00:00:00 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:00:00] S0: My name is Jonathan. I'm a partner here at South Park Commons. And for this episode of Minus One, we wanted to speak to someone who is very critical to the early stages of SPC, to our own Minus One. And that person's Anurag Goel, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Render, was employee number eight at Stripe. And before either of those, before his time at SPC, he was working on a company that needed payment processing.
00:00:24 · Anurag Goel
[00:00:24] S1: So let's start there. It is October 2010, and a friend came to me and I was bored out of my mind. And he was like, Hey, come on, let's build this video game rental platform. And I'm like, Okay. And so I code it up. It's one of those shared video game rental platforms where like people who have all these video games lying around can send their disks into the company's warehouses. Right, because you're like not using it anymore. Exactly. And then you can make money from it and so on. So, like for something like this, I needed on-site payments. Wanted it to look more legit because these guys are gonna send all their video games to me. And they did, and they did. And I didn't want it to be just PayPal. And so, again, in 2010, I went to this company called Braintree, and they refused. They were like, We're only give payments to VC funded companies. And I'm like, Dude, this is a side project. What are you talking about? And they're like, No, come back to us when you've raised funding for it. And I had read a post by Paul Graham, who said, well, these two engineers are building this payments thing that's going to change how developers accept payments. And here's where you can go and sign up for your early access invite. And I did at the time. And then in December, I got an invite from John Collison, who's one of the founders, saying, yeah, come on, sign up. And and I signed up, and Stripe at the time was called slash dev slash payments. It was a terrible name. Wait. Slash dev slash payments? Exactly. A it's a Linux y name. Okay. There's... Because slash dev is like a device thing. Yeah. And they're basically...
00:02:06 · Jonathan Brebner, Anurag Goel
[00:02:06] S0: Stripe is better. [00:02:06] S1: Stripe is better. Stripe is better. Yeah. I integrate the thing and it's not PCI compliant, mind you, at the time. And I just couldn't believe how easy it was. Even back then, suddenly, I had payments, and I was like, that's it. [00:02:22] S0: There's like a magic to the infrastructure, the ease of like this kind of infrastructural [00:02:25] S1: environment. Yeah. Like, it was just like, okay, is that it? And it was. And I accepted my first payments for this thing in January 2011. And then I started running into Stripe's API issues, and I gave them a ton of feedback about it. I was like, this doesn't work. This is broken. You should do this other thing. And that's how I got to know the team a little bit. And then one fine day, Stripe... Well, Patrick, the CEO emailed me with a list of the most accomplished thing everyone at the company had done and telling me, well, these are all the people. Here are all the great things they've done. You should join. And I was like, nope. I don't think I should because I have this other thing going on. [00:03:12] S0: Yeah. I have this... I really think the future is Seer to peer vision. Video game rentals. [00:03:18] S1: Disgruntles. When everything is going online, mind you. Yeah. Right. [00:03:20] S0: I get it. Exactly. Yeah. Like, Netflix has just started releasing their own kind of, like, original content streams. Yeah. You're like, no. No.
00:03:20 · Jonathan Brebner, Anurag Goel
[00:03:20] S0: I get it. Exactly. Yeah. Like, Netflix has just started releasing their own kind of, like, original content streams. Yeah. You're like, no. No. [00:03:26] S1: Yeah. This is fad. No. I think... Yeah. This payments thing... I mean, I don't know. I don't... You guys... Like, I gave you so much product feedback. I don't know, man. And then something else happened, which is, again, completely fortuitous, which is my wife decided to go to grad school, and I didn't want to work... I was working from home, and I don't wanna work from home by myself. And I was like, well, I don't really wanna interview anywhere. And and I need a new job that doesn't involve me working from home. And I kind of like the vibe that these guys have. And so... [00:04:00] S0: Yeah. Why don't you... And you have some opinions about the product already. Yeah. Not going in, like, totally blind. [00:04:06] S1: No. And and I like the vibe in the office. I... I'd I'd gone to the Stripe office, and they were all sitting around one big table, and I genuinely enjoyed the vibe. I was like, yeah. This could be fun. And so that's how I ended up in Stripe in August 2011.
00:04:06 · Anurag Goel, Jonathan Brebner
[00:04:06] S1: No. And and I like the vibe in the office. I... I'd I'd gone to the Stripe office, and they were all sitting around one big table, and I genuinely enjoyed the vibe. I was like, yeah. This could be fun. And so that's how I ended up in Stripe in August 2011. [00:04:21] S0: Yeah. That's funny. From like waitlist on the product to, yeah, joining what, like six months or eight, nine months later. It does sort of speak to... I mean, obviously, we always... I mean, this is true on the investing side. It's true on the founding side. There's a lot of, like, retroactive myth making and and, sort of, like, aligning of of things in a way that sounds like, oh, it was based on all these dissidents. But a lot of these things are just like... Oh. Just... Totally conditional and and... You know, arbitrary.... [00:04:53] S1: Arbitrary by chance. Yeah. I mean, I think most startup successes that are outsized have to have a series of things that happen that are usually not likely to happen Yeah. Right. For those forces to come together. That's why they're outsized. Otherwise, everyone would kind of be average startup success.
00:04:53 · Anurag Goel, Jonathan Brebner
[00:04:53] S1: Arbitrary by chance. Yeah. I mean, I think most startup successes that are outsized have to have a series of things that happen that are usually not likely to happen Yeah. Right. For those forces to come together. That's why they're outsized. Otherwise, everyone would kind of be average startup success. [00:05:11] S0: Yeah. You can definitely create more surface area for luck to accumulate. Right? That's definitely true, and and it it is... You know, it's it's not the case that it is all just purely arbitrary in luck. I do wanna ask you about the concept of myth making a little bit more because it's it's something I think a lot about, especially seeing people here in a period that is... It's very often messy. Right? Mhmm. And a lot of times, founders don't like talking about it later in part because they're trying to build up confidence and a sense of competence Yeah. Right, for their customers. Right? There are obviously certain industries where this is even more acute. And so there's there's this sort [00:05:49] S1: of like massaging of the of [00:05:50] S0: the like messy beginning or or... I mean, the joke version of it is like, you know, I I always knew from the age of three when my mom break down crying after a check bounced in the grocery store aisle that I wanted to build b to b SaaS for, like, payment verification. You know, like some Exactly. Some version of that. Right? Yeah. It's made. Like, you have seen this. You saw that Stripe. Right? Very early process there. You went through it yourself. Like, you saw a lot of it at SPC.