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.
Payments is a hard business. It's a messy business, with not necessarily the largest of margins.
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.
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.
Our idea with starting Stripe was to build better payments technology for people building things on the web.
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.
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.
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.
In so many ways, our business is very, very unique. For example, in India, people pay with cash, and we accept cash from day one. And a lot of people in India pay with cash. And that's part of our business model.
The reality is that unless you understand the regulatory environment and payment structure, you can't revolutionize it. I think most tech companies and startups have come to this realization: that you have to partner with people in the ecosystem.
Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
We're barely scratching the surface of how people experience and utilize p2p payments, despite it being a multi-millennium-old behavior.
