
company just ignored all them and just didn't do any
of them, and so they had the kind of idea
generation part and nothing happened, and then COVID happened, and

(15:44):
it was this oh moment where people they were forced
to adapt because you know, obviously the stores were locked
down or were not open, and so you maybe had
gym companies moving to a virtual training or something like that.
But that created a mandate for actually getting serious about
the digital stuf and we see much higher quality digital
execution coming out of that. And there's kind of a

(16:06):
few common patterns in what everyone's trying to do. I
think everyone is questioning their middlemen. I don't think middlemen
are going away, but they're questioning the middlemen and do
middlemen add value? And they are starting to do much
more direct customer relationship stuff. Part of that is the
product experience where you know, Hershey's using Stripe to sell

(16:26):
candy directly online and the customization and things like that.
And then everyone's just trying to build some kind of
recurring revenue. And so, you know, we think there's two
kinds of business in the world. There's those who have
recurring revenue and those who want recurring revenue. And people
talk about the engine, you know, the airplane engine, makers,
but power by the hour. You know, you actually don't
buy an engine, you buy you know specially exactly. You

(16:48):
might trust you know, the by the minute. But that
is actually what all companies are moving towards because it's
kind of better on both sides of the equation. And
obviously that's pretty complex from an implementation point of view,
and something intercomany stripe.

Speaker 5 (17:13):
I did like the Strive fire side a while back,
and you're like, what should we do? And I was like,
you should fix paywalls. Have you done it?

Speaker 3 (17:21):
We're getting there because one of us hard. Why is
it hard? Okay, it's hard for a few reasons. One,
I think people confuse paywalls with micropayments, and I think
more consumers want micropayments than publishers, where the publishers want macropayments.

Speaker 5 (17:37):
I think nobody wants micropayments and everyone wants to talk
about it.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
But okay, yeah, yeah, So anyway, once we move past
the micropayments thing, then it's hard because you ultimately need
to smooth the onboarding friction and you probably need some
cross publisher network. And you know, publishers are not they're competing,
They're maybe not inclined to work together, and then it's
just a bunch of tech upgrades which are actually kind

(18:01):
of somewhat prosaic long running projects, but you know, you
need to be able to have the patients to work
with the media company to spend a year or year
and a half upgrade in their stack. The way we've
ended up doing this is with our product link, which
is very simple. What is really starting to work. It
just remember you guys, maybe run into it on the internet.
It just remembers your credentials across websites and so if
you've bought on websites A with Stripe and you have

(18:22):
the box checked to remember your payment details, then you'll
be able to buy on site B without entering your
payment details again. And you might think it will lead
to a big increase in conversion if a lot of
consumers have their payment credentials remembered so they don't have
to type any extra data in they can just click buy,
And turns out it does. And there's obviously a virtuous
cycle here where you know, the more people sign up

(18:42):
for it, but denser the network gets. So that's really
starting to work. And so we have some media properties
starting to use that, and so what it means is
they get lots of people coming with credentials all pre
filled and they just need to hit by and so
then the commercial proposition just needs to work.

Speaker 5 (18:54):
I just feel like the media payoll problem for me
is not even the payment credentials. It's once you've paid
for a payoll, keeping you logged in, you're on your
phone and computers. Yeah, you're like, you get something emailed
to you.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
And just remember me. It's really frustrating.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
We should and may get to that as well. I
agree that's that that's part two of it, to.

Speaker 5 (19:13):
Mean, that's related to like online identity and the stuff
that people are crypti people are talking about. So I
also have listened to you on podcasts. One thing that
you've said is that when you started raising money for
a stripe, people are like, why isn't this a solve
problem exists? Can you tell us why it's not right
it wasn't or why is it isn't? Like why is
payments hard? And like there were payments companies before you, Like,

(19:36):
what's the thing that you're solving? They didn't.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
It wasn't solved for a few reasons. Payments requires you
to be good at two very different things that are
quite distinct skill sets. There's technology and there's financial services.
And so prior to Stripe, you had some payment companies
that just did the technology layer. You know, they said,
we're an ic API and we plug into you know,

(19:58):
whatever bank you use. But that wasn't a good payment
experience because you would then try to sign up with
the bank and you know, it's spent a week shuffling
paperwork around or something like that. And so a huge
amount of what we do is at the intersection of
those things where you have AMLKYC considerations, where you know,
a Stripe is essentially aiming to look at the activity

(20:20):
going on on its platform and ensure that it is
lisit and you know, acceptable activity that's happening on the platform.
And so we do lots of cool mL work. You know,
we don't talk about it really that much publicly because
it is just what goes into operating a skilled platform
like this, but it's a huge amount of the special
sauce that makes Stripe tick. At the same time, the

(20:40):
tech has to be really good and nice and usable,
and customers really care about latency, they really care about
how easy the API integration experiences, and so I would
say companies prior to Stripe tended to pick a lane
a bit where you had a few purely tech companies
where you know, they'd say, we're a payment s gateway
and we just don't think about anything. We just handle
off the transaction of something someone else. Or there was

(21:01):
banks and they actually just generally outsourced the tech. They
didn't even really do it themselves, or if they did themselves,
they did not do it particularly well, and so it
was a very crummy experience for the developers actually using it.
And of course the tech changes Mobile was just coming
along as we were getting started. You know, the iPhone
app store came oute in two thousand and eight. We
started Stripe in two thousand and nine, so like we

(21:21):
were just in time for that, and so mobile was
a very relevant consideration. You know, even just the web
apps and SaaS and everything grew a huge amount, and
so I think the banks had not built for that
and did not build for that, and so there was
maybe a gap between the existing providers and there was
that sort of things that you have to be really
good at. There were huge number of things with Stripe
that we did buy intuitive feel they were not part

(21:42):
of a particularly deliberate tops down strategy that was written
down in the business plan, but ended up working out well.
And so one was our really early focus on developers,
where our go to market was through developers. We started
by selling to startups, and there was this really I
would say, kind of bottoms up sort of adoption motion.
But again, ltimately the product we're selling is a technical
API product, and so of course you should be thinking

(22:04):
about what the developers want. We just had the developer
focus because we were software engineers ourselves. We just wanted
to build a product that we thought was a good product.
But I think it ended up being more strategic than
we maybe realized in the beginning.

Speaker 5 (22:15):
There's a lot of like mess in the legal and
like infrastructure of the payment system, and like your job
is to provide people a very clean abstraction to that mess.
And like that means handling all of the mess and
you know, actually going on and figuring stuff out and
then being able to put that in the back end
of your API. So the API is like a very
clean abstraction. Like is that?

Speaker 3 (22:37):
Burne Hobart had a line that I liked in one
of his newsletters that stripe makes the financial system work
the way people think it already does, and that I
think is actually a pretty nice design principle for us.
And you know, maybe a good example of this.

Speaker 5 (22:49):
Is see when I hear that I want you to
do like equity derivatives, I want you to do more
of this stuff in my world.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
But I don't think we've a view on how it improved.

Speaker 4 (22:59):
Maybe I just think more I do want to talk
about crypto. Yeah, we debated this internally, but when it
comes to the payments world, I mean, the conversation tends
to devolve into a crypto conversation because I feel like
crypto is trying to solve a lot of payments problems,
especially when it comes to cross border payments. And I'm

(23:19):
not asking you about like the price of bitcoin or
whether you're bullish on you know, number go up, But
when it comes to crypto and the problems that it's
trying to solve, I mean, how do you think about it?

Speaker 3 (23:29):
We're quite excited about crypto at the moment. I interpret
money stuff as the house position as moderately cryptoskeptical, and
so I guess what I would say to a moderately
cryptoskeptical audience. They'd be two things. One, there are just
a bunch of scams and dodgy characters and everything like that.
But it kind of reminds me of I at the
first I grew up in Ireland. The first time I

(23:50):
went to Vegas was for a work conference there. It
was for a work conference, and you know, at the
Venetian or something like that, probably Money twenty to twenty
and you're going into the hotel past like all the
people smoking indoors and like the people just addicted to
the slot machines just pressing them again and again again,
and it's all the blinking lights and you know the
I guess the clatter of the coins paying out and
you have to walk past this degenerate gambling areas. Yeah,

(24:15):
it's a grim scene to get to your serious industry conference.
And those very surprising to me. And I don't know this.
There's something similar in crypto, where you have the casino
dogecoin value speculating part of us, and then there's people
doing all the serious work over in say stable coins
or something like that, and those two things just exist.
But I think one cannot use the existence of the

(24:35):
slots in the Vegas Casino to write off the work anomment,
stretching the analogy.

Speaker 5 (24:39):
No, this is good, so because like, yeah, you're excited.
There's like your friend Peto eleven would say, it's a
kyic avoidance mechanism. Basically, it's like a yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Well, the thing about crypto is there's been a lot
of hype on what crypto is useful for. And so
for example, if you go back and read the original
Bitcoin b or did a great read, it's a very
readable original paper. It actually used the word interchange in
there and talks about kind of the use of bitcoin
as a payment method. But bitcoin turned out to be
certainly stock bitcoin, you know, before lightning and everything like

(25:12):
that should have to be a horrible payment method like
slow expensive, let's all do you that. And now the
technology has matured through what has been kind of fourteen
years of development. I think the crypto haters used this
argument that like, well, you know, is the web in
ninety three for you know, many many years, whereas the
actual web coming along. But there's been fourteen years of
lots of technical development happening such that we've ended up
with much more advanced technologies, and so what you specifically

(25:34):
have now with stable coins is you have firstly, something
that's value doesn't change and so there's none of the
kind of speculation stuff that we're talking about. You have
something that's actually very technically scalable. So with the current
L two's there's no real scalability issues with them, and
you have a pretty sensible construct where in a way,
it's narrow banking. Right. We've been talking about narrow banking

(25:54):
in this country for decades and we've ended up with
narrow banking through stable coins, where say a good stable coin,
you know that like a PAXOS or a USDC. In
the case of USDC, it is fully backed by short
term treasuries. And that actually just seems like a pretty
good construct to me. And so you know, we now
make it where you can, you know, accept money and
strive via crypto. You can do some payouts things like that.

(26:17):
And the obvious thing that people say is true where
in the US you will be slightly too biased against
crypto because the US is the world's best currency. You know,
the US has the world's reserve currency where you get
to spend and green back exactly. And so of course
people in the US think the USD is awesome because
it is an awesome currency, whereas many people in many

(26:37):
other countries have a much more adversarial relationship with their
own currency. And I'm not even talking about Zimbabwe, though
it is true there. I'm talking about Turkey, which is
a very large country and economy and population, but people
there do not have, you know, full faith in the lira,
and they think about what's a better place to keep
money than lira.

Speaker 5 (26:56):
I guess the other like US bias is that the
government really wants dollar payments to flow through the ky
Seed banking system, and like there's some suspicion that.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
I think all the serious grown up crypto players today,
I mean they're subject to the fincent travel real they
are ky seeing the actors, and so if you go
through a crypto flow today, you will see the normal
frictions of dealing with a regulated financial product where you
are asked to provide your you know, last for your
social or upload a driver's license or things like that.
And so I think just in most of the crypto

(27:29):
use cases that are being top obviously that the sketchy
dark web stuff exists as well, But in most of
the use cases we are talking about where serious businesses
like Stripe or serious merchants are using crypto. It is
the custodial lyssis part of the crystals.

Speaker 5 (27:42):
It's just sort of like an un chain like non
custodical transfer.

Speaker 4 (27:46):
Like correct, Yeah, I'm true. I mean, if you look
into your crystal ball and you know, it's been fourteen
years since bitcoin was created. As you said, we've seen
a ton of technology advancements since then. I mean, you
said you're quite excited about crypto, but I mean, how
far can we run that out? Do you think it's
the future? For example, would you go that far if
you look fifty one hundred years into the future.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
I don't think it's a singular future. And again there's
a bit of overpromising that's happened in the crypto world. Again,
I think that's what gets people's backed up. Actually. Speak
of Bern Hobart. We just Stripe Press published his new book.
The title is Boom and the piesis of the book
is that we generally view financial bubbles as societally net
negative because you know, they cause the misallocation of resources

(28:29):
and they cause you know, ultimately people lose out. And
he makes the argument that bubbles provide a societally useful
function by essentially coordinating effort. And you know, maybe the
dot com boom is incorrectly understood as a you know,
pets dot common webvan. It was really like by dollars
put into it, as you guys probably know, it was
a telecoms boom, and it was a fiber rollout boom.

(28:50):
But it led to the US having just amazing fiber
overcapacity that then led to the steady growth of the
Internet for the decades that followed. And so that's maybe
an example of it was a bubble, but it was
a societally useful bubble because then it alleged to this overcapacity.
This had lots of positive externalities. And I think you
make that argument about crypto.

Speaker 5 (29:06):
This that argument made as crypto led to a build
out of GPUs that led to the AI boom.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Oh interesting, I wasn't even making that case. You could
make that argument too though obviously there was a lot
of GPU spent happening even even before crypto.

Speaker 4 (29:20):
No.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
I was just making the argument that I think the
speculative side of crypto, you could make the argument pulled
in attention and resources that was then used to build
the very boring useful parts of crypto, like you know
Ethereum two or against table coins or things like that.

Speaker 5 (29:35):
We could talk more about this. Do you want to
make sure are we talking about the things you don't
want to talk about?

Speaker 4 (29:40):
Yeah? Great, which we do want to talk about.

Speaker 5 (29:43):
So another money stuff theme that we'll probably do on
our ad reads is that private markets are the new
public markets. You guys are among the poster children for that.
You're the CFO. Tell me about what it's like being private.
I don't know. I mean, how should I think about,
like the idea that, like, you're an enormous company and

(30:04):
you've stayed private and have no enthusiasm as far as
we know, for going public or even talking about this
twenty years ago, would you have been able to do that?

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah. We spend a lot of time internally at Stripe
thinking about the value of the Stripe business. I think
the external world spends a lot of time thinking about
the value of the Stripe stock price, which are related
but different things. We have definitely stayed private longer than
some people expected. I think we'll continue to stay private
longer than maybe some people expect. But there's no complex answer.

(30:39):
It's just a simple answer, which is, we don't think
companies should sleep walk into going public. We think they
should be deliberate about it. And why would stripe right
now and go public. It could be if we wanted
to sell stock broadly to a retail audience. That's not
something that we've had that you know, we just the
business is profitable, you know, we haven't needed to raise

(31:00):
very large amounts of capital. A traditional reason might be
return of capital, not just kind of a capital raise
for running the business, but return of capital to existing shareholders.
But again that's where you're maybe referencing. The private markets
have gotten deeper, and you know, in our case, we've
run two unlimited employee tenders, you know last year and
this year. You know, Sequoia just an LP tender where
they gave liquidity to some of their LPs. But liquidity

(31:23):
is available to people in the private markets, and so
it's more I think the default spring, where companies, you know,
as SaaS company would be started and you know, go
from zero to one hundred million ARRR and then just
run out and go public. Default is being questioned a
little bit in Silicon Valley. Obviously, lots of companies are
still going public, but the default is being questioned, and
the default is more of a Silicon Valley tech default

(31:49):
than maybe a broader global default. So like in financial
stud we know exactly so as Bloomberg employees, you may
be familiar with it, but Bloomberg is the example that
everyone cites. But if you just quickly run through financial services,
you know, take the world's leading market maker, Citadel Securities
private company, take the world's leading prop trade I'm probably
offending one of the world's leading in all these cases,

(32:09):
So don't defend anyone. But if you look at Jane Street,
you know which it's been reported on a lot these days,
just how good a business it is. You know, whether
they're at a ten billion profits run rate or something
like that, private company Fidelity, when the world's leading brokerages
private company Goldin Sachs, your former employer.

Speaker 5 (32:24):
I assume that that A big difference is that a
lot like Chance Street writes very large checks. And the
Silicon Valley difference is not just that like you have
vcs you might be hunger to get at whereas like
said at all thosand but like it's also you have employees
who are getting paid in equity and they're getting tender
as every Oh yeah, like is it tender every year
just as good as publicly traded stock.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
We think the tender every year is in nice solution.
And there are some things that would be different if
we're a public company for the better. There's some things
that'd be different as a public company for the worst.
And you get into you know, trading windows and who's
an insider and things like that. But it's thus far
work quite nicely for a solution.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
So is that the model then? Like tender every year?
You've only done two, but.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
We don't have forward looking plans to announce, and so
I come back to it at some stage with you know,
we could go do something that you don't expect, and
we're not announcing the plans because genuinely, it's not like
there's a written down plan at stride that we're going
to do this, this and then this. We are always
reevaluating it. But again, up to this point, it has
made more sense for us to grow as a capital

(33:22):
efficient private company, then it's made sense for us to
be a publican sure.

Speaker 5 (33:27):
Like chancer, it just makes money every year and they
don't need to raise capital and so they just.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Seems like great business haze and money to people. Right.

Speaker 5 (33:33):
I don't know what the economics that is, literally, but
they seem extremely good. But like, it does seem possible
that you could just make cash every year and fund
the business out of that and pay people out of
that and never.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Need to For twenty four, we're trying to make a
decision for twenty four, and for twenty five, we'll try
to make a decision for twenty five. So luckily it's
not the case that you're faced with a you know,
a fork in the road and you have to make
some kind of permanent decision. We do constantly re evaluate
it when.

Speaker 5 (33:55):
I write about this topic. One concern that people have
is that there are a lot of cool companies, like
an increasing number of them, like fast growing, profitable companies
that or sorry, I should say fast growing, not profitable,
early stage companies, stage companies, high growth companies that don't
go public, and that deprives like ordinary investors of access

(34:15):
to those companies, and therefore it should be like made
easier to go public or whatever. Right, So for you
do you worry at all about that? From like a
systemic perspective that you're depriving like American retirement savers of
access to the stripe. And then two, you're not entirely
because there are people who are going around selling stripe
shares in a way that I believe you do not like.

(34:37):
And I don't know, like there's like a way around
of the barrier that you've set up. I guess.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Look, I do think the debate over who should be
allowed by private assets is a good debate. And the
accredited investor rule is it's kind of an odd rule,
like we're able to take it for granted that it's
been around for a long time, but basically we define
investors as rich people, which is, you know, maybe some

(35:03):
a historic and.

Speaker 5 (35:04):
In like a declining standard of rich where it's now
like sort of upper middle class people.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
Correct. Yeah, So I think debate on that is a
good thing. In stripes case, you know, most of the
non employee ownership is through essentially kind of VC funds,
and the underlying VC fund ownership the LPs there tend
to be pension funds, college endowments. People. I think we
feel quite good about making money for it, and so

(35:28):
I don't think it's the case that's kind of broader society.
It doesn't get to benefit from the appreciation. I think
we feel quite good about the LP base of the
investors that are behind striving Again, I think that's another
thing that has allowed us to stay private for as
long as we have, which is actually the very long
term vcs. And I think if we had a different
set of vcs, we would have been less fortunate in
being able to grow Stripe as a private company because

(35:48):
maybe they would have felt the need for a win
or something like that. But I think luckily, you know,
Siquic Capital is one of the best VC firms that
there is that don't quite need to prove themselves.

Speaker 5 (35:56):
And they probably count you as a win anyway, say again,
they probably count you as a win exactly yea, yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
And then on the I don't know what you call them,
but the firms out there the market.

Speaker 5 (36:05):
I've taught on the podcast about Destiny Tech one hundred,
which has a private market. I was that fond situation
with like some Stripe forward contracts, and like there's like
a general there's like a market for forward contracts, which
all seem to be not really appreciate this.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
It's not going to end well because generally hyping financial
assets has a bad history. It worked out badly with SPACs,
it worked out badly with icos, and it just tends
to work out badly, which is why it tends to
be regulated this. You know, financial regulators tried to rein

(36:43):
in the hyping of private assets, and so again, Stripe
is not a public company. We do not enable broad
retail ownership of Stripe stock, and so if people try
to back into that by having either company stock in
a vehicle that that is then available to public mark investors,

(37:05):
we just think it's not a good construct, Like it's
underdisclosed where people are buying an interest in things based
on name brand recognition but not based on going over
the financials or understanding what it actually is. They tend
to all be very high fees. I mean, it depends
on the vehicle, but they tend to be fairly distractive
in that way. And so we don't like it. We
don't we don't permit it, and I'm personally not a fan.

Speaker 4 (37:28):
Is there much that you can do about it? Like
in the case of a Destiny Tech for example, that
says that you know they have Stripe forwards zuchrre Yeah,
I mean, what can you do?

Speaker 3 (37:38):
We prohibit forward. So we had a bit of a
about that.

Speaker 5 (37:42):
People do them anyway, can you then avoid them?

Speaker 3 (37:45):
And I don't know where this goes.

Speaker 5 (37:48):
Yeah, because right, I mean, it seems like they're prohibited
and people do them.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
And yeah, we put it up on the website just
to make it abundantly clear, so everyone has the same information.
Instruments they're not allowed. So I don't know this areas
where people have to read the tea leaves or the
body language. We tried to make us abundantly clear get
out there with the semaphore flags. So this people are
not in any doubt.

Speaker 4 (38:08):
On the topic of going public. It doesn't sound like
you're in any rush, obviously, you said in June, And
I thought this was interesting that many companies make the
decision to go public too early. That you personally see
tons of opportunities to change and grow the business quite
a lot, and I think it's interesting that you want
to stay private to do that, and I think a

(38:28):
lot of founders would agree with you. But just the
fact that you know, sort of like going public. You
see this as this sign of maturity and maybe that
you're not innovating as much as you would in the privates.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (38:41):
It kind of made me think of tech companies like
offering dividends, Like I remember when Meta started giving out
dividends earlier this year. Everyone was like, oh, well they're
old news now they're too mature.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
Well, I think Meta is the wrong example to use
for that argument. I guess they currently seem to be
doing extraordinarily well in the AI race. And I'm not
making the claim that you know, one can as innovate
as a public company, because that is clearly an absurd
claim and you would just be kind of constantly slapped
in the face by counterexamples. And Meta would be the
perfect one where they just am of the ring glasses
and those look amazing, and again they're just nailing it

(39:13):
in the AI race, and so they're basically argument. I
do think that on the margin, if you are developing
large number of new products, if you have a fast
growing business, if you're constantly reinventing how the business works.
And again in our case, we are transforming Stripe from
not just being a payment's business to there are all
these new software lines of business that are much earlier

(39:34):
that are harder to predict how they grow. Everything like this.
You know, we're changing out the underlying payment methods. You know,
we talked about crypto, we didn't talk about around the world.
There are all these interesting trends happening in new payment
methods where basically bank transfers and things like UPI and
picks in Brazil and things like that are becoming much
more relevant to anyway, the huge amount of change. I
think on the margin, the public company valuation apparatus is

(39:59):
you see it how people you know, the quarterly earnings
and the miss and the beach and everything like that.
It is optimized for mature, predictable businesses, and indeed people
talk about kind of business predictability, whereas you know, for
a business that is still in the you know, in
the early stages like stripe, and we think about a
lot of new products on a five or ten year
time horizon. Again, I think on the margin, there are

(40:19):
some benefits to doing that as a private company because
you get to kind of completely retool the business as
you go without necessarily wondering about, you know, what will
the reception be for this in you know, the next
quarter's earnings release.

Speaker 5 (40:30):
I know you're not in any phase of learning an
IPO but I was a capital markets banker, and I
know you've had thoughts about like the IPO process. I'm like,
I don't know if you're doing an IPO, like, what
would you change about the process.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
I find all the debates about IPO mechanics really uninteresting
because it just doesn't matter. Like, if you have a
great business that's valuable for customers that millions of people
use and makes money as a result, you can do
whatever you want. Like, you know, I think Facebook would
say they bought the IPO, but they have likeable business,
so it doesn't matter and no one remembers it. And
then you can have like the world's best IPEO plan

(41:05):
and if the business isn't good, it doesn't matter. And
so people get into all these debates about direct listing
versus regular IPO, and then Bill Gurly complains that the
bankers are taking too many fees, and then it just
doesn't matter. Like build a great business and you could
write your prospectus on a cocktail napkin and it'll be fine.

Speaker 5 (41:21):
This is like why Charlie Muker doesn't like financial services business,
because you're like, like, oh, this is real business.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
It's true, but it's true right. Yeah. And the thing
is investors are smart. I think people try to do
too much of a song and a dance with investor
relations and try to you know, gin things up. And ultimately,
when you meet professional investors, you know they're really smart
and they can look through and understand the fundamental dynamics
of a business. And so the secret to good investor

(41:48):
relations is have a good business that's growing and is profitable.

Speaker 4 (41:51):
Where people should do that exactly. Yeah, well, oh, you

(42:11):
have an airport. Do you want to talk about that?
Is that something? Okay? Why where did that come from?

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Well? I should not be listened to for any rational
financial investment advisor.

Speaker 4 (42:25):
I don't know. I don't have the pockets.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Well. No, I'm a pilot and an aviation and I
grew up interested in US and I've been flying since
I was a teenager and you know, still really love
to do it and I'm flying my spare time. And
so I would say it's not necessarily the most rational
business interest of mine. But the case the airport, so
Dublin basically is three airports, Doublin International, which you've been
to Dublin, that's the one you've been to. I guess

(42:48):
three if you can't the military airport a bet Donald
and then Western, which is the general aviation airports. And
so general aviation is all the stuff that is not airlines.
So it could be public service flights like search and
rescuer air ambulance. It could be flight training and you know,
people getting their licenses. It could be corporate jets, it
could be all this kind of stuff. And generally speaking,
the appropriate home for the general aviation stuff is not
where all the airlines are because they just don't mix

(43:11):
that well. And so most places will have you know,
if someone's doing flight training in New York, they'll not
do it at GfK. They'll do it you know, Westchester
or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, they really don't make welf.
And in the case of Dublin's Western Airport, I end
up buying it back in twenty twenty one, and it
needed a bunch of investment, and so I bought it
and we've been investing in giving it the facilities that

(43:32):
needs around you know, instrument landing capabilities and you know,
redoing the terminal and the capital stock and things like that,
and so it's partly I think it's good. I mean
they are in the US, they're not for profit businesses.
They don't be government owned and federally funded. Internationally, they
are like he throws, a for profit business and they
just make money off landing fees. And so I actually
think it will, in the fullness of time, be a

(43:53):
good business once it's kind of come out on the
right side of the growth curve. But it's also a
passion product.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
Of min that's awesome. I mean not as an insult,
but I feel like to enjoy being a pilot, like
casually you have to be like a little bit crazy,
Like that seems like an insane proposition, but maybe I'm
just really risking.

Speaker 5 (44:10):
So no, it just.

Speaker 3 (44:12):
Requires a lot of discipline, you know, checklist discipline, and
you know recurrent training. I just went through some recurrent training,
and just I actually find it more interesting because obviously
aviation safety is generally talked about correctly as one of
the best examples of process optimization over the last you know,

(44:33):
five decades, where we have taken a system and just
improved the crap out of it until it's like so good.
If they talk out thing go by on Twitter recently,
where the FA doesn't mandate car seats on airplanes because
flying is so safe compared to driving that they are
worries that if they mandated car seats on airplanes, even
though like you have a tiny benefit, it would lead

(44:53):
to people choosing not to fly and choose to drive
instead and get into car accidents and therefore be net
less safe. Kind of funny that. You know, again, flying
an airplane feels like in principle it should be like
kind of hard to do, and driving car on the
ground should be easy to but permile. Obviously flying wins out.
And so again you have this decades and decades and
decades of history where we've taken the lessons of you know,

(45:15):
they say the rules and regulations, they are written in blood.
You know, we take the lessons of the previous accidents
that have happened and then we wrap them into future training.
And you know, generally, when you do pilot training, you're
studying a lot of specific accidents that happened and you
know what the learnings were for them. And so I
think if you're interested in systems design, engineering, process optimization,
things like that, lessons.

Speaker 5 (45:35):
From piloting like inform your software engineering.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
I mean, they're pretty separate, but I think the software
engineering brain tends to be attracted to flying, and you know,
you got Palo Alto Airport was a little general aviation
airport in the variance when the busy general aviation airports
in the entire country. Because I think engineering minds, of
which there are lots in Palo Alta, tend to enjoy it.
And again you're mixing you know, a kinesthetic skill and

(45:58):
meteorology and mechanical understanding of you know, a combustion engine
and all the attendance systems and you know airspace and
everything like that.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
So it wasn't like fueled by you being in an
adrenaline junkie, like I want to go fast and I
want to fly in the.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
Sky adrenaline Like if you're feeling adrenaline while flying, you're
doing something wrong.

Speaker 4 (46:17):
You feel it all the time when flying, like, God,
I hope we stay in the air.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
There was that, you know, you read entroon descentic Superie
and you know flying in Africa during the base nineteen
twenties in his case and you know, getting shot down
and all these kind of things, there clearly.

Speaker 4 (46:30):
Was a that would make you feel something.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yeah, that exactly. I think that kind of stuff would
make you feel something. But again in these days it
has become much more safety oriented and the cowboy stuff
has been pulled out. And again they actually describe one
of the cultural challenges that happened in the aviation industry
underwent was that we produced all these military pilots in
you know, the World War Two, in the Vietnam War,
and those people then went into you know, PanAm cockpits

(46:56):
and they actually kind of made bad captains in a
certain way because it was like very much shut up,
this is my cockpit. And so the CRM Crew Resource Management,
I guess thing basically was a multi decade efforts to
get rid of the the captain mindset and get towards
a collaborative problem solving a.

Speaker 5 (47:14):
Lot of like I'm going on a like seven seven
the pilot landed fourteens line carriers, Like that's got to
be the safest possible way to fly, but apparently not, No,
he's gone rogue, not listening to his second officer or whatever.

Speaker 3 (47:27):
Do European airlines have a different model than the US
airlines where they take pilots who have two hundred and
fifty hours only, which the US would consider very low,
and they put them in the right seat of airliners
and they have like a really strong safety record. And
so as you fly around an airliner in Europe, you
could have someone who only learned to fly a few
years ago. And the way they do that is a
huge amount of standardization, a huge amount of process orientation.

(47:51):
You know, people make fun of Ryanair for the hard landings,
you know, the Ryanair landing in Europe where they really
plunk it on the runway. That is one of their
safety SOPs where they say a positive landing, as it's
known in the industry, is safer because it reduces the
risk of hydroplaning if it's wet, and so it reduces
the like very small risk that you run off the
end of the runway if the runway is wet. But
we're just going to every landing, we're gonna plunk it
on and that's safer. But again it's generally process orientation,

(48:16):
standards and a lot of that kind of stuff that's
driven to safety and not excessive piloting skill. And again,
if you're relying on incredible piloting skill, something has gone
wrong in your system. Because we should be able to
have a seven seven seven full of passengers be safe
even if the pilots are fatigued or something like that.

Speaker 4 (48:33):
That's wild. I did not know that about Ryan Air.
I feel like they should put that fact out there.
You know that it's intentional that we're plunking down.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
That's true. Yeah, yeah, because you know it's quite yea
quite exactly. Yeah, attention to it.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
Being uncomfortable, Well, everyone knows that's true.

Speaker 5 (48:50):
That's true. That time calls and thanks for coming on
the Money Stuff Podcast. Thank you guys, it's fun.

Speaker 4 (48:55):
Our first guest.

Speaker 5 (48:56):
Yeah, I'm honored, and that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

Speaker 4 (49:06):
I'm Matt Levia and I'm Katie Greifeld.

Speaker 5 (49:08):
You can find my work by subscribing to The money
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Speaker 4 (49:12):
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Speaker 5 (49:31):
The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Maserakus and
Moses on the special. Thanks this week to Stacey.

Speaker 4 (49:36):
Wom Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

Speaker 5 (49:39):
Brandon Francis Newnhim is our executive producer.

Speaker 4 (49:42):
And Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Speaker 5 (49:44):
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff podcast. We'll be
back next week with mar Stuff