In the desktop world, you could build a successful business where a consumer only came back to you once or maybe twice a year. I don't think you can build that kind of business on mobile. You need higher frequency, or otherwise you fall off the home screen and the user never comes back.

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.

My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.

I think a lot of people learn to code messing around with things while in secondary school. And for me, it started up as a hobby and a plaything, and I just became more curious over time.

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

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

Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.