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.'

If you're building a consumer app, you're necessarily coupled to the intrinsic time cycle of human fashion in that it's a fashion-driven space, and we see that in the cycle of these various apps. I think for infrastructure that that just naturally tends to play out over a longer time horizon.