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

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

With Stripe, people who previously operated online or offline in a very limited capacity now have all the tools to work like a real online business. That's a very valuable thing.

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.

Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better on the web.

We hired extremely slowly at the beginning. It took us a year to get to four people. It's hard to hire as a very small company, and we wanted to make sure we found people who cared a lot about what Stripe was doing.