One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

I started Stripe with my brother John Collison while we were in school together. We first started off building iPhone apps together and using the money we made from them to pay our tuition.

One phrase we use at Stripe is, 'Most tech companies are building cars. Stripe is building roads.'

Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.

We watch so much film, calling up pitch by pitch, count by count in order to spot tendencies. Technology is a big part of how I get ready for a game. What's funny is a lot of the NFL guys say they study the 'Madden' game; that's how they learn to read offenses and defenses.

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

If you have a business website, make it stickier; redo the merchandising often and try new things until you hit the right homepage... then try and beat that. The most important audience drivers on the Internet are paid search and key word optimization. Concentrate on those. They are very inexpensive compared to banner advertising.

Startups are often best at solving the personal problems of their founders. The more diverse the founders, the more types of problems can be solved - and the more people who will be positively impacted by technology.