Always mistrust a subordinate who never finds fault with his superior.

Beloved, till life can charm no more; And mourned, till Pity's self be dead.

By fairy hands their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung.

How sleep the brave, who sink to rest, By all their country's wishes blest!

I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.

In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong.

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.

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.

Marketplaces by their nature tend to grow faster than most other companies.

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

Part of Stripe's vision is linking people better 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.

Coming from Ireland, it's quite hard to do a startup because you're culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, it's much easier. It's the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood.

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.

One of the really fascinating areas is marketplaces that take advantage of mobile devices. Ridesharing is the obvious example, but that's just the start of it, of selling goods and services with lightweight mobile apps.

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.