Words matter. These are the best Patrick Collison Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Square is turning informal, cash transactions, like you would do with a taco truck, into card swipes. Stripe is more for the Internet, it’s focused on the kinds of transactions that weren’t possible years ago. We think about how you would buy things from a mobile phone, crowd-funding, how should that work.
It’s inevitable that tough situations will come up, but it’s how you react that is the challenge.
One of the important lessons of the Internet is, how easy it is to get things done completely shapes what gets created. For that reason, technologies like Amazon’s cloud service are very important. Even if they aren’t technically impressive, they make things easy to do.
At most large companies, what is locally optimal for you is very frequently not what is globally optimal for the company.
I watch virtually no TV. All my screen time is computer time for me. When I’m not doing that I’m reading or talking to my friends who I got to know through computers.
Presumably, what you want to do is work on something meaningful and significant with people you really admire.
I think that Stripe generally is comprised of the kind of people who believe in technology or are kind of optimistic about its effect and want to have whatever future it’s leading to happen.
Stripe makes it easy for anyone, be it an individual or a small business or a large business, to accept credit card payments on the Internet. We want to give control to the user or the business to define what the experience looks like. We work on a website or a mobile app, or whatever between that.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy TV. If I had infinite time, I would watch it.
One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.
I grew up in very rural Ireland. The Internet was kind of a connection to the greater world. It had a lot of significance.
It’s very possible that advertising business models will simply never do as well on mobile devices as those oriented around transactions.
‘Entrepreneur’ is a long, fancy French word, but it didn’t seem like something you aspire to. It seemed normal, because whatever your parents do seems normal.
There is a higher degree of operational excellence and rigor demanded of Stripe than of most companies.
In general, I have a lot of issues with the mythology of the founder.
We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don’t see any argument to go back to 1600.
I started Stripe with my brother John Collison while we were in school together. We first started off building iPhone apps together and using the money we made from them to pay our tuition.
The part of Stripe that I’ve always found most interesting is the idea of facilitating new commerce that wouldn’t otherwise happen. Payouts is turning out to be a big part of that. These new networks are efficient, intelligent replacements for offline behemoths.
Silicon Valley does not breed great technology. Instead, the smartest people from around the world tend to move to Silicon Valley.
When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.
Our goal definitely isn’t to sell Stripe.
Being a public company certainly doesn’t stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.
There is really an issue in Silicon Valley with companies getting a bit ahead of themselves in terms of their own self-perception of their own success.
If you’re building a consumer app, you’re necessarily coupled to the intrinsic time cycle of human fashion in that it’s a fashion-driven space, and we see that in the cycle of these various apps. I think for infrastructure that that just naturally tends to play out over a longer time horizon.
One phrase we use at Stripe is, ‘Most tech companies are building cars. Stripe is building roads.’
