Web Summit: Stripe now ingrained in US online payments space

With the second day of the Summit well under way, one of the highlights of this morning was the talk in the main hall by Stripe's John Collison.

Seeming surprised - and gratified - by the size of the crowd in attendance, the award-winning Irish entrepreneur has become an ncreasingly confident performer, very much having grown from the shadow of older brother Patrick.

Stripe’s area of business, online payment systems, is hugely complex, but while Collison acknowledges the scale of the problem, he also speaks with such clarity and focus that it’s easy to appreciate why Stripe is considered most likely to dominate its layer of the payments space.

Most of the US presidential candidates are accepting donations through Stripe, a testimony to how ingrained it has become in the US online payments space.

“Do not be afraid to start a business that feels like it has no precedent,” he says as a word of advice to the assembled entrepreneurs. “It felt odd to begin with, but when it started getting product-market fit, it felt like the most obvious thing in the world.”