Fundraising is a long and distracting process, and by the end of it, all you want to do is go back to building the product that you're working on.
I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.
Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
Our initial idea with Stripe was that for people like us - those building apps and websites - it was incredibly difficult to take payments. So with an open mind, and maybe a useful lack of knowledge about the industry, we started building a payment product.
For Stripe, being inventive is just about applying the right solutions from other areas.
Amazon Web Services for payments is an apt description of Stripe.