Transcript
September 8, 2010
Arnold Henderson
Associate Dean and Director S³
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dear Arnold,
I am writing to inform you that I—Raeez Lorgat, MIT class of 2012—would like to voluntarily withdraw from the institute effective starting the fall semester of my Junior year. My decision to withdraw from the institute is primarily driven by an opportunity identified in a business venture I have co-founded with Patrick Collison (a fellow MIT undergraduate) and John Collison (a Harvard Undergraduate) in the course of my undergraduate studies thus far. The venture, /DEV/FINANCE INC., has drawn high expectations both from a working satisfied customer base and the Silicon Valley venture community. All indication shows that /DEV/FINANCE INC is poised for rapid growth.
/DEV/FINANCE INC is a financial services and technology company. It's first product, /DEV/PAYMENTS, focuses on changing the core concept of the traditional 'merchant account', a financial product enabling the processing of debit and credit card transactions within a given business (known as a merchant). By iterating over the traditional financial product as serviced by financial institutions today, /DEV/PAYMENTS is able to offer a modern and relevant alternative to payment processing solutions in existence today, where the focus is on servicing software developers and their products. /DEV/FINANCE INC has successfully raised rounds of funding from top-flight Silicon Valley venture capital firms, as well as a host of angel-investors. Sequoia led the last round as the largest institutional investor (with Mike Moritz as the representative partner), and notable angels include Peter Thiel (founder and CEO of PayPal, Paul Buchheit (creator of gmail at google, founder of friendfeed) and many others.
My request is driven by the realization that in pursuing due diligence with /DEV/FINANCE INC, I will be unable to commit the time necessary to pursue my undergraduate studies. The decision to take time away from my undergraduate education was not an easy one to make, but after review of council from friends, family, colleagues and investors — I have reached the conclusion that the petitioned course of action is the correct choice for me to take.
I have completed two years of my undergraduate education and would henceforth like to petition to take another period of up to 2 years away from the Institute, with a re-evaluation at the end of the 1st and 2nd year. The next 2 years will sufficiently give me the room to evaluate the business' full potential, after which I intend to return to the institute and resume my undergraduate education—at that point bringing with me real-world experience and education I'd be unable to obtain at this time at the Institute.
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
Raeez Lorgat
/DEV/FINANCE INC. · 701 Webster Street · Palo Alto, California, 94301
Claims supported by this document
- Raeez Lorgat was MIT class of 2012, with two years of undergraduate education completed as of September 1, 2010.
- On September 8, 2010, Raeez Lorgat petitioned MIT to voluntarily withdraw from the institute effective the fall semester of his Junior year, addressed to Arnold Henderson, Associate Dean and Director of MIT's Office of Student Support Services ("S³").
- Raeez Lorgat's own contemporaneous language describes the venture as "a business venture I have co-founded with Patrick Collison (a fellow MIT undergraduate) and John Collison (a Harvard Undergraduate)." This is contemporaneous self-attestation of co-founder status, twelve years before the 2022 USCIS O-1 letters from Patrick Collison and Hemant Taneja that are separately published on this site.
- The venture is named in the letter as /DEV/FINANCE INC.; its first product is named as /DEV/PAYMENTS, described as "payment processing solutions" focused on "servicing software developers."
- The 2010 investor stack as named in the letter: Sequoia as lead institutional investor with Mike Moritz as the representative partner; angels including Peter Thiel (described as founder and CEO of PayPal) and Paul Buchheit (described as creator of Gmail at Google and founder of FriendFeed). All three are independently and publicly documented as early Stripe investors.
- The letterhead names /DEV/FINANCE INC. · 701 Webster Street · Palo Alto, California, 94301 with email
raeez@devpayments.comand web addresswww.devpayments.com. The same Palo Alto address appears on the HGSC, Inc. Restricted Stock Purchase Agreement dated January 10, 2011. - The letter is signed by Raeez Lorgat in his own hand. The signature visibly matches the Raeez-side signature on the 2011 HGSC, Inc. Restricted Stock Purchase Agreement.
- The letter is addressed to a named institutional officer (Arnold Henderson) at a named institution (MIT). Receipt and processing are therefore independently verifiable through MIT's records system.
Why this document matters
This is the earliest contemporaneous, self-authored document on the site supporting Raeez Lorgat's founding-team role at the venture that would be renamed Stripe. The other primary documents on raeez.com are either contemporaneous but third-party-authored (the 2010 /dev/finance pitch document is a team marketing artifact), contemporaneous but corporate-instrument-form (the January 10, 2011 HGSC, Inc. Restricted Stock Purchase Agreement records the equity grant, not the venture history), or self-authored but retrospective (the 2022 Patrick Collison and Hemant Taneja USCIS O-1 letters were written twelve years after the events they describe).
This September 8, 2010 letter is both contemporaneous and self-authored, written in Raeez Lorgat's own hand to an institutional recipient that maintains records, twelve years before any audience for revisionist history existed. The use of "co-founded with Patrick Collison and John Collison" is Raeez Lorgat's own contemporaneous formulation, predating Stripe's rename.
Caveats
- The letter uses Raeez Lorgat's own characterization of his role. Stripe's current public newsroom and leadership pages list Patrick Collison (Co-founder and CEO) and John Collison (Co-founder and President) as Stripe's executive cofounders. This is correct and not in dispute. This document records how Raeez Lorgat described his role contemporaneously to MIT in 2010, not Stripe's current public executive leadership roster.
- The letter petitions a two-year leave with re-evaluation, after which Raeez Lorgat stated an intent to return to MIT. In fact, after /dev/finance / Stripe, Raeez Lorgat went on to research at MIT and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics rather than completing an undergraduate degree at MIT.
- The transcript above preserves minor typographical features of the source verbatim ("It's first product"; unclosed parenthesis after "PayPal"; "council" where "counsel" is the intended word). These features do not affect what the document establishes.