Hasnain says:

I learnt a lot about processes, management, and business from this one.

The most interesting quote, here, though, is where the article quotes one of the Stripe cofounders:

"When we started, a lot of people told us that payments is a scale business. You'll never make it son. And only the very large companies can survive. We were like, No, you don't realize things are different." Now, that we've gotten a chance to actually become familiar in our operating. We're like, "Wow, this really is a scale business." In that, as you look at what's required in operating, payments is a business where you make literally pennies on a per transaction basis and you have to have an enormous number of them to actually be able to operate with any modicum of profitability. And you would not believe, I mean, it's fairly obvious that it's a fixed cost business and then you need to get enough business flowing through you to make the economics work. I think what's interesting is as things have moved online, the fixed costs have gone way up compared to what was needed to run a domestic only payments business. If we think about just again, going back to your "invest like the best premium model" where you got access to exclusive content, for smart people, the Patrick interviews are only available on the paid product. And so as we think about that business, and again, just Stripe to do to unlock the payment system for that. We have engineers who are based in Singapore. They have built custom integrations with the local Malaysian bank transfer system. And they actually are now friends with the people, the engineers at the local Malaysian bank transfer system, because it's still work in flies itself. And so they're kind of working with them on some of the functionality that's needed. And so that way, if you have someone, a listener who's from Malaysia, they can pay the way that they're used to doing so, not just with a credit card, but with a bank account in Malaysia. Stripe has engineers in Ireland who are similarly a French local card switch is actually different to visa Mastercards and you need to be able to support that, to be able to properly serve French customers.

And so we've just been shocked, the degree to which, if you want to be able to reach every global customer, there really are very large economies of scale with that."

Posted on 2021-09-14T01:41:51+0000