You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

Today we have a very special guest. John Callison is the co-founder of Stripe, which powers business around the world with a developer-friendly way to accept payments, online, and in mobile apps.

They process billions of dollars a year and for thousands of companies of all sizes.

John started the company with his brother Patrick

in 2010 while he was studying physics at Harvard. John will share his experiences and insights

in his wonderful accent that he gained in Limerick, Ireland. Join me in welcoming

John.

I'm going to be using my welcoming John.

I'm going to be using my iPad for notes.

I promise I'm not on yikyak most of the time.

So I'm a huge nerd for startup history.

I spent a fairly considerable fraction of my leisure time over the past year reading histories of

Oracle and Microsoft and Facebook. It was really exciting. But there's this phenomenon where

if you're interested in startups or if you're thinking of starting a company, you don't quite

get the full picture

because companies want to put the best face forward. They want to whitewash things a little bit.

And so you don't end up seeing the really interesting detail and the uncertainty from the

early days of a company. And so what I'm going to try to do over the course of talking to you today

is give you a little bit of insight into that uncertainty, into what it's like in the early days.

And if I don't do a good job of that in this part, we'll be going into questions maybe half an hour in,

and you can ask the tricky questions.

...