John Collison Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.

We're really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.

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.

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.

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.

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

Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.

We don't think there is any money to be made in payments anymore. The entire business model of extracting a toll or having time delays around the movement of value is going away completely.

An efficient payments system provides the infrastructure needed to transfer money in low-cost and convenient ways. Efficient systems are innovative in improving the quality of services in response to changing technology and changing demand.

Elon Musk with PayPal revolutionized banking.

A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it's extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let's make it's easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.

Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

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

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

Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.

We're barely scratching the surface of how people experience and utilize p2p payments, despite it being a multi-millennium-old behavior.

Low-value payments are now possible. Now, Ripple can make it easy for Facebook and Uber and Amazon to make payments to developers in real time. It's online and completely global.

What we want to do to monetize Venmo is to add more and more capabilities. Anywhere you see a PayPal merchant, you can click on that button and actually use your Venmo account to check out at that merchant. Then we'll monetize that transaction exactly the same way we monetize a PayPal transaction.

As we think about the future, one of the things we will do is to make sure PayPal becomes the central part of consumers' lives, how we enable consumers to manage and move their money more efficiently, easily, and less expensively than some traditional ways.

For a new payment product, you always have to ask, how much better is it than the current solution? So when we started Paypal, for eBay micro merchants, it was much better than getting the 7 to 10 days process of cashing a check in the mail. When you look at stores or physical worlds, places, a lot of these places are already set up to take cash or credit card. Apple Pay may be an incremental improvement, maybe a little bit better. But when you have something that's pretty good and you go to something that's perfect, sometimes it's very hard to drive adoption because the delta is not that big.