John Collison

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.

There's no such thing as the 'Irish Internet.' It's just the Internet.

You know the way trees break through the canopy in the rainforest and they go from having this tiny column of light to having all this light - the Internet is kind of like that.

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.

We want to grow the total amount of online commerce.

Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.

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.

I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.

The Internet is a testament to a connected system that works - it's a global network where any computer can reach another, and easily transfer information across.

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.