If you want to hire the best people, the best people are already doing pretty impressive things. They have their life plans, their picture for what they want to be doing. To figure out a way in which those trajectories align really takes time.
— Patrick Collison
Presumably, what you want to do is work on something meaningful and significant with people you really admire.
'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.
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 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 a common case with high-growth startups where the co-founding team breaks up - generally, it's hard to get the team to persist. It's easy to stick with it when you have known the person for decades either as a friend or family.
I myself am not religious, but yes, I certainly grew up in a very Catholic environment.
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.
In life, in the media, and everything, people focus way too much on founders.
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.
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.
I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.
In general, I have a lot of issues with the mythology of the founder.
It's not that I don't enjoy TV. If I had infinite time, I would watch it.
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.
The promise of the Internet is around this transcendence of physical geography. To a large degree, the Internet has delivered on that promise, but when it comes to the movement of money and the ability to start and operate a business or needing to purchase from a business, it really hasn't.
One phrase we use at Stripe is, 'Most tech companies are building cars. Stripe is building roads.'
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.
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.
Being a public company certainly doesn't stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.
Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.
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.
When Facebook famously moved out to Palo Alto, there were people in the same house Facebook was based in working on different ideas. It is vital to remember that.
In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network.
What interests us in Stripe is the idea that there could much more commerce happening on the Internet.
When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.
There is a higher degree of operational excellence and rigor demanded of Stripe than of most companies.
It was very clear, if you grew up in the middle of Ireland, just how potent a force the Internet was and could be. I was always seduced by the potency of computers and the possibilities for which they could be leveraged.
It's inevitable that tough situations will come up, but it's how you react that is the challenge.
Silicon Valley does not breed great technology. Instead, the smartest people from around the world tend to move to Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
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.
It's very possible that advertising business models will simply never do as well on mobile devices as those oriented around transactions.
