Irish-founded payments company Stripe will soon pass a major milestone. Its global workforce is due to exceed 10,000.
Those employees, who are known as 'Stripes', are spread across offices around the world.
Dublin is significant as it is home to the company's dual headquarters alongside San Francisco.
But it also stands out for another reason. It is one of the most expensive cities for housing across the many locations where Stripe operates.
New headquarters
On Thursday, Stripe officially opened a new Dublin headquarters, tripling its office space to 14,500 square metres.
The modern, nine-storey building is located on the banks of the Grand Canal. It has a full-height glazed entry lobby and a six-storey atrium space.
It is decorated and furnished to the highest standards - a HQ befitting of a global company that is now reported to be worth more than $100 billion.
Stripe can easily afford the rent on One Wilton Park but the hundreds of staff based there may encounter their own challenges when it comes to finding affordable accommodation in Dublin.
Stripe co-founder John Collison was in Ireland for the opening of the new office.
As part of the launch event, he interviewed Taoiseach Micheál Martin on stage in what was described by organisers as a "fireside chat".
There are no fireplaces in the glass-lined, modern rooms of the Stripe HQ but there were a few sparks in the interview when the Taoiseach referenced bottlenecks in the delivery of infrastructure.
He said that planning decisions ending up in the courts is "what's killing us".
"I believe in planning and good planning," Mr Martin said.
"What's a killer is having gone through all the planning processes, we end up in the High Court," he added.
The sentiments were echoed by Mr Collison in a follow-up interview with RTÉ News.
'The power of the veto'
The Stripe co-founder said there is now a correct general consensus that Ireland has an infrastructure delivery problem, particularly when it comes to housing.
"We now have severe housing shortages. The housing costs our employees face are much higher in Dublin than they are in comparable cities," Mr Collison said.
"There are many very good infrastructure projects that we seem incapable of building.
"As the Taoiseach referenced earlier, things spend far too much time tied up in the judicial system.
"We have enabled the power of the veto to an absurd extent, where you can have a few residents in Fingal near Dublin Airport capping the entire capacity of the Irish state and air travel to it."
The Stripe co-founder said that the current situation is one that people should find deeply dissatisfying.
"We should be able, as Irish people, to have a world of material abundance.
"Ireland is a very wealthy, low density country, and so we should be able to continue to expand and support that expansion but right now, it's creaking at the seams a bit."
"You have a shortage of student accommodation, a shortage of housing, and a shortage of various services more broadly."
"It doesn't help the green agenda to be reliant on cars rather than having good public transit connectivity."
"It's good that there is a lot of energy on this topic right now but I think we should be deeply dissatisfied with the status quo," Mr Collison said.
Ireland-US business relations
There have been various warnings in recent months that Ireland's business reputation has been damaged in the US by the Government's stance on Israel.
Twenty-three members of the United States Congress recently wrote to the Taoiseach warning of the consequences of proceeding with the Occupied Territories Bill.
"We write to express our deep concern over Ireland's one-sided approach to Israel, a vital ally of the United States," the lawmakers wrote.
"The proposed legislation represents a discriminatory move by Ireland to economically target Israel and demonise the world’s only Jewish state," they added.
As someone who does business in Ireland and the US, John Collison said he does not believe that current transatlantic ties are under threat.
"The Irish-US connection is very strong," he said.
"There have been, at various times, things that bubble up like tariffs and the global tax negotiations."
"Obviously the political environments around Israel and Palestine are very different in Ireland and in the US but I think the bedrock connectivity is so strong."
"You have the Irish diaspora in the US and I think there is a very deep bond that has good foundations," he added.
Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition
In May, Stripe was announced as the new title sponsor of the Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, taking over from BT.
Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison is a former Young Scientist winner and his brother John won a category award at the exhibition.
A Dublin Bus promoting Stripe's sponsorship of the event was parked outside the company's new building for Thursday's official opening.
"STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) has been a big part of our journey," John Collison said.
"I think it's so valuable to get youngsters interested in this kind of stuff."
"Broadly across Stripe, we're really interested in supporting curiosity about technology, progress, science and maths."
"And so we're now the title sponsor of the Young Scientist."
Stripe also supports the youth accelerator Patch, the Irish Maths Olympiad, and the University of Limerick's Immersive Software Engineering course.
"Partly, it's our way of giving back. Partly, we think it's good for Ireland because kids who go and pursue technical careers now will go on to do great things 10 years hence," Mr Collison said.
The next Young Scientists may well follow in the successful footsteps of the Collison brothers.
Let's hope that by the time they begin their professional careers in the coming years, Ireland's infrastructure bottlenecks and housing shortages will have been addressed.
