Payment infrastructure and APIs for developers were so obviously needed by any business operating on the internet—where there are tens of millions of developers and this is one of the top needs—that Stripe's founders were initially discouraged when searching for such a service and finding it didn't exist, suspecting some latent force must be preventing its creation.
causalpending
Speaker
Patrick CollisonEvidence Quote
“it just seemed so strange that something with stripes character didn't exist in that we really looked for a stripe before we uh before we started it as an it just it felt that it must be the case that there is some service some company somewhere offering infrastructure and apis and payments and economic tools that are straightforward to use for a developer right i mean this is one of the sort of top needs that any business operating on the internet has arguably by definition a sort of a business on the internet uh must have access to these tools uh there are tens of millions of developers operating on the internet and so just given the magnitude of that market and the sort of obviousness of the business model it really felt like this had to exist”
Source
Patrick Collison: Philosophies for Running Stripe, Hiring, Decision Making, and Reading— The Knowledge Project PodcastCreated: 8/10/2026, 11:17:01 PM
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