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.

“This is something I was thinking about when I was interviewing Patrick. In some sense, when he started Stripe, payments was a super crowded industry. There’s PayPal, there’s obviously Visa, Mastercard. But, in another sense, there’s something strange in terms of domains you think of as crowded and totally competitive. There are usually totally obv... See more

Only after CZ turned him down did Sam decide to create an exchange himself. The idea was simple: the first crypto futures exchange that was well enough designed that it would serve the needs not just of crypto people but also of big professional traders, like Jane Street. Still, Sam was deeply uneasy about it. “We were going to build a product that

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Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah. We've gotten quite a lot of VC calls. But one of the things we're seeing that we really don't care too much for is that way too many companies are taking money when they don't need it. And the whole idea we had was that having too little money is a great way of getting great product, because it's a way to get focused. So w

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