♪ emily: they are brothers from rural ireland who came to america to pursue the entrepreneur dream. together, they created a company called stripe in 2010, making it debt simple for small, young companies to accept payments from all over the world. it has grown into a giant, valued at $9.2 billion. half of all americans who bought something online in the last year did so without knowing via stripe. the company now works with customers as big as lyft, facebook, and amazon, processing billions of dollars of transactions for a small fee. joining me today on "bloomberg

studio 1.0," patrick and john collison, cofounders of stripe. i have interviewed you both separately many times and i am so excited to have you here together. we are going to start at the beginning. you were born in rural ireland. what was it like growing up? the brothers collison. >> we grew up in the countryside. so it was like a 40 minute drive to get to school in the morning. none of the friends we went to school with lived anywhere close to us. when we came home from school, we couldn't run around and play with them. we had to run outside and play with each other. something else we used to do was we would go read books. we didn't get to the internet until i was a teenager. you got used to browsing websites or whatever, reading about these products and services, to scrutinize the fine print and be like, offer not available in the republic of ireland. the sense was staring through the glass at this amazing world and internet out there and not

all of those opportunities being available or equally available. again, some of them were not available in ireland. so in a way, stripe is focused on global access and expansion of global opportunity and all those things. this really was not conscious in any way. but now looking back over the last 20 years of my life, i think in some ways, that mindset was instilled by the experience of growing up in 1990 ireland. emily: how did you discover computers? >> it would be fair to say that we were sort of free range kids. >> i am always struck in the u.s. like people need finer grained counter controls for their kids life. it is like half hour increments are not precise enough. and in our case, our parents were busy. they were both entrepreneurs running businesses they had started. and patrick and i had a lot of latitudes to figure out what we were interested in and go explore that. >> you are the one that started

with programming, but that was very self-directed. that was not the plan. >> we read a lot we took the standard routine, was we would go to the library. we would go home and read the books, rinse, repeat for the next day. and then at some point, i just happened to get a programming book. and read the book. emily: you read about programming before you had a computer. >> i read about the internet for years before we had the internet. i got a programming book and read it and it seemed awesome. i built my first janky website. i was very proud of myself. emily: did you follow older brother's lead here? >> yeah. i similarly got into it as a teenager. emily: didn't you hack each other's websites or something like that? >> didn't that happen, patrick? >> i think that did happen.

i think it's an important duty as a 16-year-old older brother to, you know, help the slightly younger brother. the potential security downsides to some of the work. i took that obligation and duty very seriously. emily: you made it to m.i.t. you made it to harvard. and in 2009, you both dropped out. how did you make that decision? safety in numbers, i suppose. >> exactly. patrick has the honor of dropping out of college twice. but in 2009, we had just started college, and we had been building all sorts of side projects and internet businesses and things like that. and i don't think anyone ever -- certainly in our case, you don't set up to start a huge thing. you don't set out to build a large company. you set out to solve a problem, right? there was this disconnect between the fact that all of these new internet services and businesses were getting started, smart phones have just arrived, it felt like such a land of opportunity, and then when you actually went to do anything on the business side and accept money for what you built, it is like going back to the 1970's.

so i think it was honestly hopeful that one, we were young when we started out. and two, we were not coming from being industry professionals who had been in the industry for 30 years or anything like that. because you can bring a fresh perspective to it. we started approaching it from the perspective of the people who actually proved to be the most important decision-makers of all, the software developer actually building this stuff. the thing that led us to dropping out was a realization of what we initially conceived of, as being sort of a niche product for developers are solving a problem or something like that, the lake was actually an ocean. the character and problems we were addressing in terms of what is the global economic infrastructure for the internet? and why is it not possible? even then 2010, to accept customers, payments, revenue from internet users anywhere in the world. emily: how did your mom and dad

feel about this? i know they are entrepreneurs. >> i often wonder if i were in their shoes, how would i react? they asked us to explain our decisions. they didn't just kind of rubberstamp. they were always supportive. i think john and i are very lucky to have parents like that. emily: you got into white commentator. you moved to buenos aires to build the company. walk me through the early days of building? >> the early days of building just were not that glamorous. it was myself and john, programming all day, everyday. we wanted to get up and running with real customers as soon as possible. and so we accepted the first real payment on stripe in january of 2010. only had a couple of weeks of working on it. the feedback loop was just, ok, what does this business want and how will we implement that? let's make it happen as quick as we can. when we are ready, let's add a second business. emily: you say no one has to

fail in order for stripe to succeed. what does that mean? does it mean you don't think you have real competitors? >> i think there is a desire to set these things up as stripe versus banks. or x versus y when there is a narrative about these things. a very large fraction of the time, when people are building businesses on stripe, they are building businesses on white space as opposed to replacing another business. the stat that is very motivating for us that 5% of global commerce takes place on the line today. the other 95% is off line. so, that is what we mean when we say no one has to fail. emily: you have done partnerships with companies that could be perceived as your competitors. like apple, google, like visa. walk me through the strategy. >> we thought all of those consumer payment methods would be very successful overtime, but what has been lacking is a platform for the businesses to manage the abstract complexity of doing business online in

2018. when you talk to businesses, even for table space to get up and running, managing the payments and the treasury and the regulation and the compliance, and all the complexity that goes with that, first off, take doing that in the u.s. and then take doing that all around the world. that was a hugely heavy lift beforehand. i think it really had this damaging effect where only large companies could do it and they could not pivot very quickly. you look at what internet businesses are doing today. the models are changing, their global, getting more complex like a multiparty interaction. so that is what we are focused on. that is why -- apple pay has been growing like a weed as a payment method. that is phenomenal. on a global basis, the market side and the opportunities and they have never been greater. ♪

emily: stripe has been working with smaller businesses for a long time, but bloomberg broke the news that you are now working with amazon, facebook, microsoft, allianz, booking.com, lyft. how does a startup that is growing, but still a startup like stripe serve such huge companies? >> i think our success with these larger companies and the companies you named is not despite the fact that we started with startups, but because we are working with startups. when you start out as a startup and especially when you are serving startups, you can't bamboozle them with fancy sale materials and this big marketing campaign or whatever, they are just not going to be deceived by it. they will assess you precisely on the product merits, what helps them innovate fastest and fulfill their ambitions and goals and all the rest as rapidly as possible. it is punishing we are forced to build a product that helped them execute as quickly as possible. emily: stripe makes money by charging a small fee on every transaction.

you are now processing billions of dollars a year for hundreds of thousands of companies. taking payments worldwide. you are reportedly valued at $9.2 billion. you have raised $450 million in funding. some analysts say your valuation isn't justified, and we have certainly seen companies going to the public market that have not been able to hit the market cap they raised privately. do you have concern you will not be able to hit that mark? >> i think we are certainly always paranoid that we need to execute strongly to meet the potential of stripe. but if you are asking if the potential market size supports that valuation, absolutely. many times over. again the economy is so vast and so much smaller than it will be if we actually have good infrastructure. emily: do you see stripe as a public company? >> someday. quite possibly. but the way we have always thought about ourselves is that we are in such an expansion phase, we are so far from

reaching the plateau of that point when things stabilize and the whole business becomes predictable. i was in asia last week and man, there is such vast opportunity there for every internet business, stripe included. but i guess we are just so fixated on making sure, how do we ensure what stripe is doing in the u.s., in europe, asia, latin america and so on, that we are really capitalizing on the opportunities there. and will go to the long-term structure of the company, that we will fit within that. emily: speaking of, what is happening more broadly, we are in a world of great political and economic uncertainty with president trump being elected, with brexit, with facebook and apple and google on the other hand squelching all of the smaller companies. and in a way, you could say squelching innovation.

could that hurt stripe? given that you depend on businesses getting started? >> when you take stock of what is happening on a global basis, the number of internet connected users and people in the world continues to rise incredibly quickly. and of course, around the world, middle classes are rising to 100,000 people leaving poverty every day. i think on a global basis, the market sizes and the opportunities presented for people who want to do something new or want to build something significant, i think those opportunities have never been greater. and you know, there has always been concern with the particular giants of the day are overly dominant and my exercise some of this force. generally speaking, those giants have only prevailed for a particular window. you know, we had a concern about microsoft in the 1990's, ibm

before that, and so on. there has always been preeminent technology companies. and i don't see anything distinctly different about the current generation. emily: coming from ireland, what do you think of brexit? is it concerning? him >> i am concerned by the general trend we are seeing in a number of countries around the world towards more inward is world towards more inward looking and more retrenchment. in part because i don't think it is a global long-term trend. it has been a mistake historically to bet against more global integration or to assume there will not be more migration of people, there will not be more migration of cultures, of goods and services on things like that. and i don't think things like brexit are going to change that fact. emily: you both spent time with president obama. as the trump administration takes things in a different direction, a slide toward protectionism, what are your biggest concerns? >> we benefit from such an amazing set of tailwinds. there has never been more people employed in the u.s. at any time in the past.

the global inequality is falling. there is so much good that is happening, that i think -- emily: yet there are things that are alarming and some bad that is happening, arguably. >> absolutely. but i guess where i was going to go, if you really look out at the time periods here, all the major trends are going in the right direction. so, what concerns me is what are the tail events that could really jolt these off course? it is not clear how much influence a single person, a single country can have against all these broader trends. but -- that is what gives me concern. >> our determination was that bitcoin is not a good payment method. ♪

emily: cryptocurrency is all the rage right now. and stripe initially accepted bitcoin, but recently stopped. are you at all concerned that

stripe will be on the wrong side of history with that decision? >> we are absolutely open to revisiting this. at the time we made the decision, it was trending toward the individual store value. i think that is a valuable thing to have existed in the world. i genuinely wish them the very best. it works less well for our case. this is one thing that where we are looking at the data. it was declining rapidly in uses of payment method. if it starts increasing again as a payment method, then sure, we will go back. emily: bitcoin, cryptocurrency, is it hyped? reality, a bubble? >> our determination was that bitcoin was not a good payment method. which is a very different discussion then cryptocurrencies generally. emily: because the value was shifting dramatically? >> and the speed of those posting transactions on the bitcoin network was the main thing. so we remain fascinated by cryptocurrencies from a technology point of view and the

general speed of execution of the space. i see tons of companies and cons of people -- tons of people getting distracted by almost vanity projects of we will put this database on the blockchain. things like this, because people are not weathered into the technical details. emily: there is a concern that bitcoin and blockchain pioneers are mostly young and male. this, as tech industry is grappling with a diversity problem. if the tech industry does not do a better job including people of all backgrounds, what are the consequences? >> the tech industry has to be a place where people of any background or any demographic, or whatever origin, can thrive. and there have been big missteps on that front. they have attracted prominent headlines, and rightly so. people are paying a lot of attention to just silicon valley and how it is we do things and it has had a real ripple effect around the world. for myself and john, we try to start at home, as it were, and

if we can't build a company into -- and a culture and an organization that we can be proud of, and that we can really feel good about, and where people of any background can really thrive, then we have not achieved anything of value. emily: stripe, you guys have some really interesting things. you have an open floor plan. people change desks every so often and can meet new people. gender-neutral bathrooms. you have an interesting email transparency policy where everyone can read everyone else's emailed, as i understand it. >> people can choose to make certain emails available, but it is an opt in per email basis. emily: susan fowler, who wrote the report on discrimination at uber that ultimately resulted in the ceo leaving the company, she works at stripe. what do you see yourselves continuing to do to attract and

retain whether it is women or underrepresented minorities? >> there is a whole bunch of specific initiatives. making sure that people who are becoming moms and parents stay with the company. we track those numbers carefully. we are delighted they are as high as they are. there are specific initiatives we work on for female entrepreneurs, specific hiring practices and what we do in hiring people, hiring goals, what we set for managers. i think sometimes people leap too quickly to what their checklist is of initiatives. if you are actually going to take this seriously and do it well, it has to be something that really deeply is suffused in the culture and everybody lives every day. again, you can have a good list of initiatives. but if it is not really in the culture, then it is just not going to work. emily: before we go, i understand there is a third collison brother who, as i hear, is even more tech savvy than you are? tell me about tommy. >> tommy is a four years my junior.

tommy was very interested in this topic that we talk about, about the implications of technology and the fact that more of our lives are moving online. he was really interested in that before it was the talk of the town and before it was the cool thing to be into. so he worked at the electronic frontier foundation, which is a very storied nonprofit around digital rights and digital privacy and things like that. he now works for a nonprofit called tor who produce traceless or privacy preserving software. it is especially used by journalists and stuff like that. i think he is the one to watch, really. he is taking a very different tack on this stuff. emily: he was born with cerebral palsy. i'm curious how that impacted your relationship as a trio? >> it affected the whole family environment. as a kid, growing up, whatever circumstances you grew up in, you consider normal. for him, and for our family, it

was sort of very no-nonsense. ok, this is a disadvantage or sort of an unfortunate piece of luck, that's fine, we will figure out what the game plan is to overcome it and make that happen, and he walks, he runs, he swims, cycles. again, that took a lot of work. but there was no wallowing in self-pity or anything like that. as john mentioned earlier, both of our parents were entrepreneurs. sometimes people ask us what inspired us to become entrepreneurs or something like that. for us, it was the normal thing. i see it as a theme running through our upbringing in general. and the sort of no-nonsense way in which both he and our parents approached it. i mean, i find him inspiring, honestly. it helps keep it in perspective of the challenges of building a

fast-growing company. it's like, seeing the work that he has invested over the course of decades, it keeps us all in perspective. emily: what is your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, or people who may not look like you who want to do what you do? >> the first thing is you don't have to be here. like, that is very different versus 10 or 15 years. it depends on the company you are building. for stripe, we are serving other technology companies. there are some pretty significant benefits of being here. but you can almost certainly do it wherever you are today. i would take advantage of the community's tools and knowledge the internet now makes available and start where you are right now. emily: how do you see yourselves navigating your partnership, your relationship as brothers, as the company grows, and the stakes, if all goes well? only get higher.

>> we have figured it out. we have survived this long and i am not too worried on the go forward basis. in particular, it is very -- after 20 years, we can extrapolate whether we will last another couple. emily: who gets the last word during an argument? >> i can't even remember. we had a discussion about figuring that out. when you are so focused on working that out, stripe just passed 1000 people. we are still hiring quickly. there is always the next problem and interaction to go with. one of the things i find enjoyable is when you have a high trust environment, which we do, and we have worked together for a long time, you're not focused on the meta-structure and how to rearrange the lego bricks and all of that, you are always focused on the next problem. emily: where will stripe be in, let's say five years? >> i hope that we substantially completed this work of building this globally unified economic infrastructure. that serves companies of every

size. and that makes it possible for way more companies to get started and for companies to get started no matter what country in the world they are in. i still think it is absolutely freaking crazy that if you started a business in indonesia, good luck selling to customers in america. if you start up a business in germany, good luck with selling to consumers in china and so on. we should be up in arms that the fact that the internet doesn't make its infrastructure available today. that it is not complete and i'm proud of the progress we have made over the first 6, 7 years. but we have quite a ways left to go. when we are sitting here in five years, i hope that foundational infrastructure has been put in place and now we're at the point where we can be turning our sights to what comes after it. emily: i'm scheduling our catch up five years from now. [laughter] emily: john and patrick collison, thank you for joining us on the show. it has been great to have you. ♪

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