Q&A: Stripe boss on Asian expansion and the value of building a product before a company

Stripe co-founder and president John Collison. Photo credit: Stripe.

Online payment service provider Stripe has been making waves in Asia for the past year. It launched in Singapore and Japan in the second half of 2016 and announced its arrival in Hong Kong this week.

The startup has been building up its platform to accept more types of payment, including several ewallets around the world. Its latest deals with Chinese services Alipay and WeChat Pay give Stripe’s businesses access to a huge base of potential customers.

Launched by Patrick and John Collison in 2011, Stripe has raised over US$450 million in funding and is currently valued at US$9.2 billion. The brothers learned to code in their parents’ home near Limerick, Ireland, reading programming books and one-upping each other.

Stripe’s deals with Chinese services Alipay and WeChat Pay give its businesses access to a huge base of potential customers.

After dropping out from Harvard and MIT, the two founded Auctomatic, an auction and marketplace management system for sellers on Ebay. Canadian company Communicate.com bought the company for US$5 million in 2008. After that, the Collisons got to work building Stripe. They’re now the most recent additions to Forbes’ list of billionaires under 40, each with a fortune of US$1.1 billion.

Stripe is far from alone in the payments arena in Asia. US-headquartered Braintree has a strong presence in the region and Europe’s Adyen is making strides here, nabbing clients like Grab and Uber (Grab also uses Stripe). Asian competitors include Thailand-headquartered Omise, which just raised US$25 million in an ICO and acquired payments solution Paysbuy from local telco DTAC.

Stripe claims its edge is in the end-to-end service it provides, from its easy company setup feature to its recently announced data analytics product, called Sigma. Most of those features are available to customers through the basic dashboard, and the startup works to make them easy to use and integrate without additional hassle.

John Collison was in Hong Kong this week for the company’s local market launch and the RISE conference, so we caught up with him over the phone for a brief chat about Stripe’s Asian journey.

Below is a condensed and edited excerpt of our interview.

Stripe has grown to a US$9 billion dollar company. How has that affected your day-to-day in the company and yours and Patrick’s roles in it?

Our mission has largely stayed the same, and every new launch points to that. How we go about fulfilling that mission has changed. Now, for example, we have an engineering team of about 300 people and offices all over the world, from London to Melbourne.

Stripe is a rapidly evolving product.

These days I spend a lot of time with the product team. Stripe is a rapidly evolving product and that takes a lot of active involvement. We also spend a large amount of time with customers – just this week we held a customer lunch in Hong Kong to gather feedback on how our customers use the service, what problems they have, and so on.