John Collison Quotes
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There's no such thing as the 'Irish Internet.' It's just the Internet.
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You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don't think 'normal' is one of them.
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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.
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Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
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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.
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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.
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If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they're probably working in a job and very happy with that.
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Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.
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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.
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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.
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For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.
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Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.
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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.
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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.
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Marketplaces by their nature tend to grow faster than most other companies.
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As long as the Internet economy continues to grow, Stripe will continue to grow.
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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.
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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.
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Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.
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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.