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I Got to Work with Stripe When Nobody Had Ever Heard of Them
What a mysterious female venture capitalist in Chuck Taylors can teach you.
I heard about Jack Dorsey’s original pitch for Twitter through a woman named Susan Wu.
Susan came to my hometown of Melbourne in 2014 to bring a company to our shores called Stripe.
I attended the interview with her at Startup Grind to hear about how she met Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams when she worked as a Venture Capitalist at Charles River Ventures. She famously was one of the reasons why Twitter secured funding and became the platform we know and love today.
People originally thought the idea of Twitter was stupid, but not Susan. Susan told the story of how she bonded with Jack because he was obsessed with traffic patterns. Susan, too, thought the world of traffic patterns could explain a lot.
At the end of the event, I walked over to chat with Susan. Within two minutes she was surrounded by a crowd of startup fans. She was extremely introverted and didn’t seem to like all the attention. I thought my chance of having a conversation with her was almost zero. But I dared to try.
To my surprise, I managed to cut through the noise. We drifted over to a quiet area of the co-working space where the event was held and spoke further. It was a life-changing moment.
She had been in the room with some of the most influential tech startup founders in the world — Square, Unsplash, Canva, Reddit. What struck me about Susan was that she was incredibly humble. She liked solving problems but not all the attention that came with it.
If you didn’t know who Susan was (I didn’t before the event) you would perhaps walk past her in the street and dismiss her. She wore black jeans, Converse Chuck Taylors, and had a simple backpack on her shoulders. She was unsuspecting and that was what intrigued me about her.
You could be anybody and talk to her. Status wasn’t the focus; how interesting the problem you wanted to solve was.
I returned to work the next day and spoke to a colleague who had become my mentor. He was working directly with Susan to bring Stripe to Australia and have our employer (a…
