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.

Once I found out that people were really making careers for themselves off the Internet, independently, I was really inspired.

I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.

I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.