Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

The thing I love most about Stripe is that they have invested quite a lot of resources in their Atlas program to help people from around the world get a level playing field.

Before Stripe Atlas there was not a single resource that would allow a non American to setup a bank account for their company totally virtually without ever visiting US (i know because I spoke to at least a dozen of different people and everyone agreed that while they could open a company for me, opening a bank account was impossible after the patriot law (?) yet somehow Stripe managed to do it).

So not only they have made great accomplishments in the dev part with their amazing API they have also made a huge difference in many other aspects too that only a few know about.

My startup went through Atlas a couple years ago when it was in beta, and it was amazing. It let us focus on actually building the business rather than screwing around with generic corporate structure and banking, and the team seemed to be fully invested in removing as much legal noise from starting companies as they possibly could. Any problems we had they were there with us to make them disappear.

John Collison apparently said the goal of Atlas was to have an impact on access to entrepreneurship that would be visible in macroeconomic indicators, and the team seemed to really be putting in the work to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship and make that happen.

And all of it for $500, and they gave us like $5k in AWS credits. It was such a good deal that it didn't even make sense, which I assumed was because it was in beta, but it doesn't even look like it has changed.

"Do things that don't scale"[1] references Stripe specifically for actively recruiting users, but your description of the Atlas program makes it sound like an extension of that strategy. Whereas launching in a single tiny overseas market probably didn't look like it had favorable numbers in absolute terms, they probably got better at opening new markets after each success, and an ever-increasing portfolio would made it increasingly difficult for competitors to imagine ever catching up.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

It's the classic "grow the pie" strategy - if you create more customers that feed into using your service, it's worth it even if you're running a modest loss.

Think of it as a marketing or business development strategy, rather than a service of its own.

How did Stripe bypass the law here?

Stripe are just awesome. Thing I love most about them were the capture the flag comps they did. Seriously. So much love for those games.

I suspect it's less "bypass" and more "did the extra research/work".

I don’t think there were laws preventing it. Just skiddish banks.

And such a great business development strategy at that. It's a win/win for everyone involved. Other online payment providers didn't have the foresight to create Atlas, and it's a testament to Stripe's brainpower that they had this idea and pulled it off so well.

I just noticed that their vision is to "build the economic infrastructure for the internet." That's ambitious. I wouldn't have guessed, from that vision, that they'd build Atlas. But in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.

They didn't. It was all stuff that was technically legal, but required founders to hire a US lawyer to handle the paperwork for them and to make lots of micro-decisions about a legal system with which they were unfamiliar.

In addition to focusing on international, they are still focused on very small companies. I went to a conference for small solo entrepreneurs this year, and they had a heavy presence. They also acquired/supported indie hackers. Now that they are giant, it would be so easy for them to write off the small customer, but they continue outreach. Its strange that I have such positive feelings about a payment processor, because payment processing isn't a major issue for our business, but they have just been good to do business with compared to the 3 other processors I had before, and that makes me like them.