202 Annual Letter to Stripe Users

Stripe’s slogan, “Increase the GDP of the internet” points at a far loftier vision and more ambitious goal than the mundanity of payment processing. And this is reinforced in both much of Patrick Collison’s projects outside of Stripe as well as initiatives like Stripe Press.

In 2005, sixteen-year-old Patrick Collison (Patrick is the cofounder of Stripe) did what many high school nerds do and participated in the Young Scientist Of The Year competition. As a young teen, he leveraged it to build his app "Isaac" (his entry to the competition). Isaac is what we would call today a chatbot….in 2005, chatbots weren't a thing….... See more

In a decade, Stripe has gone from accepting payments, which is now a commodity business, to providing an increasingly comprehensive suite of products that make it easy to start and run an online business.

Stripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is “ideas.”

Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others... See more