Patrick Collison. Illustration by Mike Sullivan.
It’s a quirk of Silicon Valley that one of the most seemingly uninteresting businesses is run by one of the most interesting people.
Ten years into running Stripe, its co-founder and CEO, Patrick Collison, still has a voracious appetite for just about everything related to the future of technology—including his payment company.
And while reliably moving around money isn’t as flashy as flying cars or rocket ships, Stripe, which has skyrocketed to a private company valuation of more than $35 billion, is definitely important. If there’s anything this pandemic has shown, it’s the power of digital commerce and the demand for the tools that enable it.
It’s one of the reasons why, while Uber and Airbnb were the poster children for the last wave of the private tech boom, I believe Stripe and other digital infrastructure companies like it will emerge as the next major hits.
But this week, when I sat across the Zoom from 31-year-old Collison, I found a lot more to discuss than payments.
