Stripe is a B2B company, and the hardest part of B2B, by a country mile, is sales. If you have to do sales, selling to a small company is also far easier than

Stripe is a B2B company, and the hardest part of B2B, by a country mile, is sales. If you have to do sales, selling to a small company is also far easier than to a large company. A startup that just joined ycombinator, and is setting up a marketplace, is easy to sell to: They need something that works, and they can integrate with tomorrow. If you are instead fighting for the ebay payment contract, expect to have a long negotiation process, multiple bidders, and a very narrow profit margin. And after all that work, which every bidder put in, only one company wins, and will probably not make a lot of money. If you are big, you shrug it off. If you are a small company, you die. On top of that, the large customer will always be afraid of you going away, while they will not with your larger competitor, so all else being equal, you are probably losing! So if you are a startup doing payments, you absolutely want to aim for small targets. Also, startups grow. Sometimes they grow a lot. Stripe didn't get the lyft contract when they were a giant. They got the contract when they were a small company with their office down the street, and rode the growth of Lyft's processing volume. This kind of plan is something Lagos should be trying too. So it makes perfect sense to try to sell to a technical audience: You aren't going to succeed selling to almost anyone else.