Quotes from John Collison

If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they're probably working in a job and very happy with that.

One of the myths you see in entrepreneurship is that people have this dream one night, wake up the next morning, and start building it. It's actually much more of an iterative process.

Coming from Ireland, it's quite hard to do a startup because you're culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, it's much easier. It's the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood.

You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don't think 'normal' is one of them.

People tend to pay too little attention to history - the history of Silicon Valley and American business - and think they're the first people to come across a problem.

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

We hired extremely slowly at the beginning. It took us a year to get to four people. It's hard to hire as a very small company, and we wanted to make sure we found people who cared a lot about what Stripe was doing.

As long as the Internet economy continues to grow, Stripe will continue to grow.

For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.

Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.

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.