Patrick Collison recounts Stripe’s darkest moment

June 10, 2025

Patrick recounts his first meeting with a bank where he was told “in no uncertain terms” that there was “no possibility” they would work with Stripe.

Stripe faced roadblocks like this for two years, and Patrick tells the audience of entrepreneurs:

“I really feel this imperative to emphasize the long period—two years is long time when you’re in it—of working away with so many of these roadblocks and headwinds and people telling us that it couldn’t work or shouldn’t work or was a bad idea… It could mean that you can’t actually do it or the idea is bad. Or it might not.”

When asked what the darkest moment for Stripe was, he tells a story six months into the company’s existence when an upstream switch at their data center failed and took down Stripe’s API. Patrick’s pager alerted him at 4am, and he immediately went into the office.

“This is not like a social media app or something. This is the conduit for our customer’s revenue. So it was a big deal.”

It ultimately took 8 hours for the data center to fix the switch—the whole time Patrick was worrying this might damage customer trust and be the end of Stripe.

“The darkest moment of course was because I was bracing myself for the deluge in complaints and dissatisfied customers and anger and vitriol and everything else. And 1pm rolled around and as far as I could tell, nobody had cared or notice. On some level, that was good news. But as I reflected on it, I realized that it was actually kind of existentially bad news.”