A mission statement is meant to direct effort and help executives make ambiguous decisions. "Our mission is to be profitable in the payments space" is both too narrow and too broad. "Being profitable" is too broad because of course they want to be profitable. They will shut down if they aren't. It's literally just the definition of running a business. It doesn't help anyone make any decisions. "in the payments space" is too narrow because it specifies the "payments space". Now anybody trying to make decisions that align with the mission has to have an agreed definition of the "payments space", and what activities fit within it.

"Our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet" is much better since it captures the value they are trying to create. Presumably this is mostly things that make online payments faster and more ubiquitous, bringing more commercial activity onto the internet.

With "Our mission is to be profitable in the payments space", someone might decide to open Stripe check cashing locations, which presumably is not something that upper management wants the company spending time on. With "Our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet", Stripe's activities will be much more closely focused on their core competencies.

Every company's "mission" is to be profitable. It wouldn't really have any impact on anyone if that's what they stated. The mission statement is about how they want to be profitable.

Like imagine walking into an interview and asking what the company does and they say "Oh, we make money". Like..not helpful.

I worked at Stripe for 4.5 years, and the mission is actually a different mindset than simply becoming a prosperous payments company.

For example, Stripe Atlas exists because it grows the GDP of the internet, not because it makes the company more profitable in payments. Obviously, the goal is for the newly minted businesses to be Stripe customers, but the more the overall "pie" of e-commerce grows, the more the company's slice of it becomes as well.

There are different ways to be profitable in the payment space. One is to try to give you simple services at the lowest possible price, focusing on the lowest cost. The other is to try to make it really easy to do the complicated parts of payments, making it easier for new businesses to be started and for them to grow.

You see the differences pretty clearly today: Adyen is a profitable payments company, but their route forward is very different from Stripe. Adyen wins many contracts for the largest companies on the internet. Stripe hands smaller companies a lot of savings in time writing infrastructure, but doesn't do so well at winning competitive bids from the eBays and Netflixes of the world.

So their mission really is informing them how to get there, and it makes a big difference in how decisions are made internally. And as long as it doesn't change, it's helpful at predicting their next strategic moves.

I don't think it's that weird that they see themselves contributing to the wider world as an economic multiplier.

Of course they exist to make money, but some folks want to make money while adding something positive to the world.

It is the pretext for becoming a central bank.

First they will move payments off of government currency and onto crypto. Then they will move payments onto their own crypto. At that point they can issue credit and modify the money supply at will.