This Week in Startups - Pregame Your Launch Before Your App Exists (w/ Amanda Bradford) | E2355

Episode Date: October 26, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo: https://odoo.com/twist G2i: https://g2i.co/twist Rippling: https://rippling.ai/twist Plaud: https://plaud.ai/twist Today’s show: Amanda Bradford’s “launch party” for her dating app The League actually extended for months. She “pre-gamed” the app’s formal launch with months of mixers, boat parties, and free events, where the only ticket required for admission was having the app on your phone. By launch day, she had a massive wait list, and still just let in 500 people, who ensure maximum buzz (and FOMO). At LAUNCH’s first-ever Tactical & Practical live event from San Francisco, Amanda walks the crowd through how she built a vetted, two-sided dating marketplace as a solo founder, eventually getting prominent enough to attract the attention of Match Group. (She sold The League for ~$30 million in 2020.) Hear exclusive tips you won’t get anywhere else, like how Amanda used a “fake paywall” to gauge willingness to pay for subscriptions, and how to time your rate of expansion into new markets. Plus, an all-new Flashback segment, featuring Alex and Lon looking back at a classic 2017 interview between Jason and Stripe’s Patrick Collison. Guests Amanda Bradford on X: https://x.com/amandabradford Book a Call with Amanda: https://intro.co/amandabradford The League: https://www.theleague.com/ Patrick Collison on X: https://x.com/patrickc?lang=en Stripe: https://stripe.com/ Relevant Links: The League was called "elitist." Its founder says that was never the case (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/20/founder-of-the-league-on-dating-ambition-and-that-viral-ad-campaign.html Alex Wilhelm’s Cautious Optimism: https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/ TWiST E723: Patrick Collison (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-NepiMQGvY Timestamps: 0:00 Amanda Bradford on building The League 4:30 Hand-reviewing early applications 6:40 Building an MVP with a rented co-founder 8:56 The VIP approach 13:10 Why Amanda only let in 500 people 15:44 The “Heavy Hitter” fake paywall test 16:44 Odoo: The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://odoo.com/twist 17:46 Why live events are the real unlock 21:35 Controversy as a hook 24:22 Flashback to Patrick Collison in 2017 25:13 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 28:13 Stripe: Then vs. Now 30:53 G2i has been recruiting software engineers for over a decade. Go to https://g2i.co/twist to find out how G2i vets engineers, and can help you hire them in days, not weeks. 32:17 Why did PayPal stay PayPal? 37:50 Problem, not a product 44:33 Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business. 45:46 The outage nobody noticed 51:00 Why persistence beats pivoting 52:13 What’s left before a Stripe IPO? Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: Odoo: The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist G2i has been recruiting software engineers for over a decade. Go to G2i.co/twist to find out how G2i vets engineers, and can help you hire them in days, not weeks. Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business. Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Hey, it's Lon. Welcome back to another episode of this week and startups. We've got an amazing two-parter for you. First up from our recent San Francisco tactical and practical event with launch, we've got Jason presenting an incredible presentation from Amanda Bradford, the League. She's going to walk you through how she used guerrilla marketing tactics and stuff that wouldn't scale in order to grow and find her first customers for the league, signing on a foundation of users before the app even launched. It's an amazing talk about how your pre-gaming and your marketing and your event planning has to start way before the app is actually ready to launch.

Then we've got the latest edition of our flashback segment with myself and Alex Wilhelm. We're going through a classic interview with Patrick Collison of Stripe. It's very insightful and it's about how Stripe has both changed over the years and how they've stuck to their guns and sort of not becoming a public company and why they've stayed prized. of it, really insightful, lots to talk about with Stripe. So stay tuned right now for a new episode of this week at startups with both of those amazing segments. Hi, everyone. I'm Amanda Bradford.

I built a dating app. Sold it to Match Group in 2022. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story and how we launched because I think that's kind of the most important part. And especially from what I understand, most of you guys are early stage founders. So feel free to talk to me afterwards if you want to talk more about the M&A and the scaling and kind of all that stuff. But I'm going to focus on the early stage story.

So just quickly what I'll go into, a little bit of who I am, what our pitch was, how I built it, and then end with some tactical advice. My story, I went to business school, which I joke is like going to college part two, and it's very social experience. And you meet a lot of people. I think our class of 300 had like 30 couples that started out of that, you know, very tight cohort of people. And so one of the reasons that I kind of thought to do this was when I was graduating, I was like, wait, this is crazy. I'm in this pool of amazing. very eligible people and now I'm in the real world and they all go away and now you're back to like Tinder. So I was like, why don't I just try to create the kind of the same sort of very

close-knit, very ambitious, very, you know, educated cohort with an app so that people don't have to go to business school to meet people. And I, my background was in, I like to call myself like technical enough that engineers don't like me, but not technical enough to do their job, at least in the former days. And so I, you know, I did HTML, JavaScript, CSS, but I wasn't. building APIs. So I was not like the last speaker who had a co-founder. I was a solo founder. So shout out to anybody who's solo founding. Now is a day that you can actually do it a lot easier than in my day. So the league, if anyone hasn't heard of it, we built our product on LinkedIn verification. So we were the very first dating startup to use the LinkedIn API and also to have

an admissions-based process where not everybody got in and that was very controversial at the time. and I spoke about this a little bit, but I think the kind of lightning bulb for me was that it's so easy to meet people when you're in these college environments. You don't really need dating apps. That's why a lot of people pitch me on dating apps for college kids. And I'm like, just go outside, like knock on someone's door, on your dorm. It's really not that hard. But when you're actually in the real world, all that stuff goes away. All the infrastructure goes away.

You hope to find people at a bar. No one's going to bars. You hope to find people at the gym, but no one wants to talk to anybody at the gym. So it's kind of a terrible environment for meeting people, especially when you compare. to what you just came from and where I had just been. So what I did is I created the same kind of thing. I was like, okay, Stanford is very selective. They only accept like one or two or three percent of people

depending on if your legacy or not. But my goal was to just have a very vetted community of people that really wanted like a serious relationship. So this was not for the one-night stands. It wasn't hot or not. It was, you know, let me find serious people that are kind of seriously interested in dating. And so the way I designed it was Happy Hour,

which in retrospect was actually a very difficult technical design. challenge because we had the entire user base come at 5 p.m. And we would give them three matches or five matches at five. So that was our tagline, five at five. And so this was, again, contrasts this with Tinder where you're just swiping for hours and you're like, you have infinite homework was what I felt like on the other apps. And I was like, I just want one that gives me some a day. I don't have to stay online.

You know, we weren't trying to get people to engage and be on the app for 30 minutes. We just wanted to give them very good matches. So it was a little bit very, very different than what the current kind of dating app environment was where it was sort of all you can swipe. And then what we also differentiated with was besides LinkedIn, we also had the admissions-based applications. So I reviewed, I personally hand-reviewed every single application. And then I hired my best friend to do it. So we joked that she worked the door while I life worked the product. And then we also had a, one of our big features was that we wouldn't match you with people you worked with. So I had been doing an internship at Sequoia,

where I was the only woman. And the last thing I wanted was for all the people that I reported to, were to like see me on a dating app. So we built it because we used LinkedIn, we could say, don't show me anyone else at Sequoia or anything like that. So that was, you know, a feature guys didn't care about as much, but women really cared about. So, you know, find your niche and find your like power users. And women really gravitated towards the feature that, you know, if they'd managed a group of people and there were men, they don't want their direct reports seeing them on a dating app or vice versa, their boss. And then we also did a lot of events and parties, which I'll go into, but that was a big differentiator

because we were kind of doing offline back when no one was doing offline. And people really liked the fact that they could meet people in real life through the app. So here's some of the taglines. We really leaned into being like, we are for the ambitious, we're for the picky. It's better to be single than settle.

So we have a lot of, you know, kind of brand. We worked really hard on making sure the brand was very much for people with high standards. And this is our demographic side when we sold. We're much bigger now. But, you know, we really focused on people I had come from an MBA program, so that was obviously my founding wedge was MBAs. One of my investors joked that like the first five weeks on the app, he was like,

you should just call this MBA date because it's all these MBA women. So go really deep and narrow at the beginning. So ours was sort of the advanced degree people, and then we got finance on it. We got marketing people on it. So we had a lot of tech lawyers, people with advanced degrees and MBAs, of course. And we, you know, people were like, oh, it's for the Ivy League. and it wasn't actually for the Ivy League. I mean, I went to Carnegie Mellon.

That's not Ivy League, but because the way we named it and the sort of the brand we built, people kind of associated with the Ivy League, which I actually thought was a good thing, because we can associate your brand to something that people really understand readily. It helps them get the message across very quickly without having to be like, how is it different? So how I built it? This was a hard, you know, a hard slog when you're a solo founder, but I basically found an iOS engineer. He built, we only built it in four months. And during those four months, I was basically QAing the product, finding bugs,

sending it back to him to change things. And then I also pre-gamed our SF launch. So what I mean by pre-game, if none of you guys have been to college. But that was one of the fun parts of other parties is everybody got together to pre-game before the party. And we always joked that the pre-games were more fun than the party. And so that's sort of what I did for the SF launch. I didn't have a big expensive party.

I didn't think that we had to have people coming out of a cake or whatever. People do it. These crazy launch parties, I just actually had a lot of series of small events. beforehand and kind of went door to door to collect people on my wait list. And then we, by doing that and by getting the word out beforehand, we even got some press before we launched, which was great because then I could even choose from, you know, the kind of the best of the best that had applied for the founding cohort. So you want to build your wait list before you launch, especially if you're doing a double-sided marketplace. Like I know that I'm a consumer person.

I'm sure a lot of you guys are doing B2B, but all these things hold for any double-sided marketplace, whether you're in B2B or consumer. Again, you never want to have the empty room problem. And so that was like I really focused on those five months to make sure we did not have the empty room problem in San Francisco, which is where we launched. So you can see here, this is my very first like prototype that I handed to a developer. It ended up being a different developer because I tried going out. I outsourced it at first and then outsourcing doesn't work, at least in my experience. So then I hired someone to sit next to me and actually be kind of like a rented co-founder. He got an equity stake and everything like that. But he was really just there to build the app and give me

a proof of concept. And then that was sort of our contract was when he gets me into app store, his equity vest. So it was, you know, I kind of joked that, yeah, I rented a co-founder for those five months. But we went really fast, so you can see, you know, we only spent five months building the app. And now, you know, in today's day, that's probably like two months, if not even, maybe even shorter. We spent a lot of time on the onboarding before the user gets in. So when they were, you know, when we were still collecting wait lists, you can see I had the countdown, how many women, how many men we needed. People were inviting their friends so they could get the spot. So we showed how selective we were being. And it created a sense.

sense of urgency when people saw that screen that they should say, oh, wow, I mean, there's only, you know, 50 slots left. I should tell my friends to get in it. And so building your founding user base, this is the, you know, this is a hard part, but most important part, especially again for a double-sided marketplace. But I did the VIP approach. That was where most of my time went, where I was going to tons of events. You basically become, you know, a socialite. If you're not one already, become one or find a co-founder who's going to be a socialite. And you're just going out. You're asking people to get feedback on your onboarding. That was my most common way. I went up of people. I said, I just wanted to see, like,

what do you think about this onboarding? Would you do this? What do you like about the current apps? What do you don't like about the current apps? And they feel really special because you know, you're asking them for their feedback. They're almost being like a design partner to you. And so I called all those users founding members and they were, you know, I was like, yes, I'll give you founding member

credit and you know, you'll get first dibs at the, you know, when we launch, you'll be in the first cohort. And so the like door to, that's kind of, I call that door to door sales. And then I had a bunch of parties, so I wasn't always saying, hey, download my app and just give me feedback. I was like, oh, hey, I'm having a MBA mixer. I'm having a Fleet Week boat party. You guys should come. And to do that,

you need to have the app on your phone to do that. But I don't, I didn't tell them that until you're at the door. And then you have to hire someone very good at the door that isn't, that's going to hold, hold that line and say, you know, you need to have the app on your phone to get in. So I can go and do a little bit of what I did. See here, you can see some of all the different events I did. I did girls feedback in wine night. I did a shopping event after hours, all These things were free. The local business owners were like, sure, we'll open this door an hour later if you're going to, you know, commit to like $300 in sales. And of course, people, you know, we had like 60 girls there. We spent way over $300. Barry's boot camp did the same thing. They had a, they had a time slot that nobody was booking. So they gave it to me for free and then I booked it out. Blue Angels boat party. It's really hard to get on a boat during Blue Angels. So I rented that like three, four months in advance. And then got, you know, I actually charged people $300 for that event. So we didn't, we actually made a couple grand on that. event. So I didn't really spend that much money on these marketing events. Like open bar, I'd say, okay, I'll buy everybody the first drink free and then it goes on your card. So it's, you know,

you can do these kind of on the cheap. And we actually did all this and then I closed two million after we launch. So again, it's in consumer especially, it's very hard to close funding without traction before you launch. If you can do it, you're a rock star and, you know, good for you. But for the most part, people need to see that users are using it and they like it and they're sticking around. And so that was a big, how we closed in January was showing that we, you know, people in San Francisco were actually liking it. Here's some of the events I did. I can scroll through these really fast because I'm getting low on time, but these are all the different events I did. Again, this is all before the app goes live. So just remember that. It's like we're building the wait list,

building your word of mouth, building your kind of founding design partners, whatever you want to call them founding members. And then we did a lot of press and partnerships. Today, in today's plan. This would be influencers also. And here you can see some of the emails I sent to get the word out. So this is my friend who went to Wharton. I didn't go to Wharton. So I had no one to contact there. So I asked him to forward that to his Wharton group of 350 people. So he did that. And then I got another, you know, I got all the Wharton people using it. And then these are the press outreach that I did before we launch. This is Bold Italic. I don't even know if they're around anymore, but, you know, things like Refinery 29, TechCrunch, Business Insider. So we, you know, I had friends

that had worked in PR and they told me, you know, you need to, here's how you pitch, here's the people you need to pitch, and there's people that write about dating and you should contact those. So I probably wrote about 30 of these emails, and this is very much too long, but it was my first one. I was early days, so I would have shortened it down to like probably a paragraph now, but you can see at least that, you know, you're kind of telling your story to the people and trying to get as many people to write about it when you launch. And we did. We got tech crunch. We got, I think that one on the right is Business Insider, but you can see they, you know, everyone seemed to like the angle of, you know, the very elite, elitist dating app,

which, you know, in a way it was a double-edged sword because then some people felt like they weren't eligible for it if they didn't go to a fancy school. But, um, most of the time, they'll sign up anyway because who doesn't want to, you know, be in an exclusive group of smart, educated people that want a relationship. So it did better, you know, it was more good than bad, but that's definitely, press will take your, tilt, we'll take your pitch and make it their own. That's for sure. So on launch day, we opened our gates. I only accept. 500 people. Keep that in mind in context. We started on 419 people. So similar to the guy who's just before me, he only had to get 10 users. It's like it's really better to have 500 people that, like,

are obsessed with your app than trying to open it to like 5,000 people and figure out what you're doing wrong. So small is better. And then we just rins and repeat. We did these all over. We were in San Francisco for six months. Then we launched New York six months into San Francisco. And then we were in New York and San Francisco for a full year before we launched L.A. And we didn't even have monetization at the beginning. So we added monetization in that period of time between New York and Los Angeles. But we did, you know, parties at the best rooftop bars. We would work with Soho House. We did partners with, partnerships with the Equinox because they have a place in every city we went to and they would let us have parties there for free as long as we brought people that weren't Equinox members.

So again, the partnerships are a really big help, especially if you're trying to do things on the cheap at the beginning. And eventually once we did stuff with Equinox and we did stuff with Soho House, all these people came inbound to us. So they were like, HBO wanted to us to do a party for one of their shows. We did a Netflix party for one of their movies that they launched and we helped launch things. So this was a, again, once people see other good brands next to you, they'll come to you. And then we grew, you know, we weren't, it wasn't exponential growth. It was hard, you know, hard growth. But we kind of rose consistently through the, you know, daily active users and signups. And then eventually we launched in 155 cities. The big takeaway is launching

other cities. So a lot of founders come to Maine are like, oh, we want to go to New York. We want to do this. We want to do this. We want to go international. And I'm like, no, no, no. you still have so much Tam in New York or San Francisco, wherever their first city is. I was like, you need to get better penetration in your first city before expanding. And I think you can, in retrospect, we launched 155 cities. I've had to go back in time. I would have capped it at 20 because the revenue from the 21st through the 155th city was negligible and added more complexity to operations.

Hiring, I couldn't find a perfect co-founder. If you can, that's amazing. If you can't, just go forward. Don't wait for Mr. Wright. fundraising same concept with fundraising show that you have skin in the game before asking for money so if if you don't get a yes say cool this ship is this ship is sailing whether you're in or not and so I think my investors particularly liked that I was I was launching already I was going to launch you know I need it if they gave me money that's great but I wasn't you know like stuck if I didn't get fundraising

and in press and I would put influencers on this now too are your best friend because they'll do it for free it's it's earned media none of our press cost us money If you can get influencers to tweet about your things or post about your things for free, that's amazing. So try to, you know, do these targeted pitches to these people that have this distribution. And in monetizing, we didn't monetize the first year and a half, but what I did do is a smoke and mirrors thing where I said, do you want to upgrade to heavy hitter? If so, click the button. And then I just said, we charged your card.

Now you're a heavy hitter. And we gave them the features, but we didn't actually, my engineer didn't even know how to do, you know, billing or anything at that point. So it was a total fake out. But we could then see, okay, about 15% of people pushed the button, said they were willing to pay $15. So then when I went to go fundraise, I could say we did a test and we know that 15% of people, so maybe 13% in reality, would be up for like a membership fee. So that helped people or helped the investors feel okay with the fact that we could monetize, even though we hadn't.

And then rebuilding your MVP, start earlier than you think. We had a lot of kind of scaling issues when we went to New York and that was part of why we waited so long for L.A. But it was definitely an MVP. So as soon as you know that you're getting traction, just realize that that's a project you'll probably need to take on. Odu is the all-in-one management software that brings everything you need into one easy-to-use platform. And founders already know it's going to save a lot of their valuable time.

But I want to spend just a few minutes exploring one of these real apps with you that you get access to when you sign up for Odu. Let's check out Odu Discuss. This is where Odu brings together all of your text conversations, your voice notes, your documents, and any other updates you have into one easy-to-scan dashboard. No more deep-dive searches, trying to find the specific message you remember reading the other day or flipping between 18 tabs to make sure every member of the team is up to date. No. O-Doo helps you record and transcribe meetings and calls right in your sidebar with results

automatically updated once they're ready. Yes, O-Dew discuss built into the platform. So if you're still cobbling together, your back office across five different apps, get started today at odu.com slash twist. And your first app is free. That's the right price. That's ODOO.com slash twist. Give it a shot. Let's do an exercise here.

If it's a dating app for elite customers, yeah, everybody wants to meet them because they can afford an equinox or they can afford being a member of Soho House. They can afford a John Verado's outfit. So let's double click on this. Because the real live events is, I think, the real unlock here.

Yeah. you could kind of expand it and make it the whole talk. So that's my ask for the next one. So real world driving customers, building community, and just getting pressed. There's something really great there. Do it for Replit, a bunch of developers. And then I want you to do it for Salesforce as a SaaS product, right?

So how do you do it for those two groups of people? Well, Marco, the book on Dreamforce, I used to work at Salesforce. So that was a big part of his strategy is getting everyone together and they could talk to other people that also were admins of Salesforce. So he had, you know, he had like the first sort of developer meet sales conference together. For Replit, I mean, I think developers like to meet other developers. And it's similar to like how MBA singles wanted to meet other MBA singles. You find sort of a niche of the developers that maybe it's hard to find people that are specialized

in this one thing and you could create a meetup for them or, you know, like a startup hackathon or something that they get $100,000 or if your startup, maybe it's $10,000, but you get, you know, some sort of award and a trophy. But I think, yeah, it's finding what those, that group of people, like, what their need is around, like, who they're wanting to connect with that they can. Maybe it's investors and developers that want to meet those people. And so then you bring in, you ask Jason to see if you can bring in some investors. They want to come to the event. So, you know, use your network, but find out, like, what it, what it is that they're, they're not getting. And for our demographic, it was they weren't getting like curated sort of mixers.

You were going to a bar and everybody was either in a relationship or too old or too young. It was like the Goldilocks thing. So if I could get everybody who's like same age. Ah, so this is key. The hit rate in it. So if you're here, is anybody in the room not a founder? Anybody here not a founder? Okay.

Oh, good. We don't to kick you out. People on my team are investors. So it is, if you are if you are here, here and you're talking to somebody, they're 100% a founder. That's actually kind of a great thing. So now, I guess the way I can make this better is I could tell people I'm going to have 75 early driven founders here and I could offer to have 10 investors. Early stage because it's hard to get early, find early stage. And then that could make the post networking even better. But so, okay,

I'm unpacking it. Step one, everybody in the room has to be a match, so to speak. That's one thing. Yeah, I mean, I guess in the target demographic of what you're going after, if you're going after, I don't know, rock climbers or something for some outdoorsy app, then yes, you would want to try. Okay, now, how do you get it to convert to a press hit and how do you get it to convert to a customer? Let's unpack those. And we have a good example. I think we're working here, which is, you know, say, Replit or some dev tool. You got the hack. You've got the hack. You've got the hardest one, dev tools. Well, that's what I was trying to do. I mean, if I asked you to do it for, if I asked you to do it for a probiotic. soda, that's also pretty hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So do probiotic soda. So, I mean, we, so our example for us was we, you know, we would do some PR stunts.

Like we had a helicopter, we had a party in Montauk in upstate New York, and we had, we flew people out on Blade, which is this like, you know, elite helicopter that people take to the Hamptons, and we put three, three, three blind dates on that, and then we invite, you invite press. So that's the trick is you got to invite press to your party, obviously give them a free ticket, tell them there's going to be all these interesting people that they're going to cover. Maybe if you have some sort of out there thing that might be controversial, it's good to kind of mix that in. Maybe you have, I don't know, RepLIT is doing something that, I don't know,

they're going to copy Open AI or they're going to go head to head against the monitor. That would be actually a good one if you add a little controversy. This, what is not distilling or deconstruction, but a reverse engineering. Yeah. Is it reverse engineering? It's a better term for it. Distilling. Yeah, that's a good example. You could have like, oh, we're going to have a distillation of Photoshop, best distillation of Grand Theft Auto or something as a competition, and you can actually watch people distill a piece of software. And the best hit will be like Silicon Valley Engineers. Distills Photoshop kills trillion-dollar company.

Meet up together to overthrow the rest of the tech industry, and it's us against big tech. All right. So I think this was too easy for you. Do the probiotic soda. It's making hard. Oh, my gosh. I guess you would, you know, you'd find the people that are really into the probiotics and have all this. That's health.

healthy people. Well, yeah, not everybody believes in all that stuff. But I would, yeah, you would find your influencers that focus on this space, right? Obviously invite them if you can. But if you want to have someone that has a talk about maybe there's different, there's, you know, different schools of thought on probiotics. Should it be in a drink? Or maybe it should be in an injectable. Maybe it should be in a pill. And are there new pills coming out that think the soda has too much sugar in it or whatever it might be? And so I think having, again, like fostering debates and like more of a, I don't know, like a, what do they call it, a salon of where people are exchanging ideas that are like maybe a little hot takes, I guess, I would say.

Yeah, like actually probably the adjacencies would be those people would be into those glucose monitors. Yeah. They would be into GLPs, which means if they were into those things, they would be into like a Brian Johnson. They might not be into drinking your probiotics. I think there's some people. There's probably some people.

Yeah, Brian Johnson might want a suppository or something. Right. He's into kind of weird stuff. Or like implanting poop inside you from someone else. Like that's a hot. That's what he's into. That's why I'm bringing it up. That would be good to show the press.

Like this guy is showing how he inserted someone else's feces and it made him healthier. Just took a turn. No, that's Brian Johnson. But that's what we're trying to do is try to bait the press. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're baiting the press and that sort of like a weirdness in your group or whatever. Well, actually you bring that up because did anybody see these peptide parties, Silicon Valley story trend? Who saw that story trend on social?

Yeah, it looks like a third of the audience, a quarter of the audience. That was like an example. They did a peptide party. Right. And they're like, yeah, people are shooting each other up. And you're like, with heroin? They're like, no peptides. It's even worse.

Right. Your ACL is never going to feel better. You're torn ACL. It'll feel great. All right. Let's give it up for a minute. Well done. No, Jason Calicatus.

Today he's traveling the world doing many impressive events. But you do have me, Lon Harris. I'm here in the studio. And calling in from the East Coast, our old friend. He's back again. Alex Wilhelm. Thanks so much for being here, Alex. Oh, it's such a treat.

I love being Diet Coke Jason Stand-in. It's my favorite job to play. You're full sugar Coke, Jason Stand-in. How are you? Oh, you're very sweet. Before we get any further into the show, we're going to be looking back at some very classic, beloved, iconic twist clips from both from the year 2017, funny enough.

And then we, Alex and I like to revisit these classic moments and then see what new conclusions, new ideas we could draw from these fascinating deep dives with some of our favorite founders of years past. Obviously, full of tactical and practical advice you can apply even today if you are running a company. But before we get into all that, I do want to call attention to this device that you can see hanging here on my lapel on the side of my jacket. That, of course, is a plod note pin.

If you just tap it, a little light comes on, and it starts recording. everything that's going on around you, everyone's speaking. Amazing for transcribing your meetings or discussions you're having with team members in the moment. Anything that you don't want to forget, you just record the plod. It goes onto the plot app. It goes under the web. It's they've got summaries. They've got transcripts. They could turn it into whatever you want. Meeting notes, a lesson plan if you're a teacher, whatever you want. It's a very impressive product. Alex, you played around what you've got a plod pin. Oh, I've used plod quite a bit. I mean, what I use it is actually recording arguments with my spouse.

So then later I can feed it into a LLM judge and then decide who was more or less than the wrong. It's really great for your marriage too. 100%. We're getting a lot of insight into Alex's 2028 divorce. I don't do that. That was a joke. Don't do that.

But if you do want to get good, positive, healthy relationship uses out of your plot pin, go to plod.a.ai slash twist. Use the code twist. And they're going to give you 10% off your plot. note pin. Thanks so much. We applaud, plot, as Jason likes to say. Yes, we do. Now, we're going to look at some interviews along that I think are very important to put into context, because we often talk to leading CEOs in the moment when they have just done the latest thing, and we don't have context

about what happened afterwards. So I love it to rewind the clock about a decade to some truly iconic companies to see what they were talking about in the past, what were we curious about, and then how does their progress line up with where we are now? So, who's first? So first we're going to take a look at this classic moment from Jason and Patrick Collison of Stripe. This was originally published on April 11th, 2017. It was filmed at the launch festival 2017. This was Twist Episode 723, for those of you keeping track by number. And we're going to kick off with a clip in which they talk about the metrics that Stripe was seen at the time.

And then we're going to have a fun little comparison to where the company is today. Roll the tape. You've got a brand new product and we're going to show a video, but I wanted to start just maybe giving people a little context and the history of the company. What's the footprint of Stripe today? So we're, we don't disclose many metrics about the business, but we say we handle now billions of dollars of sort of aggregate revenue every year for sort of all the companies building on the platform.

And, you know, we've many thousands of companies building on top of it, but we don't disclose the exact figures. One thing that's now the case because of Atlas, this project just mentioned, that I think is super cool, is we now work with companies in about 124 countries. And so basically we now work with companies in just most countries. How many people work at the firm, generally speaking? We're about to hit 700. 700. That's right.

All right. So, Lon, here we saw Patrick talk about, I would say billions of GMV. I think he's what he's talking about there. Thousands of businesses, 700 employees. Okay. So I went through and I pulled out the Stripe numbers from both the end of 2025 and the midway point of 2006. So it's a little bit different, as you might imagine. In 2025, the company did drop the number.

They processed $1.9 trillion. So not billions, but several trillion dollars worth of GMV. And that was up 34% compared to the year before and worked out to about 1.6% of global GDP. Now, if you look forward to the first half of this year, Stripe is now processed. is in about 2% of global GDP. They announced 5 million businesses on the platform, and the revenue in the first half of this year was up 41%. So what I just love about this is here we have a successful founder,

entrepreneurs doing great things, really good company, scaling hundreds of employees, really proud of the numbers, and it was just an absolute pit squeak compared to where it is now today. Very impressive. I mean, it's also interesting how disclosure and transparency shifts over time, when Stripe was still up-and-comer, startup, you know, underdog. They were like, we don't, we don't really like to give out that tricks. Like, we don't,

we, we got to, we got to protect what we're doing and we don't want to prying eyes. And, you know, obviously today, they're publicly reporting. They've got valuations. And we know a lot more about what's going on inside Stripe. But also the Collisons themselves are routinely on podcast. They've got, I think the cheeky pipe, they've got their own. There's, there's a lot more discussion publicly about what's happening at Stripe, the larger. that they've grown over the years. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I believe they built the cheeky pint set

just for that show. So that might show just how the scale has changed from going to someone else's event to making your own fake pub so you can have your own podcast. I think shows the scale of the company. You mean reality TV? That's like finding out that the pawn stars pawn shop is not a real pawn shop.

It's like learning that the real housewives of Rhode Island are not really indicative of the average housemaker in the state. Shockingly enough. I don't think anybody thought that. You might have been the only one they thought that. All right. So I think we should move on to our next clip. Jason tried desperately to get Patrick to bag on PayPal.

One of the Stripe's key rivals back in 2017. Of course, Patrick did not take debate. Particularly funny to look at now with all of the PayPal Stripe acquisition talk of late. These two companies obviously have remained in one another's orbit and of interest to one another ever since. Let's take a look at this clip. AI has changed everything about how software gets built, and that includes how you hire the best engineers and developers. It's not about lead code rankings anymore.

No, you need to know how well candidates understand working alongside AI, or maybe even SI, superintelligence. You need to know how they're going to direct these agents, evaluate their output, and most importantly, look for mistakes and make sure that the code is tight before you deploy it, and our friends at G2I can help. has been recruiting software engineers for over a decade, and their vetting process has evolved and adjusted to how engineers actually work today. They're not just asking candidates if they use AI. Well, of course, everyone's using A. My mom's using it. My brother's using it. My kids are using

it. No, G2I is evaluating how well they use AI tools to boost their productivity and effectiveness at writing code, at deploying. The focus stays on technical judgment. You don't want a staffing agency that looks for AI first on a resume and calls it a day. Nope, you need somebody who tests for it. The best way to know if somebody is good at a task is to watch them do the task. So go to g2i.com slash twist. Book a call and find out how G2i vets their own engineers. So you can confidently hire them in just days, not weeks or months. That's G2i.com slash twist. PayPal was just horrific to deal with. Every time I tried to get into my account, it didn't work. Every time we tried to except money from people, it didn't work.

And then they would, everybody would tell me the same thing. Yeah, do you have PayPal? I have one. Oh, can I think, it's locked. Right. And I can't get anybody on the customer support line. And I have $2,000 in there, but I can't get into my, anybody have customer support problems with PayPal? Raise your hand. It's the whole lot, he just raised her in.

There was just like this very, they seem to have figured out since, but there was this very dark period where nobody was running PayPal. Right. Was that what led you to have that opportunity to zip in there? Well, look, don't to speak ill of any particular That's my job. But yeah, we heard from our friends and from people around as building companies and so on

that some of the companies they worked with were occasionally so optimal. But, you know, it's easy to kind of focus on PayPal. And I think that's actually, you know, obviously they're pretty large and established and so on, but it certainly was not just them. And that sort of when we look to our friends, people we knew running companies and so on,

and most actually weren't building on PayPal, maybe perhaps in part for those reasons or others or I don't know, but most of them weren't. Most of them were building on the these legacy players, like they were working with banks, they're working with gateways, processors, sort of stuff like this, right? And they were sort of looking to buy essentially

a technology service from them, right? I mean, they wanted APIs for turning credit card numbers or whatever the payment instrument was into money in their bank account, right? That's kind of the service they were looking to buy. But these companies, which were, again, providing an AWS-like service in terms of the core nature of it, they were not equipped to be AWS.

They were not equipped to provide flexible APIs or to enable people to enable people to really iterate. I absolutely love that clip because there's a bit of a historical echo here, Lon. I'll let you talk about the acquisition that didn't happen in a second, but you go back to 2017 and you look at the stock price of PayPal at the time. It ranged from about 40 bucks a share at the start of the year all the way up to about 80 bucks, but it was about 55 in the middle of the year and it's currently at about $55 per share. So at the time, PayPal is probably worth about what it is now, $48, $50 billion. It's gone up, it's gone down, it's back to where it was.

And in the meantime, Stripe has just been churning along. Yeah. Of course, as we sort of tease, Stripe and Advent International made a joint offer to acquire PayPal for about $60.50 a share. That would have valued it at about $53 billion a little bit more. But, you know, it did not. That was for mid-July. We so far don't have an update from PayPal. It looks like maybe that particular deal has sort of stalled out.

Just, you know, in retrospect, funny, nine years after these comments. that they sort of came back around to each other. The other thing I think that is so fascinating is not only has PayPal remained like sort of consistently valued in all of that time, a very long time in the technology world, but it's so fundamentally the same offering. I mean, it just, it's like PayPal always stayed PayPal. They didn't, all these other FinTech revolutions have happened. I've now got, you know, I had the PayPal app on my phone this whole time.

Now I've got Kalshi next to it. Now I've got Zell next to it. Now I've got Venmo next to it. Now I've got Robin Hood next to it. And it's like, why didn't PayPal become any of those other things? It's sort of a fascinating question. I mean, I think you're describing what, like the entire opportunity for startups. Because what does a startup do?

They go into a market where the incumbent is lacking, say, or they invent a new market. In this case, I think what startup did was a bit of both attacking incumbents and creating something that was new. You saw Patrick in that clip talk about how some companies want to be like the AWS for payments, but they don't have the actual tech for it. So clearly they were improving the tech, but also doing something that we've seen before much better. And the market will respond. So if you look at the most recent results, Law,

if you look at PayPal's second quarter results from this year, revenues were up 5% year over year, which is essentially zero after inflation, if you wouldn't do it that way. Might as well be nothing, yeah. Might as well be nothing. I think this is just the risk. You know, a large company spends more time defending its cash flows

than it does, innovating. And sometimes you can see an incumbent that was built as a disruptor originally fall prey to the same foibles that caught up their previous generation's competitors. Another example of this recently, I would say, Amazon, blocking, muse, and instinct and other agents. We need to be able to interact with its website because it wants to charge ad dollars against human eyeballs not facilitate machine transactions. Mistake. Fundamental mistakes. That will bite them in the backside. Yeah, we said that on the show. There was like a, there was a clip going around that we put on social about Jason. I think it was with me talking about this. And people got so bad, they were like,

it obviously makes sense that Amazon would like, why would you guys even expect Amazon to like play along? Like they want you to use their own agent. It's like, it doesn't, it does it. The moment you try to do it and then you can't buy something off of Amazon with your agent and you get frustrated, that's the moment it becomes a mistake. Like it's,

they should be facilitating any way you want to buy things. They're Amazon. That's what they do. They sell you things in an easy, direct fashion. That's like the whole big. They should have the world's biggest hook outside for my agents to hook on to. They should accept any possible type of payment that I want. They should have an intelligent way to handle my permissions.

And you know what company would support that? Stripe. He was working on a gentic payment. Exactly. So it's fun to see people that were right, stay right. And I'm really glad that they didn't buy pay bucks. I think that deal looked really dumb from the outside. I'm sure there was more logic to it.

But I'd rather have Stripe unencumbered than stripe dragging PayPal behind it like the Alien and Independence Day. Okay, there you go. Took a second, but I got there. Let's move on to our next clip. This is, we promised up top. I don't like to promise things at the top of YouTube videos that we're not going to deliver, folks.

So we're about to deliver. This is, I think, a really good piece of tactical and practical advice for founders coming from arguably one of the great founders of the modern technology era, hard to make that argument. Let's take a look, Zach, at this next clip about how good ideas don't always seem intuitively great

when you first have them. Over the course of that summer, basically, and again, I think there's kind of maybe a lesson here where, you know, I think a lot of really good ideas really don't seem particularly great or big up front. Again, certainly, speaking from personal experience, Stripe did not. But over the course of working on it that summer

and sort of thinking about and so on, we kind of came to shift from sort of thinking about it, merely as this nice little tool for developers that kind of makes their lives easier initially, which is kind of what we started out with, to kind of realizing that, well, when you sort of survey the broader landscape, it's not just that it sort of sucks for developers to have to sort of integrate payments

initially into their website or service or whatever, but that like the whole edifice is broken, right? I mean, 2% at the time, 2% of all consumer spending took place on the internet. And it's like, why is it so low? Why is it so insanely difficult for any company to do anything that touches online transactions? When we went, we talked to a mid-sized

company or a large company. It's like, what's your experience of just dealing with business and the internet? And they would spend half an hour telling us about the markets they couldn't serve and their fraud challenges and the things they couldn't integrate in it. We came to appreciate that what we thought was kind of,

this little pond was actually kind of this much larger ocean. And so we see that summer, we kind of made two decisions to drop out of school, or as our mom could use, to prefer we call it to take a leave of absence. And then secondly, and then secondly, we had to go, you know, raise some initial money from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel and Sequo and a couple of others. Yes. I mean, this is, I'm writing these daily substack tactical and practical posts.

You can check about TWI Startups.substack.com, if you're curious. And this variations on this topic have come up so frequently throughout, not just this week in startups history, but any other tech founder's startup podcast that you watch. The idea that a lot of people think that when you come up with an idea for a business, the very first thing you do is make a product. Like, I've figured out a product that people need and I'm going to build it. And today, this is so especially true because you can literally just tell your agent or Claude, like, here's the tool I have an idea for. Let's build it together.

And what this and so many other founders come back to is really when you come up with a business idea, you've figured out there's a problem. Like, here is a problem people have. It needs solving. I want to be the person that can facilitate the solution to this. But without getting your hands dirty, building things, talking to your future customers, learning everything you can, you probably don't know the exact right solution. It's probably going to take iterations and education and research to really crack how do you solve

the problem in the way that the people who are going to use your solution are going to come back to and repeat use over and over again. So, like, I think that's kind of what a lot of this gets to is that you're, you're not ready to build your finish, like, let's build strike today, because I figured out there's a need for strike. It's like, okay, now you've got to do a lot of what Patrick talks about in this clip. Now you've got to, like, talk to all of the people who run banks and financial institutions who understand what's missing now.

And then in the future, you will know what you need to build that actually solves the real contextual problems that exist. Yeah. Whenever I hear a story like this from a founder, I'm always, one, impressed at their ability to just work on things that are non-obvious, non-consensus and difficult, because that's kind of like you're out in the field by yourself digging a hole. Like, it's not exactly a fun place to be. Yeah. But also, the willingness to have patience. I mean, if you think about the current startup world today, Law, every time you see one of those revenue charts, everyone's trying to be

the fastest to 100 million error, the fastest to a billion in recruitment. revenue, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. Everyone's obsessed with what have you done the last 30 days and how can I measure it and how can I instrument and how can I put that against other things to benchmark it? This seems like a slower process, a bigger problem. Yes, it did take a while. But think about the result they got out of this. I mean, this is a hundred-ish billion-dollar company now, but they had to go out there

and ask questions. I just, I hope that there's still room for founders like the Collison's who do things that take time to get launched, get rolling, and become unstoppable to build up that a nerve Russia versus the companies today that are just kind of going from zero to hero overnight. And I worry that they're going to go back from hero to zero in the same time frame in some cases. Yeah, I feel like it's probably like a pendulum swing.

Like right now, things are just in this incredibly. Like we figured out what a few of the key AI bottlenecks are and everybody is just pouring into those niches. Like, okay, we need like faster, more efficient inference. Like everybody try to do that. We know that's a problem. You know, so I think we'll probably wait a little while. And then we'll get back to like, we have to do a little bit more legwork to figure out exactly what these bottlenecks and obstacles are to the next iteration of our AI agents.

Because I'm assuming it's all going to be AI from now. I do just want to add a caveat, though. I'm not trying to say that today's companies that are growing quickly are not valuable, aren't doing something cool. I just appreciate that there was a time when you could do the equivalent of messing about in the garage longer. And I think that's something that we don't want to lose in the broader startup conversation. I'm reminded of Clue, Q-L-O-O, who've been on this week in AI a few times recently, Alex Elias, a great founder. They predated AI. They were already trying to figure out recommendation engines and algorithms.

And then AI came along and it's like, oh, this technology is even better. Like, let's just adopt that. And like, that's been a fascinating process to sort of follow is, like, becoming this AI company. Because obviously, AI is good at recommendation engines and put in a lot of data. about what you like and it spits out, here's what else you'll like. And, you know, it just reinvented that business, but he's been building that business all along.

Yeah, no, I love it. Now, my last clip from this interview comes when we're talking about the darkest moment in Stripe's history. And the story is not going to go the way you think it is. So listen closely to what Patrick has to say here. Here's a common founder scenario.

You're looking over your sales numbers at the end of the quarter. And hey, your team, They're at risk of meeting their quota. This kind of thing happens all the time. You can't figure out what the specific problem is without taking a closer look at all of the data. Not long ago, that meant pulling it all in from across the entire organization, a time-consuming ordeal.

But now today, there's Rippling AI. Rippling is already built on your real-time people and business data. That means Rippling AI pulls metrics from both their data and your CRM into one dashboard, and then you get to see how close you are to hitting quota. And you can figure out the root of the problem of why you're not getting there. Maybe it's the marketing. Maybe it's the targets they're going after. You can break down all of that revenue, by region, by customer size, all of that important

information is going to be at your fingertips in seconds with Rippling AI. When you're running a company, you have important questions that need immediate answers. That means ASAP, as in right now, as in yesterday. So if you're ready to rule your business, head to rippling. dot AI slash twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your startup. What was the darkest moment? The moment where you're like, this is not going to work. Yeah. So there was a moment very early on. So, you know, now sort of Stripe is replicated across, you know, multiple data centers and invested kind of a huge amount in redundancy and availability

and failover capacity and everything else, right? That was not the case, you know, four months in, call it. Maybe it was a little bit more, maybe six months in. And six months in, you know, we still ourselves, of course, took it very seriously and the fact that sort of our customers were relying upon us for the revenue was, you know, was a big deal for us, right? And so my pager went off at 4am one night and, you know,

the API was down. And again, this is not like a social media app or something, right? This is the conduit for our customers' revenue. for our customers' revenue. So it was a big deal. And so I remember immediately heading to the office. We lived very close to the office. I was at the office within five minutes,

four or five a.m. and started to try to figure out, diagnose what was going wrong. And it turned out that sort of an upstream switch at our data center had failed. And nominally, they had redundancy on multiple internet connections, but it had been misconfigured. And so it was all down. And so we had multiple servers, but the underlying uplink

connection was broken. And so, you know, upshot being API was down. and we couldn't do anything about it. And it was amazingly painful, right? Because the thing is down, you sort of want to be curiously typing, fixing, getting it back up, whatever, and you just couldn't have to wait on hold. And we were getting these kind of forlorn updates

from the data center every 15 minutes. That's kind of their progress in fixing it. Eventually, and this felt like one of the longest eight hour periods of my life. It was almost literally eight hours. They sort of got a new switch and they replaced it. And the whole thing came back up. But that's a lot.

That's not why it was the darkest moment. The darkest moment, of course, was because I was bracing myself for the deluge in complaints and dissatisfied customers and anger and vitriol and everything else. And you know, 1 PM rolled around and as far as I could tell, nobody had cared or noticed. Wow. Dajde a bud. Anyway, Kevin, some of all those good news, but, you know, as I reflected on it, I realized that it was actually kind of existentially bad news.

Oh my gosh. What a brutal story. So a couple of learnings from that. One, early on, super hands-hands-on founders, very close to the office. They were not on a jet. They were not at a conference. They were building. I think there's a lot of side quest founders can do these days.

At that time, far fewer. But the lack of being yelled at as a very dark moment I thought was a really good encapsulation of the founder journey because either way he was going to feel bad, either he was going to get yelled at and feel bad. But it turns out there's something that's even worse, Lon, which is being ignored because no one cared. Yeah. I mean, I think that's like the, you know, the crux of the story is like, we all, we all imagine, we're all walking around all day, like, thinking about how embarrassing the stuff we've said or did our, like, what a bad job we're doing.

Like, we're all very hard on ourselves all day. You're imagining other people or judging you or criticizing you or, like, watching you and being like, oh, this idiot. And really, Jason and I've talked about somebody says, nobody else is thinking about you in the world. Like if right now, if you went and looked up every single person who you've ever met and their thoughts, like such a tiny fraction of that thought would be about you and anything you've done good or bad. And it could be it could be freeing in some ways. But when you're starting a company, it could be a real struggle. You're like desperate for attention and eyeballs. And it's so hard to get people's attention and eyeballs.

I mean, especially like if you are in a crowded marketplace. or you're trying to get the attention of, you know, like anybody who's, like, busy. And this was 2017. It's exponentially harder in 2026. There's so many more distractions today than there ever were. Like, it's, it's real. Anybody who's ever tried to build anything on the internet can tell you. Like, the attention economy is rough and it takes no prisoners.

And like, you are, you are up against like a million other things for everybody's two seconds of focus. So that, dead on launch, but also we mentioned earlier, the ease now with which people can make stuff, right? You can prototype faster, launch company faster, which means that your ability to have a lead on the competition has gone down. Anything you do can be replicated to some degree pretty quickly. And then you're not only competing with the world to pay attention to your genre and your idea, but also to compete with other people that are now just following in your footsteps. I've kind of roughly called this. Everyone's building the same startup because it converged a little bit these days.

But yeah, I cannot imagine how they managed to get up off the mat after they got the service back up and no one noticed. But I'm really glad that they did because that early face plant, I think we can call it, didn't stop what is now this $100 billion behemoth that runs a big chunk of the world. Also, did you catch the number, you said, the 2% number that only 2% of transactions were online total. I did catch that. Herred that now with 2% of global GDP passes through Stripe alone. Wow. So they became the 2% that they originally. detected, yeah. That's why

I wanted to get to that number, because I wanted to bring it back here, because I think it's such a good indication of just how much the growth the company has seen in the year. It's an old adage. I mean, we hear it from the VCs on our round tables all the time. It's like the founders who win, they're not necessarily like the smartest, or they had the best

idea or they had the best advisors. It was, you know, they were the most persistent. Like, they hung in there the longest, they didn't give up. Everybody else pivoted to four different ideas and they just stuck to their guns and stuck to their vision and, you know, held, held to what they really believed in and, and it persevered. And I think that's like the huge takeaway here is like, yeah, I'm sure there was a moment there after that day where the stripe guys were like, people don't want stripe.

You know, like we went down a whole day. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Like they're not using our service. We should make something else. You know, like what about a chat GPT rapper? It was too early for that. But you know what I mean?

I bet it wasn't a single cheeky pint that got them through that. I bet it was a number of pints. Yeah, Cheeky's pint is how you do, is how you pluralize. No, it's not AirPods Pro. Stop it. It's not. All right, we got one more. We've got one more stripe clip and then I promise we will move along.

This one, I've got to say, I feel like it's less like practically useful in the moment and it's more just funny because of the nine years that has progressed since this was shot. and now retrospective looking back on it. But here is Patrick talking to Jason about why in 2017, despite lots of pressure, Stripe did not want to go public. And we're actually planning, don't know if you've heard about this,

they're planning on putting off going public as long as possible. Here's Patrick. Just generally. We were going to hold off for as long as possible from partaking in them in that. So generally, And the, you know, from our standpoint, instead of Atlas, I think is a good example of this.

You know, there were, as we think about the idea of growing the GDP of the internet, I mean, there are so many things that, you know, we want to invest in on that front, they're just going to take a long time to come to fruition. And, you know, of course, you know, there were good examples, there are some good examples of companies

that I think have done a good job of sort of maintaining really long-term time horizons while being the public markets, you know, Amazon being the kind of most famous and prominent example. On the other hand, if you look at the kind of Amazon, Amazon's early history, you know, they had an incredibly turbulent time for sort of their first couple of years as a public company.

Instead of now, 2017, you know, Amazon is up whatever 50% year. So clear, yeah. Exactly. It all looks great, but sort of they really had a tough time in the beginning. And so I think there's, you know, this is a broader kind of structural challenge, you know, across the industry. But I think being a public company certainly does not stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.

And so... Much more difficult. And you have all your employees looking at a stock price every day, which Bill Gurley said when he was an analyst, he wrote a paper to try to get the employees to stop, Amazon's employees specifically, stop looking at the stock price and focus on work. And I'm sure that worked just as well as you might think.

But from our standpoint, I think being a public company kind of makes sense when you've reached some kind of some point of some point of stability, some plateau of, you've done the stuff that you at least initially set out And we feel like we haven't. We're still very early and sort of did this trajectory they first established. And just because we work with startups and technology companies, you know, they themselves have lengthy trajectories. And so, you know, this is just going to have to be when you're building infrastructure.

You know, there's just long time horizons involved. Boo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're number one IPO fan who follows them like sports. So I understand that must be frustrated. But I think it's a really fascinating answer to look back on now. Like, so does that mean that even a decade or so after this, they still feel like our work here is not yet done?

Like, what is left that Stripe needs to conquer before they feel ready to go public? Well, they held off when they were being pressured. And now they're too big to pressure. What are you going to do? You're going to go tell the Collison brothers to do something? They're going to tell you to take a hike. Okay. I mean, they're worth what, 10, 15 billion apiece.

they run this huge company. I presume they have some form of voting control or protections they're off, and they don't want to go public. So tough. Now, they are intelligent about this. There are tender offers. There are things that they do to provide some liquidity. But I want to actually push back because I feel like he reached for a relatively

uninspiring example there. Patrick is not here to defend himself, so I'm not going to take this too far. But I will say that saying that Amazon had a little bit of a struggling time early on its public life, and therefore, Stripe shouldn't go public is forgetting when Amazon went public and what happened next which was the dot-com crash. So I'm sure. It was probably tough for a lot of public companies.

I don't think Amazon struggles were because of that. And also, other public companies that have grown to their size while being public, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet. I mean, so to me, if you look at the big companies out there, Nvidia, they all did 95% of their growth

while public and it worked great. So maybe something has changed, Patrick, and I think what has changed is your ability as a founder to say no to going public. But I've always found it to be a specious complaint. We love a spicy take. I'm going to send this to him and hopefully he'll respond. And then this episode goes viral.

Don't keep me in trouble on X. I don't want to have all of his fans attacking me. Like, what if you've never built a company more than that? I would do it that way. We have very nice fans. Everybody out there don't attack Alex or Patrick Collison on X. Send all your hate mail to lawn at launch.com. Thank you.

Yeah, put that out there. I think we're good. I think we're good on Stripe.