Reid Hoffman Quotes

Elon Musk with PayPal revolutionized banking.

PayPal's been around forever. How do we use that platform to solve the future of commerce?

Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right.

I think Twitter is the future of communications and Square will be the payment network.

Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.

Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time. Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card.

Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.

PayPal, which was founded in 1998, may be the closest thing to a global currency that has ever been created. Based in San Jose, California, the company operates in 190 markets, sending and receiving payments in 24 currencies on behalf of 90 million active members.

Venmo is one of the jewels of Paypal.

Digital payments have already made it easier to move and manage money. While there's more work to do, the potential is real and understood.

Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.

The part of Stripe that I've always found most interesting is the idea of facilitating new commerce that wouldn't otherwise happen. Payouts is turning out to be a big part of that. These new networks are efficient, intelligent replacements for offline behemoths.

For people who use Google Wallet, the experience works.

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.

We had a mission at PayPal - which was to create a new financial system, a new world currency, and we failed. We were a financial success, but we didn't succeed at the purpose of our company.

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

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

We haven't even begun to see just how many transactions are going to take place online.

What interests us in Stripe is the idea that there could much more commerce happening on the Internet.

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

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

The truth is, you cannot run a political campaign like a tech startup. Technology is a field that fetishizes disruption. The old ways are suspect, and we place an almost irrational trust on new tools. That's fine for developing games, but it was a failing playbook for politics.

I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.

Blockchain technologies will change transactions in a broad way.