This Week in Startups
00:24:45 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris, Amanda Bradford
[00:24:45] S3: Very sweet, Molly. [00:24:46] S0: Before we get any further into the show, we're gonna be looking back at some very classic, beloved iconic twist clips from both from the year 2017, funny enough. And then we, Alex, and I like to revisit these classic moments and then see what new conclusions, new ideas we could draw from these, fascinating deep dives with some of our favorite founders of years past. Obviously, full of tactical and practical advice you can apply even today if you are running a company. But before we get into all that, I do wanna call attention to this device that you can see hanging here on my lapel on on the side of my jacket. That, of course, is a plot note pin. If you just tap it, a little light comes on, and it starts recording everything that's going on around you. Everyone's speaking amazing for transcribing your meetings or discussions you're having with team members in the moment. The... Anything that you don't wanna forget, you just record the plot. It goes on to the plot app. It goes on to the web. It's... They've got summaries. They've got transcripts. They could turn it into whatever you want. Meeting notes, a lesson plan if you're a teacher, whatever you want. It's a very impressive product. Alex, you you played around with. You got a plot pin. [00:25:57] S3: Oh, I've used plot quite a bit. I mean, what I use it for is actually recording arguments with my spouse. So then later on, I can feed it into a LLM judge and then decide who was more or less in the wrong. It's really great for your marriage too. [00:26:08] S1: 100%.
00:26:08 · Amanda Bradford, Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis, Alex Wilhelm
[00:26:08] S1: 100%. [00:26:09] S0: A lot of insight into Alex's 2028 divorce proceedings. [00:26:13] S2: Do that. That was a joke. [00:26:14] S0: Don't do that. But if you do wanna get good, positive, healthy relationship uses out of your plot pin, go to plot.ai/twist. Use the code Twist, and they're gonna give you 10% off your Plod note pin. Thanks so much. We applaud Plod, as Jason likes to say. [00:26:34] S3: Yes. We do. Now we're gonna look at some interviews, Lan, that I think are very important to put into context because we often talk to leading CEOs in the moment when they have just done the latest thing, and we don't have context about what happened afterwards. So I love it to rewind the clock about a decade to some truly iconic companies to see what they were talking about in the what were we curious about, and then how does their progress line up with where we are now? So who's first? [00:27:00] S0: So first, we're going to take a look at, this classic moment from Jason and Patrick Collison of Stripe. This was originally published on 04/11/2017. It was filmed at the launch festival twenty seventeen. This was twist episode seven twenty three for those of you keeping track by number. [00:27:18] S3: And we're gonna kick off with a clip in which they talk about the metrics that Stripe was seeing at the time, and then we're gonna have a fun little comparison to where the company is today. Roll the tape.
00:27:18 · Alex Wilhelm, Jason Calacanis, Patrick Collison
[00:27:18] S3: And we're gonna kick off with a clip in which they talk about the metrics that Stripe was seeing at the time, and then we're gonna have a fun little comparison to where the company is today. Roll the tape. [00:27:28] S2: You've got a brand new product. That's right. And we're gonna show a video, but I wanted to start just maybe giving people a little context and the history of the company. What's the footprint of Stripe today? [00:27:38] S4: So, we're... We don't disclose many metrics about the business, but we say we handle now billions of dollars of aggregate revenue every year for sort of all the companies building on the platform, and we've many thousands of companies building on top of it, but we don't disclose the exact figures. One thing that's now the case because of Atlas, as Projji just mentioned, and I think is super cool, is we now work with companies in about 124 countries. And so basically, we now work with companies in just most countries. [00:28:11] S2: How many people work at [00:28:12] S4: the firm, generally We're about to hit 700. [00:28:15] S2: 700. [00:28:16] S4: That's right.
00:28:16 · Patrick Collison, Alex Wilhelm, Jason Calacanis
[00:28:16] S4: That's right. [00:28:16] S3: Alright. So, Lan, here we saw Patrick talk about, I I would say billions of GMV. I think he's what he's talking about there. Thousands of businesses, 700 employees. Okay. So I went through and I pulled out the Stripe numbers from both the end of 2025 and the midway point of 2026. So it's a little bit different as you might imagine. In 2025, the company did drop the number. They processed $1,900,000,000,000, so not billions, but several trillion dollars worth of GMV, and that was up 34% compared to the year before and worked out to about 1.6% of global GDP. Now, if you look forward to the first half of this year, Stripe is now processing about 2% of global GDP. They announced 5,000,000 businesses on the platform, and the revenue in the first half of this year was up 41%. So what I just love about this is here we have a successful founder of entrepreneurs doing great things, really good company scaling, hundreds of employees, really proud of the numbers, and it was just an absolute pit squeak compared to where it is now today. [00:29:17] S2: Very impressive.
00:29:17 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris, Alex Wilhelm
[00:29:17] S2: Very impressive. [00:29:18] S0: I mean, it's also interesting how disclosure and transparency shifts over time. When Stripe was still up and comers, startup, you know, underdog, they were like, we don't we don't really like to give out metrics. Like, we don't... We we gotta we gotta protect what we're doing, and we don't wanna prying eyes. And, you know, obviously, today, they're publicly reporting they've got valuations, and, yeah, every... And we know a lot more about what's going on inside Stripe, but also the Collisons themselves are routinely on podcast. They've got, I think, the cheeky pint. They've got their own. There's a there's a lot more discussion publicly about what's happening at Stripe, the larger that they've grown over the years. [00:29:57] S3: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I believe they built the cheeky pint set just for that show. So that might show just how the scale has changed from going to someone else's event to making your own fake pub so you can have your own podcast, I think shows the biggest [00:30:09] S0: scale of the company. You mean reality TV? That's finding out that the pawn stars pawn shop is not a real pawn shop. Like, you're you're [00:30:15] S3: It's like learning that the real housewives of Rhode Island are not really, indicative of the average, housemaker in the state. You know? Chalkyly enough.
00:30:15 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris
[00:30:15] S3: It's like learning that the real housewives of Rhode Island are not really, indicative of the average, housemaker in the state. You know? Chalkyly enough. [00:30:22] S0: I don't think anybody thought that. I think he might have been the only one who thought that. Alright. So, I do think we should move on to our next clip. Jason tried desperately to get Patrick to bag on PayPal, one of the Stripes' key rivals back in 2017. Of course, Patrick did not take the bait. Particularly funny to look at now, with all of the PayPal, Stripe acquisition talk of late. These two companies obviously have remained in one another's orbit and of interest to one another ever since. Let's take a look at this clip.