John Collison Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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We want to grow the total amount of online commerce.
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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.
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The values we developed were instrumental in gaining a competitive advantage.
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Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
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Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.
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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.
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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.
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I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.
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Elon Musk is a cool cookie.