Stripe's 2023 annual letter

About this letter

This is Stripe's annual letter for 2023, dated 13 March 2024, addressed to the Stripe community and signed 'Patrick and John'. It is published as a PDF linked from Stripe's 2023 annual update page.

The letter opens with a two-part rule described by Charlie Munger, take a simple idea and take it very seriously, and restates Stripe's mission to grow the GDP of the internet, arguing that the journey of software-driven innovation is still early. It reports that businesses running on Stripe passed $1 trillion in total payment volume in 2023, up 25% from the prior year, or roughly 1% of global GDP. Later sections cover why businesses make more money on Stripe, enterprise adoption, start-up formation, how Stripe engineers for reliability and new progress in technology, and the letter closes by marking the death of Charlie Munger the previous November.

What to notice

1. 1

   A change to a core API service, deployed about 400 times on a typical day, passes a battery of around 1.4 million tests and then rolls out gradually, from a single machine to 0.5%, 1%, 5% and 20% of traffic.

“Our view is that Stripe should be the most reliable part of a business’s stack.”