This Week in Startups
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?
00:55:03 · Alex Wilhelm
[00:55:03] S3: Well, they held off when they were being pressured, and now they're too big to pressure. What are you gonna do? You're gonna you're gonna go tell the Collison brothers to do something? They're gonna tell you to take a hike. Okay. Flyweights there. But I mean, they're worth, what, $1,015,000,000,000 apiece. They run this huge company. I presume they have some form of voting control or protections thereof, and, they don't wanna go public. So tough. Now they are intelligent about this. There are tender offers. There are things that they do to provide some liquidity. But I wanna actually push back because I feel like he reached for a relatively, uninspiring example there. Patrick is not here to defend himself, I'm not gonna take this too far. But I will say that, like, saying that Amazon had a little bit of a struggling time early on in its public life and therefore Stripe shouldn't go public is forgetting when Amazon went public and what happened next, which was the dot com crash. So I'm sure it was probably tough for a lot of public companies. I don't think Amazon struggles were because of that. And, also, other public companies that have grown to their size while being public, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet. I mean, so to me, if you look at the big companies out there, NVIDIA, they all did 95% of their growth while public, and it worked great. So maybe something has changed, Patrick. I think what has changed is your ability as a founder to say no to going public, but I I... I've always found it to be a specious complaint. We
00:56:25 · Lon Harris, Alex Wilhelm
[00:56:25] S0: love a spicy take. I'm gonna send this to him, and hopefully he'll respond, and then this episode goes viral. Viral. [00:56:30] S3: Don't don't keep me in trouble on X. I don't wanna have all of these fans attacking me. Like, what if you've never built a company more than that? [00:56:35] S0: I wouldn't do it that way. We have very nice fans. Everybody out there, don't attack Alex or Patrick Collison on X, please. [00:56:41] S3: Send all your hate mail to Lon@Launch.com. [00:56:43] S0: Thank you. Yeah. Put that out there. Alright. I think I think we're good. I think [00:56:47] S3: we're [00:56:47] S0: good on Stripe.