Yahoo Finance Payments giant Stripe hires Google veteran to head Dublin base
Stripe, the San Francisco-based payments platform owned by two Irish brothers, has hired Google veteran Matt Henderson to head its newly expanded Dublin engineering hub.
Henderson, who led the search giant’s strategy for scaling the Google Play app store, previously led Amazon’s marketplace strategy in Europe, and founded shopping platform Rangespan, which was acquired by Google in 2014.
Stripe, which was recently valued at $22.5bn (£17.8bn), provides the online payment infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Uber, Deliveroo, and Booking.com.
“One of the reasons we're very excited about Matt and bringing him on is that he has experience not only in leading functions within the largest and most successful technology companies like Amazon and Google, but also has started his own successful company in the past,” said John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, in an interview with Yahoo Finance UK.
"I think there is a set of lessons you learn and a set of skills that are transferred in starting your own company that are different to what you learn in an existing company,” Collison said.
Henderson joined Stripe, Collison noted, because he was interested in solving the "Google-sized problem of building the economic infrastructure of the internet."
He also said that Henderson was attracted to Stripe’s business model, which sees it provide solutions for developers, rather than the end customer.
READ MORE: Stripe secures Irish e-money licence
"For someone from a technical background like him, that's quite exciting," Collison said.
Henderson will report directly to Stripe’s chief technology officer, David Singleton.
In March, Stripe secured an e-money licence from the Irish Central Bank, and said that it wanted to significantly expand its Dublin operation.
“Dublin is the heart of Stripe in Europe. It’s our fastest-growing office and our first international engineering hub with over 150 employees,” the company said.
“We're in the process of building out a fairly serious operation in Dublin,” Collison told Yahoo Finance UK, noting that the European market was “changing and progressing at a much faster rate than the US.”
“Now we're hiring leadership like Matt, to support that office,” he said.
