In 2010, two young Irish brothers pitched to Peter Thiel, an early Facebook backer and one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, on why their online payments system was better than PayPal. Their start-up, now called Stripe, would vastly simplify online payments and thus “increase the GDP of the internet”, they claimed, somewhat grandiosely.
The first problem was that Stripe barely existed: Patrick and John Collison, then just 21 and 19, had hacked together a prototype while on holiday and had no experience of merchant gateways or other financial arcana.
The second problem was that Thiel had founded the very company they wanted to usurp. “I remember being very critical of PayPal,” Patrick recalled two years later. “Halfway through the meeting I was like ‘hmmm, maybe that’s not the best strategy’.”