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Why Patrick Collison Refuses to Take Stripe Public

By Patrick Collison · Fundraising · 2 min read

We're going to hold off for as long as possible from the public markets. Being a public company certainly does not stop you from taking a long-term time horizon. But it does make it more difficult.

Key Points

Stripe is holding off on going public as long as possible — growing the GDP of the internet takes time
Being public makes sense at a plateau — Stripe hasn't hit one yet
If public markets make long-term innovation harder, that's bad for the country and bad for investors

Being a public company certainly does not stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon. But it does make it more difficult.

Hold Off as Long as Possible

Collison: We're going to hold off for as long as possible from partaking in the public markets. As we think about growing the GDP of the internet — there are so many things we want to invest in on that front that are just going to take a long time to come to fruition.

Being a public company certainly does not stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon. But it does make it more difficult.

We're holding off as long as possible. Growing the GDP of the internet takes a long time.

Amazon Had a Tough Time

Collison: There are good examples of companies that have maintained long-term time horizons while public. Amazon being the most famous. But if you look at Amazon's early history, they had an incredibly turbulent time for their first couple of years as a public company.

Now Amazon is up 50% a year. It all looks great. But they really had a tough time in the beginning.

Amazon's early days as a public company were incredibly turbulent. It all looks great now.

Go Public at a Plateau

Collison: I think being a public company makes sense when you've reached some point of stability, some plateau — you've done the stuff you initially set out to. We feel like we haven't. We're still very early in this trajectory.

We work with startups and technology companies — they themselves have lengthy trajectories. When you're building infrastructure, there are just long time horizons involved.

Going public makes sense at a plateau. We feel like we haven't hit one. Still very early.

The Liquidity Question

Collison: This is a big question across the industry. What are the points between being fully private with no access to liquidity and fully public? There are so many constituencies — not just here in Silicon Valley, but regulators, most notably the SEC.

For the first time, there seems to be a real appetite in many places to figure out a better model. My hope is that some new models come into existence that enable companies to broaden their investor base and provide liquidity to insiders and early investors.

What are the points between fully private and fully public? For the first time, there's appetite to figure it out.

Bad for the Country

Collison: To the extent that the public markets do make it harder to take a really long-term time horizon around innovation — that's bad for the country overall. It's in fact even bad for investors long-term.

If public markets make long-term innovation harder, that's bad for the country. Even bad for investors.