Farm To Fortune Journey

Bryan Johnson shares how he went from a small-town farm boy to building Braintree, which sold to PayPal for $800M.

"I grew up in a small town basically with my grandpa on a farm. I didn't meet an engineer until I was 21 or 22 years old. I was raised in a deeply religious community. At 21, I decided I wanted to try to do something meaningful for humanity. I had read a bunch of biographies about people who had done things in their time and place.

I thought given my options, I'll become an entrepreneur, make money by age 30, and then try to go after something meaningful. It was a naive contemplation. I did a bunch of startups and accidentally fell into payments because I was building a startup and struggling to pay my bills. I had a child at the time and would do anything for money. I applied for 60 jobs - nobody even contemplated hiring me.

I found this job selling credit card processing services door to door. It was 100% commission and I became the company's number one salesperson in a matter of months doing it part time while building my startup. I accidentally stumbled into payments and learned there was this big opportunity. PayPal had grown up during the internet but had stopped really innovating for a couple years, so developers didn't have the tools they liked.

We started Braintree and landed a big deal early on with OpenTable. We built a custom solution that allowed us to store credit card data on our side instead of them so they didn't have compliance issues. From there we expanded to more general merchants and got customers like Airbnb, GitHub, and Uber. We helped Uber do their payment experience where you get in the car, arrive at your destination, leave the car - no exchange of payment information, no signing of receipts. We really made our headway into high-tech companies."