In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network.

Patrick Collison

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

Patrick Collison

Stripe makes it easy for anyone, be it an individual or a small business or a large business, to accept credit card payments on the Internet. We want to give control to the user or the business to define what the experience looks like. We work on a website or a mobile app, or whatever between that.

Patrick Collison

It's inevitable that tough situations will come up, but it's how you react that is the challenge.

Patrick Collison

Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.

Patrick Collison

I watch virtually no TV. All my screen time is computer time for me. When I'm not doing that I'm reading or talking to my friends who I got to know through computers.

Patrick Collison

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

Patrick Collison

I grew up in very rural Ireland. The Internet was kind of a connection to the greater world. It had a lot of significance.

Patrick Collison

Being a public company certainly doesn't stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.

Patrick Collison

If you want to hire the best people, the best people are already doing pretty impressive things. They have their life plans, their picture for what they want to be doing. To figure out a way in which those trajectories align really takes time.

Patrick Collison

When Facebook famously moved out to Palo Alto, there were people in the same house Facebook was based in working on different ideas. It is vital to remember that.

Patrick Collison

Presumably, what you want to do is work on something meaningful and significant with people you really admire.

Patrick Collison

The promise of the Internet is around this transcendence of physical geography. To a large degree, the Internet has delivered on that promise, but when it comes to the movement of money and the ability to start and operate a business or needing to purchase from a business, it really hasn't.

Patrick Collison

In life, in the media, and everything, people focus way too much on founders.

Patrick Collison

I think that Stripe generally is comprised of the kind of people who believe in technology or are kind of optimistic about its effect and want to have whatever future it's leading to happen.

Patrick Collison

Square is turning informal, cash transactions, like you would do with a taco truck, into card swipes. Stripe is more for the Internet, it's focused on the kinds of transactions that weren't possible years ago. We think about how you would buy things from a mobile phone, crowd-funding, how should that work.

Patrick Collison

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.

Patrick Collison

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.

Patrick Collison

When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.

Patrick Collison

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.

Patrick Collison

I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.

Patrick Collison