Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, released its annual letter from Cofounders John and Patrick Collison.
The letter “takes stock of Stripe’s business, reflects on the past year, and shares the Collisons’ views on the trends shaping the online economy.”
Collectively, businesses built on Stripe “processed more than $817 billion in total volume in 2022, up 26% from the prior year.” (E-commerce, an imperfect but relevant comparison, grew 7% last year.)
This is “a significant deceleration from the breakneck growth that we saw during 2020 and 2021.” At the same time, they are “as confident as ever in the internet economy’s long-term prospects, and they’re heartened by the steady advancement of the millions of businesses they serve in the face of banking crises, war, pestilence, energy shocks, supply chain issues, inflation, and broader volatility.”
More than 100 companies now “handle more than $1 billion in payments with Stripe every year.”
As mentioned in the letter:
“This set continues to grow rapidly, expanding by more than 50% each year since 2018. Some of this expansion is about established titans, but most isn’t. Part of the joy of working at Stripe is partnering with early startups on their way to meteoric success. Of these 100+ category leaders, more than half have grown their revenue 10x while on Stripe, and over a quarter have grown 100x. Many now-household names, such as Instacart, Substack, and DoorDash (originally as “Palo Alto Delivery”) charged their customers with us from the very beginning.”
As noted in the update:
“In total, the number of new businesses coming to Stripe increased by 19% in 2022, with an average of more than 1,000 new ventures launched every day. While the US is currently our largest market, 55% of the businesses that joined Strripe last year were based outside of the US. Stripe now supports businesses in more than 50 countries.”
Their first operating principle is “Users First.”
Part of the value of “serving smart customers is that just listening to suggestions is a surprisingly effective product strategy.” Last year, substantially “informed by user feedback, they shipped 244 new user-facing features and 336 API updates.”
Their mission is “to grow the GDP of the internet.”
They are “unabashed boosters of entrepreneurship and capitalism, and think that a more vibrant internet economy will bring broadly-felt prosperity.”
Stripe tries to help in four primary ways
- Increasing the rate of new business creation by lowering the cost and complexity of starting a business
- Helping established enterprises adapt to the internet
- Reducing impediments to payments, especially across borders, to unlock more economic activity. (There is a surprising amount of low-hanging fruit here that we’ll get into further down.)
- Lowering the costs of scaling by providing simple, reliable, secure, and developer-friendly APIs and services.
