I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.
— John Collison
You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don't think 'normal' is one of them.
Our initial idea with Stripe was that for people like us - those building apps and websites - it was incredibly difficult to take payments. So with an open mind, and maybe a useful lack of knowledge about the industry, we started building a payment product.
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.
You're used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron's values.
There's no such thing as the 'Irish Internet.' It's just the Internet.
If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they're probably working in a job and very happy with that.
Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.
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.
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.
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.
Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.
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.
Advertising obviously helps with awareness, but if you look at some of the most successful companies, they're actually not generally ad-driven when it comes to customer adoption.
Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.
The values we developed were instrumental in gaining a competitive advantage.
We want to grow the total amount of online commerce.
Elon Musk is a cool cookie.
No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.
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.
You know the way trees break through the canopy in the rainforest and they go from having this tiny column of light to having all this light - the Internet is kind of like that.
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.
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.
Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.
Fundraising is a long and distracting process, and by the end of it, all you want to do is go back to building the product that you're working on.
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.
Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.
Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.
As long as the Internet economy continues to grow, Stripe will continue to grow.
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.
Marketplaces by their nature tend to grow faster than most other companies.
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.
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.
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.
I think a lot of people learn to code messing around with things while in secondary school. And for me, it started up as a hobby and a plaything, and I just became more curious over time.
