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.

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

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.

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.

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

Help each user personally. Sure that won't scale to a very large size, but when a startup is just starting out, it really helps you have an advantage as a small and nimble company.

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.