San Francisco based Stripe announced today that Dhivya Suryadevara will take over as its chief financial officer (CFO.) The company provides digital payment systems and other infrastructure for online businesses. It has millions of clients in over 120 countries, ranging in size from small start-ups to large companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Uber. Stripe has over 2,800 employees in 16 locations around the globe.  

Founded in 2010, Stripe is growing rapidly, with demand for its services getting a big additional boost since the global pandemic began early this year. Due to COVID-19, “several years of offline-to-online migration (of businesses) are being compressed into weeks,” Patrick Collison, co-founder and chief executive of Stripe, said in April.

Rapid climb at General Motors

Suryadevara, 41, leaves her job as CFO of General Motors, which makes cars and trucks, to take on the role at Stripe effective August 31. In 2005, she joined GM’s Asset Management division as a senior financial analyst in foreign exchange and commodities trading, after a year at UBS Investment Bank in New York. At GM Asset, she rose to become the Chief Investment and Chief Executive Officer, roles she held from 2013 to 2017. Then at GM, the parent company, she moved up rapidly from Treasurer to Vice President of corporate finance to CFO.

In 2019, GM paid $2.3 million in cash compensation to Suryadevara. She also owned about $9 million in GM stock. Founded in 1908 and based in Detroit, GM has a market value of $41 billion. Today its automobile business faces severe competition from electric vehicles being made by Tesla, which has a market value of $280 billion, and other new competitors. Suryadevara is among several key executives at GM , Ford and other older auto companies who are fleeing and taking up jobs at electric vehicle and other fast growing technology companies.

Stripe’s diversity policy

While the terms have not been made public, it is very likely that Stripe is offering a more lucrative financial package to Suryadevara, including attractively priced stock options. Stripe was valued at $35 billion at its last funding round in April. Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and other major U.S. venture capital firms, who were early investors in Stripe, invested additional funds in the company in April.

Stripe apparently hired Suryadevara as part of its strategy for a public listing of its stock. Also, the company says it actively promotes diversity among its employees, especially in senior management. Suryadevara meets two diversity criteria: a woman as well as a minority. On its site, Stripe’s appeal to potential Indian and other South Asian hires includes a Desi community organized by employees to promote their “cultural identity and interests.”

Employers in America, from colleges to hospitals to high tech companies, point to their hiring of Indians as evidence of their commitment to minorities and diversity. But they ignore that, unlike Blacks and Hispanics, Indians do not qualify as minorities. Indians in the U.S. are from middle-or-upper class families and are educated mostly at good schools in good neighborhoods. They faced no economic exploitation and no historical disadvantages due to social and other discrimination in America. This is true of numerous CEO’s, including Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as hundreds of thousands of Indian engineers, managers, doctors and professors in the U.S.

Suryadevara got an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 2003 and became a Chartered Financial Analyst in 2007. Earlier in 2000, she became a Chartered Accountant and got a Masters in Commerce from Madras University, while working at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in India.

She is a graduate of the Ethiraj College for Women in Chennai, India. She finished high school at St. John’s Senior Secondary School in the South Indian city. Her father died when she was young. Suryadevara and her two sisters were brought up by their mother who worked at a branch of the Syndicate Bank in Mylapore, Chennai.

Founded by two brothers from Harvard and MIT

Stripe was founded in early 2010 by Patrick and John Collison, two brothers who came to the U.S. from Ireland. Patrick was studying math and physics at MIT while John was at Harvard University. Three years earlier, during his first year at MIT, nineteen-year old Patrick dropped out to start Auctomatic with Harjeet and Kulveer Thaggar. It sold software that enabled individual sellers on sites like eBay and Amazon to optimize their selling and maximize profits. In 2008, a year later, the start-up was acquired by LiveMedia for a reported $5 million.

In early 2010, Patrick and John were discussing why it was so difficult to accept payments for online transactions. Patrick dropped out again from MIT and John from Harvard to work on creating a simple solution to the problem. The start-up evolved into Stripe. Patrick, 31, and John, 30, are each worth an estimated $3.2 billion, according to Forbes.  

Last December, Patrick returned to MIT to speak to students at an event, “The Impatient Pursuit of Progress.” Patrick was introduced by Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. Chandrakasan, B.S,, M.S. and Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, 1990, and 1994 respectively,

Replying to a question, Patrick shared that he wished he had experimented more while at MIT. When you leave campus, he said, it is easier to study theory and more challenging and costly to experiment. In answer to another question from a first year student on how to be confident of success, Patrick said it was important to focus on one’s own interests rather than follow “the train tracks laid down by others.”

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