Like entrepreneurs everywhere, the Collisons must navigate this new normal without slowing down. The shockwaves from such instability are being felt by businesses big and small-and Stripe, which powers transactions for everything from delayed Peloton bike orders to hard-to-find baby formula, has a front-row seat. The S&P 500 is off nearly 20% so far in 2022 big tech concerns like Stripe’s public peers have fared even worse. The ongoing pandemic, a brutal land war in Europe, a global energy crisis (see page 102) and a busted supply chain have largely made such concerns moot. The job is harder today than a year ago, when the biggest question about Stripe was when it would finally go public. “The scope of the job doesn’t change that.” “We’re not a glamorous business, just an infrastructure company that hopefully we’ll be able to compound for a long time,” says Patrick, his short cropped red hair sun-bleached after his rare week off. They also still personally fill out “friction logs” of any user-unfriendly moments they encounter using Stripe and, in Patrick’s case, occasionally dive into the code itself. At the heart of it all: Patrick and John Collison, who still review every product that goes out the door, an act akin to scientific “core sampling” or restaurant owner–style kitchen visits, depending on which brother you ask. Stripe now offers a broad suite of financial tools to handle everything from DoorDash driver payouts to taxes for Duolingo in-app payments and subscriptions to the Atlantic. The Collisons have come a long way from the precocious boy wonders who, a dozen years ago, wowed Silicon Valley with just nine lines of code-which was all developers needed to copy and paste to enable credit card payments on their sites. Levon Biss for Forbes Ethan Pines for Forbes "We meet in the middle where Patrick and I might end up debating products," John says. The younger Collison works with sales and marketing more introverted Patrick with engineering and finances. (Forbes estimates Patrick and John Collison each own about 10% of Stripe, making them worth $9.5 billion each.) That puts Stripe behind only TikTok owner Bytedance, Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Shein and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the title of the world’s most valuable startup. Its eye-popping financials explain why investors including Fidelity and Ireland’s sovereign development fund poured an additional $600 million into Stripe in March 2021, raising its total funding to date to $2.4 billion and valuing it at $95 billion. Stripe declined to comment on its figures. And, unusually for a unicorn that’s still growing fast, Stripe finished the year with hundreds of millions in profit on an Ebitda basis, two sources add. Net revenue, which excludes the cut Stripe passes along to partners like Visa and Chase, reached nearly $2.5 billion. Its gross revenue, still mostly the 2% to 3% it collects on such volume, reached nearly $12 billion in 2021, according to sources with knowledge of its financials, up about 60% year over year. The company, dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, processed $640 billion in payments last year across 50 countries. “Everyone just needs to be a grownup and well-behaved about it.”Įven so, such “front page tests” of Stripe’s ethical reputation, as Patrick calls incidents that have the potential to bubble up in the popular press, will only prove more common as Stripe transitions from startup darling to tech dreadnought. “We will compete with a bunch of companies, and we’ll partner with a bunch,” John says with a shrug.
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