Stripe in aggressive frame of mind

Payments start-up, valued at $US5 billion, not keen to rest on its laurels, with co-founder John Collison saying there’s still plenty of work left to be done.

Stripe co-founder John Collison.

When you’re the founder of a start-up valued at $US5 billion, you’d feel pretty confident saying you’ve ‘made it’. For John Collison, co-founder of San Francisco-based online payments company Stripe, that’s not the case.

“I would take issue with the characterisation of having ‘made it’. If you look at how Stripe is different now versus when we launched, I think we’ve started scratching on the surface of the problem and we’ve started building out the company that will hopefully help solve it.

“As you start scratching away at the problem it just keeps becoming bigger and you keep realising there’s more to it. Rather than having ‘made it’, the fraction of the problem that we think we have solved keeps becoming smaller.”

The start-up has gone from a staff of 10 four years ago to 320 last year and hopes to double in the coming year.

“We’re going to try. Fingers crossed we’ll do it.”

Speaking at the Web Summit conference in Dublin, Collison discussed the company’s recent expansion into new markets including Brazil and Portugal, and said Stripe is “betting big on Europe”. The UK has just become its second biggest market and the company’s reach now extends to 22 different companies, including Australia.

The company officially opened its doors to Australian merchants in July last year and this week forged a partnership with Australian mobile invoicing start-up Invoice2go.

“Online commerce is still between 2 and 5 per cent of total commerce globally and we think that is going to grow massively and we need the tools in place to make that happen,” Collison said.

The company isn’t just expanding geographically, it’s also shifting from working solely with businesses to individuals. US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and Donald Trump all now use Stripe to accept campaign donations.

Collison also sees huge opportunity in the shift toward mobile browsing.

“I think there’s still a bunch of really interesting start-ups to be started as a result of this shift … Funding environments aside, I feel very confident that most of the interesting start-ups as a result of all these technology shifts have yet to be started.”

Giving some advice to the entrepreneurs attending the summit, Collison said not to be afraid to start a business that feels like it has no precedent.

Of starting Stripe with his brother a few years ago, he said “it felt odd to begin with, but when it started getting product-market fit, it was the most obvious thing in the world”.