Patrick Collison on what he wishes he did differently when scaling Stripe

“I think one of the most pernicious mental models you can have is that you are on some growth curve… I think a much better mental model to have is that you’re serving some market, and then there’s the percentage of the market that you’re serving. And whatever percentage you are not serving, you just haven’t built the go-to-market functions and organization that’s brought the product to those market segments.”

In the early days of Stripe, they assumed they were on some growth curve, but Patrick believes they could’ve accelerated their growth by viewing growth as a function of their go-to-market apparatus:

“What we did not do, but what I wish we did, is six months after launch, we should’ve mapped out the concentric circles of our market.”

As he suggests, Stripe should’ve started with very early stage startups then mapped out the larger set of all technical startups - not necessarily very early stage. Then continue this process in successive increments until they got to all companies handling online payments. Each step along the way, figuring out the size of each market, the fraction Stripe was currently serving, what it would take to serve more, and so on. And then work backwards from there:

“What would the organization look like that was serving the entire market? Let’s just start building that organization, because the growth curve is under my control. Of course, it’s not 100% under your control, but I think it’s much more under your control than people tend to think.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Running Your Company by Patrick Collison“ (Oct 2018)