Stripe hires Google veteran to head up product strategy in Europe from Ireland

Google veteran and entrepreneur Matt Henderson, has joined Stripe to head up product strategy in Europe. Matt will lead Stripe’s engineering operations in Europe from the Dublin engineering hub. Reporting to David Singleton, Stripe’s CTO, he’ll shape the development of Stripe’s products to power the region’s most exciting internet businesses.

Prior to Stripe, Matt was at Google where he led the company’s strategy for scaling the global apps and games marketplace Google Play. Like many employees at Stripe, he is a former entrepreneur too, having built shopping analytics platform Rangespan which was acquired by Google in 2014.

Matt also built and scaled Amazon’s efforts in Europe in the very early days of the e-commerce giant. He started there as a product manager and ended up leading Amazon’s marketplace strategy in Europe, leading large teams across multiple functions including product management, account management, and business development.

The latest in a string of investments Stripe

Matt wrote on a Medium post “The internet has become a multi-trillion-dollar platform for commerce, yet it still has big deficiencies. New payment methods are costly and time consuming for businesses to implement. Complexities prevent many businesses from trading globally. Billions of people don’t have credit or debit cards. Transactions are deterred by a lack of trust between buyer and seller.”

“Something else that is motivating for me is Stripe’s globally-distributed organizational model. There’s a super talented, growing team across EMEA, and Dublin is becoming a major software engineering hub. Locating the full breadth of functions in proximity to our users in EMEA will help us build even better products.”

This is the latest in a string of investments Stripe has made in the region, as tech-forward businesses thrive on the company’s infrastructure. Stripe is now at the heart of the European tech, powering the region’s most exciting, tech-forward businesses, including Booking, Deliveroo, and Spotify. In the past few months, the pace of development here has picked up: Stripe has launched a new set of products to help with SCA compliance and launched its Billing product in Europe to help high-growth SaaS and subscription businesses get paid faster.