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Alex MacCaw on Stripe’s success, API products & founding Clearbit

Since launching in 2015, Clearbit has gone from strength-to-strength in their quest to be the Business Intelligence infrastructure for businesses. In this chat, co-founder and CEO Alex MacCaw talks about his career in tech and engineering, including working for Stripe in the “early” days and travelling the world whilst writing a book on Javascript.

Alex MacCaw and his Co-Founders are innovating in an emerging space for SaaS businesses – one that looks set to grow significantly in the next couple of years.

This new breed of SaaS product is one without a user interface – you interact with the service through an API, which any business can easily integrate into the business logic of their product. Clearbit is essentially a building block, where the true value is in the data consumed.

During our chat, I wanted to understand how Alex approached some of the challenges and opportunities presented in building such a business.

As well as his current role of CEO at Clearbit, Alex has an fascinating history in the tech community, where he’s spent years writing code for the likes of Stripe, winning a book deal with O’Reilly – and then spending the following months travelling the world to write the book – as well as writing and building a loyal audience within the developer community through his blog and other mediums.

Ed Shelley

Former Director of Content

@Mr_Ed

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