John Collison Quotes
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I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.
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You're used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron's values.
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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 want to grow the total amount of online commerce.
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Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.
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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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I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.
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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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Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
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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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Elon Musk is a cool cookie.
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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.