Patrick Collison

“In life, in the media, and everything, people focus way too much on founders.”

“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.”

“I grew up in very rural Ireland. The Internet was kind of a connection to the greater world. It had a lot of significance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One phrase we use at Stripe is, 'Most tech companies are building cars. Stripe is building roads.'”

“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.”

“It's inevitable that tough situations will come up, but it's how you react that is the challenge.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is a higher degree of operational excellence and rigor demanded of Stripe than of most companies.”

“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.”

“What interests us in Stripe is the idea that there could much more commerce happening on the Internet.”