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-lauded pandemic response and about his behavior,

it seems something we'll 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.

The first stop, 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, worth of a platform for these new ventures, for these new undertakings,

and for people doing things that weren't privacy possible.

As of this weekend, it's now valued at 95 billion dollars, 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, the question is whether all that enthusiasm is matched by real growth prospects.

You might never have heard of Stripe, but you're probably familiar with the kind of service it provides.

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