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.

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.