John Collison

Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.

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.

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.

Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.

If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they're probably working in a job and very happy with that.

One of the myths you see in entrepreneurship is that people have this dream one night, wake up the next morning, and start building it. It's actually much more of an iterative process.

Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.

Advertising obviously helps with awareness, but if you look at some of the most successful companies, they're actually not generally ad-driven when it comes to customer adoption.

For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.

Elon Musk is a cool cookie.

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.

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.