From Sweden to Silicon Valley: 20-Year-Old's Start-Up Success Story

While many 20-year olds are spending the first week of September back at college pounding beers, pondering their career path and switching majors for the third time, Ludwig Pettersson is in Palo Alto from his native Sweden on a second invitation from a Silicon Valley start-up; this time it’s Stripe.com.

The company is a Peter Thiel-backed group of serial entrepreneurs; the co-founders are also in their 20’s, and their first company Auctomatic was acquired by Live Current Media in 2008 for $5 million while both were still teenagers. Now they are creating a buzz the in the world of web-based payments.

We sat down with Pettersson to dig into the mind of a rising designer and programmer and learn what we should expect from the stealthy Stripe, which plans to launch next quarter, and already has a waiting list of users. 

Patch: Rumor has it you are somewhat of a programming protégé. At just 20 years old, how is it that you are being wooed from Sweden all the way to Silicon Valley?

Ludwig Pettersson: Wow, well it’s certainly flattering, but honestly I’m not sure about the protégé bit. I did start designing my first website back in 2002. I was only 11 years old at the time, but was already obsessed with the design of simple things like the visual feedback after a button click. Even then my passion for design went far beyond websites. I remember spending my time going to and from school thinking of ways to make the payment terminals on buses more efficient and nicer to use.

I was thinking the other day about how interesting it is that one decision leads to another and then another, which is how I find myself here today. Back when I started designing, I quickly progressed to more complex projects, eventually creating Observer, which caught the eye of the 280 North founders. A couple years ago they invited me to spend time with them in San Francisco, which was incredible for a high school kid from Sweden. A year later I went home to Sweden to finish high school but I knew that my future meant returning to Silicon Valley. And sure enough, Ross Boucher (280 North co-founder) introduced me to the Stripe founders, and I was instantly smitten by their passion to fix online payments. And here I am.

Patch: What was that like for you as a child? Perhaps Sweden is more evolved than the US, but it’s not the average kid who is building websites instead of playing soccer or video games. Did your interests and hobbies feel different than the other kids?

LP: I've always spent more time at home playing with my latest design or programming projects than out with friends. While other kids were talking about what to do during the weekend, all I could think of was last night's design problem. It's incredibly rewarding to create beautiful things, but you instantly realize they can be better. I'm always trying to spend more time iterating on my projects.

But no, it wasn’t completely isolating. There are kids everywhere who are inspired by design. Over the years I met other kids who had similar interests, even if they physically lived far away in other cities and even countries. We grew up together online, always learning new things while trying to one-up each other. Ten years later, I still talk and hang out with many of them.

Patch: It sounds like this was just a field that naturally appealed to you, but along the way have you felt inspired by anyone?

LP: Absolutely. Mike Matas, responsible for much of the iPhone & iPad user interface, is definitely a hero of mine. He consistently produces amazing and groundbreaking interfaces, which are truly breathtaking. I also look up to the immensely talented European designers, such as Sebastiaan de With of doubleTwist and Tim van Damme of Gowalla.

Patch: You said that you were building something called Observer; can you explain what that is?

LP: Sure. In 2008 I was looking for a project that I could really pour my heart into. I've always had a bunch of websites and found it incredibly fun and addictive to track their traffic. I tried different tools and settled on Google Analytics, but thought it was very clunky to use. There'd been so much progress in user interfaces in the last 10 years and none of it seemed to have made it's way into web analytics; it just felt very old and outdated. I knew this was the perfect thing for me to recreate.

So I made Observer, my own real-time website analytics tool. Observer is innovative in many ways: it provides real time updates of all your data, it introduces a new UI paradigm for jumping across all your tracked sites, and it uses a very intuitive approach to sharing data with others. Everyone I showed it to asked, "Why hasn't it always been like this?"

Patch: I imagine the average reader will be a little surprised to hear you call Google Analytics old! But I suppose that is the reality for this incoming generation of innovators who don’t remember a time without Google. How does that affect your approach creating these sites? It must be hard not to get stuck in style and structure of what’s already out there on the Web.

LP: Among my group of online friends anything that is more than a year old is often seen as a dinosaur. This forces us to always think of how to make things better. I believe this rapid iteration is what produces groundbreaking innovation.

I also think that great designers must have a balance of taste and engineering ability. The best designs quickly break down if the technology does not support them. Changes in what is technically feasible also create new opportunities for new design/interaction paradigms. I've always worked hard to understand all aspects of the platforms I work on.

Patch: You mentioned Stripe earlier. Can you tell us more about the company? There doesn’t seem to be much info out there yet.

LP: Many of us at Stripe have painful memories of setting up payments for other projects: faxing multi-page applications to get merchant/gateway accounts, trying to decipher intricate pricing pages, working with crusty APIs, and exporting CSV files to figure out how much money we'd made. Patrick and John started Stripe, which is based here in Palo Alto, to get rid of all of this hassle.

Stripe is a developer-oriented system for handling payments online. Stripe replaces the outmoded approach to payments with a beautiful, RESTful JSON-based API and idiomatic client bindings that are coupled with a modern and powerful application for tracking your payments. We also have a very different approach to all the other aspects of managing payments  pricing, reconciliation, developer support). We're all developers and are constantly thinking of ways to automate things, eliminate paper, and work with other developers to extend what we've built. We want Stripe to be the best way to accept payments online.

Patch: So how did you get from creating your own version of Google Analytics in Sweden to working for a stealth payment start-up in Silicon Valley?

LP: As I mentioned, the 280 North guys introduced me to Patrick and John. Observer and Stripe both deal with transactional data. I really love working on the visualization of data; showing you how many visitors you had today versus how much money you made isn't all that different. I knew that payments presented the similar opportunity of taking something old and crufty and transforming it into a powerful and modern web experience. There is so much you can do with data to make it easy for people to analyze it. But you can also make it fun to browse and view, especially since you're showing developers how much money they're making!

Patch: What we should expect from Stripe – is there any big news before the end of the year?

LP: Stripe has made some amazing progress over the last year but we're still in private beta. We've got many companies using us for payments and they're giving us great feedback on what can be improved and how we can make developers' lives easier. We're obsessed with making Stripe the best way to accept payments online.

Patch: It’s funny. I was just realizing that as we are sitting here talking about preparing to launch a start-up in the heart of Silicon Valley, most of your friends are probably back in Sweden talking about preparing for school to start. Do you ever miss not going to university and do you have any desire to go later perhaps?

LP: The thought of actually studying at a university never occurred to me. It felt like something that other people do, but not me. My field is rapidly changing; it’s more about experience and gut feel. I get to learn new things every day by working on new and innovative projects like Stripe.

Patch: Do you have any advice for all those kids out there with dreams of being here as entrepreneurs, doing exactly what you’re doing right now?

LP: If you have something you’re passionate about, don’t worry about how you will get there – just keep at it. Sometimes you don’t know the exact path it will take, but if you just focus on creating great things that solve real problems, the rest will take care of itself.