Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has had a long career being uncompromising,

but as allegations have piled up about his once-lawed pandemic response,

and about his behavior, it seems something will have to give.

And in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, there's a service that's on the rise, plastic surgery.

Demand is up as more people spend time abroad and online.

Problem is, being a cosmetic surgeon in the country is something of a dangerous profession. First up, though, Patrick Collinson co-founded the Irish-American payment platform, Stripe, with his brother John, in 2010, when he was just 22.

We started out building a payment platform for internet businesses, as simple as that.

And so you want to accept payments on your website, in your app, you want to charge people over the internet.

We built a system that makes that really easy to do.

By the time our sister show Babbage spoke with him in September 2019,

private investors had poured money into Stripe and it was worth

$35 billion.

Stripe works with millions of the highest potential companies all around the world, and so

worse of a platform for these new ventures, for these new undertakings, and for people doing things

that weren't previously possible.

As of this weekend, it's now valued at $95 billion, making it the most valuable private

company that Silicon Valley has ever produced.

There's clearly plenty of investor interest in the small handful of firms that handle the

back end of e-commerce.

But as ever, with the eye-watering valuations of the tech world,

...