Words matter. These are the best John Collison Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s no such thing as the ‘Irish Internet.’ It’s just the Internet.
Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don’t think ‘normal’ is one of them.
Coming from Ireland, it’s quite hard to do a startup because you’re culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, it’s much easier. It’s the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood.
Part of Stripe’s vision is linking people better on the web.
People tend to pay too little attention to history – the history of Silicon Valley and American business – and think they’re the first people to come across a problem.
Marketplaces by their nature tend to grow faster than most other companies.
The Internet is a testament to a connected system that works – it’s a global network where any computer can reach another, and easily transfer information across.
Elon Musk is a cool cookie.
My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.
You’re used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron’s values.
We hired extremely slowly at the beginning. It took us a year to get to four people. It’s hard to hire as a very small company, and we wanted to make sure we found people who cared a lot about what Stripe was doing.
Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.
It’s easy to talk to people over the Web, but it’s not very easy to trigger transactions. That’s the thing we set out to fix with Stripe.
Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.
We want to grow the total amount of online commerce.
With Stripe, people who previously operated online or offline in a very limited capacity now have all the tools to work like a real online business. That’s a very valuable thing.
One of the myths you see in entrepreneurship is that people have this dream one night, wake up the next morning, and start building it. It’s actually much more of an iterative process.
For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.
Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.
Stripe is building payment infrastructure for the Web, so we make it easy to accept credit cards online. Before Stripe, the way you’d do this is using the legacy banking structure. It was slow, it was complex, it was expensive. It had this very chilling effect on e-commerce.
When a country doesn’t have a good economic infrastructure, that harms the country. With Stripe, the idea is that by providing better infrastructure, by linking the Internet economically, by making it easier for these online businesses to exist, it’ll make the web better.
With PayPal, you have to send people over to their website… whereas with Stripe, we offer a way to integrate payments into the website, on the website or into a mobile app. That is what all the best businesses care about, so we make it very easy, very fast, very simple and very cheap to do this.
One of the really fascinating areas is marketplaces that take advantage of mobile devices. Ridesharing is the obvious example, but that’s just the start of it, of selling goods and services with lightweight mobile apps.
