Top 41 Quotes & Sayings by John Collison
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish businessman John Collison.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
You're used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron's values.
There's no such thing as the 'Irish Internet.' It's just the Internet.
Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.
The Internet is a testament to a connected system that works - it's a global network where any computer can reach another, and easily transfer information across.
When a country doesn't have a good economic infrastructure, that harms the country. With Stripe, the idea is that by providing better infrastructure, by linking the Internet economically, by making it easier for these online businesses to exist, it'll make the web better.
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.
Stripe really did come about because we were really appalled by how hard it was to charge for things online.
I think a lot of people learn to code messing around with things while in secondary school. And for me, it started up as a hobby and a plaything, and I just became more curious over time.
For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.
Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
The values we developed were instrumental in gaining a competitive advantage.
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.
No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.
You know the way trees break through the canopy in the rainforest and they go from having this tiny column of light to having all this light - the Internet is kind of like that.
It's easy to talk to people over the Web, but it's not very easy to trigger transactions. That's the thing we set out to fix with Stripe.
You could use many adjectives to describe Silicon Valley; I don't think 'normal' is one of them.
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.
We want to grow the total amount of online commerce.
My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.
One of the really fascinating areas is marketplaces that take advantage of mobile devices. Ridesharing is the obvious example, but that's just the start of it, of selling goods and services with lightweight mobile apps.
As long as the Internet economy continues to grow, Stripe will continue to grow.
Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.
Advertising obviously helps with awareness, but if you look at some of the most successful companies, they're actually not generally ad-driven when it comes to customer adoption.
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.
I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.
If someone is a known spectacular quantity, then they're probably working in a job and very happy with that.
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.
I think there is this very nice, if at times dangerous, untethered optimism that exists in Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk is a cool cookie.
Stripe is building payment infrastructure for the Web, so we make it easy to accept credit cards online. Before Stripe, the way you'd do this is using the legacy banking structure. It was slow, it was complex, it was expensive. It had this very chilling effect on e-commerce.
Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.
Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.
Marketplaces by their nature tend to grow faster than most other companies.
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.
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.
With PayPal, you have to send people over to their website... whereas with Stripe, we offer a way to integrate payments into the website, on the website or into a mobile app. That is what all the best businesses care about, so we make it very easy, very fast, very simple and very cheap to do this.
Help each user personally. Sure that won't scale to a very large size, but when a startup is just starting out, it really helps you have an advantage as a small and nimble company.
Stripe is building payment infrastructure for the Web, so we make it easy to accept credit cards online. Before Stripe, the way youd do this is using the legacy banking structure. It was slow, it was complex, it was expensive. It had this very chilling effect on e-commerce.
In the desktop world, you could build a successful business where a consumer only came back to you once or maybe twice a year. I don't think you can build that kind of business on mobile. You need higher frequency, or otherwise you fall off the home screen and the user never comes back.
Coming from Ireland, its quite hard to do a startup because youre culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, its much easier. Its the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood.
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