John Collison

“For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.”

“No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.”

“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.”

“Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.”

“I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.”

“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.”

“Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.”

“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.”

“We want to grow the total amount of online commerce.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.”

“Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.”

“There's no such thing as the 'Irish Internet.' It's just the Internet.”

“Elon Musk is a cool cookie.”

“You're used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron's values.”