support for this podcast and the following message come from the Glen Live, its new Caribbean Reserve Expression. A new single malt with a bold tropical twist. Learn more at the glen. Levitt dot com 2020. Imported by the Glen Levitt Distilling Company, New York, New York Hey, So before we start the show, I want to tell you about today's episode. And it's about software, a seemingly simple payment system that was actually so complicated that none of the big tech companies wanted to take it on. And the two guys who did were recent transplants from Ireland. Two brothers, both college dropouts. And as you're about to hear both Super super smart, this episode first ran about two years ago.

It is one of my favorites, and I say that a lot, but it really is. I hope you enjoy it. Way built the first prototype back in October of 2009 and it really was a parent twist that can I wouldn't be easy, like it was not going to be possible for it to be some sort of well, you know, we code furiously for two months, we launch this thing and then it's off to the races like from when we started working on it full time. Do we re publicly launched with almost two years on. So yeah, gonna be hard but it is actually possible from NPR. It's how I built this A show of that innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and stories behind the movements they built I'm Guy Raz and on today show how two brothers from Ireland wrote seven lines of computer code and built it into a $9 billion business. So the Holy Grail for a venture capitalist is the elusive unicorn.

This is what hundreds or thousands of business school graduates working at venture firms search for every day. They said through pitch after pitch power point after Power Point, hoping that today will be the day that one of these pitches will be the next uber Airbnb and opportunity so rare, so coveted. It's like a unicorn. Well, welcome to today's story because stripe is basically a unicorn with extra whipped cream and Cherries on top. This was a company that went from 0 to $100 million in value in a matter of months, and today, barely seven years after its founding stripe, is valued at more than $9 billion. So now your next question. What is stripe? Well, stripe isn't a thing you buy. It's not like under armour shirts or Warby Parker glasses,

but it is what allows you to buy those things online. If you use insta card or lift or Kickstarter, or even if you shop online and target you're using stripe. It's basically the back end technology that allows you to safely enter your credit card details and pay for what you want. And there are two things that make strike very different from its competitors. The first is its simplicity. It was originally just seven lines of code and the second theme youth of the two brothers who founded it When Striped launched in 2009 Patrick and John Collison were just 23 21 years old. The Collison brothers grew up in rural Ireland in County Tipperary, where their parents ran a small hotel. Very small. I did 12 bedrooms when he bought it on and on. We got a house, maybe a mile or two away onto regroups, surrounded by farm line. You know the options were Teoh play in the garden and did a lot of that on two play with Lego. We did a lot of that and to read books and I look back at it very finally.

So your dad was running this hotel and were you guys involved with it at all? Like, did you have to go there on the weekends and, like, change sheets and mop the floors?

Remember, You know, powder. I think these patterns probably four when I was two on DSO. You know, there's only, you know, a two year old can only be so useful in the operations of the of the hotel. I think my favorite memory is the ballroom floor, the highly polished surface that was awesome as a kid for kind of getting a, you know, kind of a length game in terms of who can slide the furthest but much and all aside, like toe. Imagine that we were extremely useful in running it out. I think we were primarily a hasn't.

How did you guys get into coding? How did that happen? I bought a book when I was 13 on, and I read it one Saturday and started writing somewhere Pages on. Really. It was all sort of, uh, it was all downhill from there. And how about you, John? Did you seeing Patrick and into coding? Did you think I won't try that too? Yeah, there's definitely

an influence. And I think I had an experience that a lot of people I know who've learned to coat hat, which is it's often an end result that pulls you along on your making. Everything up is you go. And you don't really understand. You know, you're copying things from a book or from websites and typing them into a computer to get it to work on. It seems like the two big motivations that people often have our websites or video games. Answer. In my case, the initial website I made was not very good. After I built us, Patrick taught me a lesson in in security. You know, I was probably 14 at the time, and I cuddled together this website and there were vulnerabilities and issues and stuff that Patrick then hacked, precise. Just teach me a lesson on that.

OK, so, Patrick, I mention this because you're not gonna mention this In 2005 you won an award like the things like the young scientist award of Of Ireland. You were 15 and, um, or 16 or something like that. And, um, I'm assuming and maybe you weren't cognizant of this, but well, I mean, people must have said, Oh, they're the Collison boys. You know, there's those twos really smart boys.

Were you aware that you guys were just really smart? I mean, did did you were you would Were you aware that people were aware of the two of you when you were kids? Um, I don't think they were when we were kids. I think, actually, this this kind of science contest is that was really the first time we're anyone might have had even the slightest cause. Yeah, toe have kind of come across. So are heard of either of us. What do you do? What was your invention or experiment or submission? That one. You young scientists of Ireland. Well,

as we sort of touched on, I've gotten really into programming and in particular become interest in this program language called lisp. Andi, I was fascinated by list because it had been invented in the late fifties, like, really early into the history of technology. Uh, but have been kind of for gotten on and ignored the thing. I worked on the set of a new version place trying to kind of update it, making it really straightforward bill to have complicated Web applications and things like that. And, you know, it's funny. It's only kind of looking back in it that this becomes clear. I mean, from a very early stage,

I was interested in sort of working on tools or just gonna building things that created leverage for others in that basically, the whole point of working on this programming language was to provide a tool that would make it easier for others to build things. And so I didn't consciously think about it this way at the time, you kind of run starting stripe or whatever, but basically all the things that I've worked on, kind of somewhat seriously have in some ways been kind of tools for creation show. In 2006 after a Patrick one, the Young Scientists of the Year Award, he decided to go to the U. S to M. I T. For college, and two years later, John would follow his brother to Cambridge to attend Harvard But all the while, the brothers were always working and conspiring and ways to solve problems. They come across on the Internet,

for example, why it seems so hard to buy and sell secondhand things in an efficient way. So one afternoon, while mulling over some ideas at their local pub, Patrick and John came up with a potential solution. Back end technology for eBay users to manage inventory. And they found two other guys who were working on a similar problem. So they joined up with them, moved to San Francisco and called their company Octa Matic. What Octa Matic did was it made it really easy to kind of manage on toe list items for sale on existing platforms, things like Eve A, uh oh, are you know, other marketplaces for? For selling some of these items you could use Octa Matic Teoh sort of track your inventory and toe, upload your items and toe,

manage the listing photos. And so basically, it was a tool for people who work of selling significant amounts of stuff online, you know. Ah, and so it was software to help those people do that job better, And the idea was that kind of that could help us gain kind of one side of the marketplace since then. Over time, we could come and then build, you know, a better user experience for customers. So you guys build this thing and who was the public face of Octa Matic? Because, I mean, obviously, because they're super smart and talented.

But, you know, you were really young, right? Like 18 and 16 years old. So were you guys sort of staying in the background and with the other founders? The public face was really the website. Great. The great line about how on the internet, nobody knows that your dog on, you know, we kind of took full advantage of that. But the company must have done pretty well, right? Because I guess just over a year after you had your original idea, it sold for reportedly for $5 million.

So was this strange toe all of a sudden at that age, you know, land into that kind of money. A man. No, You didn't get five million yourself yet to divide it up. And it's a pistol. You probably masters, and yeah, he still pride walked away with a couple 100,000 bucks. That was probably more money than you'd ever seen in your life. It was certainly more money than we've ever seen in our lives. Yeah, was enough money that it afforded a kind of freedom and really, I think just kind of forced it of a kind of reflection that, you know,

had we Bean had Ibn kind of unjust the treadmill of you know, you go to college, you get your degree and first job and so on such that. I can certainly imagine sort of a different version of my life in my career where I didn't do some of that thinking until I was much older. Yeah, so I guess this was, like, right around the time you were at at Harvard. Uh, John and Patrick, you eventually went back to M I t for for a while, right? That's

exactly right in the fall of 2000

nine, and I should just preface is within both of you with dropout and never return. But in that brief moment of time, where John your hovered and Patrick, you're at M i t. Uh, is that really this around 2009 is that were the early sort of idea that would become stripe began. That's

an interesting question. On the one hand, stripers the most interesting idea we had come across during the course of automatic in that it was the single hardest thing about developing an Internet business was just the business side of us and the accepting money, the pain inside. Yeah, it's an issue. It seemed like a really important problem on We thought there should be something really easy focused on developers. Instant set up T people started starting accepting money. But on the other hand, what we know, right? Were these two college students? Yeah, and so maybe the financial system had it all figured out on we were these these impetuous youngsters with the wrong ideas. And so you're trying to figure out in those early days of starting and company or starting a product are re wrong, Or is the world

wrong? So let me understand. Try to understand what take us back to 2019. I remember using Amazon and, you know, buying stuff from Amazon and for me as a customer was seemed fairly frictionless, you know, But I just hit b o click toe bite and it would be delivered, like couple days

later. That's exactly is. And I think that's part of why it didn't get solved. Is that as a customer, everything seemed fine? Yeah, on then you talked to anyone who had to run a business and in particular and Internet business, and they would talk your ear off happily about it. I mean, the kind of stories they would tell you again. Oftentimes they'll tell you it was the single hardest thing about getting their business off the ground because the providers that exists at the time, it was often through banks. They were the gatekeepers. They were the people that said, Yes, you can have an online business or No, you can't.

And it was a much more important step in that regard. And, you know, it's funny when we goto investors early on for stripe, they would say, you know, it seems pretty solve, you know, 2009 like that. You know, I think we have this Internet payments thing down, and they were do some asking around, and that's when they got

it right. So you so if you were starting Internet business in 2009 when this idea came to you. What I mean and you know you want to accept payments. Let's say you had a business selling. Oh, I don't know. Ah, you know, homemade peanut butter that you would ship to people. It was great. It was hard. It would have been really hard to set up a way to accept payments to your site. It's hard to imagine that it could have been the case. And, you know, clearly there must be some kind of reasonable answer to this some some easy to use piece of software, something and we just were in finding us.

But when he came to realize is that because it was financial, that that sort of technology companies were very hesitant to go on addresses. Why? Why would they be hesitant? Because you deal with partnerships with financial institutions and regulation and risk controls and making sure that things were sort of done compliant, Lee, And it becomes then very complicated to figure out how to offer that service internationally. And so the fact that you have to get a span these multiple sectors and deal with all these kind of and constraints with figure out a better way to do payments. Technology companies start ups attended and still tend, I mean, for understandable reasons to kind of shy away from thing from problems that sort of, uh, we have to solve a lot of hard problems in multiple domain. Yeah, And then you couple to that was the fact that in papal existed. Yeah,

And I think for a while back in the early days of PayPal, people thought that, you know, people was going to solve this. Explain for a moment of the papal thing because, you know, I've used PayPal not very often, but I've had, you know, occasions where somebody asks me to pay pal them and pay pal them. And it seemed pretty easy. So what was the problem? So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's a designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building a website of your building and you marketplace something like this,

people works okay for sending, you know, $20 from Joe to Jane, where it works much less well is when you want to do this at scale, you want to sort of build on all automated integration to your websites Were running a business with those people Just isn't designed for the business use case It was built for eBay. Were kind of one off sending $100 manually from this person to that? Yes. And whereas when you're building a business online where your again integrating this into a website or into an apparition collect cash? You've a quite different set of considerations around how you do that scale and people had not been designed for that. So Okay, so here's what I don't get. You guys were obviously super smart and very good at coding. But what made you think that you could solve these big, enormous problems like regulation and dealing with banks and developing relationships and credit card companies that, you know, Google and Apple clearly felt that they could not resolve in large,

part healthy dose of the naivete of youth? Um, but ah, you know, we didn't just leap into us. We built the first prototype back in October of 2009 and then we basically spent kind of eight or 10 months trying to sort of map out public actually required to have this work into this any material scale, what sorts of people would have to hire which sorts of entities would have to partner with. And you know what that would look like? And so we realized while we need to hire a very senior and experienced partnerships people to make sure that we get to the first to your relationships in place with banks. And it really was a parent to us, that kind of wouldn't be easy like it. It was not possible for it to be some sort of Well, you know, we code furiously for two months, we launch this thing, and then it's off to the races.

Like from when we started working on it full time. Do we re publicly launched with almost two years? That's how long it took us to kind of orchestrate all those details. That sort of you're describing. But I guess, yeah, when we got a sense first of after again that this kind of investigation was yet gonna be hard, but it is actually possible. So you guys had a couple of 100,000 bucks from the sale of Octa Matic, and obviously you had the coating chops and the technology chops, but you did not have any money. How are you able to get money? Teoh, You know, fuel the ambitions of this company.

One of things that Silicon Valley does well is it probably has the hot. You know, Patrick and I now travel toe a decent number of other places and stripe has offices around the world in Dublin, London, Singapore, in places like this. But I think Silicon Valley is probably the best place in terms of the risk tolerance of the investment capital that's available. If we could get people convinced of the opportunity on if we could show people that initial early customer attraction on how much it resonated with the target market, they were actually willing to take a best despite the fact. I mean, when you look back on it, there's a vast amount of uncertainty in every other aspect of the execution between would Patrick and I'd be able to get visas for, You know, if the United States to work here, would we be able to hire toe halt with the long term? You know, financial partnership structure of things like that looked like, But people are willing to look past all of those things to the opportunity.

What I'm what I wonder is when you I mean, you had an advantage when you when you started meeting with investors. I'm assuming because you had already started and sold a business. And and and a lot of investors love that. They love to see that experience. Um, but did they ask you where you asked tough questions by potential investors? Like for example? You know, you guys are really young. How are you gonna manage people or you don't have any connections or involvement in the financial industry or about back? Did you get questions like that? Surprisingly, no. I think people are used to that in Silicon Valley. I mean, by the time people become famous because because the thing they worked on succeeded,

they tend to be older. But I think the mental image we have of people who do successful things is like 10 to 20 years, maybe even mawr older than the ages at which they tend to have actually done them right, and veces and investors and just people in general in Silicon Valley, I think, are sort of unusually sort of attuned. This fact and recognize and realize that sort of hey, really significant work not only can be done by people in their twenties, but is very commonly done by people in their twenties on. So, you know, I think that's going to their great credit. And, you know, we really benefited from it. The thing is not toe suggest that investors,

you know, rushed with enthusiasm to invest in stripe. Most investors said no, but the reason was much more reasons were much more because they just thought it was a bad idea. Rather, that kind of people, well, you are a whole host of reasons it was going to be a developer oriented service rather than going instead of trying toe run this big kind of expensive sales and marketing campaign.

So really many companies in the same exactly

already thousands of companies doing something like this. Um, as you suggested, there were a lot of partnerships we'd have to navigate and get in place. And, you know, those don't tend to be kind of the forte of a startup, and it wasn't clear to them back then. I think viscerally just how dearly the market kind of still wise. You know we were sort of starting stripe in the wake of the financial crisis, and it's kind of hard toe. Remember this or kind of internalize it now, But people who are actually fairly pessimistic about technology in some ways back then And that was in part because U. S investors had really kind of tilted, quite skeptical on where technology was going. And so I think the kind of the bear case on stripe was, in part this bear case on technology more broadly where?

Well, maybe we've already done all the stuff. They're going to wait, Come back. John and Patrick stayed bullish on strike and how they finally got it off the ground. Stay with us. You're listening to how I built this from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Apple TV Plus with Boys State, featuring the high school program that has spawned a U. S. President, senators, pro athletes and a Supreme Court justice. Boys State follows 1000 teen boys as they create their own mock government, winner of the Sundance Grand jury price and a revolution in very tae filmmaking, says Variety Watch Boy State Rated PG 13.

An Apple original film now on the Apple TV app subscription required for Apple TV, plus support for NPR in the following message come from our sponsor, the House of Role, whose Shaw's sinks are individually handcrafted. Operations director Andy Hampson says they're artisans are proud to sign every sink they make as each craftsman finishes the sink. He's got a stamp, a stamp is his name on. He places that on even the back of this in car underneath the base of the sink. And that's our craftsman say this syncs up to shows quality. I am happy that it meets my expectations. Onda. I want to put my name to it to learn more. Visit House of role dot com Hey, welcome back to how I built this from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2010.

Patrick has dropped out of M. I. T. John has dropped out of Harvard. Their parents are not freaking out about this, By the way, the brothers are working full time on stripe, and they start to look around for investors, and a lot of investors are saying no. But finally, John Patrick catch a lucky break when they managed to get a meeting with a pretty big player in Silicon Valley. We had a meeting with Peter Thiel on instead of just as in this conversation, be sort of. I told him, structurally, what we saw is being all the kind of major flaws in papal way looking back and I said of Cringe a little bit,

you know how in polite a guest I must be in again co founder of PayPal. Exactly. Right. Exactly. And so, you know, at great length belabor the point about how they kind about things wrongly. But Peter, being such a sort of, you know, on inveterate contrarian, um was quite sympathetic to this case and decided on the spot to make, you know, a fairly material investment of $200,000. So So what did Peter Teal c and striped like? What was it just easy to use?

I mean, what was it? The kind of thing where a software developer like Oh, my God, somebody is finally figured this thing out. I think

many of the developers were just really glad that someone was finally paying attention to them at all. Now, as it happened, repaid obsessive attention to them, and we were really building for that audience. But the baseline that people were working with was very low. It was not competitive. I think what changed and Waas we were fortunate to be a part of was the fact that now for Internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience, and so basically I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business where it was just something that needs to be taken care of. And there was only downside. Really, you could make a bad choice, but you couldn't make a great choice for is now, as we've seen with companies like Amazon, like lift, like insta cars, they can actually win based on their product experience, and that's

new. So OK, so for people who are non technical, non coders and I will count myself among them, explain how this works basically your lift and ah, I I take a lift and I pay the driver. I just click pay and I've left you guys, I guess, have my credit card, and so you have to communicate with my credit card company to make sure that they are charging me eso than my bank account will be able to pay the credit card company later. Presumably, you also have to pay the credit card company right like they're taking a cut of your money

to. That's exactly right. So what's happening underneath the hood when you use any business part by stripe is you know, you probably type in your credit card. You probably only type it in once, and that it saved with your profile of for any time using in future. That is securely sense directly to stripe. So it's not hitting or jumping stored on other servers. And then when the business wants to, actually, you know, accept money and charge your credit cards. And in overtime, it's now more than just credit cards, bank transfers and different international payment methods and things like this. But the business that wants to charge your credit cards, they say,

Hey, I'd like to charge this card $20 Onda. We put money in their bank accounts and we have handle everything that goes on between that instruction on the money arriving in their bank accounts. It's actually pretty complex what goes on under the hood, but again. Our aim is that people did not start businesses so they could deal with the minutia of the financial system. Right? They start businesses because they have a vision and they've a product that they want to get out there into the world. And we want to get them back to doing that. Anything that does not get them jumping out of bed in the morning. You know, we should be able to take off their place on that of the technical of us.

So my understanding is that it was basically seven lines of code, which I guess from a coding standpoint, is very simple, elegant. And a developer could just plug that in to the application or site they were developing. And then that was it. That's pretty much it. We had lots of stories of people integrating payments in an afternoon or an evening and then launching their business the next day on. I just worked consistently. That was a big break from Well, how did prevail before and once you started to gain momentum and you launched, and I guess you lot you launched publicly in 2011 right? That's right. How did you convince companies to to trust this toe work with you. Who was your first big customer client? Well, because we're serving high potential companies and start ups and fast growing companies,

we grew with our customers. So back in the early in the very earliest days Yeah, those companies were pretty small, but some of them started to become pretty big, like lift and Shopify, and so on became customers of strife. And of course, Lift and Shopify have now become, you know, have very successful companies in their own right. And how did you get them to work with you to just meet, meet the people who were working at those companies and use developed world as well? Yes, we should have got to know those people. But I think more fundamentally and importantly than that we d enabled product experiences that they wanted to have so in lift case, for example,

they wanted to not just charged the customers, but they wanted to pay their drivers on. There was no product that enabled a really good driver payment experience. And so we've kind of co evolved with them to enable the best and user experience and and your revenue stream was a percentage of every transaction that was that was going to. And that is the way that you get paid. Yeah, we really wanted kind of clarity in the alignment of interests where we would only make more money when the businesses be served, made more money and is like, I think it's like 2.9% or something. Transaction fee, right on transactions. That right? That's right. What, did anybody try to stop you or make life difficult for you banks or regulators? Because you're dealing with intricate financial regulations.

And I mean and big banks presumably have a big interest in this is could be a revenue stream for them, like did. Were there people who to try Teoh? Or was it just once you started you just the mo mentum was the wind was behind you. One of this department we really tried tried to approach things differently to I think, how technology companies often tend Teoh, a technology company I think often have a sort of go it alone mentality will build it all in house, will do it all ourselves. We can do things better than ever in the outside world whereas we thought that strike would only be possible and it would only be possible to do it well if we partnered closely with people who had deep expertise and experience and industries that we ourselves were less familiar with. And so, from the very beginning, even before we launched, we partnered closely with banks. And now we work with banks and many different countries, and not just banks, but of other financial institutions.

Besides, but we really wanted to build stripe as sort of a multi decade thing. Yeah, and if we're going to go and do it that way, we really had to do it right. So as you started to really, you know, launch and developed and get more and more attention, Why didn't the competitors come out from the woodwork? Quite unlike PayPal or these other transaction companies square and stuff Say we're gonna do what they dio. Did they try? Well, what we were doing didn't look that important back then. It wasn't the case instead of we immediately or what we're doing immediately looked like it was obviously working and obviously of major significance, we were back then in the eyes of others that have working with all these inconsequential little companies on making their lives a bit easier. But while was this mobile payment thing actually going to amount to much inaccuracies were were there actually that May developers that would be starting the successful companies.

I mean, again, it gets back to this pessimism around technology that kind of existed in prevailed around 2000, 90,010 and so on. And this is one of the great facts about our industry is that you cannot turn money into great products as a kind of mechanical operation. Uh, if it were possible, there would be many more great iPhone competitors. Facebook would have been long since he tripped by my

space, or Yahoo would be really good to use, right?

The intricacies of good product of good design of good architecture. Those can be trivially replicated. I mean, I mean, essentially your competitive advantage was was you guys. I think it's and an amorphous combination for any of these products. And I don't mean to single stripe out for any great product, some amorphous combination of sort of the e 1000 the culture and the people and sort of the work style and kind of a fingertip sense for the priorities and all these things that are just, like, very hard to copy. I mean, it's the sort of a continuum where at one end, you know, your your manufacturing steel and at the other end your you know, you're manufacturing novels and in steel manufacturing sure, you can turn capital into mawr better, cheaper steel.

And at the other end it very hard to know how you how you turn the money into kind of better writing and software is somewhere in between. And I think this is kind of constantly the challenge for people looking to analyze and make predictions in the industry. Where again Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had, ah, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, mawr of kind of any of the obvious inputs. And yet somehow there was something missing. When you think of this number last year, $9.2 billion valuation, does that mean anything to you? I mean,

is it abstract? Do you think, man, I'm rich? Or do you even doesn't even cross your mind? Must at some level, right?

It's been my experience that people pay a huge amount of attention to the headline numbers of Silicon Valley companies. And so, you know, Stripe is a company that's been valued in in fundraising at night, $9.2 billion or what have you? There is an assumption baked in that striped continues to execute very strongly, and so it would be a very dangerous mode to slip in tow. Teoh becoming rearward, looking on, looking at everything that has happened today's because the much more relevant fact is, whilst we release in 2018 what we release in 28 19 what stripes global expansion looks like on things like that. You don't have a valuable company unless the company continues toe execute. It's very dynamic.

It's a very careful way of saying, Hey, I could lose us all at any moment. What? How much of the success of this company do you attribute to your skill and your you know, your intelligence, how much to luck? I think the question is less about how much could be attributed to my skill and intelligence on instead to the skill intelligence of the hundreds of people who've gotten striped where it is on, I guess I would say that skill and intelligence and especially, most importantly, intense application and hard work. I think all those things are necessary. I think had they not being there, had there not being so many people who just came up with so many smart ways of doing things. And, you know, in many cases,

toils at such length. There's not a chance, not a sliver of the chance that we would be here. But I also think that the luck was required to there again, groups of people who are smarter and harder working than us, who just didn't have the same good fortune. You are still both You guys are still so young. I mean, you know, you're at a point

in your life where that so every

day but every day But Pointer life were. Lots of people are just starting out, you know, the same age. So when did you guys know that this was huge? I mean, you know, it was going from this idea that you have in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raising two million to being valued 20 than 100 billion, and then today more, almost 10 billion. When did you did you ever have a moment where the two of you sat back and said, Wow, what we built has never really been time for that home on day. There's nothing like a young company, too.

Every morning I remind you that there's so much left to be done so much that's not yet working the way it should be. I mean, it's really quite visceral. You wake up in the morning and there are 20 emails in your inbox that are sort of somehow all related to things that you're doing badly or wrongly. There's never a moment what it feels successful on. And there's a quote that I kind of often think about from Greg Lemonde saying, Of course, the cyclist, it never gets easier. You just go faster. Andi. I used to kind of cycle quite a bit, and there's a lot of sort of, ah painful truth to that. Where, as you cycle Maura's,

you practice more as you get fitter is you get faster is your form gets better. Sure, you start cycling faster. Your times get better with the experience of being on the bike never gets easier. The pain that you feel on the first bike ride. That's the same pain that you're gonna feel on your 500 bike ride. You'll just be going much faster on the 500 bike ride. And it kind of feels like that in the startup, where every day now the problems and challenges on and visceral pain is just a za cute, as when we were starting out. The problem is, just have a different form. It's It's just this kind of relentless process of trying Teoh shift, what it is that exists and what we've collectively managed to create so far into what we all set out to create in the first place on we still have quite a ways to go there. It's Patrick and John Collison, founders of Stripe.

In 2017 John Collison was described as the youngest self made billionaire on earth, and I know you heard us talking about their valuation is being like nine or $10 billion will remember we did that interview back in 2018 today, just two years later, Stripe is valued at $35 billion and please do stick around because in just a moment we're going to hear from you about things, your building. But first, a quick message from our sponsor, TurboTax TurboTax makes doing your taxes as easy as taking a picture. Simply snap a picture of your W two to get a head start on your taxes. TurboTax. All people, our tax people. Hi, I'm a new summer Rohde and I am the new host of NPR's Ted Radio Hour. I am so excited because we are working on a bunch of new amazing episodes were exploring big ideas about reinvention, making amends and the psychological effects of climate change.

Our first show drops March 13th. Please join me. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're updating a story that we ran about a year ago with Kirby or daily from white salmon. Washington and Kirby and his family spend a lot of time at the beach, which means they have all observed one of the great wonders of marine life, the free flying some umbrella. When the wind comes up, those things blow down the beach like crazy and you hear about it all the time. You hear about the beach umbrellas that fly through the air and land on somebody's car, and those things blow around because they're not always well anchored right in a big gust of wind. A metal state can just fly off the ground. And Kirby just wasn't satisfied with stuff that was on the market. Lots of inexpensive tent stakes that you pound in with a hammer or rock. But there's no really good Tulis solution that would hold in all weather conditions,

and that would work in sand. It would work in clay, And because Kirby is a professional woodworker, he started to tinker around with ideas for a better ground anchor. And he was inspired by one thing in particular. You've probably seen it, and it looks like a gigantic wine cork opener. And in case you haven't seen this giant wine cork opener, think pets. Because people use this corkscrew thing is kind of an anchor to help keep their dogs tethered outside. And Kirby thought a big screw like that could be great for anchoring all kinds of things. Because the screw threads have quite a bit more surface area, it increases the surface area between the soil and the ground anchor and more surface area means a firmer hold on the ground. Anyway, Kirby started experimenting with prototypes and looking for a company to make the screw. And while he's doing all this,

he has this huge, earth shattering epiphany. The Internet is amazing. Kirby was able to locate the perfect recycled plastic to make the screws and the perfect injection molding company that could make him. You could screw this into the ground, anchor your stuff, and the hold is pretty darn incredible. And then Kirby did a Kickstarter campaign. About four years ago, he raised $45,000 boom! His product was launched. The crazy thing that kept happening over and over again, as we would get a phone call or an email that says I'm going camping on Friday, I have toe have these for the weekend, and so I don't know how we went from this product that never existed to something that people have tohave for the weekend, and they're upset if they're not gonna be able to get it.

Okay, great story. So far, right? But then one morning about two years ago, Kirby gets this email, you know, an angry email and it said I ordered your screws from this promotion you did on Facebook, and I haven't gotten anything yet, and I thought, I don't even know what this is. We're not running a promotion on Facebook, and you probably know where this is headed. Scammers were starting to get into Kirby's business. They were copying his photos and design and advertising cheap knockoffs and way undercutting his prices. So as soon as we would report one of these for trademark violations is how we would take them down.

One would disappear, and then two more would pop up. So Kirby actually did something kind of unusual. He sent his own product for free to anyone who had made the mistake of buying a cheap knockoff. Meanwhile, some of his loyal customers kept reporting the knock up sites and leaving comments warning new customers about the scam. We created this kind of international police force, probably of 50 or 60 people. It would email us every day and say, Here's another one, and that helps for a while. But when we last checked in with Kirby, he told us that the counterfeit screws kept showing up online. So in August, of last year, he hired a law firm,

which is now gone after 85 knockoff companies with more lawsuits on the way. As for sales, Kirby's doing pretty well. He hopes to do about a $1,000,000 in revenue this year. His product is called Oren Screw to hear more about it or here. Previous episodes head to our podcast page How I built this dot NPR dot org's. And, of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build dot NPR dot org's and thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at H i B t at NPR dot org's and you Want to Follow Us on Twitter. It's at how I built this or add Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by Thomas Lu,

with music composed by room teen Arab Louis. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Candace Limb, Neva Grant. Jeff Rogers, our intern trainee,