The CFO of $20 billion Stripe is now its chief product officer, and he says his mission is to shield customers from 'the highly complex and esoteric global financial system'

Matt Weinberger

Dec 5, 2018, 23:30 IST

Stripe

Stripe's Will Gaybrick is moving from the CFO role to the chief product officer role.

Stripe CFO Will Gaybrick is taking a new role as chief product officer and head of payments.
Stripe was recently valued at $20 billion in a monster $245 million funding round, and this year signed on huge customers like Microsoft, Google, Spotify, and Uber.
Gaybrick says that even the largest companies like Stripe because the company makes it super-simple for them to start taking money from customers anywhere in the world.
More broadly, he says, the real opportunity for Stripe is in making the complexities of the global financial system feel simple for its customers.
Stripe will search for a new CFO, but Gaybrick says that this move doesn't impact the company's plans to stay private indefinitely - which is to say, don't hold your breath for an IPO.

Back in September, Stripe raised a massive $245 million round of funding, valuing the 8-year-old payments company at $20 billion.

That deal only served to reinforce Stripe's standing as the most valuable financial technology startup in the world - and capped off a year that saw Stripe add companies like Microsoft, Google, Spotify, and Uber as customers.

Now, as Stripe prepares for the new year, it's given one of its top execs a new role, as Chief Financial Officer Will Gaybrick steps into a new role as chief product officer and head of payments.

Gaybrick, who joined Stripe in 2015 after a stint as a venture capitalist, will still be performing many of his CFO duties while the company searches for a permanent replacement.

But his main focus will be overseeing Stripe's payments products - which, given Stripe's focus on financial services, accounts for a lot of the company. That includes its core credit card processing products, as well as its fraud-detection services, its AI efforts, and more. Everything else, including internal infrastructure and the Stripe Atlas global entrepreneurship program, will all belong to CTO David Singleton.

When it comes to the shift from CFO to CPO, Gaybrick tells Business Insider that it's a more natural fit than one might think.

"To be successful as a CFO, you need to work closely with product teams and engineering teams and users," says Gaybrick. At Stripe, in particular, it helps to have somebody with a head for "the highly complex and esoteric global financial system" involved with the decision-making process, as Gaybrick puts it.

Gaybrick says that the time is right, too, as the influx of larger tech companies as customers points the way towards the future of Stripe.

Stripe
Patrick Collison (left) and John Collison (right), cofounders of Stripe

Masking complexity

One might think that the likes of Microsoft or Google would have the capacity to build their own payments system, rather than rely on a startup like Stripe. Gaybrick says that this might be so, but the real question is: Why would they?

"The biggest constraint to growth for the largest companies in the world is engineering talent and bandwidth," says Gaybrick, and he believes that even a large company has better ways to use its resources than to waste time doing what Stripe has already done.

Hiring the "dozens or hundreds" of engineers to build a payments system like Stripe is costly and time-consuming, Gaybrick suggests, and the end-product would still be less mature than what Stripe already offers. Stripe already allows companies to take payments from most anywhere in the world, with just about any form of currency, from almost every platform - it's easier for even large tech companies to buy Stripe than build this in-house.

To that end, Gaybrick sees a lot of opportunity in continuing to help Stripe customers smooth over the complexities around the movement of money for commerce, including local regulations, laws, and taxes.

This year, Stripe launched new services like Stripe Issuing, which lets companies easily issue their own custom-branded debit cards, as well as Stripe Terminal, a program for point-of-sale systems and cash registers that are integrated with Stripe payments.

The big idea with Stripe's product strategy, Gaybrick says, is to continue making it easy for companies to accept money from their customers, no matter how they want to pay, and no matter where in the world they are.

He likens it to the same circumstances that resulted in the rise of Amazon Web Services as the leading cloud computing player. In the same way that AWS started because Amazon had the idea to sell the computing infrastructure that it had built for its own retail business, Gaybrick says that many of Stripe's newer products were actually born for its own use, and then released to customers.

"We sort of found ourselves building this infrastructure to mask all those complexities," says Gaybrick.

No IPO in sight

As for the future of the company, Gaybrick says that his vacating the CFO role has no bearing on the financial future of the company.

Stripe is still "very happy as a private company," says Gaybrick, and the company still has no plans to go public in the foreseeable future. This echoes comments made by Stripe President John Collison earlier this year, who said that the company has no immediate plans to go after any more venture capital funding any time soon, either.

While Stripe has never disclosed whether or not it's profitable, Gaybrick says that the company is very efficient with its cash, and has always raised investment capital as a strategic move, not out of strict necessity. All told, Stripe has raised $685 million in funding from investors including CapitalG (formerly Google Capital) and Visa.

All of which means that Stripe doesn't feel any kind of pressure to go public, he says, or to take any other kind of money if it doesn't want to.

"We've never been constrained by capital in any way, ever," says Gaybrick.