As Dublin Web Summit kicked off today, one of the icons of Irish tech took to the stage to talk about his company Stripe and its monumental growth.
Cofounder John Collison is somewhat of a champion for Ireland’s tech scene having dropped out of Harvard to work on the mobile payments company in San Francisco.
His company, Stripe, helps businesses accept and manage payments over the internet and is valued at over $1bn.
I caught up with him after his session to learn a little bit more about Stripe’s future.
What exactly is the problem Stripe is solving?
It’s easier than ever before to get a product online but it has been traditionally very difficult to get a business online actually going. Turning products into businesses has been very cumbersome – dealing with banks for example.
Stripe makes it much easier to get your business off the ground.
The businesses that are being created are also far more complicated than offline businesses and Stripe gives them a toolkit to manage all their payments.
Do you think your young age affects how you run your business?
24 is the only age I have, so I’ll have to make do with it. There is definitely experience that I don’t have, but the flipside is that I think differently to those who do.
The reason the payments industry for so long went without new products is because it was run by people within the industry who couldn’t think outside the box.
I think having a new perspective for a business like Stripe is important. We have hired people within Stripe who have done this before though and bring a lot of experience.
What does bitcoin mean for the mobile payments market?
The thing merchants care about the most is selling to every customer they can. They want to maximise revenue per customer and they want to maximise the number of customers.
What bitcoin means, particularly for companies with an international userbase, is that you can in theory accept payment from everybody.
It’s easy to forget that a minority of internet users actually have a credit card.
What does a impressive roster of investors bring to Stripe?
First and foremost, it brings capital.
It’s easy to make a product that is successful in the short term, but it’s much more difficult to build something that will be successful over a longer time period.
The investors’ expertise is very valuable. Our board is myself, my brother Patrick and Mike Moritz from Sequoia. Mike was on the board at Google, Paypal, Cisco. His expertise helps plan for the long term because he has the experience and has done it all before.
TCN in Dublin
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