This Week in Startups
00:48:34 · Lon Harris
[00:48:34] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's like the, you know, the crux of the story is like, we all we all imagine... We're all walking around all day, like, thinking about how embarrassing the stuff we've said or did did are, like, what a bad job we're doing. Like, we're all very hard on ourselves all day. You're imagining other people are judging you or criticizing you or, like, watching you and being like, oh, this idiot. And really, Jason and have talked about this many times. Nobody else is thinking about you in the world. Like, if if... Right now, if you went and, like, looked up every single person who you've ever met and their thoughts, like, such a tiny fraction of that thought would be about you and anything you've done, good or bad. And it it it could be it could be freeing in some ways, but when you're starting a company, it could be a real struggle because you're like desperate for attention and eyeballs, and it's so hard to get people's attention and eyeballs. I mean, like if you are in a crowded marketplace or you're trying to get the attention of, you know, like anybody who's like busy, and this was 2017. It's exponentially harder in 2026. There's so many more distractions today than there ever were like, it's it's real. Somebody who's ever tried to build anything on the internet can tell you like the attention economy is rough and it takes no prisoners. And like you are you are up against, like, a a million other things for everybody's two seconds of, focus.
00:50:00 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris
[00:50:00] S3: So that dead on lawn. But, also, we mentioned earlier the ease now with which people can can make stuff. Right? You can prototype faster, launch company faster, which means that your ability to have a lead on the competition has gone down. Anything you do can be replicated to some degree pretty quickly. And then you're not only competing with the world to make it into your genre and your idea, but also to compete with other people that are now just following in your footsteps. I've kind of roughly called this everyone's building the same startup because they tend to converge a little bit these days. But, yeah, I I cannot imagine how they managed to get up off the mat after they got the service back up and no one noticed, but I'm really glad that they did because that early face plant, I think we can call it Yeah. Didn't stop what is now this $100,000,000,000 behemoth that runs a big chunk of the world. Also, did you catch the number you said, the 2% number that only 2% of transactions were online total? [00:50:50] S0: I did catch [00:50:50] S3: that. Pair that now with 2% of global GDP passes through Stripe alone. [00:50:56] S0: Wow. So they became the 2% that they originally detected. Yeah. [00:51:00] S3: That's why I I wanted to get to that number because I wanted to to bring it back here because I think it's such a good indication of just how much growth the company is seeing in the, in
00:51:00 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris
[00:51:00] S3: That's why I I wanted to get to that number because I wanted to to bring it back here because I think it's such a good indication of just how much growth the company is seeing in the, in [00:51:07] S0: senior year. It's it's an old adage. I mean, we hear it from the VCs on our roundtables all the time. It's like the the the founders who win, they're not necessarily, like, the smartest or they had the best idea or they had the best advisers. It was, you know, they they they were the most persistent. Like, they hung in there the longest. They didn't give up. Everybody else pivoted to four different ideas, and they just stuck to their guns and stuck to their vision and, you know, held held to what they really believed in and and and persevered. And I think that's like the huge takeaway here is like, yeah, I'm sure there was a moment there after that day where the Stripe guys were like, people don't want Stripe. You know? Like, we we went down a whole day. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Like, they're not using our service. We should make something out. You know? Like, what about a chat GPT rapper? It was it was too early for that. But you know what I mean? [00:51:57] S3: I I bet it wasn't a single cheeky pint that got them through that. I bet it was a number of of pints. [00:52:03] S0: Yeah. Cheeky's pint is how you do... Is how you pluralize. [00:52:07] S3: No. It's not AirPods Pro. Stop
00:52:07 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis, Patrick Collison
[00:52:07] S3: No. It's not AirPods Pro. Stop [00:52:08] S0: it. It's not. Alright. We got one more. We've got one more stripe clip, and then I promise we will move along. This one, I gotta say, I feel like it's less, like, practically useful in the moment, and it's more just funny because of the nine years that has progressed since this was shot. And now retrospective looking back on it. But, here is Patrick talking to Jason about why in 2017, despite lots of pressure, Stripe did not want to go public, and we're actually planning... Don't know if you've heard about this. They're planning on putting off going public as long as possible. Here's Patrick. [00:52:44] S2: Just generally. [00:52:45] S4: We were going to hold off for as long as possible from partaking in them, in that... So generally, from our standpoint, instead of Atlas, I think, is a good example of this, you know, were, as we think about the idea of growing the GDP of the internet, I mean, there so many things that we want to invest in on that front, they're just going take a long time to come to fruition. And, of course, there are good examples, 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 public markets, Amazon being the most famous and prominent example. On the other hand, if you look at Amazon's early history, know, they had an incredibly turbulent time for sort of their first couple of years as a public company. Sort of now, 2017, you know, Amazon has up for over [00:53:31] S2: 50 Exactly, century a
00:53:31 · Jason Calacanis, Patrick Collison, Alex Wilhelm
[00:53:31] S2: 50 Exactly, century a [00:53:34] S4: it all looks great, but they really had a tough time in the beginning. And so, I I I think there's... And you know, 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. And so... [00:53:49] S2: Much more difficult. And you have all your employees looking at a stock price every day, which Bill Gurley said, there... When he was an analyst, he was... Wrote a paper to try to get the employees to stop... Amazon's employees, specifically, to stop looking at the stock price and focus Yeah, on [00:54:02] S4: and I'm sure that worked, you know, just as well as you might think, but but, you know, from our standpoint, you know, we we... Think being a public company kinda makes sense when when you've reached sort of, you know, some some kind of some point of stability, some plateau of, you know, you've done the stuff that you at least initially set out to. And we feel like we haven't. We're still very early in sort of this trajectory that we 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 there... There's just long time horizons involved. [00:54:40] S3: Boo.
00:54:40 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris
[00:54:40] S3: Boo. [00:54:41] S0: Yeah. You're you're number one IPO fan who follows them like sports, so I understand that must be frustrating. But I think it's a really fascinating answer to look back on now. Like... So is it... Does that mean that even a decade or so after this, they still feel like our work here is not yet done? Like, what is left that Stripe needs to conquer before they feel ready to go public?