Sean Mullaney
speaker
1,197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
um so mainly they are in the uk but um europe in general um and you know every week i'd have like three or four meetings with founders and every week i would be exhausted by the corporate job and then 30 minutes spent with a founder i would just have so much energy coming out of it i'd be so excited i'd be like there are 100 ways this company could be huge i love the founder and then i would spend the rest of the evening and the next day thinking about their business
And I'm like, one thing is draining my energy and the other thing is giving me energy.
So the portfolio is still pretty early because, you know, I've been doing this for a few years.
But really, the folks that I've enjoyed the most with are the X stripes that I've been able to back from the first day.
And Stripe has now been a really fertile ground for startup founders.
The second thing that enabled me to do my own startup is, and this is a huge credit to Stripe, instead of IPOing, Stripe decided that they would give employees liquidity on a regular basis.
Answer this question for me.
Why have Stripe not IPOed?
because there's no benefit to ipo right from stripe's perspective they have access to infinite capital and they regularly go and raise from vcs um they have cleverly now solved the employee liquidity problem and i think this is what more and more companies should i think stripe is absolutely like spearheading what the future should be in this kind of private company market for employees
which is it's like every six months they bring in a group of investors and say, employees, you can sell your equity.
And the different investors bid on that equity and come to a price and the employees can sell.
That's brilliant.
But there's no stock price every day that everyone's looking at.
It's twice a year.
Every employee knows they can sell stock.
But they're not sitting around having, you know, the last thing Patrick and John really want to do is sit in a analyst investor call every quarter and have people ask them about, you know, all of their, you know, cash flows and, you know, what are your ratios and why are you doing this and why are you doing that?
Like.
They're like, no, why would we do that when there are investors who will give us the capital and the investors who are funding Stripe, they have a five to 10 year horizon on their investment.
This is the difference between VCs and public market investors.
public market investors just i mean every single thing that happens in a given week it could be geopolitics it could be the price of oil the price of the dollar is there a recession like it's just up and down and up and down um whereas vcs are like i have a 10-year fund and i'm going to put money in and i can definitely see that stripe in 10 years it's going to be worth a lot more than it is now and i'm going to write you the check and then i'm going to sit back and wait
Showing 681–700 of 1,197 · page 35 of 60
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