I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash - a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A.
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.
PayPal came within an inch of being shut down by regulators when they started. The feds seizing the Dwolla account and stealing the money that is owned by Mt. Gox customers is more proof that Bitcoin is the superior payment system.
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.
Elon Musk with PayPal revolutionized banking.
Web banking lets you monitor your spending, tweak your budget, schedule payments, and more, particularly if you marry your online bank with the personal-finance management tools available online.
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.
Every form of payment has some risk associated with it.
The big idea of, 'Hey, I can pay anyone, anywhere, with whatever digital wallet they have, and it just flows around the Internet' - that's on the horizon; that's how we built everything we do.
E-commerce is not an industry; e-commerce is a tactic.
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.
When you're dealing with digital goods, you don't have to be tied to one URL.
I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.
Any competent programmer has an API to cash, payments, escrow, wills, notaries, lotteries, dividends, micropayments, subscriptions, crowdfunding, and more.
If you really care about a game, spending a couple of minutes setting up payment is perfectly reasonable. It's certainly happened with 'Fortnite.'
As long as the Internet economy continues to grow, Stripe will continue to grow.
I can use my credit card to send money to the Ku Klux Klan, to antiabortion fanatics, or to anti-homosexual bigots, but I can't use it to send money to WikiLeaks. The New York Times published the same documents. Should we tell Visa and MasterCard to stop payments to the Times?
Guess what? The world changes. eBay has defined e-commerce.
Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
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.
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.
For me, the international expansion of eBay was the best idea. We are now in 35 countries, and have a huge global network. The second best one was the acquisition of PayPal - the wallet on eBay.
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.
Straight-up digital delivery will be the way the future works.
More people are using PayPal more frequently.
