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Seven and a half years, six months at a time
The 2012 bet
That was 2012, and the valuation was frothy for the time. Plenty of people looked at a company they had never heard of, with so few employees and such a high price, and wondered how much bigger it could possibly get. Cristina Cordova was 24, and her thinking was simpler. The company had runway, the people were smart, and the worst case was a couple of years of working with them.
She didn't dwell on the upside. The market was large and full of old, stodgy, legacy companies, so there was a slim chance Stripe could be the one to take over a huge share of it. What she wanted was a great working environment and people to learn from. A big financial outcome is the chance an early-stage startup offers, but it shouldn't always be the driving force early in a career.
Six months at a time
The first few years were amazing, and she never thought about leaving. After that she reached a stage of asking every six months whether she would stay another six months, and she kept answering yes until seven and a half years had passed.
A company like Stripe grows along a steep slope, and the ideal is to grow at the same slope. Over seven and a half years that isn't always true. The company may need someone different, and what she liked to work on was what she had been working on two years earlier. Past a certain point she took it day by day, because things changed too fast to predict.
Why were payments run by legacy companies?
Before Stripe, accepting cards online usually meant opening a merchant account with a bank and signing up separately with a payment gateway. Each step involved applications, paperwork, and fees, and approval could take days or weeks. Banks, card networks, and processors had built these systems over decades and had little reason to simplify them for small developers. Stripe launched publicly in 2011 on the pitch that a developer could start accepting cards by adding a few lines of code.
Why do job roles change as startups grow?
A company that grows from a few dozen people to thousands needs different skills at each stage. Early on, one person covers many functions, and later the work splits into specialized teams. Employees who joined at the start can find that the job they were hired for has become several jobs, or a different one. Researchers who study organizations often describe this as the point where a founding team has to give way to formal structure.
How does a startup valuation get set?
Valuations at the early stage are set by negotiation between founders and investors. An investor decides how much of the company they will get for a given amount of money, and dividing one by the other gives the implied value. With little revenue to measure, the price rests on the team, the size of the market, and how fast the product is growing. That is why two investors can price the same young company very differently.
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