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. John Collison More Quotes by John Collison More Quotes From John Collison Stripe is building payment infrastructure for the Web, so we make it easy to accept credit cards online. Before Stripe, the way youd 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. John Collison stripes banking credit Help each user personally. Sure that won't scale to a very large size, but when a startup is just starting out, it really helps you have an advantage as a small and nimble company. John Collison nimble size starting-out Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web. John Collison technology people ideas In the desktop world, you could build a successful business where a consumer only came back to you once or maybe twice a year. I don't think you can build that kind of business on mobile. You need higher frequency, or otherwise you fall off the home screen and the user never comes back. John Collison successful home fall Coming from Ireland, its quite hard to do a startup because youre culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, its much easier. Its the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood. John Collison actresses hollywood moving Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online. John Collison stripes online hard 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. John Collison people school thinking 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. John Collison dad mom brother 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. John Collison stripes long years 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. John Collison selling apps example 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. John Collison stripes real people 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. John Collison stripes country ideas If we can help a business double their sales, then it doubles our revenue from that business. John Collison company-news Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences. John Collison experiences product our past No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people. John Collison will company influence people If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they're probably working in a job and very happy with that. John Collison someone job quantity happy Elon Musk is a cool cookie. John Collison cookie elon-musk cool Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web. John Collison web better vision people 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. John Collison best you simple people 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. John Collison doing small beginning people
