John Collison

No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.

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.

Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.

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.

Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.

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.

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 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.

You're used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron's values.

The values we developed were instrumental in gaining a competitive advantage.

Marketplaces by their nature tend to grow faster than most other companies.

I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.