Businessman

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

Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.

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

Presumably, what you want to do is work on something meaningful and significant with people you really admire.

The part of Stripe that I've always found most interesting is the idea of facilitating new commerce that wouldn't otherwise happen. Payouts is turning out to be a big part of that. These new networks are efficient, intelligent replacements for offline behemoths.

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.

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.

The promise of the Internet is around this transcendence of physical geography. To a large degree, the Internet has delivered on that promise, but when it comes to the movement of money and the ability to start and operate a business or needing to purchase from a business, it really hasn't.

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.

The promise of the Internet is around this transcendence of physical geography. To a large degree, the Internet has delivered on that promise, but when it comes to the movement of money and the ability to start and operate a business or needing to purchase from a business, it really hasn't.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network.

It's very possible that advertising business models will simply never do as well on mobile devices as those oriented around transactions.

It's a common case with high-growth startups where the co-founding team breaks up - generally, it's hard to get the team to persist. It's easy to stick with it when you have known the person for decades either as a friend or family.

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

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.

Silicon Valley does not breed great technology. Instead, the smartest people from around the world tend to move to Silicon Valley.

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

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.

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