Stripe thread (III)

1. Stripe's vision goes beyond just that of a payments company and im fascinated to see what new features emerge after they "solve" payments a decade frm now. This is a thread on their vision

2. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/patrick-collison/
Vision is still to solve all the payment issues that exists today. But on a second level, it's this:
"there’s maybe just like a deeper question of what determines how many firms there are in the world. And what determines the character of those firms?

3. Are they doing something innovative or novel, or are they doing something prosaic that has existed for a long time? What determines who starts and why and the probability of survival? What determines the growth trajectory and the expansion rate into other markets and other

4. products and so on? And I think part of the Stripe hypothesis is that things like that, that … one would think are very difficult to move are actually movable. For example, 60% of companies started on Atlas say they wouldn't have existed without it.

5. If Atlas is causing x number of new businesses to start, then impact to economy is huge. Similarly, if stripe can create products that help businesses sell 2x as many global markets than before, then that's a big deal. Stanford study showed that by teaching management

6. concepts to India firms, that group saw dd gains in revenue above control group of firms that were not taught. So there's this low hanging fruit of just passing on this management concepts, best practices.
"When we think about Stripe and what to do in the future and the

7. possibilities that exist, and so on, it’s much more I think about how do we perturb this overall system to move some of these macro outcome measures, like number of technology firms started, survival rate of these companies, expansion rate of these companies, magnitude of

8. the value provided to the end users, consumers/customers and so on, and mediated by payments as this foundational layer because it’s something every business necessarily has and because it gives us good understanding of the dynamics within the business and so on."

9. Now tie it to the ambition of "increasing the GDP of the internet" and doing it by "levelling the playing field to enable entrepreneurs everywhere". It is not hard to see how stripe likely be more than just a payments company decades down the road.

10. This to me is the biggest contrast between it and the other payment focused companies. @collision spoke abt how 1960 engineers didn't envision chips being used to create realistic games today because the first order thinking is always what chip power enables in

11. terms of today's applications. from interviews, it is clear the brothers are not just thinking about what their payment solutions can enable in terms of today's Internet businesses. But also looking to create solutions that enable other ecosystem to blossom, new biz

End/ to evolve. It definitely sounds like they will keep evolving towards what @patrickc calls the second level problem which is beyond payments. No idea what it is, but certainly exciting to track the company's progress over next couple decades