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

The way that customers pay businesses is constantly evolving. Instead of paying with paper, like cash and checks, businesses are expected to accept a variety of payment methods ranging from credit cards to digital payments.

Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge. It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

From the law firm's perspective, billing by the hour has a certain appeal: it shifts risk from the firm to the client in case the work takes longer than expected. But from a client's perspective, it doesn't work so well. It gives lawyers an incentive to overstaff and to overresearch cases.

There is no denying that auto-bill pay is easier and more convenient than keeping track of and remembering to pay all of your bills each month, so it makes sense to use it for fixed expenses that you have approved and that you're 100% comfortable with.

We are quite a way off before people travel around the world without cash in their pockets. The growth of plastic and electronic transactions have tended to impact traveller's cheques rather than cash.

Swipe fees have increased steadily since the introduction of debit cards 20 years ago, when there were no swipe fees at all. Merchants can't negotiate or control them. They've tried, but they have no leverage against the big banks and issuers. So they get ignored.

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.