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Stripe's John Collison: You Can't Skip Steps. Every Giant Company Had to Be Small First.

By John Collison · Startup Growth · 2 min read

Startups have powerful path dependence. You're not just trying to arrive at the final form — you're trying to get all the intermediate forms in the chemical reaction that gets you there.

Key Points

Vision = the things you won't compromise on. Everything else — listen to the market.
Startups have path dependence. You need every intermediate stage to get to the final form.
Microsoft couldn't have started as enterprise. Uber couldn't have started with ridesharing.

You're not just trying to arrive at the final form. You're trying to get all the intermediate forms in the chemical reaction that gets you there.

Vision vs. Iteration Is Not a Trade-Off

Collison: There's a lot of debate — lean startup versus vision-driven product. To me that's not a trade-off at all. You need a small set of things — the vision — that you're not willing to compromise on.

You can even probably define vision as the things that you're not willing to change. With the remainder, if the market is telling you you're wrong, you really need to listen to that data.

You can define vision as the things you're not willing to change. Everything else — listen to the market.

The Chemical Reaction

Collison: Startups have a really powerful path dependence. It's not just a question of arriving at the final answer. You're not just trying to arrive at the final form for your product — you're trying to get all the intermediate forms in the chemical reaction that gets you there.

You need all the intermediate forms in the chemical reaction that gets you to the final product.

Microsoft and Uber Couldn't Skip Steps

Collison: Microsoft started building BASIC compilers in the hobbyist market. They couldn't have stayed there. But they also couldn't have started as an enterprise company — no one would have bought from two random college kids. They had to become each of their stages to jump to the next level.

Uber is the same — if they had just started with UberX ridesharing, they probably would have been shut down quickly. They needed to start with the limo business, get to scale as a well-known service, and then they could start doing ridesharing.

Microsoft had to become each stage to jump to the next. Uber needed limos before ridesharing was possible.

Stripe's Vision

Collison: In Stripe's case, we were really focused on instant onboarding and building a developer-friendly tool as our path to market. That was stuff we were not willing to compromise on. If that wasn't a valid way to build this company, I'm not sure we would have been able to pivot out of that.

But in every other area, we explored the market. We kept running into feedback from customers that ended up being really critical to allow the product to succeed.

Instant onboarding. Developer-friendly tools. That was stuff we would not compromise on.