How Hard Can It Be?
Collison: John — my co-founder and also my brother — we went to Startup School in October 2009. We'd sold some apps in the App Store and it had been incredibly easy. And we're reflecting on how it was so easy to sell apps and so monstrously difficult to do anything involving transactions or commerce on the broader internet.
Walking home from dinner, I remember John turning to me and arguing — we should just go build a prototype of this. How hard can it be? 'How hard could it be' — the start of many a billion-dollar company.
'How hard can it be?' — the start of many a billion-dollar company. Here we are, a decade later.
Facebook Wasn't Obviously the Thing Either
Collison: We weren't initially sure how seriously to take it. I always love the story that Facebook was not the only company they were working on — there was also that peer-to-peer file sharing thing. Facebook had launched at Harvard in February '04. That subsequent summer, 6 months later, it was not obvious that Facebook was the thing to be working on.
Similarly with Stripe — even once we built this little prototype that we thought had promise, it wasn't obviously a great idea.
6 months after Facebook launched, it wasn't obvious it was the thing. Stripe was similar.
A Little Pond That Was Actually an Ocean
Collison: We didn't know if we should raise money. We were in school. Was this going to be a serious thing? So that summer of 2010, I decided to work on Stripe as our bootstrapped internship.
Over the course of working on it, we shifted from thinking about it as this nice little tool that makes developers' lives easier — to realizing that when you survey the broader landscape, the whole edifice is broken. What we thought was a little pond was actually a much larger ocean.
What we thought was a little pond was actually a much larger ocean. The whole edifice is broken.
Drop Out and Raise Money
Collison: That summer we made two decisions. To drop out of school — or as our mom continues to prefer we call it, to take a leave of absence. And then we had to go raise some initial money from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel and Sequoia and a couple of others.
A lot of really good ideas don't seem particularly great or big upfront. Certainly speaking from personal experience, Stripe did not.
A lot of good ideas don't seem great upfront. Stripe did not.