When Stripe moved into its first office in Palo Alto about 15 years ago, its founders (brothers Patrick and John Collison) did what every tiny startup does: They drove to Ikea to buy cheap desks and chairs. As they started to unload their haul in their new space, though, they unwittingly revealed one of the traits that would lead Stripe to revolutionize internet payments, company formation, and more.
After they put down some of the boxes, they started sprinting back to the car. Darragh Buckley, who was Stripe’s first employee and experienced this moment firsthand, recalls thinking, Did we park illegally?
“So what are you going to do?” he adds. “They’re running. ‘I guess I’m going to run too, because I’m not going to be the one person who’s not.’”
As Buckley, who worked at Stripe until 2016 and is now the founder and CEO of Increase—which offers ambitious technology companies such as Stripe, Gusto, and Ramp API-first banking, the backbone that enables them to process billons (or more) annually—explains: “It’s all a pleasantly shown sense of urgency. It’s not, ‘Why haven’t you done this yet?’ It’s like, ‘Oh, come on, let’s go do this together.’ . . . It matters whether it’s done now versus in an hour. John and Patrick are fantastically good at injecting urgency and not in an obnoxious way.”
That urgency is what has led Stripe to go from one product (enabling developers to start accepting online payments by adding just seven lines of code) to more than 30 and from zero to $1.9 trillion in payment volume worldwide in a decade and a half. It’s why Stripe was reported in mid-July to be buying PayPal, which would leave no doubt as to its leadership position in internet payments.
Yet, outside of the worlds of developers (or perhaps followers of the Collisons’ thought leadership), the extent of Stripe’s influence is not widely known. Maybe it’s weird to think of the world’s fourth most highly valued private company as underrated or unappreciated: Stripe’s $159 billion valuation puts it behind only Anthropic, OpenAI, and ByteDance among private companies. Yet Stripe is far less understood for a business that, again, facilitates $2 trillion in global commerce annually. And even that doesn’t capture the role it plays promoting entrepreneurship and startup creation.
Although Stripe is undeniably a “founder factory” akin to Palantir or SpaceX, which I’ve previously analyzed, the Collisons’ creation is also wholly distinct.
Stripe is an “idea factory.“
In this Fast Company exclusive, you’ll learn:
- Who the 268 Stripe alumni turned founders are, what they’re building now, the influence they’re having on the future of fintech and AI, and how their experiences at Stripe informed their own startups
- 33 facts that reveal the breadth of Stripe’s (and CEO Patrick Collison’s) influence
- How Stripe’s mission works as a talent magnet
- What Stripe looks for when hiring talent
- The Collisons’ behavioral trait that sets them apart from most billionaire founder-led companies—and defines Stripe’s culture
- Two ways that ideas “bubble up” at Stripe
- Why Stripe puts users first and how that empowers employees
Once you understand how Stripe thinks and operates, you can build your own idea factory, as well as get unparalleled insight into the future of global finance, AI, startup creation, climate tech, and more.
33 facts that showcase the extent of Stripe and CEO Patrick Collison’s influence
- OpenAI and Anthropic were both cofounded by early Stripe employees.
- Greg Brockman was Stripe employee No. 4 and went on to be its CTO before leaving in 2015 to cofound OpenAI.
- Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei joined Stripe in 2013 as a lead technical recruiter, employee no. 45. (She left in 2018 to work at OpenAI.)
- Stripe’s Atlas product, which makes it easy to incorporate a business and start accepting payments, now accounts for the creation of 25% of all Delaware corporations.
- Stripe is an unusually active investor in startups, especially for a private company, participating in 89 funding rounds of other startups in the last decade, according to PitchBook.
- This includes multiple investments into the corporate spend management platform Ramp ($40 billion valuation) and the British neobank Monzo ($6 billion valuation), both of which are Stripe customers.
- Stripe has become a major player in shaping the direction of climate tech. What started as a $1 million test known as Stripe Climate is now Frontier, a major funding mechanism for proving carbon removal technologies.
- Anthropic, Shopify (an early Stripe customer), Google’s parent company Alphabet, H&M, and Salesforce are among the companies that have joined Stripe in backing Frontier.
- In June 2026, Stripe participated in another $915 million commitment to Frontier, doubling its lifetime funding to more than $1.8 billion.
- As of July 2026, Frontier has granted almost $700 million to 53 projects.
- Until June, Frontier was led by Nan Ransohoff, a Stripe employee. She is now Stripe’s head of public goods.
- In June, Stripe announced Intercept, its latest effort to impact society. Intercept’s mission is to eradicate respiratory diseases, and Ransohoff is its co-head with Charlie Petty, a biotech investor who’s now also a Stripe employee.
- Intercept operates on a similar model as Frontier, offering funding to de-risk early projects with the idea that other investors will then come in and back proven approaches.
- It launched with a $500 million commitment from Stripe, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit Flu Lab, and individuals from Jane Street.
- Stripe has its own book publisher, Stripe Press, to promote progress.
- In Stripe’s 2025 annual letter, Stripe Press reported that it has sold more than 1 million books since it launched in 2018.
- It publishes titles meant to inspire entrepreneurial minds (Where Is My Flying Car?) as well as more tactical ones that offer advice on how to build enduring businesses (Scaling People by former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson).
- Stripe Press has also experimented with visual storytelling, producing the Stewart Brand documentary, We Are As Gods, and making original documentary shorts about tacit knowledge in a miniseries called Tacit.
- In 2022, Stripe acquired an ideas journal, Works in Progress, which also exists to promote, well, progress.
- Works in Progress considers its two major areas of focus to be cities and science.
- “The Housing Theory of Everything,” which presents the ripple effect of the lack of affordable housing in Western cities, and “AI Isn’t Replacing Radiologists” are representative of the ideas it promulgates.
- Both Collison brothers are minority financial backers of California Forever, the effort to build the next great American city halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.
- Patrick has financially backed California YIMBY, a nonprofit seeking to “undo 70 years of NIMBY land-use policy” in an effort to solve the state’s housing shortage.
- Patrick is a cofounder of Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization that “aims to accelerate scientific progress and understand the root causes of complex diseases.” (John is a financial backer but not a cofounder.)
- Arc, akin to Frontier and Intercept, relies in part on offering scientific investigators “long-term, no-strings-attached funding and the freedom to pursue bold ideas.”
- Arc’s two primary initiatives are to build a machine learning model for a virtual cell and an Alzheimer’s Disease one to develop new drugs that could address its root causes.
- In 2019, Patrick and the economist Tyler Cowen called for the development of Progress Studies, to understand better how progress happens so more of it can take place. It has inspired several think tanks devoted to the cause.
- The Federation of American Scientists directly credits the essay for its Progress Studies Policy Accelerator, part of its Day One Project to turn big ideas into impact.
- Roots of Progress Institute, whose mission is “to create a new philosophy of progress,” lists Patrick and Cowen as advisors.
- Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank for innovation policy, includes Stripe Press commissioning editor Tamara Winter as a board member.
- Patrick is also a partner in the Abundance & Growth fund at Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), a $120 million initiative that offers grants to groups advocating for housing policy reform, accelerating scientific progress, energy abundance, clinical trial reform, and the abundance and progress studies movements.
- Patrick and Cowen initiated “a call for New Aesthetics” in late 2025, seeking ideas that help answer the questions “what should the future look like?” and “what is new and also beautiful?”
- In May 2026, 28 individuals and groups received grants to pursue such projects as mobilizing support for burying more of San Francisco’s above-ground cables to beautify the city and creating AI-first computers.
All this societal ferment stems from Stripe’s success. But these activities that expand Stripe and the Collisons’ influence also emanate from how Stripe itself operates. That is the true source of its power.
Why Stripe’s mission is a talent magnet—and what Stripe wants in a great hire
Ben Guo wasn’t sure Stripe would be a fun place to work when he joined in 2015. “Payments seems boring from the outside,” he tells me. But the reason Guo stayed for eight and a half years, leaving in 2023, is that he quickly got obsessed with the big idea that drives Stripe: “It is a decades-long vision to build infrastructure for the internet economy,” explains Guo, who’s now cofounder and president of Zo Computer, which gives users an AI computer in the cloud in pursuit of his equally big goal to make computing fun again and usurp control from the techno-feudalist kings. “It just felt like this whole, very large civilizational project, which was cool.”
Guo is not alone in this belief. “Stripe could have been an ‘API for payments’ company,” says Taylor Francis, cofounder of Watershed, a platform for enterprises to manage their carbon footprints, and a Stripe alum who worked there between 2014 and 2019 and was part of the team that built Atlas. But, as he notes, “it’s easier to start a more ambitious company than a less ambitious company.”
By framing Stripe’s mission in what has now been refined as increasing the GDP of the internet, it “attracted people who may not have wanted to work on a payments API,” Francis continues, “but did want to dedicate their time, sweat, and ingenuity to economic infrastructure for the internet.”
Specifically, here’s what can get you hired at Stripe. “We’d be looking for someone that had a big vision, but who was also a doer,” says Anthony Kline, who started and led leadership recruiting at Stripe as well as working on M&A. He’s now a partner at TheGP and founder and co-lead of Xtripe Syndicate, a group of about 750 former Stripes, as employees are known, who back startups from fellow alums, though not exclusively. (The syndicate is a subset of a larger Stripe alumni Slack community of about 2,300 people.)
“[We wanted] folks that had driven critical-path, high-impact projects,” Kline continues, “and could go into absolute detail about what they did, how they did it, why they did it, who was involved, which other teams interacted, who the stakeholder was, what their motivation was. It did not allow for ambiguity or any lackadaisicalness when it came to why you were building something.”
That kind of talent, people who could “altitude shift” (Kline’s phrase) from strategic priorities to weedy details, combined with the company’s big vision, would unlock new products, revenue, and influence.
A winning ethos: ‘We haven’t won yet’
The other critical—and distinct—elements of Stripe’s culture are kindness and humility.
The idea of the benevolent billionaire may run counter to current public sentiment about the world’s richest business leaders, but numerous former employees referred to both the Collisons and the company culture in this way. “John and Patrick were not just brilliant, but really high EQ and thoughtful. They treated people well,” says Adam Stevenson, who worked at Stripe from 2015 to 2021 and is now president of Thatch, a personalized corporate health benefits platform. “The best people are drawn to a place where they can do their best work and have a high degree of psychological safety. Who doesn’t want to work in an environment like that?”
One key aspect of the Stripe culture, says Meghan Scanlon, who joined in 2020 as an early enterprise sales hire, is “‘we haven’t won yet.’ . . . There’s a constant state of improvement, iteration, and always learning.” Scanlon, who’s now CEO of Aleoop, an AI-native platform to connect frontline conversations to the teams prioritizing what to build next and why, adds that this mindset started “at the tippy top” and “permeated down in the best way possible to make sure that everyone stayed hungry and humble.”
However, one should not confuse kindness with softness. As you’ll see, Stripe’s workplace can sound intense at times. But just like the story of the Collisons running to their car to get the next set of furniture boxes, Stripe’s hunger for success is more cheerful than cutthroat.
Putting rigor into writing
Several Xtripes describe the company to me as being an “academic place” or “university-like.” When I reference the Collisons’ propensity to share books they’re reading on X or on podcasts, multiple people tell me that Patrick and John really do have stacks of books—and they’ve read them all, too.
This academic-like rigor manifests most clearly in Stripe’s writing culture, something the Collisons adapted from Amazon. The company’s prioritization of long-form writing also ties directly into its long-term vision.
“‘We want to build a 50-year company, and we need to document everything’” is what Patrick told Dave Nunez during his interview process in 2017. Nunez, who is a technical writer (and co-author of Docs for Developers), joined Stripe to build its internal and external documentation systems and now, as CEO of Falconer, has created a platform for companies to get the most out of their knowledge and documentation, including an AI-powered knowledge base. Stripe, which also values transparency, wants everything not only written down but accessible within the company.
When I ask Buckley, employee No. 1, if the goal was to have the equivalent of a dissertation that you’d ultimately defend, he tells me no. “It’s us against the problem,” he says. “It’s cooperative as opposed to antagonistic. There are prerequisites for that. You need to be in a highly trusted environment.” He likens it to Pixar’s brain trust, “experienced practitioners giving frank feedback on the progress,” Buckley adds. “You can do a lot more with early ideas in that environment than you can do with an antagonistic environment.”
Trusted and cooperative? Sure. Also: Brace yourself.
“Were you sweating and wringing your hands when you publish something? Absolutely,” recalls Kline, the investor. “It’s 1:00 AM or whatever, and you start seeing Patrick or John scrolling through your particular doc. It felt good that they were looking at it, but it was also nerve-wracking.” Nunez likens sharing your writing at Stripe to being “a puppy and you’re just getting smothered to death. People won’t leave you alone.”
But for Stripe, this process was crucial. “Preparing for quarterly business reviews or product things, you knew that what you put forward was going to be thought through very rigorously,” says Erika Reinhardt, an engineering manager from 2017 to 2019 and cofounder and executive director of Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit focused on shortening the timeline for managing major climate risks that currently lack comprehensive solutions such as methane emissions from livestock enteric methane and warming-induced emissions. “That then raises the bar across the organization of how much thought and effort people are putting into things, recognizing that it’s not just going to get the quick, easy stamp.”
Or, as Stripe Press’ commissioning editor Tamara Winter puts it: “Writing is just the most useful communication technology that has ever been created. It’s easy to bullshit your way through things if you never actually have to test the idea.”
Customer obsession feeds the idea machine
Stripe’s commitment to listening to customers informs employees’ thinking, writing, and ultimately, the ideas they pursue. “It’s crazy how rare that still is in tech,” says Falconer’s Nunez, who before starting his company “went to about 25 to 50 of my most curmudgeonly engineering friends” to test the idea. “There’s this Steve Jobs ethos where you’re better than the user.”
That isn’t how things work at Stripe. “Your users come first, Stripe comes second, and then your team, and then it’s, like, you and then it’s your manager,” says Zo’s Guo. He adds that this is also a factor in Stripe’s culture. “By talking to users and attracting people who are into talking to users, you attract people who are generally kind and nice.”
Anurag Goel, who was hired as employee No. 8 after being an early beta user of Stripe, sharing feedback, and even dropping the product to go with a rival payments processor before he ultimately joined the team, says the key wasn’t just talking to customers but listening to the right customers. “We developed a culture of recognizing the most valuable customers, even if they were not paying us a lot,” says Goel, who’s now CEO of Render, which operates a cloud platform for developers to host and scale applications and agents. “The value that they provided was sometimes that they were an influencer in their community, or they just gave us really useful feedback because they were using Stripe for a use case that was still nascent but that we knew was going to become big.” Render brings this idea forward by providing personalized support even to the free users of its cloud platform.
This obsession, though, requires constant vigilance. “A lot of us would get messages in the middle of the night,” Nunez recalls, “some Twitter egg with no followers is complaining about Stripe. We would be expected not only to address the issue if it was legit but respond to this person.” The goal was to find and deal with these complaints before Patrick dropped the link in Slack asking you to look into it.
Sometimes, the job at Stripe is to take the role of the user yourself, writing what are known as friction logs. “You go through some workflow like a customer would,” Nunez explains, sharing that an example would be something like sending an invoice from Stripe. “You’d start from signing up for Stripe,” he says. “There are dozens of steps between point A and point B. You would write a memo of every single piece of friction that you experienced along the way.”
Every identified pain point would not only be addressed but they could also create insights into what to build next. Aleoop’s Scanlon describes her sales role at Stripe as being “a good detective,” piecing together sometimes disparate clues to figure out how the company could solve a customer’s payment challenges. As she won deals, “because we were at the core of seeing payments in and out,” she says, “we could move up the stack, which is, Hey, what does it look like before that customer’s customer decides to pay?” That allowed Stripe to innovate the shopping cart experience, the conversion funnel, the checkout flow, and payment options.
Stripe, Scanlon adds, could also go “all the way down the stack to the back office.” Meaning, it could automate such things as revenue reconciliation and subscription logic for customers. “There was a very natural progression of expanding the platform with payments still at the core.”
The obsession with listening to customers combined with the writing-first culture where all that customer feedback got turned into written reports shared with the whole company “created this awesome dynamic,” says Nunez. “Every other company I worked for, it’s my opinion versus your opinion, and the person with the best persuasive argument or who’s the most senior gets the decision made. At Stripe, you’re only arguing over your interpretation of what the user says. You have these reports, you have the data, and if that was unclear, you would have to go talk to more users or talk to the right users.”
From ideas to products
“Stripe is a place that is excited about ideas, new verticals, and ways to push the product and the company,” says Raylene Yung, who started the volunteer organization U.S. Digital Response during Covid to help the government with tech talent and then worked in the Biden administration in a number of roles. The process is “very bottoms up,” adds Ryan Wang, CEO of Assembled, which uses AI to empower and scale customer support teams and who built the first machine learning system for Stripe’s customer support. “Nobody asked us to work on this customer support project.”
But support was becoming a big problem as the company grew. He recalls once going to the Collisons’ apartment not far from Stripe’s San Francisco offices to process customer requests and another time when 10 to 20 people gathered on the office’s top floor to respond to support issues. “I was new, and it probably took me an hour to do one ticket,” Wang recalls. “Then you see Patrick slam his laptop down. ‘Alright, I did 20,’ and he walks off to do something else.”
When Jeremy Hoon (who worked at Stripe from 2013 to 2022, built its Capital lending business, and is now working on a new startup) tells me initiatives like Capital started as “small teams,” he’s not exaggerating. Typically, these new products would be teams of two or three, akin to a startup with multiple cofounders.
“A lot of things are done by very few people,” says Yung, who now sits on the board of multiple startups in the civics and climate sectors. “You might say, ‘Oh wow, there’s so many projects.’ But then on the inside, you’d realize some of them are one-person, two-person [teams], so you could afford to have a lot of these projects.” Someone has to keep working on the core products, and the best way to get a spot on a hot new product team or to start your own was to be great at your current job.
This lean approach could only last so long before even the most crack team would need more support. “I was brought in with huge mandates and very little resources,” says Nunez of his role working on documentation. He had two technical writers during his first year working on internal docs, “but it wasn’t enough,” he says. “We had really bad tools. We didn’t have enough resources to build our own or make them better. So I ended up putting all the resources on the external documentation for a bit, despite my manager at the time saying, Patrick’s not going to like this” because he knew Patrick cared about internal docs.
Nunez ignored the internal doc effort as the company grew from 500 to 7,500 people. “That was when it became untenable,” he says. Nunez had compiled the evidence of how their tools were hurting productivity: New engineers were taking longer to merge their first lines of code and documents, which were spread across seven or eight programs, were a top complaint in a quarterly survey of developers. He got the engineers and technical writers he needed to build Trailhead, which allowed engineers to find what they needed among the company’s then half-million docs. “There was somebody who had told me early on that Patrick and John have to feel the pain themselves a lot of times in order to make a decision, and then you’ll get resources,” he says. “You won’t get punished for letting them feel the pain. You’ll get rewarded” with the resources you need. The Collisons, he says, “would seek pain,” noting that Patrick would do rotations on real teams.
The Collisons, says Michael Manapat, who was among the first 50 employees at the company when he started in 2013 and is now CEO of Rowspace, which builds AI infrastructure for asset management firms so they can leverage their institutional data to make better decisions with AI, can be “extremely demanding on outcomes.” Yet they do so without micromanaging. “I was always impressed at how carefully they were thinking about things I was working on and how specific and granular the feedback would be,” he says. “But it was all in service of, ‘Now you go run this thing and make it the best version of what it could be.’”
That freedom has helped many Stripes to become founders. But really, when you’re working at a company which wants to create more entrepreneurs and build tools to support them, the whole culture fuels that spirit. “At Stripe, you were behind the scenes looking at what was being built, but not just what was being built, but which business models and financial incentives are really working,” says Thatch’s Stevenson.
“You’re just exposed to this endless kaleidoscope of companies of all shapes and sizes that are coming out of the woodwork,” says Zo’s Guo. “Often, you’re talking directly to these teams about what they’re doing. It sparks a lot of creativity on what’s possible.”