Finally met my hero Patrick Collison founder of Stripe
✨ Finally met my hero @patrickc, founder of 💳 @Stripe
He saw I was in Los Angeles and invited me for dinner so we flew to San Francisco of course!
He has two extremely cute 🐶 fluffy dogs and a very beautiful house
I keep realizing that unlike the cultural tropes and what the media makes you think, usually the most successful people in the world are often also the most friendly and humble
Patrick is so curious and chill and he asks you so much about your life and he's really just intrinsically interested in people I think, he wants to learn about everything from everybody
We talked a lot about digital nomading and indie hacking, and he told me back when he and his brother started Stripe, they were broke and so wanting to save money, they flew to Buenos Aires and just worked on laptops in cafes all day and lived off $10/day. And that's where they built the first prototype of Stripe. And this must have been in 2010, so they're like O.G. digital nomads!
He doesn't just learn from people: his living room is stacked with books he's reading, like A LOT, it's like he wants to suck up all the knowledge in the world and learn to give him new insights about the future
He doesn't have to be this way, he's already successful. But he managed to keep things together really well considering, and stay very chill and grounded, it's very special to see
Stripe has been a big part of changing my life, because before they existed it was VERY difficult to accept payments on your website. You'd have to do a contract to get a merchant account and it was something only big companies would do. Just when I started making startups ~2014 Stripe rolled out in the Netherlands, so I could start accepting payments online. Since then millions of $$$ have gone through Stripe to my bank account. I'm not sure if my life would have been the same without it.
Stripe also made it possible for me to work the way I do: quickly test and validate new ideas for startups as MVPs: landing pages with some functionality, and then a big [ BUY ] button that would take people's $$$. If enough people paid for something, I knew I had made something with demand and I could keep working on it and iterate it into a real business. If not, I could refund customers and shut things down just as quick and move on to the next project.
When we met he also asked me radically honest feedback on what to improve. I told him to keep Stripe simple to use for developers like me, to get out of our way and just make it work. People like me need Stripe to be a simple API with logical common sense defaults, because we don't have resources to spend days on payment code. We want to ship things fast.
And everyone knows Stripe has become more complex because it has bigger customers now and they need custom features. He is very aware of that and wants to improve Stripe for indie hackers and SMBs ($1M-$50M/y)
He's the only billionaire founder in the world who has been and still is in my DMs every time I have a problem and he tries to solve it himself which is very special and shows how much he still cares about his product every day I think
P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
