Who are Stripe's decision-makers?

Stripe was co-founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison. Patrick, the CEO, dropped out of MIT; John, the President, left Harvard — together they had earlier built and sold a software company (Auctomatic) as teenagers before starting Stripe in Y Combinator. Patrick sets company and product direction and is the public face of Stripe (he also sits on Meta's board); John runs much of the business, partnerships, and go-to-market side, and is based in Dublin.

The broader leadership bench has matured for scale. Will Gaybrick — who joined as CFO from Thrive Capital in 2015 — now serves as President of Product & Business, Stripe's most senior product role. Steffan Tomlinson (ex-Confluent, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks) is CFO, a hire widely read as preparing Stripe's finance function for public-company scale, and Eileen O'Mara runs global revenue as CRO. The CTO position became vacant publicly when Rahul Patil departed for Anthropic in late 2025; Stripe has not announced a named successor, and engineering leadership is distributed across its platform teams.

For a finance, engineering, security, or GTM-tooling sale, the buying committee almost never starts with the Collisons. It centers on the functional leaders who own budgets — engineering and platform leaders, product leaders under Gaybrick, finance and procurement under CFO Tomlinson, revenue operations under CRO O'Mara, and security and IT for any tooling that touches data or infrastructure.

The founders and senior executives set strategy and approve large or strategic purchases, but day-to-day vendor decisions sit with those functional owners. At ~10,000 employees those functions are specialized, so the practical move is to identify the specific team your product serves and find its leader, rather than aiming at 'Stripe' or its founders in the abstract.

Stripe has grown from a single payments API into a broad financial-infrastructure platform spanning payments, billing, money movement, embedded finance, fraud, tax, stablecoins, and AI/agentic commerce — and its org has specialized to match, with distinct product, engineering, data/ML, finance, sales, and operations functions across a global office network. The 2025 dual-HQ move (adding a permanent Dublin headquarters alongside South San Francisco) reflects how much of engineering, product, revenue, and international operations now sit in Europe.

With institutional and sovereign capital on the cap table and a CFO brought in for public-company readiness, expect a formal, process-driven procurement and security posture: vendor risk assessments, security reviews, and multi-stakeholder sign-off. Mapping that structure — who owns the budget, who runs security, who signs — is the difference between a stalled deal and a fast one.