Billy Alvarado is Chief Business Officer at Stripe, a financial technology company that builds economic infrastructure and tools for internet companies. In his 8 years at Stripe, Alvarado has been pivotal in scaling the business from a one-room Palo Alto startup to today’s global footprint of more than 2,000 people across more than a dozen offices worldwide. In September 2019, Stripe was valued at $35 billion, making it the highest valued private financial technology company in the world.

Joining the company in 2011, Alvarado has played a lead role in building the global network of strategic partnerships on which Stripe’s infrastructure is built. That includes market-leading integrations with Visa, Mastercard and American Express, as well as strategic partnerships with global banks including Wells Fargo, Citibank, Barclays, Standard Chartered, and HSBC. He has also led innovative product partnerships with Shopify, Apple, Google, and others to use Stripe’s technology to build disruptive internet commerce experiences.

Global expansion has also been a core focus of Alvarado’s work at Stripe, leading successful market entries from Singapore and Japan to Germany and the Nordics. Most recently, Stripe has accelerated its LATAM expansion, with new products and operations in Mexico and Brazil. Today, Stripe serves millions of businesses across 34 markets.

Originally from Honduras, Alvarado has had particular passion for ensuring that opportunities in technology and entrepreneurship are available not only in major markets, but in developing countries as well. In 2016, he helped launch Stripe Atlas to offer entrepreneurs around the world access to the basic building blocks for starting a global internet business. With a few clicks, Atlas users anywhere can incorporate a U.S. entity, obtain a U.S. bank account and tax ID number, and set up a Stripe account to receive payments from anywhere in the world. Since inception, thousands of founders in over 140 countries have started their companies with Atlas.

Before joining Stripe, Alvarado co-founded Lala Media, a pioneering online streaming platform that powered digital music experiences across the web, from Billboard to Google and Facebook. At Lala, Alvarado helped to evolve the business from its origins as a CD-sharing community to an innovative cloud-based hub for online music discovery and purchase. He brokered partnerships with the four major record labels, and independent artists and publishers, building a library of over 8 million songs. In 2009 Lala was acquired by Apple. Prior to Lala, Alvarado held roles as a VP Product and Engineering at SEVEN Networks and an Analyst at Capital One.

Alvarado moved from Honduras to the United States in 1991 for college. He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Arjay Miller Scholar.