This Week in Startups
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.