Selling their First Software company for 5 million. Enough to become the talk of the town in their home of limerick. But its when they came to San Francisco and their second startup when they achieved the kind of success measured with a b, naz billion. Their Financial Service startup, stripe, has raised enough funding to be valued at 1. 75 billion. Stripe make its easier for merchants to take payments online. John cullisson is cofounder at stripe. He recently took a pause from harvard to concentrate on the company. An interesting bit of trivia. Johns leaving certificate score, i take to be a little bit like the s. A. T. S. A. T. , was the highest in the country . I think i got that right, but lets introduce hannah cool. Leer from financial times, john schwarz from usa today. Start with this leaving certificate, like the s. A. T. S. A. T. . Yeah the end of school year. Highest in ireland in all of irish history . Im not sure. Its little hard to if i were close, i would have checked. Was it a perfect score . Yeah, you can get a perfect score. Did you . Yes. The highest ever. But anyway. I dont know how they go about man thats so long ago. Yes, what three years ago . No, no, we started stripe four and a half years ago now. Oh, okay. And so, you know, we it was in 2009. We have i was in the bay area since 2010. Lets start, all kinds of things i want to talk about i got a whole list here, i want to start with just the basic friction point. I have been buying stuff online for many, many years. We all have. We buy airline tickets, book hotels, we use paypal, use paypal now all the time, it seems to pop up on all kinds of websites. Im having no trouble buying things online. But apparently, the vendors are having trouble buying things online or you wouldnt be worth anything. I think thats right. Old school way of people selling things online go to your desktop and put people ooit helps in the cart and checkout. People have been doing that a long time. You luke the past five years, what all the Interesting Companies are doing, all these totally new kinds of commerce, you have got Subscription Services like drop box, an ongoing relationship with them. Global Ecommerce Companies like go pro just went public. A lot of very interesting mobile marketplaces like the lifts and insta carts and postnets of the world gobbling up offline commerce but doing it through your phone. For those companies, they have pretty complex, specific payment needs what stripe has. Im sorry. A problem that they are having is it consummating you the transactions or that the process itself or what is it that they need to have solved . If youre building Something Like, say, a task grab it or an insta card, you need not only accept payments easily from people on android and ios and all these different mobile devices but need to accept payments from people and then pay out the vendors on the other end. And so you know, very quickly gets pretty complex and thats just in the u. S. If want to go international, you are doing all this all this other work to handle payments. So, this is a failure of visa, master card, even paypal. Some of them have experienced, like American Express did, pay by tweet, they are trying or are they not . They are. I think its inherently a reasonably complex problem. Lets not forget, not even all within the purview of the visas and master cards of the world. One thing we announced recently was a partnership with ali pay i think everyone forgets about the online world, a minority of Internet Users actually have a credit card. Tell people what ali paysome chinese, right . The huge, huge market. So, ali pay dumped a lot of profile for how successful they are, but the largest payment Online Network in china and hundreds of millions of users. Up to now, these people with ali pay accounts buying mostly from sites in china and been very difficult to buy from overseas markets. What makes that hard . Can the chinese before what you did you did, could a chinese citizen buy something from an American Store . Yes, if you had an International Credit card, which is pretty rare in china. I see. Go ahead. I was going to ask you, one equation, get nothing bit con. I we i went to las vegas and felt i was on the set the munsters television show, libertarian, male people but very passionate about what they do and its glowing terms of acceptance. So, i think the thing thats cool about bitcoin, all a similar problem. We spent a ton of time this year on letting merchants accept payments globally, because this is something that still in 2014 is unsolved. I think as you say, all shopping online a long time. If you are in the u. S. , u. S. Consumer buying from as you merchant, its s not the most broken thing ever. If youre a consumer in china or, you know, germany or south africa, its pretty tricky. So bit coin is one way addressing it. More fluid, faster . Nobody needs to give you permission to buy bitcoin. But you need to have quite a lot of money sometimes. One of the things i dont understand about bitcoin is that why would i spend it on lots of stores have come out saying we are going to take this, overstock. Com was one and i cant help but think it is a bit of a if i had lots of bitcoin, going up in value very fast, i dont want to keep it i wouldnt buy a sofa with it. A chicken and egg problem, me as a consumer why should i buy bitcoin while theres no sites i can spend it on similar lakers website, why should i accept bitcoin if no consume verse it. A lot of sites saying, okay, the Consumer Base is not giant now, think this may be a big thing in the future and want to get ahead of it do you think a big part of your business because people might want to keep that money . Thats true. As a store of value, pretty volatile, see a lot of people doing, buying bitcoin to make a transaction and selling it afterwards but people solving the same problem. If you are a mer charngt the key thing you want is the largest possible base of consumers. When you did start accepting bitcoin, was it more just because it fit the theme of we are going to allow any currency into any currency shopping or because you believed in bitcoin or a bit of both . A little bit of both. We are not betting the farm, we dont think that all transactions on stripe will happen on bitcoin in two years. That said, over a five tenyear time horizon, will cryptocurrencies become a real thing . These trends are here to same given that bitcoin had so much expoesh sure the last year or two, why arent we all checking out bitcoin these days. Do you have bitcoin yourself . I do no i own a tiny bit of bitcoin. Interesting things, like mark andreessen, make use a lot of predictions, usually they are wrong within the first year but usually right within five years. So may be too early. We underestimate change in the short term overestimate in the short term and overestimate in the long term. I think true for a lot of technological changes. You look at the paperless office. This thing always around the corner, actually happening. Mobile, everything is moving to mobile and it didnt feel like it was happening and now its happening. Can i ask you about a rumor . Amazon in the online payments . Amazon is. No, getting into the like a square like device what they are going to develop . Gonna get into the Payment Processing . Like retailers . I have heard that. Amazon is pretty secretive. Not your front line to the Online Services . Kind of interesting if they did. Can i ask about another rumor that involves you. What about we should do, hannah, take a break. Because people will absolutely stick around to find out what your question is, right . Thats pretty tricky, isnt it . Be back with john cullisson from stripe after this. Welcome back to press here. I know why you stuck around. Hannah kuchler about to ask an important rumor question. I feel like there should be a drumroll or something. I was gonna ask if you were gonna tie up with twitter for ecommerce, the rumor . I cant comment on that we dont comment on rumors. Watch him smile. I think that said yeah. I think the thing looking from the outside is that ten years ago, people spending all their time in web browsers. Look where people spend their time today, in facebook, in twitter, in pintrest, where they discover a huge amount about products, where a lot of purchasing intentsome so i think social buying is clearly valued. That time with amazon they just started . The hashtag . A key deal, john, early on was you got taken seriously by wells fargo, which is also based in San Francisco. Its enormous bank. I dont want to spend too much time on your able. You know, a but its about your age. A 20yearold kid, 22, 21yearold kid 20 at the time. Yeah. A 20yearold kid comes into wells fargo, says, hello, im new to your country, but i would like to make a major deal with you. How were you able to pull that off . You know, i think i mean, you should have them in here and ask them. But i think part of what helped us was the fact that this was so unsolid. You could feel at the time that no one was getting it right when it came to online payments and mobile payments, just all this new stuff happening, waves of new companies, this was the time when the air b and bs and ubers of the world were emerging, werent going to the banks to handle payments. We understand why zuckerberg might want facebook or Something Like that, but i dont really understand why youre not super passionate about payments . Im not 20. You should have been. We very much came it tat at the approach, the reason we were passionate, we had been customers before, our life was miserable. We developed websites and mobile apps, interesting, right, Great Technology for Building Software for hosting us and getting it in front of customers, with these people who really laked our software around wanted to pay us and just accepting money from those people was extremely difficult. You were generally working with people who kind of didnt get developers, didnt get Online Software and apps. Where does the connection with peter teal come on . You went to harvard. We know what peter teal thinks about he did drop out. Give the guy some credit. So its interesting in that peter was, you know, one of our basically our first real Angel Investors and always gonna be awkward when he walks into a. Radio and say to peter teal, like online payments are completely broken. Let me explain that to the viewer so they get that joke. Peter teal founded paypal and online payments. You walked in and said its broken so the guy who invented it. Peter and elon musk also with paypal. Get the need for a universal platform for accepting payments from people. We still dont have that are they disappointed in paypal, what its done now . I think i mean, i think its definitely true that the paid product today is eerily similar to the product of ten years ago. Saying that i think the world changed a lot. Make the same argument about twitter, too similar to what they have been for years. A problem. In terms of their growth. Twitters seen a lot of twittery lot of in terms of user growth, significantly lower. Like it to be. How do you get a meeting with peter teal . You sold your First Company for 5 million. Very impressive. But its peter teal. No, its true. I mean, we we initially gotten a introduction from paul graham who is the founder of white did you it through exactly. Yeah. And i think the i mean, this space is obviously interesting to people like that a product we can show to people. Whats interesting, you are not pitching, you know, youre not pitching a vague idea. Likes here the product, heres how it works, how what the people using it says, more concrete to get in front of someone. Can we talk about citizenship and immigration and whatnot for a second. You are a guest in this country . I am. You employ how many people . 120 people now. 120 people. You are creating wealth for americans. But you are here at the pleasure of the United States government. Mmhmm. And sometimes, you have candidates, im assuming, that you have want to hire that you probably cant. Yeah. That bothers me as an american. We want more Success Stories like you. No, its true. This is immigration is pretty personal for me. I chose to come here, first for college and then moved out here and it hasnt always been super easy, right . Its not like youre just its not like people are encouraging you to still get sort of a lot of questions when you come in through the border because, i mean, i do, and im not here. Its fine now, but i think the thing is the thing that i ways find tragic, right is that we look at all the successes. We look at the paypal is founded by, you know, peter teal. We look at google founded by sergey brin. Look at space charge. And tesla cofounded by elon musk who similarly came here when he was pretty young. And i think, you know, people point to these as the immigration success story, but that selection there, those are the ones we know b picture now all the companies that we dont know. That are not happening and not just that they are not happening inside the United States, they are not happening at all because people cant come here and access, you know, the unique access of capital and business clients. How would you change it . People have been trying to figure this out for decades. What do you think zuckerberg said . Um, i do think both on the entrepreneurial side and on the town side, i mean, we should be able to get get more people in and not just because of sheer numbers but because increasingly, facebook is a global company. For facebook to do well, they need more than just an american perspective. And so, increase the company being started here need to be able to compete in a global market, if you want them to do well, and markets are getting into t john colson is the cofounder of stripe and taking it off. We look forward to having you back again. For now, thats all the time we have for you. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you. Up next, a career adviser at google who and linked in to said one of the most important things you can say at work is no. So, were gonna talk to him next, or maybe we wont. Thank you for being here this thank you for being here this thank you for being here this welcome back to press here. Success create lot of options. You would think thats good thing. My next guest says too many options is the first step to failure. Greg mcewen says quick success robs you of the singleminded focus that made you successful in the first place. Mcewens book, essentialism, the disciplined pursuit of less a selfhelp book for successful Silicon Valley winners. Greg has taught the idea at linkedin and google and pixar and ive read a good portion of your book and the biggest lesson i got out of it is to say not a work. Now, why would i, as the boss, want you to talk to any of my employees about how to say no . Well, look, essentialism is actually about how to say no to the good things so you can say yes to the really great things. Okay. I dont want my boss to know anything. I will push you on that for a moment the idea that people cant say no to anything is just nonsense. Of course they are say nothing to things f they tried to say yes to everything, they would be saying no to something. This idea is theres no tradeoffs. Perfect example of this is an executive here in Silicon Valley doing great work at a company. The company gets purchased by a larger, more bureaucratic firm and when he is in that new company, he is trying to say yes to everyone and everything, be a good team player, a good citizen, all of those things but his stress is going up, the quality of his work is going down. And he almost decides to leave the company. But instead, he decides to try an essentialistic experiment, become really selective. This is what he gets back. His home life, he says i got my life back. I was able to go to the gym every night, able to have dinner with his wife, but at work, hold on one second, but at work what he got back was that his performance ratings went up. Yes. And he ended the year with one of the largest bonuses of his career. That phrase, put people in the position to succeed and sometimes, the best way to put somebody in a position to succeed is to limit them in what they do dont ask them to do too much. Ask them to do whats in their wheelhouse. I think thats true maximum athletics. I think in business, that does work. You say no i think about apple or about the design team, likeson at apple who used to work there, well, tony from told me that some of the designs at google before joining google would never pass muster at apple. He said no. You have to say no. Not good enough. You have got to ask questions to prioritize and what kind of questions do you ask yourself to prioritize . These are two great points. Let me first take the tony thing. I was talking to tony this year in switzerland at a conference. One of the things he pointed out i thinks brilliant, the same design ethic he applied both at apple and now at nest to the way you design your life. The ethic described by deiter rams originally 35 years industrial designer at braun, summarized the whole philosophy as less but better. Not the same as just less, but less but better, incredible selectivity. So he said he applied that not just to the products but the way he lived his career and choices he made in his life as well. Now, coming to your question, questions that you can ask yourself. I mean this is exactly right. If you are overworked and, you know, underutilized, if you are busy but not productive, if this is the life many of us fall that this category, cause we are asking the wrong questions, more selective questions, give us more selective answers. Thats okay, design in your room and, you know, concentrating on whats in front of you, but what if your job is a journalist or sales, marketing, get out there and meet people and you dont know whether this connection is gone dma be the one which, you know, gets you your next founder or next sale. How do you account for the fact that chance encounters make a lot of peoples luck . Well, first of all, let me just talk about this idea of fear of missing out, right . Fomo. A real phenomenon. A lot more people experiencing it today than ten years ago, five years ago. The counterargument is the joy of missing out. The jo