John Collison, co-founder and president of Stripe Inc., discusses the digital payment company’s $95 billion valuation and how it performed during the pandemic. He also talks about whether the company will accept Bitcoin payments and why he has no plans for an initial public offering yet. He speaks to Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.”
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I want to talk about how strike fared in the pandemic because
such a massive amount of business came online and Stripe was

powering a lot of that. And then there was a lot of business
that didn’t happen because of the pandemic. What are the trends

that you saw through the pandemic on strike.
It was obviously very interesting and serious time on the

business side. I would say we saw two really interesting trends.
One is it was clearly very disruptive for small businesses and

depending on kind of which sector people were in. The impact was
felt differently. But I think the big advantage that small

businesses have over large businesses is they can turn on a dime
and they can really change things. And so we saw that with a lot

of the small businesses on the stripe where if you needed to you
know completely reorient yourself to trade online. We saw this

with the role of bicycle as in Ohio with Jane Russells handmade
sausages in Ireland. They lost half their sales overnight. Were

able to retool to go online. And so I think we saw the
structural advantages that small businesses have in the form of

it. Agility actually start to play out. And if you look at the
numbers we actually saw a higher rate of new business creation

during the pandemic than we had seen previously. So that number
actually ticked up. And then we also saw on the large and kind

of traditional enterprise side many more large companies
retooling themselves for digital stuff than we had seen

previously. And so you can imagine say you’re working as a large
established company a grocery retailer or something like this.

And you’ve been banging the drum internally for many years that
hey we need to take our digital ordering seriously or something

like this. This was the the year where they finally got those
projects out and really saw massive growth of them. And so this

is actually something that’s somewhat newer for Stryker.
Obviously got our start with startups but we’re now working with

a lot of traditional enterprises. Think of Waitrose in the U.K.
or Harris Teeter here or companies like Fast to help them

launched the brand new digital offerings. So you’re big virtual
conference stripe sessions is coming up. What is the next phase

of growth as the world real. What does that look like.
Well one thing that’s interesting to us is we think of the the

the pandemic as a time when everything moved to a completely
digital right. You know all commerce was e-commerce or something

like fast. If you look at the raw numbers it was a massive bump.
It was an acceleration of multiple years. But if you actually

look at the raw numbers for a second you see retail sales in the
United States moved from 11 percent to 14 percent online. We’re

still talking about penetration in the teens overall. So the big
thing that we’re focused on you know we’ve talked about this

before Emily is the fact that there is still so much room to
grow ahead. And I find that quite exciting. And that if you’re

thinking about starting an e-commerce company today I think it’s
actually a fabulous time to do so because retail is still only

14 percent online penetration. United States. Yeah. There’s been
so much habit forming that’s taken place over the past say two

years. Do you think that we’re really excited about stride.
Continues to branch out and broaden the set of products that

we’re building on behalf of our users. So we try to take an
extremely user first approach in the products that we built. We

now have the benefit of the millions of businesses on Stripe. In
fact we had two million businesses join the strike since the

start of 2020. We just go ask them. You know we don’t have to
overcomplicate ISE. We don’t have to be too sparse about what

we’re building. We can just go ask them what is causing them
friction or make their life easier. And so you saw two big new

launches in the lead up to strike sessions. Strike tax which
handles sales tax and V A T for businesses is something that’s

incredibly complex big lift not something that any business
owner enjoy spending time on and then strike identity where as

you’re probably familiar risk all sorts of different businesses
need to do some kind of identity verification and strike out.

She makes it sets simple fact for them to do it right. And
obviously that is so important as we continue to see these cyber

attacks on the rise. Speaking up users. Back in 2018 you stopped
processing Bitcoin payments saying that not enough people were

interested in doing them. And now we’ve seen more institutional
adoption and obviously a lot of individual investors buying in.

Has your thinking evolved on crypto. Well I think our thinking
on crypto has always been fairly nuanced and to be clear we are

extraordinary and extraordinarily enthusiastic Bitcoin fans and
that if you think of the kinds of the kind of world that at

crypto people and we are trying to bigger bring about.
I think it’s very related set of goals. And so one thing we’re

really hung up on is 22 percent of Commerce Day is cross-border.
That’s like it feels like it should be much higher especially on

the international. It’s so easy to have cross-border
interactions. We’re stuck down at this level where only a fifth

of interactions are cross-border. And it’s actually very hard to
have any kind of meaningful cross-border interaction.

And so crypto is one very exciting direction for effort for
trying to solve fast. But also you know the kind of stuff Stripe

is doing. But we’re making it really easy to handle non U.S.
payment methods are kind of non locally based payment methods

like Ali pay or broad pay or something like this is another
approach. And I think we should pursue all approaches and see

what works. We’ll be pursuing them in parallel. On Bitcoin in
particular I think rightly it gets a lot of angst in the crypto

community. The fact that you know transaction fees on both
Bitcoin and the theorem you know the two main crypto currencies

are still too high. And so there’s all manner of interest and
kind of work going on solving bass between you know the liking

network and some of the saliva on some of the new chains and
Stella and things like that. And so we’ll see what works. But is

this a problem that needs solving the fact that it’s still way
too hard to have a cross-border interaction and the fact that

people in long tail of countries are still so underserved.
Absolutely. It’s a problem. And we’re picking kind of another

approach to solve that. This is why we we we have quite piece
back you know quite recently. The alphabet broadly has has been

really underserved for a long time when it comes to digital
commerce infrastructure. And again we’re taking our approach

toward solving about.
So strike recently raised another massive amount of funding your

evaluation approaching 100 billion dollars. Maybe it’s beyond
that and we don’t know yet. The Wall Street Journal just

published a story that there is a ton of investor interest is
the next step being a public company.

Yeah look it’s a cliche and I feel like this happens every time
we come on the show but you know we still have no plans to IPO

and we’re just very hung up on that long term opportunity. You
know there’s lots of fun stuff for us to do that you know we

just had two big major new product categories that we opened up
here. And so you know we’re having lots of fun building stride.

The massive opportunity in front of us. Maybe we do. Maybe we
don’t someday. But right now we have no plans right now. You

mean disruptive moves in remote work giving workers a twenty
thousand dollar bonus if they left high cost cities like New

York like San Francisco but also accepted a 10 percent pay cut.
How many employees took you up on that and how that’s changing

that the distribution of your workforce. Yeah I don’t know the
exact number. Add to that question off the top of my head. We

saw a pretty major uptake. I think there are a lot of people
where they took advantage of all the remote work that was going

on last year to be able to move to be closer to their families.
You know somewhere that wants to move you know previously. And

so the way we think about Stripe is I think we have not come to
our you know ultimate stance or ultimate decision on what the

exact IBEX of in office vs.
versus remote will be. Because I think that’s very hard to make

a decision on right now. And in particular you know it’s a huge
confound of everyone who’s been working remotely during a

pandemic. But I think that’s going to be very different. This
study say to work remotely. What we do know is that strike is a

very global company. You know we’re dual headquartered across
San Francisco and Dublin. And that’s very important given our

Irish roots. And given how much of our business we do in Europe
and how quickly that has been growing. And so we know we’re

going to be kind of multi homes and we’ll have multiple hubs
over time. And we’re also going have a very large remote

population. We’ve always done a lot of remote hirings in the
North America time zone. Actually during the past year and a

half we opened to promote hiring in Europe. And so I think it’s
clearly going to be a mix. What the exact composition of those

will be kind of hard to say right now.