External stakeholders are hard

Yesterday I was chatting with someone when the eternal question to ex-Stripes came up, “When is Stripe going to IPO?” Personally, I haven’t the faintest clue, and from there the conversation moved towards Silicon Valley’s fascination with Stripe. Stripe does a lot of things well, and deserves credit for all of that, but I think the hardest thing that it does is often underappreciated: it manages to innovate quickly despite having a vast number of external stakeholders.

My experience is that at B2C companies, your loudest stakeholders are probably your users, your investors, and then your employees. Conversely, at B2B companies it’s probably enterprise users, investors, non-enterprise users, and then employees. Unfortunately, that’s just the baseline for B2B. If you’re in a highly regulated industry like finance, integrating with numerous financial partners, working internationally across an increasingly large number of countries, and doing it while each of thoes countries is reimagining data privacy and data locality every six months… that gets hard.

Stripe has retained its ability to ship new product despite the immense pressure from their external stakeholders, and in my opinion that’s their biggest accomplishment as a scaled business. This complements their key insights at previous scaling points: eengineers are the only stakeholder that matter at small startups, and platform switching costs are commensurate with a platform’s capabilities.