Stripe

Shaan Puri applied to two jobs when he moved to Silicon Valley. He got one of them. The one he did not get was Stripe.

This detail, shared almost in passing, contains a quietly devastating insight about how wealth is distributed. The difference between getting the Stripe job and not getting the Stripe job, for someone who arrived in Silicon Valley in 2014 or 2015, could easily be the difference between being worth $50 million in stock and being worth nothing in stock. Same person. Same resume. Same city. Different outcome on a single interview.

On My First Million, Stripe appears not as a company to analyze but as a kind of gravitational constant — the invisible infrastructure that makes everything else in the internet economy possible. When Sam and Shaan discuss Shopify, they are discussing a company built on Stripe. When they discuss SaaS metrics, they are discussing revenue that flows through Stripe. When they discuss any online business at all, Stripe is the plumbing.

The Job That Got Away

The story is brief but Shaan tells it with the self-awareness of someone who has processed it fully. “I came out to Silicon Valley, I applied to two places: the place I’m at now and the other place I applied to was Stripe. Those were the only two jobs I’d ever applied to in my life and I didn’t get the Stripe job” (The Crazy Story of Google’s $7 Billion Building).

He shared this in the context of a broader conversation about luck and proximity — how being in the right room matters, how a single connection or a single rejection can redirect an entire career. The Stripe rejection pushed Shaan toward the entrepreneurial path that eventually led to selling Bebo and starting MFM. Had he gotten the job, he would likely be wealthy in a different way: rich from stock options rather than from building and selling businesses.

The counterfactual is worth sitting with because it illustrates something the show returns to frequently. Career outcomes are not just a function of skill. They are a function of which doors open and which doors close, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the person standing in front of them.

Two Brothers and the Boring Revolution

Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in 2010 when they were 22 and 19 years old, respectively. They were Irish immigrants who had already sold a company (Auctomatic, an auction management tool) to a Canadian firm for a reported $5 million.

Their insight was that online payments were unnecessarily difficult. If you wanted to accept credit card payments on your website in 2010, you needed a merchant account, a payment gateway, PCI compliance certification, and weeks of integration work. Stripe replaced all of that with seven lines of code.

Seven lines of code. That was the entire product at launch. You copied the code into your website, and Stripe handled everything else — the credit card processing, the fraud detection, the regulatory compliance, the payouts to your bank account. The idea was so simple that it was almost embarrassing, which is precisely why no one had built it yet. The payments industry was dominated by legacy companies that had no incentive to make things simpler.

This is the pattern MFM celebrates most: a genuinely important problem that everyone assumed was solved because the existing solutions were “good enough.” Stripe’s founding thesis was that “good enough” in payments was actually terrible, and that making it genuinely easy would unlock an enormous amount of economic activity that was being blocked by friction.

Developer-First as Business Model Innovation

Stripe’s most important strategic decision was not about technology. It was about audience. Rather than selling to business executives or finance teams, Stripe sold to developers. The seven-line code snippet was not just a product feature. It was a go-to-market strategy.

Developers are an unusual customer base because they make buying decisions based on product quality rather than sales relationships. If Stripe’s API was elegant and well-documented, developers would choose it over competitors regardless of which payment company had the better sales team or the fancier conference booth. This meant Stripe could acquire customers without a traditional enterprise sales force — a structural cost advantage that compounded over time.

The developer-first approach has since become a standard playbook in B2B technology. Shopify, Twilio, and dozens of other companies adopted versions of the same strategy. But Stripe was among the first to prove that building for developers first, business buyers second, could create a hundred-billion-dollar company.

The Picks and Shovels Thesis

Stripe is the clearest embodiment of what the show calls the “picks and shovels” business — the company that sells tools to the people chasing the gold rush rather than chasing the gold itself. During the e-commerce boom, thousands of companies competed for customers. Stripe processed payments for all of them. During the SaaS explosion, thousands of companies sold subscriptions. Stripe managed the billing for many of them.

The economics of this position are remarkable. Stripe takes a small percentage of every transaction. As the internet economy grows, Stripe’s revenue grows proportionally — without Stripe having to do anything differently. The company does not need to acquire new customers to grow. It needs its existing customers to grow. This is the definition of a business model aligned with its customers’ success.

Sam and Shaan discuss this dynamic across many episodes without always naming Stripe specifically. When they talk about boring businesses that compound quietly, when they talk about infrastructure companies that benefit from every trend simultaneously, when they talk about the power of sitting at a chokepoint in the value chain — they are describing the Stripe model.

The Valuation Question

Stripe’s private valuation has fluctuated dramatically — from $95billionin2021to$50 billion in 2023 and back up in subsequent rounds. This volatility in a company that processes over $1 trillion in payments annually illustrates something MFM discusses often: private market valuations are stories, not facts. The underlying business — its revenue, its growth rate, its customer retention — changed far less than the valuation suggested.

For the MFM audience, the Stripe valuation story is a useful corrective to the tendency to equate a company’s worth with its last funding round. The business was always excellent. The price the market attached to it was a function of interest rates, investor sentiment, and the broader tech cycle — none of which had anything to do with whether Stripe’s API was still the best way to accept payments online.

What Stripe Teaches

Stripe appears in the MFM universe as proof of three principles:

1. Boring problems are the best problems. Payments processing was not exciting. It was not the kind of business that generates magazine covers or conference keynotes. It was unglamorous infrastructure. It is also worth more than almost every glamorous consumer company ever built.

2. Sell to builders. The developer-first strategy created a self-reinforcing adoption cycle. Developers chose Stripe because the product was better. The companies those developers built grew on Stripe. When those companies hired more developers, those developers already knew Stripe. The flywheel was built into the go-to-market from day one.

3. The chokepoint is the business. Sitting at the intersection of every online transaction is a structurally superior position to competing in any single vertical. Stripe does not need to pick winners among its customers. It wins when any of them win.

Sources

• The Crazy Story of Google’s $7 Billion Building — Shaan’s Stripe job rejection, luck and proximity

See Also

• Shopify — Fellow infrastructure company, built on Stripe
• Boring Businesses — The thesis that unglamorous businesses compound best
• SaaS Metrics — The revenue model Stripe enables and processes
• OpenAI — Parallel “platform for builders” positioning
• Network Effects — The developer adoption flywheel