Monday,November 05, 2018   9.57AM / By RyanHoover Founder of Product Hunt. Weekend Fundinvestor. @rrhoover

TodayI’m visiting Stripe’s office in San Francisco to chat with Patrick Collison andCourtland Allen, shortly after they announced their latest round of funding,valuing the company at a whopping $20B.

Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, anambitious company aiming to increase the GDP of the internet. The now 1,300person company was started in 2010 by Patrick and his brother, John Collison,at the age of 23 and 21, respectively. While young, this isn’t their firststartup. Prior to founding Stripe, Patrick and his brother started and soldAuctomatic for $5M in 2008.

Courtland Allen is a super talented designer and developer.In 2016 he founded IndieHackers, an awesome community of bootstrappers and makers sharing theirstories. Nine months later Stripe acquired the company. Courtland is also a YCombinator alumnus and an MIT graduate with a degree in Computer Science.

Listento this episode of Product Hunt Radio — check it out here:

https://simplecast.com/s/81640f0a

In this episode we talk about:

• Who Patrick and Courtland’s role models were when they were building their businesses, and how the right role models today can help build a more inclusive tech ecosystem.
• The influence of Indie Hackers on Stripe and why even with the great tech for online communication today, some of the best interactions between its community members happen at meetups.
• If there’s too much or too little funding in tech and how the investor-founder dynamic changes when you move outside of Silicon Valley.
• Why Stripe started a book publishing business (in 2018) and the reading habits of Patrick, Courtland, and others at Stripe.

We ofcourse also talk about some of their favorite products including a product totell you how you sleep, helpful tools for building your next app, and some“oldies-but-goodies” that you might have forgotten about.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast,or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to oursponsors, Airtable,GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support.

Quotesfrom This Episode

“How do we help increasethe number of successful companies that get started in the world? The number ofcompanies that get started is not some sort of cosmological constant, and if itcan be increased then I think it’s incredibly valuable to go and do that.” — Patrick

“Indie Hackers themovement wouldn’t have been as possible ten years ago, because there’s so muchmore knowledge being exchanged now and so many more tools to help you buildthings — it’s just easier to dowith a small team than it ever has been.” — Courtland

“People are subject toextremely strong Girardian herd effects, so I don’t think investors are uniquein this regard — they index on thispopular conception of things. I think startups outside of the popular hubs areless popular than they ought to be and that people update too slowly based onchanging trends.” — Patrick

“There should be morefunding in the world, but more spread out and distributed more evenly.” — Courtland

“It all comes back tothis idea of, ‘how do we grow the GDP of the internet?’” — Patrick

Companiesand Products Mentioned in This Episode

• Airtable — Realtime spreadsheet-database hybrid.
• Firebase — App success made simple by Google.
• JUMP — Electrified, dockless bike rentals.
• Emfit — Contactless sleep sensing solutions.
• Pocket — Save and read news, articles and videos that fuel your mind.
• Retool — Build custom internal tools in minutes.
• Uber — Get a ride in minutes.
• WhatsApp — Fast, cross-platform messenger.
• Yelp — Crowd-sourced reviews for local businesses.

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