Full transcript: John Collison on London Real
0:20 This is Silicone Real, the half-hour dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. My name is Brian Rose. I also host a show called London Real, which is a similar tri-log format. It’s a little bit longer in length. My co-host today and partner in the whole Silicone Real venture is Mr. Bryce Keene.
0:40 He is the founder and director of Albion Drive, and he’s also a member and co-founder of The Three Beards. And if you haven’t heard of The Three Beards, then I pray for you. Because they are a London phenomenon. They host the Silicone Drink About, which is a weekly get-together for anyone who is in the tech community or if you’re like in a zoo and you want to go look at them. Because you can go. Anyone can go. There’s no sign up. There’s nothing like that. You also run monthly events called Don’t Pitch Me Bro and Quarterly Digital Sizzle.
1:10 So thanks for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being part of this crazy venture. Good to be back. Good to be back in the city.
1:15 No, it’s very good. And our guest today is Mr. John Collison, who is the co-founder of Stripe, a company that makes it easy to start accepting credit cards on the web today. I ripped that straight from your site. No, it’s accurate. That’s why we have it on the website. Perfect.
1:31 You are from Limerick, Ireland. You live in Silicon Valley, which, according to Bryce, is not a place but a marketing concept. So you live in a marketing concept. That’s what Bryce said on his London Real show. I think you’ve attended Harvard a little bit and he’s also a pilot. John, welcome to Silicon Real.
1:49 No, it’s good to be here. I think I hit London during its one day of summer. It’s a good time. You brought the weather with you, right? I wish I could say it’s been like this all year, but it really hasn’t.
1:58 But, you know, as immigrants to this town, we know not to complain about the weather. Oh, yeah. We’re better than that. You know, we’re all expats. You know, I must say this rarely happens, but I already have some beef with John and this is why.
2:11 You know, he went to Harvard and I went to MIT down the street and we’re both pilots. But he is what we call a fixed wing pilot, which means he flies airplanes and I fly helicopters. And the two groups hate each other. They do? They do. All my instructors are always like, yeah, we don’t like those fixed wing guys.
2:30 Explain why we hate each other. So there’s this thing where like MIT students always talk about how they like have this whole rivalry with Harvard and they’re like, you know, like play pranks in the Harvard statue. And then the Harvard students are like, who? And it seems like the helicopter pilot thing, I don’t like helicopter pilots, I guess. No, helicopters are cool. I mean, a little bit dangerous. I go for the safer forms of transportation.
2:56 No, fair enough. My instructor was always, you know, they just start a rivalry right away because and it never made sense to me. He’s like, yeah, we can hover. And I’m like, all right, well, you know, that was that was his we can hover. I’m trying to picture like a top gun moment, but I don’t know what the helicopter parts would look like like.
3:12 It’s just they’re hovering. Yeah, they’re like, check this out. Lying in wait. Elevated. I don’t know. I don’t get it.
3:17 But I’m glad you put those two ways. Actually, the MIT guys don’t really think about the Harvard guys. How long have you been trying helicopters? I started actually in Chicago, probably about 10 years ago. And then when I moved to London, I kept it up, but I actually don’t have my license yet.
3:31 But I’ve got about 60 hours and an R-22, which is a two man helicopter. It’s basically a lawnmower in the sky. It’s a piston engine. So you’re like, you know, so actually, I have this checklist that I go through on London Real every day. And that’s from piloting, because you have to go through like every little thing because you forget that one thing. You fall out of the sky. I’m sure it’s the same.
3:48 Yeah, same and fixed thing. And you’re right about the aircraft and that, you know, occasionally I’ll take take someone up for a spin. And when we go flying, I think they have a very different picture in their head of what it is. And you’re in this like 80 horsepower, like, you know, two seater with an 80 horsepower engine is what I trained in. And like, you know, most cars have double that horsepower. They’re like these like, totally tiny, precarious things.
4:11 And it’s loud too, right? Oh, it’s loud. Yeah, people don’t know what’s that loud. And it’s bumpy. Yeah, and it’s bumpy too. I mean, I was reading your story and you moved from Limerick to Silicon Valley when you were like 17 or 18. I mean, that’s, yeah, so it’s quite a move.
4:23 Basically, Patrick, my co-founder at Stripe and I, we started a company before Stripe called Octomatic that did tools for eBay sellers. And then that was acquired in 2008. And then went back to Ireland, then started college. And then during college, ended up starting working on Stripe. Because you know yourself when you start working on something, it’s not like one day you decide, oh, I’m going to start a company. The whole gestation process is pretty gradual.
4:52 And so we’ve been talking about these kind of ideas. And like with Stripe specifically, we’ve been talking for a while about when we had been doing Octomatic, our last startup, how miserable it was, the payments part of it, but also how the banks who you traditionally had to go through to accept payments online didn’t get it. Traditionally, to open a merchant account, if you wanted to swipe payments for your brick and mortar store, you would be there filling out all this paperwork and sending it off. And a few weeks later, you get approved.
5:20 And then the internet came along, and banks’ response to the internet was to put a PDF version of their application form online. And you’re like, guys, that’s not what the internet is about. And so Patrick and I very much came out Stripe from the angle of engineers and the angle of what if we build a set of APIs for people doing stuff with payments, and we built that set of APIs, and we got one person using this, and then two, and then very, very gradually building it out. And obviously the tricky thing was that we didn’t know that much about the financial sector, so we had to learn as we went. It’s a crazy place, the financial sector, because all the banks have been there forever. And I think by nature, they’re trying to protect it. It’s the innovator’s dilemma. They don’t want to kill their own business model. I used to work in the banking industry. It’s a very profitable business model, even when times are hard. So it must be tough. Yeah. And you’re exactly right. It’s the innovator’s dilemma.
6:12 Like if you look at an industry like web hosting, previously in web hosting, if you were to do anything, you’d have to buy managed servers and have them in a colo, and you’re paying whatever amount per month. And that’s before you serve your first web request. And so there was this incentive to keep the status quo around, because it meant that running whatever tiny small traffic website started at thousands of dollars a month. And so the hugely disruptive thing about AWS or Heroku or all of these is they’re charging on a per unit of computing power basis or per web request basis. And so for all the small users, for all the users who are getting that much value out of it, they’re not paying very much.
6:59 And so it’s not in the traditional web hosting company’s interest for this whole model of promulgation. That is the classic innovator’s dilemma. It’s acting against your interests by serving this lower end of the market. And so I think it was similar in financial services, where the banks were interested in the large e-commerce companies and everyone else they didn’t really care about. And high monthly fees was all a relationship business where you had your account manager and everything. And the way the web is going, that is not how payments online should work. And so we took a lot of our cues from other instances, like we talk a lot about cloud hosting, because I think it’s a good case where you have a very old school way of doing business, just completely released by a technology platform.
7:49 When did you first hear about these guys? And what’s your read on them? Because you see all sorts of different companies every day, right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I met John last time he was in London. So Stripe have just set up a European operation for this time, which is really interesting. So they’re obviously branching out here. And John was in town visiting a local team and got in touch with us and came down to a drink about and very kindly stood there for a good four or five hours answering just about everyone’s questions, because he’s quite well known in the tech scene. Why is that? Because I don’t think you have many. So the one element of, I think, with John’s story that you breezed over is that when he was 17, Octomatic was obviously got into Y Combinator, which is the most prestigious accelerator in the world. It’s given rise to all sorts. Reddit came from Y Combinator, Songkick, Airbnb, Dropbox. This place is sort of just off the charts. Are these PayPal founders or is that a different?
8:49 Paul Graham and a few others started Y Combinator. They had had a very successful web business early on. And I think they got a lot of what was important about web businesses and they really shaped the ecosystem. And then separately, we ended up raising money from some of the PayPal co-founders. But yeah, YC was one of our first investors.
9:10 So after they bought Octomatic, is that right? So it merged, didn’t it, with another company? Yeah, we merged with these two British founders, Harjit and Coolveer, Tagar. And it was bought by a Canadian company, actually, by the name of Life Grant, a year later. That just makes me think of something. I mean, the whole reason we’re doing this show is because it’s about people and relationships. And I’m curious for you, they see a young guy who obviously isn’t afraid of coding and jumping into doing stuff. They merged or bought your old company. I mean, do you keep these relationships up with these people and how much of that is due to your success? It’s like your next venture. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think you do, but I think that’s just like, that’s normal. Everyone does, right? And so Harjit and I are still pretty good friends in Coolveer as well. Harjit is now actually a partner at Y Combinator. So it’s like all full circle. We were a Y Combinator company, and Harjit is now a partner there. And so it’s pretty cool how these things work out.
10:07 But yeah, it’s quite interesting seeing, I just actually met up with, I randomly bumped into a guy in White Barriard, which is where our office is based here on Clerk and Well. I ran into someone who had helped us out in 2007 with some optimistic stuff. And it’s funny how these things persist. And you’re back in London. You used to live in Limerick. Now you live in Silicon Valley.
10:28 Is any part of you feel like just canceling that plane flight home and staying here in London? Well, it’s funny. I don’t think I would live in Ireland anytime soon, just because San Francisco or the Bay Area and the US is so big and there’s so much to explore. And I haven’t gotten a chance to live in New York yet or anything like that. There’s so much there.
10:52 And so I don’t have any imminent plans to return to Ireland, but London I’m really liking. And I realize that’s like the thing everyone says when they visit a place, but I mean, I actually do really like it. I feel like a lot of the specifically, I really like the, I mean, the culture and the openness of people here and just like getting to know people and, you know, Bryce and I, I mean, we have only met each other once or twice. And yet we’re like here, you know, doing this and next things and like, it’s much easier to get to know people here. And you also have like, London has this like amazing feel about it. Just even the architecture and the infrastructure. And you know, in San Francisco, you take the bars, which is this like dirty old from the 50s, like screaming train that’s super loud underground and it’s miserable. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken it, but here you feel like gorgeously clean underground trains and like the, the Barclays bikes. I’ve been like cycling around the city all week. And so I think London is like super livable. I would have never thought someone from, you know, San Francisco area would have said, a, the tubes are clean or b, that you enjoy cycling in this city. So we’re having a moment. I was, I was cycling yesterday on Oxford Street and it was like, like a game of Frogger in that, like the buses and the buses like passing each other. And yeah, I think cars aren’t allowed on Oxford street. You know,
12:08 It’s, it’s, it’s dangerous. It’s all just, it’s all duck and wave. I want to just ask you a bit about Stripe and I want to just ask you very generally, like what’s been your biggest surprise and your biggest disappointment over the past? What’s it been three years, two years, three or four? Okay. Yeah. Biggest surprise. I get the biggest disappointment. I mean, I think the, like, if you were to graph kind of happiness or success or, you know, uh, of, of a startup over time, it’s like very spiky and very noisy. And like you have updates and down days and you need to, you need to be able to even it out or otherwise you’ll end up being like miserable on 50% of days. It’s kind of like, uh, this is a massive tallops thing and full by randomness, um, that we’re, you know, we’re over sensitive to the noise and there’s like a lot of noise in startups where, um, you’ll have like lots and lots of, uh, you know, minute, uh, disappointments.
13:05 Like we haven’t had anything major go wrong at Stripe. You know, we’ve never had some like, you know, huge lawsuit touch wood or, uh, you know, uh, anything go catastrophically wrong with the product. There’s been lots of kind of minor things that we’ve been, uh, that we’ve been disappointed with. But I think the whole point of a startup is that you need to be like good at taking that into your stride. And one thing that’s been really cool to see as the company has grown is, you know, when you start out, you’re these like, you know, you’re a two or three or four or five people working on, uh, this idea. And it’s not even clear if this like idea is a good idea and it’s not even clear if anyone will use us and, you know, it’s very much, uh, you in this like uncertain limbo of, uh, is this like a startup or is this like four guys wasting their time? Uh, and, uh, uh, and as the number of people working on it grows, you get this very cool sense of like shared mission and shared common purpose. Uh, and, uh, that’s one of the nice things because that helps, you know, even at the, you know, even at the, um, those bumps because, you know, even if you’re having a down day and things aren’t going well in your area, someone else is doing stuff. And so we, we actually do a lot of stripe to try and, um, to promulgate this, uh, you know, the fact that we’re like, you know, now 55 people all working on this one shared thing. And so, uh, for example,
14:17 When you ship something, it’s tried like a feature or a product or a new thing, you’ll like send out an email to everyone. Uh, so we have this like ships at stripe.com mailing list. Uh, and that’s just like one of those little things where like you’re part of a larger collective thing rather than like you miserably kind of hammering away on your own part of it. Um, that’s which I realized is not answering your original question. So the whole company gets that email that we’re all launching this thing. Yeah. And it doesn’t even have to be like a public facing feature. You know, like our, our lawyer will send ship emails that we have like signed some agreement or our, you know, like, uh, sales folks are like our support team that they, you know, have got down to inbox your own tickets or this kind of stuff. I mean, it’s important to get extra communication, ultra communication. Oh yeah. So we do that. I mean, I could, I could go on for like a whole podcast, uh, about communication because you know, we have a lot of stuff around it, but in general, what we tried to do at stripe is like, just like surface as much communication as possible and be as much of a hive mind as possible. And so we like have a, like this whole intricate email, um, email list structure where you can share information across groups and you can be subscribed to do it. It’s like a subscription model, uh, where you can be like
15:22 Pulling in from all these different areas rather than you don’t have to be like listening to one channel. So it’s not like, you know, you’re on the SIS team or you’re on the, you know, product team or you’re on the sales team or you’re on the support team. What happens is like, uh, a lot of stuff is organized by a mailing list and, uh, then you can like choose, I’m going to like be part of these discussions and these discussions. And so like, even though I don’t work on like systems infrastructure day to day, I’ll still keep up with the discussions. It means that like everyone can be part of like a lot of the larger, you know, things that are going on rather than being segmented into their, their one area, which we think is cool. I think that’s good. It’s a good strategy.
15:56 I mean, I guess that’s, I mean, and that’s probably like your open layout. You were saying you don’t have a receptionist and is it just like free flow of ideas? Well, I mean, it’s, I feel like I know the, uh, I really like madmen and, uh, Me too. I worry about myself because I like it so much. One of the reasons I really like madmen is like Don Draper has this amazing ability to make like completely meaningless things sound really interesting and like, you know, attach a narrative to nothing at all.
16:22 And so he’ll be talking about, you know, uh, like in the most recent one, Hershey’s and like what Hershey’s means and Hershey’s is happiness. Uh, and I feel like, uh, sometimes people pitching, uh, you know, ideas on collaboration could be a little like that and you’re talking about like free flow of ideas. And you know, like 99% of a startup is not about like free flow of ideas. It’s like having a clear idea of what you’re doing and like executing on that and being able to like really get stuff done and get stuff done at a faster pace than everyone else.
16:45 Uh, so it’s a little bit of the, you know, everyone sitting around talking about their like free flow of ideas. But at the same time, uh, we do think that, uh, one, like sharing information is just like really important because, uh, one thing we try to do at Stripe is like, we don’t have like all these different layers of management. Uh, like everyone is working on their own individual thing. And so people, no matter kind of how long they’ve been there or what they’re working on, it’s like an individual working on, uh, tasks rather than rather than managing a team. And so, for example, we don’t have product managers at Stripe, uh, which is a fairly traditional role within, uh, tech companies, uh, where that person is responsible for, uh, just like specking the product and managing it, but not actually implementing it. Instead, there’ll be like a, you know, two or three, four person engineering team or like, you know, two engineers and a designer working on something and they will, um, and like one of the, one of the engineers will just do the product management part-time. So they will be responsible for making sure everything that is getting done that needs to be done for it shipped, for it to be shipped. Uh, they’re the ones responsible for like talking to the users along the way and making sure that this actually like solves the person’s problem. Um, but, uh, so, you know, people have the, you know, a huge amount of
17:51 Autonomy in how they do things. If you’re, if people are going to have all that autonomy, one of the things you need is like, they need to very clearly understand what’s going on at the company and like, you know, what our plans are for the next, you know, end months and, uh, also what everyone else is working on. So if I’m dependent on, you know, if I’m working on this product and we’re also going to need to get the, like, you know, uh, get some deal done and like sign some contract, I need to know like how up to speed the legal team is with this and all this kind of stuff.
18:19 And so the, the whole point of the mailing list structures and like the general free flow of information across the company is that, uh, people can work much better autonomously if they like can keep as much of the state of the company in their head as possible rather than all these independent departments who don’t really know what the other one is doing. And so, you know, we also have like fairly regular all hands meetings where, you know, there’s actually a lot of detail on what each team is doing, even if it mightn’t be like directly relevant to what you’re doing today, it’s pretty important to know the general direction. Okay. I’m going to hit you with a devil’s advocate question and then you need to come up with one too. And I’m just looking at the business model for the first time. And I’m like, okay, um, I look at your company, um, you’re a new company, you’re, you’re, I look at your fees.
19:00 It’s like 2.9% of transaction. You’re very upfront about that 30 cents transaction. And I say, that’s the same as MasterCard. That’s the same as PayPal. You’re a new company. How do I know if you will go and solvent? I’ll get my money. I’m sure you hear all these questions all the time.
19:12 What do you say to that? Um, yeah, I mean, I can give you the standard answer is that, you know, if we’re, if we’re having, uh, you know, uh, newspaper, newspaper interview, um, I’ll say that like, uh, one, uh, as the, you know, as the business, the money is always held in your name. And so when you charge a credit card, it’s like your money, it’s not Stripe’s money. And so, you know, even if Stripe went and solvent, you would just like get all that money, which is like a pretty nice property to have. Uh, but I think the general question you’re asking is about like, why do people use Stripe if, um, it’s like priced the same, uh, as, you know, other things. And I think the reason is Stripe really lets people build things that they either, like, that they wouldn’t otherwise build. And so we see all these like cool use cases, um, that, uh, you probably know Squarespace, the one of our sponsors. Oh, for London Real.
20:00 Yeah. So Squarespace, you strive for a bunch of stuff and they use it for, um, like managing their subscription payments. Um, and so, you know, uh, when you sign up for Squarespace first, you enter your credit card number and you’ve got a free trial and then you’re like billed every month after that. Uh, and they also use, um, uh, they use it so that Squarespace sites can really easily start accepting payments. So imagine you’re like a photographer and you set up your Squarespace site. Uh, you’re there, you know, adding your, adding your photos to it and you’re like, Oh, I want to, um, I want to actually sell, like sell prints online. Uh, you can use Squarespace as commerce features and then you can just click link my Stripe account and you’re accepting, um, you’re accepting, like you’re selling prints online, uh, two minutes later. And before this Squarespace, if they’d wanted to let people do that, if they’d want to add commerce features, they would have had to like, have people go get a merchant account and like fill out all that paperwork and maybe hear back like many weeks later. And the point is like, you know, no one would really do that. Everyone would fall out of the conversion funnel.
20:58 Like Squarespace is just like, it doesn’t make as much sense to build this product to let your users accept payments if something like Stripe isn’t around. And so I think like it’s not so much, you know, what, um, you know, why would I use you versus this versus this? It’s like the fact that you have this set of APIs, it’s really powerful that you can do things that like other, other, um, you can necessarily do with PayPal or, or like a merchant account. I think that’s why people use it.
21:24 So you’re ultimately not a finance company or a technology company. Yes. Oh, and we like, we say that all the time. We like to say that we’re blue in the face. And, and I think the interesting thing is like, you know, we’re a technology company and yes, there, there is a financial part of that, but that’s a little bit like saying, um, I don’t even have a good analogy for it, but, uh, uh, but, uh, you know, uh, like transport for London is like a transportation company. They’re not, uh, you know, they’re not in the business of producing wheels or trains. They’re like about getting people around.
21:54 And so that’s why they get into all their other things. And similarly, like moving money around is, uh, is like part of what we do, but the core of what we do is like providing better technology so people can build better apps, build better websites. And we’re seeing like all sorts of cool stuff being built with, uh, Stripe right now. So do you know lift and sidecar, the right sharing services sidecar in the, yeah. So the right sharing services there, uh, in a lot of places in the us.
22:15 So like lift uses Stripe and what they use it for is, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s super cool. It’s this app. You, uh, take it out of your pocket. Uh, you sign up and you like, give them a credit card or something like that. Uh, then when you’re anywhere in the city, if you’re anywhere in San Francisco, you like tap a button and like a car comes to pick you up and they drop you off where you want to go. And the fair is just doing it deducted from your, you know, uh, from your card on file. The interesting part about it is like these aren’t cabs. These are just like normal people driving their cars. And so like normal people can also sign up for this service. You can like become a driver if you want to earn income on the sides. And so the people driving for them are a lot of like students, a lot of people working part time, all this kind of stuff. And so you can imagine if you’re, if you’re, if you’re lift, uh, the real challenge here is like, not only do you need to like charge money, but you also need to like, you’re not the one collecting us. You’re not collecting us purely on behalf of yourself.
23:02 You’re like paying out all these drivers. And so lift, you strive to say that, okay, we’re going to store all these like customer payment credentials. And then we’re going to like, when we charge $20 say, okay, you know, whatever seven, I don’t know what the ratios are, but like 17 of it goes here as the driver and we give three of it for ourself or something like that. And so they’re doing this like kind of complex multifaceted thing that like, I don’t even know if you can do that with PayPal or a merchant account.
23:22 It’s interesting. Cause yeah, we look at it originally as a consumer, but then when you’re a vendor, all of a sudden, I was just gonna say, if you start taking donations, you’re going to be using like square space. Now you can sell your photos. And everyone’s like, what? Now, like now, now you’re the best thing.
23:36 But you’re totally right on the, on the technology company part. You know, the interesting, like the, the amazing thing about the, uh, the internet is that, uh, like it’s breaking down. You just break down all these geographic barriers. Like, you know, we were talking about UFC earlier. If you go on a UFC UFC forum, it’ll be, um, you know, guys from the US and Australia and South Africa and the UK, just like all talking together and like no regards paid to the geographic boundaries. Uh, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with Stripe, but for the, like the internet economy and that right now the internet economy is like quite, uh, like fractured, like you, the US money flows around within the US and you know, South African money flows around within South Africa.
24:20 And we’re trying to do is make it easy for like anyone, anywhere to just like start participating the broader web economy and make that like more interlinked and more global. And I know that sounds kind of like very high level, but that’s actually a really meaningful thing. And so that’s why we’re, that’s why we’re in London. That’s why there’s like four of us based here. Now is that, uh, London’s probably going to be the hub for, as we start, uh, expanding into Europe and again, making it so that like, you know, uh, if I am just like a developer in Denmark, building a service that people really like, um, that I can, um, that I can start using it. And, but we see this all the time where people, uh, it’s like people all over the world that form the web community and the form the web we use today. Like, uh, Travis CI is like a pretty popular continuing integration tool. There are like some guys based in Germany. Uh, if you send out like mailings to your users, you probably use campaign monitor, which is based out of Melbourne or Sydney. Yeah. And so we want to kind of like, have there be more of this, have the web be more global. I mean, uh, London’s always been the currency capital of the world. You could say New York is for stock markets, but for currency, it’s always London. It’s right between Tokyo and New York. And it’s a smart place to be.
25:24 It must be tricky though, when you’re dealing with all these random countries and offshore dollar accounts and all that stuff. Uh, I’m guessing it is, but anyway, I want to ask Bryce, I’m putting you on the spot. Yep. If you had to ask him a devil’s advocate question, what would it be? I don’t know. I’ve got more of a devil’s advocate question. I’ve got a different question. It’s not so much devil’s advocate. So I want to know about, so the one thing that you, um, you may have, uh, glossed over is that, uh, is that second thing I’ve glossed over glossing over everything. We’re having all the glossing. You guys drop all these big names and these big, like, you know, why, why, why, why? And I mean, like a lot of people don’t know these things, but in your niches, everyone knows these things. Well, so one of the things I want to explore, one of the things about John Collison that I find quite fascinating aside from the fact that he’s a dude who comes to drink about and we’ll spend five hours talking to people. He doesn’t know. It’s pretty cool, which is very nice about it, which thank you for that, um, is that, uh, John’s co-founder Patrick is in fact his brother, if I’m not mistaken, mystery, intrigue. So he was my brother before he was my co-founder.
26:19 Well, see, we’ve buffed up the timelines on my, my, my, my documents are out of water. But, um, but the reason I find this interesting is I, you know, I want to get to like, uh, you know, what was it like growing up in the Collison household? When did you guys learn to code? Because we’re talking about, we’re talking about why Combinator at 17 years old with a product that was then acquired. So you, the two of you together, there’s what, one year between you or two years between you, two had, I mean, one of the things we face most often, and the reason I bring this up and I was quite curious about your sort of childhood and growing up is, um, always one of the things that we hear a lot is the shortage of, of developers developing talent. Now the two of you to get, it’s, it’s rare enough to find one person in a family who’s a wonderful coder having two that are, that are brothers and also co-founders is, is, is, I find really interesting not only because it’s a local European thing, but of course the age you started and the business and then often.
27:08 Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about, so Patrick learned to, to code when he was I think nine or started coding when he was nine. Uh, I think learn to code has this like, you know, era of completeness, completeness and finality about it. I learned to code and then I was done with learning to code and I knew all the code and it was great, uh, at nine and ten I moved on to philosophy. Um, but, uh, but so he started coding when he was nine. I was a bit later, I was, you know, 14. Uh, and you know, it was like both of us in the era today is messing around with websites. Actually we just, um, the, we both learned to, um, uh, code from this book, uh, the PHP visual quick start guide by Larry Elman, uh, and Larry actually just joined Stripe, uh, last week, uh, this week, which is pretty cool. Okay. That’s full circle. Totally full circle.
27:53 And like we have this like highlighted marked up copy from like 15 years ago. Did you ask him to sign it when he came in? Uh, yeah, well we met him for the first time, uh, about half a year, a year ago and, uh, I’m not sure if he signed up, but we got, we got a photo, which was good. Uh, but anyway, um, you know, we learned to, we learned to code then. And I think the thing that’s valuable is, uh, it’s not like some people, uh, learn to code at a young age and they take it to it, like ducks to water and they end up having like amazing engineering contributions their whole life. And that’s awesome.
28:21 But specifically within the startup community, and I think, you know, the, the general debate around, you know, you’re reading the papers all the time, like, should everyone be learned code and this kind of thing, I think there is a value to like, just like everyone should learn to write, but not necessarily become a writer. And I think there is, uh, you know, same as like everyone learns math since school, even though, you know, a lot of it, you know, you don’t use calculus in most of your day to day life. And I think there is also an element of, uh, this and engineering her forming a, like a building block for the things you do in the future and understanding the, you know, the, the technologies change and the frameworks change, but understanding the general principles and ideas, uh, I think sets you up much better because, you know, the thing about the, the math you learn is that, um, you’re not learning the specifics of how to do, you know, I don’t know, did you do trading or whatever when you were in finance or you’re not, if you become accountant, you’re not learning accounting, but it gives you all the like building blocks for that. And I think, uh, learning some kind of building blocks such that later down the road, if you end up doing stuff, um, really helps you. And the second thing that I think is valuable about knowing how to code is for startups, it gives you this, this self-reliance.
29:26 If you want to start, you know, an online publication, you probably start off by writing the pieces yourself. And even if you’re not the best writer, you know, you kind of get the idea and you hire like one or two writers and then it like really gets under its own steam. Uh, and, you know, with, uh, with Stripe, it’s kind of the same thing where, uh, you know, Patrick and I don’t write much code day to day anymore, but, uh, you get that first version of the product that people start using and it’s hard to bootstrap that, right? And I know people who’ve done it, like, it’s really impressive when people build, uh, you know, a technical product or any kind of product without knowing to code themselves. Um, you know, uh, there’s, uh, one founder I know who I really respect and she, uh, has built like a number of companies at this stage. She doesn’t know how to code. And so she was working with like a team in the Ukraine, uh, who was like a development consultancy. Uh, and so she would send over like specs and stuff and they would make it and they would go through this feedback cycle. And like, it’s, it’s a really impressive, um, it’s a really impressive feat, but again, it’s like dictating a novel because you don’t know how to write. And then when you go, you have to go back and like edit it. Uh, you have to like read that back to me and then like, it’s just like this, it’s so much clunkier. Uh, and so I think, uh, if you’re going to be, uh, starting a, you know, a business
30:37 Online or starting a startup, being able to code and being able to dive in and like poke at the things yourself, uh, is, is the most important thing maybe in the very, very early stages. Then, you know, some things later it becomes more of a company and there’s so many other factors at play. But if you’re just like starting a startup day one, uh, it’s super valuable to to be able to, uh, you know, at some level, like there will be code involved. And so you’re either like writing the code or you’re like having someone else write the code and that gets compiled to code, but it means you can like speak at the, like at the, at the appropriate layer. Or you’re hostage to someone writing the code, right? Or you’re, or you’re, or you’re spending your day searching for a technical co-founder as we see a lot of.
31:17 Yeah. But you pretty much said the same thing when we, we had your show and then you surprised me at the end, you said, what’s the one thing? And you were like, you know, learn how to code early, you know, well, what do you think? And I guess my point is that you don’t actually have to become the like world’s best engineer. Like I don’t actually know like that much. You know, I’ve never done any formal CS and I’m like, not that great an engineer. Um, but I think like having some minimum level, uh, is the really important thing. And so, uh, I guess that was my point in the, the comparison to the education. I don’t think like, I think everyone should study CS as people study CS in college today. I think it’s kind of useful. Right. My next question was going to be, uh, who’s better you or Patrick, but, uh, competitive Patrick at engineering, everything else, everything else is you and he does the, okay, I got it. I know how it fits together. I’m moving us along. I’m just going to ask you another couple of random questions and we’re going to wrap this up.
32:07 If you, um, if you sold a Stripe right now for someone godly amount of money and you had to sign a non-compete, you can’t compete in the industry and you got to take six months off and then we’re going to give you 20 million pounds to go do something else. What would you do? Interesting. Uh, could you take six months off? That’s a question.
32:27 Some people can’t take vacations. Uh, no, I can take vacations. Um, uh, go fly. Uh, but, uh, no, there’s a, hmm. Um, I think the, like the, there’s so many things that I want to say that sound like cliches cause they’re like the hot topics. But for example, I think drones are legit legitimately pretty interesting. Uh, I know, uh, a handful of people now who are running like drone startups. Uh, and the really interesting things about drones is like, there are so many things, uh, that, uh, the drones are like bringing the internet into the real world in that it’s kind of crazy that, uh, I mean, trivial example, if you’re like, you know, a cattle farmer, you can’t just be like, where am I cattle? Uh, and, uh, that’s something that is like impossible to answer. And that’s one of the places that, uh, the internet has not pervaded.
33:13 And so the, one of the companies I know that’s doing drone stuff is doing like a lot of his agriculture where it’s like surveying and things like that, or they’re doing it in industry for mining or anti poaching or all this kind of stuff. And so it’s like, you know, there’s so much data online and you can do so much stuff like Google can crawl the web, but you can’t like crawl the real world. And that was previously extremely inefficient. You know, anti poaching, the way it worked was like two guys in a, you know, an assessment, like flying around the, you know, flying around the country. Uh, and they would maybe spot a poacher occasionally, but there was like so much that got went on cause. Uh, and so the idea behind drones is you’re like gathering more and more data and you can have these like kind of very cheap devices, um, out there, uh, in the world, uh, like connected to the internet, you know, recording or doing something like that. And so I think that’s a, that’s a good example of just like a really interesting trend that is happening before us. I mean, there’s also the scary surveillance aspect of drones.
34:03 Yeah, it’s just that word makes everyone kind of say for the ones who are, cause you had a lot of listeners at London Real, uh, who are international, who are not necessarily tech. Um, so when you choose into this, just want to, just want to clarify, we’re not talking about military. Yeah, we’re talking about little, the small kind of quad cop. Yeah. Yeah. So the, you know, a drone is, I mean, the, the colloquial word for an unmanned aircraft. And so you have the military unmanned aircraft, which shoot you from the sky. Uh, and then you have the, uh, like any other kind of, uh, like unmanned robotic aircraft. And they’re getting pretty small these days. You know, you have drones the size of like a dinner plate. Uh, and a pretty common one is a multirotor, like quadrocopter where you’ve like these four separate ones. And they’re pretty good aircraft.
34:41 We had a guy drink about with one last week, actually, he was flying it around. And I think the, the, the thing about drones that will have to evolve is that, uh, you know, in the U S they’re like very clear, um, kind of expectations around what’s private and what’s not in the real world. Like there’s all this precedent and case law that like, you know, a police officer can’t enter your house without a warrant. But like that, that took time for people to develop the concept of like, where are the boundaries and like, what’s, and you know, then cars came along and now, you know, a police officer can like look inside the windows of your vehicle, but they can’t like get you to open the trunk without a warrant because that’s like a private space. But like the backseat of your car isn’t a private space. And we’ve developed all these kind of, uh, understandings of like what the expectations are, uh, as these new things develop. Uh, and I think in the online world, I mean, as we’ve seen with all the NSA stuff, we still haven’t like, like there’s a, like whatever you think there was a clear mismatch of expectations here, where like, uh, you know, people expect the government to not be collecting all data that goes over the wire. And I mean, yeah. Uh, and, uh, and I think similarly with drones, uh, there’s like the very scary aspect of like, okay, now there’s like so much more surveillance happening. I think that’s like fundamentally not a bad thing. Um, it’s just
35:51 Like, we need better expectations. Um, but anyway, so I think drones are interesting. I, I could see myself doing something there, but I mean, I also just like really like planes and things. So that may just be a pure fascination with like things that go flying. A flying head. Um, just a couple more questions. This has been breezing by. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten? Um, I mean, there’s lots of good advice. Lots of it tends to be, um, information or a very context specific, uh, in terms of general advice, um, uh, the, why commentators motto is make something people want. And I think that’s a reasonably good way to look at it, uh, in the, the valuable bits of that advice is they kind of leave out everything about kind of market sizing and revenue models and whatever until later.
36:35 Because generally that can be figured out if you’re developing, delivering value to people, presumably there’ll be some way to collect value in return. Uh, and so I think that’s why, you know, if you’re deciding, you know, should I do, if you’re the YouTube guys in the really early days, you know, you’re deciding, should I do this? And you’re like, Oh, well, online video is expensive. And maybe, you know, like, will people pay a subscription or whatever?
36:54 And they ended up just like pushing that way off into the distance. Uh, and they’re like, people really want to be able to share videos online and we’re like making something people want. And that worked out really well for them. And so I think that’s a reasonably good kind of motto for startups. And similarly, you often find, you know, you occasionally run into people working on startups, working in these like complete Rube Goldberg machines, and they’re like, Oh, it’s a service. And like, sometimes like you don’t want to be impolite, but you like legitimately got asked, like, do people want this? Um, and so people want this. Uh, and so I think, you know, if you’re to have one, like completely general piece of advice, I think that’s a, that’s a decent one. Uh, there’s been lots of, uh, Stripe specific advice, but, uh, I’m not sure how relevant that would be. That’s a good one. I like that. Do people want this?
37:36 Yeah. Well, is it make something people want? Yeah, that’s about it. And what’s
37:43 What’s next for you? I mean, what’s, uh, what’s this year looking like six months, 12 months or like, what are the big hurdles of the things you’re looking most forward to? Right. So I think, you know, we, we believe a lot in the, you know, the core idea of Stripe, as we’ve talked about it of, you know, anyone, anywhere being able to start accepting payments for, for what they’re creating online. And so unfortunately, you know, that’s good in that it’s a very broad statement. It’s clearly a large market. And I think it’s clearly a thing worthwhile working on the bad thing about it is like, it’s a very broad statement. And so there’s just like a lot to do. And so we’re, uh, you know, we have two countries launched publicly. We have two more countries in private beta, you know, we’ll be releasing a lot more countries over the next year. Um, and we also have, uh, like the, the set of things you can do with Stripe is so broad that we also have a lot of kind of development of the platform.
38:28 So like I said, you know, recently we started, uh, doing really, really cool things for marketplaces where, uh, as I was describing, you can charge money and then, you know, split it out to various people on the backend because so often the fast growing web companies aren’t necessarily charging money for themselves and they’re not like completely vertically integrated. They’re like, uh, connecting a buyer and a seller in a disparate location. And they’re like, you’re just running the network and you see this trend like again, again, and again, uh, there’s a really cool startup. I just tried out in San Francisco called get around, which is like, you probably know zip car, the like car service and zip car like own all the cars and they manage the whole fleet and everything. Get around is like zip car, but with normal people’s cars. And so again, it’s like using the liquidity and scale of the internet to, uh, to provide the service presumably more efficiently and cheaper.
39:09 And it’s cool because they have like a greater variety of cars and they, you know, I think we’ll soon have like a greater density of cars and zip car, uh, because, because they’re tapping into just regular folks and presumably as well, it’ll be, it’ll be cheaper than zip car over time. Um, but so I think many of the fast growing companies are marketplaces. And so we, we built some features to make their lives easier, but like this, the set of things you can do with, um, uh, like with a paid product is so variable.
39:35 You can like be having some subscription service or like people paying you on a one-off basis or you’re like an e-commerce store where you’re actually shipping physical goods or you’re, you know, a marketplace. And there’s all these different things. And so a lot of Stripe will be actually just like making life easier for these businesses. And then again, because we’re like the backbone of those businesses, there’s so much we can do for them to make their life easier. So right now, if you’re a business, like doing accounting and taxes completely miserable. And then, uh, I know this sounds kind of boring, but like being able to just like sync, um, your like data from Stripe with whatever is doing your taxes, like that’s a really cool feature. And that actually like saves large amounts of money. Uh, and so there’s a lot where there’s this trend on the way, where, uh, we’re going from a world where you have like all your payment data again, it’s like banks, gateways, all these companies that don’t get the internet, like banks, if you use them for online payments, still send you a paper statement in the mail at the end of every month. That’s like how they do it. And so you’re wondering, you know, how much, um, you’re wondering like how much of my money is coming from overseas users.
40:34 And you’re there like paging through all the stuff. Uh, and so, uh, being able to like moving all this stuff online, turning it into, you know, we’re a technology company, now a fans company. Uh, and so taking advantage of all the technology and all the structured data we have is, I think a lot of what we’ll be doing over the next year. And I was going to turn it over to you for a final question, but I just thought that when I’m saying this, I was like, I got to get your take on Bitcoin. It probably is a whole show, but it’s a, yeah, that’s another, like we have come up with ideas for so many whole shows here.
41:02 Um, uh, but Bitcoin, the thing that I found really cool about, so, so what Bitcoin is like genuinely like a technological breakthrough. Um, uh, and the, the idea that like the fully decentralized nature of it, um, is actually kind of a phenomenal accomplishment accomplishment in that before, uh, Bitcoin, when everyone talks about virtual currencies, really, you know, like these virtual currencies were just like balance with some online, you know, you, you have like Facebook balance or you have, you know, uh, Eagle balance, or you have, you know, all these services, you have paid them money and they’re like, they give you a gift voucher. And so there was nothing like that special or interesting about it. Like the thing that’s phenomenal about Bitcoin is that you hold these Bitcoins and like, so long as like there are people in the world who trade Bitcoins, you can trade them with them and no one can stop you trading with them. You know, Eagle can go out of business or Facebook can go out of business. Uh, whereas in Bitcoin, it’s not that anyone’s going to go out of business.
41:55 You have these, um, and you can, and you can trade them with people and there are no intermediaries. And so that is legitimately a, a very major big breakthrough. At the same time, um, uh, you know, we, Bitcoin is still pretty early in its history. And so I think there’s a lot of questions around, you know, if it ends up being so highly regulated is that it’s just not that useful. It’s no better than credit cards. Then I think that might, um, stopper its, its growth a bit. Um, but the thing that’s really interesting for me actually about Bitcoin is the, the access component, uh, where anyone anywhere can get Bitcoins. And so if you’re aside, accepting Bitcoins, uh, on the web today, you know, you, you can accept payments from someone in India or in like Germany, even if they don’t have a credit card, so long as they have some way of getting Bitcoins. And so Bitcoin starts acting as this like universal connector, uh, where like I get Bitcoins by some means, maybe I like, you know, pay my friend cash because he has Bitcoins or maybe there’s like a service in my country, like a, you know, a, a financial service that turns, uh, you know, it takes my local payment method takes and pays in Kenya and gives them Bitcoins in return. And then I pay the service with Bitcoins and then they in the backend converted to dollars for their earnings. And so I don’t think you’ll see like, I don’t think you’ll see the word because if Bitcoin succeeds, I don’t think you’ll see the word Bitcoin around
43:11 A lot. It’ll just like silently be there, you know, like providing value. Like, you know, when you buy, uh, you know, when you buy anything, when you buy an iPhone, like foreign exchange was involved there because like, you know, there was a Chinese company manufacturing it, and like money had to be converted into other currencies along the supply chain, but you don’t think like, hmm, a new iPhone foreign exchange. And so similarly, when you’re doing an online payment, even if Bitcoin sits underneath it, I don’t think you’d be like thinking about Bitcoin or the word Bitcoin will even play there. You might just have it.
43:40 What if, um, you know, you were paying for something and like it was silently being converted to Bitcoin and then like converted back on the other end. Uh, I think that’s in the, the success case of Bitcoin is like a world where no one really talks about Bitcoin. Interesting. Wow. Really interesting. Uh, what did I miss price?
43:55 I got two, I got two final questions. Okay, go for it. Number one, who’s your, uh, who’s your favorite, uh, startup right now? One, one, say one, one FinTech and one non FinTech, just for fun. So is that one question or two? That’s one. Okay. Um, so I mean, I already talked about this. I’ll do the non FinTech first. I already talked a little bit about this, but I think the whole marketplace world or ecosystem is not a fad, uh, in that you look at Airbnb like they’re just doing a really interesting thing where, uh, before it was, you know, before if you have, uh, you know, in Ireland somewhere, if you have some spare space, uh, you don’t have the like advertising power to, you don’t have enough eyeballs to make it worth your while to actually rent that out. Whereas now with Airbnb, you have this platform with all this people who like want to rent space in like, you know, whatever town in Ireland. Uh, and that, that, that’s really powerful shift. You basically have the like internet allowing these like large communities to interact that obviously were just like very, very fragmented and heterogeneous. Uh, and so, you know, like I said, get around is, uh, like, uh, I don’t own a car in San Francisco and I like rent a car, you know, maybe two times a month using like zip car or get around. And so like the internet is allowing me to like use a car, even though I don’t own one. And similarly with Airbnb for space and similarly with, you know, Lyft and sidecar for short term ride sharing.
45:14 And you know, it gets into all these kinds of interesting things. This startup called, um, exec in San Francisco, which is like a cloud labor service. And so if you need someone to like to do something for you, um, uh, and like a lot of companies use them for like temp, uh, services, uh, you can just like, uh, say like I need a person and like a person shows up and you didn’t have to go through all the like interviewing processes. So I think marketplace are a real thing and they’re, they’re here to stay and the internet like changes that, you know, something like, uh, Lyft or sidecar or Halo here in London, that, that wasn’t really possible five or 10 years ago. Cause people didn’t have good smartphones that were connected to the internet. So as we have like better interfaces to the internet that are, that are always with us, uh, which is only in the last five years. Um, I think that just enables a new set of things. Um, favorite fintech company, um, here in London transfer wise, uh, seem to be doing really good stuff. I haven’t actually used it myself to convert money, but apparently they are just like breaking the banks. Uh, you know, it’s another case of, um, banks have been eking out all this easy money, uh, on foreign exchange and transfer wise, uh, again, just saying like, no, actually it’s going to be this way. Uh, and, uh, I think that’s a really troubling trend for banks, which is like, they’re being unbundled by all these
46:26 Different companies. You know, you have, uh, if I want to actually, you know, set, sell things in my like cafe or, you know, at a farmer’s market or whatever, I use square or I settle or one of these, uh, if I want to like sell things online, I probably use Stripe. Uh, if I want to, uh, you know, transfer money, I use transfer wise. If I want to like take out a short term loan, I use, you know, funding circle or longer or, or yeah, or in the U S is like prosper any loan stuff. And so you go from a world where like you have banks with these like stone columns, uh, on the high street, providing like all these services and this whole like platform of services to like all these different companies on the internet for each different thing. And like gradually, if you keep removing things, I mean, look, there’s not a whole lot left. Uh, and so I think that’s a troubling trend. Yeah. I mean, that was the, like you have one more question, but that’s kind of the last question. Is it get to a point where banks aren’t necessary? You don’t need to put the money here to move it to here.
47:19 We can all be, yes. So I’m trying to think what services will stay with banks. Um, you know, for the next while, certainly like, uh, banks because of the way, you know, the regulatory environment has evolved. Uh, a lot of these, you know, if you talk to transfer wise, they’re probably built on, on a bank. And so they like hold the money in the meantime, like in a bank. Um, and so like banks are, are pretty good at storing money and they’re pretty good at like being regulated and like managing regulations. And so I think it will certainly see for a long time, you know, all these services that I mentioned, uh, like, you know, Stripe Square, I settle, uh, one go, whatever, they all like back end to a bank. A bank sits behind them at some point, but it is in no way exposed to the consumer. And so I think you’ll see banks for a long time being like the platform upon which all these various services are built.
48:07 I think the problem for banks is that that then becomes a commodity. If I just need you as like a dumb store of money, then it’s like a race to the bottom of like, which bank can be the cheapest dumb store of money. And so banks traditionally have all this like claim that they’re like, you know, relationship businesses and they, if you know, the ad on TV would like the handshake and whatever early, at least it’s this way in America. And as they move away from being like relationship businesses and more towards being a utility, uh, then it’s just like, I can get electricity from this company or this company. And I’m just, just going to look at the like number of cents per dollar price. Right. Last question. Last question. Then we’ll wrap this up.
48:40 So we were talking about some ideas and interesting questions. And of course, for any founder, um, the, uh, one of the most interesting areas in startup is, is the VC. So again, with the question, we want to know who in your opinion is the cool VC cannot be one of your own investors is the catch. So who do you think is a cool VC? Who’s a VC that you would most want to have a beer with with that? That’s not one of your investors that I would most want to have a beer with. Um, and why, and why, uh, I like this question. It’s like, cause all the VCs have different, everyone’s always got a different opinion on the different fees. Um, so yeah, I mean, our, our investors are, and this is another question, but our investors are, uh, Sequoia, uh, Andreessen, uh, Redpoint, General Catalyst. Those are the kind of institutional investors as well as some like larger angels who, I mean, they’re not really angels because they’re investors can be large amounts of money like Peter Thiel. Um, and all those are, are, are all the people we work with. There are pretty good guys at the other kind of, uh, fairly well regarded firms in the Valley are like, you know, Benchmark, Cozla, uh, ones like this, people I’d want to have a beer with, uh, you, not to talk investment.
49:49 It’s just less talk investment. So, uh, first round capital, I don’t know if you’ve seen, they do these like crazy videos every year with, uh, like based on means and they’re like slightly awkward, but they’re like awkward in the like fun family Christmas photo, um, way in that they did, um, uh, Friday, uh, Rebecca Black spoof, uh, I think I did like the old spice another year. Uh, and so they seem like, uh, like pretty chill guys. Like if you can, like one of the guys was like in the bath towel, like being the old spice guy, I think it was Josh Copelman. Uh, and so he was there like in his bath towel recording this, uh, and like, if you can, if you can do that, um, for a video for, you know, millions of people to see, I think you’re probably a good guy. And what about, do you know, what about European VCs? Yeah. So I don’t know the European VC scene that well. Um, uh, I mean, I would turn that question back to you.
50:38 Like you tell me who we should be. Oh, no, I can’t. I’m not supposed to be impartial. That’s a great question. I like that. I just, it’s always interesting. I’m always interested to say that cause it’s all, it’s, it’s a funny world in, in which perception is often everything and half the battle is, is, is, is this somebody I’d want to have to be with? And this is the classic one of, you know, the pools in the 2000 presidential election shown that like John Kerry was the, um, the, the person that people thought was more competent and George Bush was the person they wanted to have a beer with. That’s a terrifying analogy.
51:12 Oh, it’s interesting because I mean, I guess all money isn’t the same, you know, if you’re looking for a certain investment at a certain market cap, you have to think a little bit beyond. Yeah, no, it’s interesting. And VCs have managed to, you know, you would think that it is, but VCs have really managed to, you know, you talk to anyone raising investment, uh, in the, in the Bay area in the, in the marketing concept of the Valley. And, uh, you know, they’re talking about which engineers have the, or which investors have this value and, you know, who has the best connections, uh, and like, what services each one’s provide. And the VCs have really turned the conversation towards like, you know, working with a firm and partnering with, with them and, you know, what you value and what you’re going to go with rather than again, a sheer like utility, a sheer like numbers for stock game. Uh, and I think that’s like, uh, uh, that’s certainly very good for the investors, right? Cause they could get to compete on something other than the price. Excellent. How do people get a hold of you?
52:01 Do you want them to get a hold of you? Uh, I’m just janetstripe.com. They’re more than welcome to get a hold of me. Um, Twitter, you’re at Collison and at Stripe. As Collison on Twitter, which causes no end of confusion.
52:10 Oh wow. Collison. Yeah. Did you do that on purpose? No, I did it on purpose. Uh, so it was like, you know, a handful of people used, um, not very often, but a handful of people use nickname me, uh, Collison, uh, when I was a teenager. It’s a cool name. I almost saw it a few times. Yeah. I just, I just, I bunged up that tweet that I sent before this started. You wouldn’t be the first. Um, but yeah, Collison on Twitter, janetstripe.com, janethenh at Stripe.com, uh, on, uh, on the emails. Uh, and yeah. Awesome. You know, um, thanks so much for coming. You know, when I told a bunch of people today, I was going to have John on, I was like, yeah, he was 17 and he sold his first company and now he’s 23 and doing this. And some people get that look in their eyes. They’re like, Oh, what am I doing with my life? And they’re like, I already don’t like him a little bit, but I had the complete opposite reaction. I read like John’s bio and I’m like, goddamn, I want to talk to this kid because I love kids are young men. I just love seeing young men doing things that I might not have been doing at that age.
53:03 And so, um, really excited to hear your story about it. Really. Well, thanks for having me on. This is a fun chat. And Bryce made it happen. The man behind the scenes.
53:11 Oh, you shush, Brian. Well, this is, uh, this is the first time you’ll see Bryce. You’re going to see him, uh, hopefully, uh, once every two weeks or who knows when, um, subbing in for Collison as we continue this crazy journey, which is silicone real. Silicone real. Did I miss anything?
53:25 I think we’re good. I think that’s a wrap. Cool. Yeah. If you want to listen only, we’re on iTunes, you know, you can check us out on Twitter at silicone real and we’ll be doing this every week. Somebody from the technology startup community, either here in London or coming through London, you know, like a John’s case.
53:40 So that’s it. It’s about the people. Hey, guys. Sweet. All right, guys.
53:43 Thank you very much.
