Stripe's Patrick Collison: 'We want to be an independent company for a long time'
The Limerick man said the payments provider wants to help young companies scale faster.
STRIPE CHIEF PATRICK Collison has said there’s no reason why the internet economy “could not be very substantially larger” as his company moves towards becoming an all-in-one toolkit for online businesses.
In an extensive interview with tech podcast Recode Decode, Limerick native Collison said the payments provider recently launched software engineering magazine Increment with a view to helping online businesses grow faster.
“Stripe does better if the internet economy is larger,” he said. “If Increment succeeds and makes a sizable fraction of companies grow faster or operate more effectively, that’s actually really fabulous news for us.”
The company recently acquired startup advice forum Indie Hackers for a similar reason - to give internet entrepreneurs nuts-and-bolts advice that would help them work through the early stages of their companies.
He said Stripe measures its success by “this idea of increasing the GDP of the internet. What fraction of GDP of the internet do we represent?”
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison
The Stripe CEO – who founded the company with his younger brother John – suggested the company is shifting away from being just a payments provider to more of an all-inclusive resource tool for internet entrepreneurs.
That’s part of the reason why it launched Altas, a start-your-own business kit that provides financial and legal advice to get technology companies off the ground.
“We think about Stripe as sort of a platform for first launching but then subsequently building and scaling an internet business,” Collison said.
“What we initially thought of as being this nice development really has over the intervening five-plus years become this much broader infrastructure.”
Founded in 2009, Stripe is now valued at more than $9 billion, making the junior Collison, 26-year-old John, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
Patrick Collison said Stripe is a “multi-decadal undertaking” and stressed that the firm is in no rush to go public any time soon. ”We want to be an independent company for a very long time,” he said.
Security
Interestingly, Collison – who was speaking before last week’s high-profile ransomware attack – warned that the public should be worried about potential cyber-attacks against legacy computer systems used by the likes of financial firms and hospitals.
“I feel pretty good with the information that I have that resides with Facebook, that resides with Google,” he said.
“They don’t have these enormous, impossible-to-comprehend systems from 1970 that have points of connection that someone forgot about.”
He said security was “an immensely key part” of Stripe’s business. For that reason, the company has hired security experts Peiter Zatko and Jon Kaltwasser, who both worked for the US National Security Agency.
In the podcast, Collison was highly critical of America’s immigration policy. Stripe was founded in the US while the Collison brothers were students at MIT and Harvard.
He said America is the “preeminent destination for high-potential people all around the world”, but there are “needless barriers in the way” for immigrants.
He said the best and brightest entrepreneurs move there “despite rather than because of US immigration policy”.
