In many ways, launching in Canada is a big step for us—going from 1 to 2 is often harder than going from 2 to n—but it’s only a small piece of what we have in mind. We grew up in countries from Honduras to Kenya, and a large part of why we’re so eager to build Stripe is to help those outside the US to participate as first-class citizens in the internet economy.
I'm glad they address this before people complain about Stripe only moving to Canada.
I'm very curious to how much time they have budgeted for this - has this been consuming 50% of their time? 75%?
It's really hard for me to tell if this was a real problem for them, or if they were just working on other stuff because the competition is still non-existent.
It's probably tough to measure. I imagine most of the bottlenecking comes from communicating with external entities, which may not scale well by adding more Stripers to the task. I would be surprised if they could just pull a developer aside and say "Joe, you're off feature X. Go call up Canada and make things happen!"
While they probably don't feel external pressure due to lack of competition, I doubt they're hotdoggin' it because they are leaving money on the table.
I'm glad they address this before people complain about Stripe only moving to Canada.