You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don't think 'normal' is one of them.
No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.
Elon Musk is a cool cookie.
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.
Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.
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.
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.
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.
Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.
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.
As long as the Internet economy continues to grow, Stripe will continue to grow.
Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.
For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.
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.
