{"id":39482,"date":"2023-10-20T15:02:47","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/four-tips-for-building-a-startup-from-the-founder-of-6-billion-tech-giant-stripe-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:02:47","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:02:47","slug":"four-tips-for-building-a-startup-from-the-founder-of-6-billion-tech-giant-stripe-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/four-tips-for-building-a-startup-from-the-founder-of-6-billion-tech-giant-stripe-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Four tips for building a startup from the founder of $6 billion tech giant Stripe – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/div>\n

Brothers John and Patrick Collison have grown payments platform Stripe to a $6 billion ($US5 billion) tech company operating in over 20 countries with 520 employees, and remain behind the wheel of the business.<\/p>\n

The company has raised $US300 million in the last seven years, and boasts the likes of Twitter, Shopify and UNICEF as customers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you had dropped me into managing 500 people overnight that would\u2019ve been quite an experience,\u201d John Collison tells StartupSmart.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cBut Stripe went from one to two to four to eight people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collison says he has four key tips for budding founders and entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

1. Look for people outside your \u201ctype\u201d<\/h3>\n

Many new founders look for the \u201cyoung, very ambitious go-get-em types\u201d or the \u201creally experienced, stable, done-it-befores\u201d, he says, when really they should opt for a mix.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s necessary to have the experience and the people who\u2019ve done it before and the people who have those qualifications and then it\u2019s really healthy for the culture to have the ambitious, disruptive mindset who want to flip over some tables and make change happen,” Collison says.<\/p>\n

He\u00a0says Stripe wasn’t immune from this in its early days.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fifth guy we hired became our COO and he was our first hire who was not a software engineer,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had gotten introduced through a mutual connection, an angel investor in Stripe, he was very understanding and he was like, \u2018guys, you\u2019re being idiots and you need to hire this guy\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe ended up being hugely impactful on the business.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. Review how you hire at every step<\/h3>\n

At the start, Collison says sticking to software engineers was the best recruitment call.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time you grow by 25%, you want to be standing back and reevaluating what talent you\u2019re looking for, what talent you need,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we\u2019re only two people, we were right to be hiring only software engineers because that was the biggest challenge, that was what needed to be built.”<\/p>\n

But as a startup grows, this\u00a0will change with time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWouldn\u2019t it seem really unlikely if the source of hiring you needed when you\u2019re two people is the same as the source of hire you need when you\u2019re 20 people, is the same as the hire you need when you\u2019re 200 people?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

“That seems vanishingly unlikely to me.”<\/p>\n

3. Own your\u00a0culture<\/h3>\n

Creating startup culture requires proactive effort and a dedicated approach from those on top, and for Collison and his team it meant really reflecting on what \u201cmakes Stripe Stripe\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are the beliefs we hold that are different to other companies, how do we act differently to other companies?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took the ways in which we believe we were different and then committed them to paper and started holding ourselves to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

These guiding principles influence how Stripe is run, who they hire and who they appoint to be project leaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re falling short on those standards, people correctly call us out on them,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Without\u00a0a real set of\u00a0guiding principles, Collison says a lot of businesses fall to the wayside.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019ll be a natural effect anywhere you get growing numbers, to regress towards the mean,” he says.<\/p>\n

“To really fight that you have to put a stake in the ground.\u00a0A culture is a distinct set of beliefs and a differentiated set of beliefs around how you operate.<\/p>\n

“You have to teach that to the new people who are coming in or of course, you\u2019ll just end up as the average of everyone\u2019s beliefs.<\/p>\n

“You want to be explicit about what your culture is, make clear: these are the traits we value.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Learn from the best<\/h3>\n

To become a successful global tech company, Collison says it\u2019s vital to learn from the best by watching how role model firms operate, talk to users, foster culture and go to market.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get huge value out of that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who I\u2019ve noticed are really good at this have a veracious desire to learn and see how other people are doing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very dangerous sign when someone is incurious about the world around them, it suggests the world doesn\u2019t have anything to teach them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI run away from people who are not curious about the world and constantly trying to learn and pick up new stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/em>\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Twitter<\/a>,\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0and SoundCloud<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brothers John and Patrick Collison have grown payments platform Stripe to a $6 billion ($US5 billion) tech company operating in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39482\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}