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.

The legend of a cable company trying to break the Internet makes scary bedtime stories for children of telecom geeks, but it is not reality.

When I first started at HSN, I knew that retailers would have to be poised to take advantage of technology and the rapidly changing ways in which people shop. It was one of the things that drew me to the company.

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money.