Moritz was an astute judge of character, and his questions to Patrick were designed to detect resilience and ambition. He understood the promise of digital payments; after all, he had backed PayPal. And he had faith in the prospects of challenger firms: having seen Google eclipse Yahoo, he was willing to wager that Stripe would eclipse PayPal. But on top of these advantages, Sequoia was assisted by that early tip-off from its scout network and its relationship with Y Combinator, and the combined result of all these factors was that, among Stripe’s early backers, the investor with by far the
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