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How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

bloomberg.com

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Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#51

Post by s_dev »

defen wrote: post #37
pkilgore wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article: "Surely the smartest redhead in Ireland,” read one headline about 16-year-old Patrick being named Young Scientist of the Year for developing a programming language and artificial intelligence system."

Are "redheads in Ireland" stereotyped as being particularly smarter or stupider than other Irish? That's the only way I can make sense of that headline - it makes as much sense to me as "the smartest black-haired person in Ireland"

No -- "smartest red head in Ireland" just an arbitrary qualifier and a throwaway comment -- if anything it just emphasizes the number of red heads in Ireland.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#52

Post by ckinnan »

shimon_e wrote: post #23
Kluny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.

The PayPal form is roughly the same number of lines. The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.

Nope. The Stripe advantage over PayPal is that Stripe operates more like a merchant account, where the buyer sees the seller's name on the credit card statement. PayPal injects itself into the checkout process, Stripe is basically a white label. Stripe also has easier underwriting. I suspect Stripe is taking more business from merchant accounts/gateways than PayPal, because they are different markets.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#53

Post by Dirlewanger »

legohead wrote: post #24
Kluny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.

Actually it's 1 line.

There always has to be that guy...

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#54

Post by dawson »

strictnein wrote: post #34
whipoodle wrote: post #21

The bit about Amazon is the actual news contained in the story, if anyone here is interested in discussing that.

Yeah, this is really, really interesting: > Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon. com Inc., the largest and most sought-­after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Lots of questions about why Amazon would do something like that. Is it so they have a backup in case their systems go down? Or was Stripe actually able…

I suspect Amazon will, if this isn't already part of that discussion and or negotiation, acquire Stripe.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#55

Post by omarchowdhury »

artur_makly wrote: post #43
shimon_e wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PayPal form is roughly the same number of lines. The real break through for stripe was it was an alternative to PayPal with a modern UI.

Another great reminder to all you founders - don't underestimate the power of great product design.

And don't underestimate the power of new and... different. Many founders pass on markets they think have no room for innovation or new entrants, only to leap into some small marketless crevice.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#56

Post by komali2 »

Kluny wrote: post #11
eggbrain wrote: post #2

If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of co…

To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.

Wait, the /your-server-side-code bit seems like the most difficult. Did Stripe not implement this aspect as well? I would have no idea how to securely process credit card transactions server-side.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#57

Post by komali2 »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #47
mschaef wrote: post #4

~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html I'm glad to see he has continued to do well.

I read these stories and feel like I was the only good kid that actually focused in class.

I read them and see how all these smart entrepreneur types dicked around in class reading books, just like me, except they turned out to be geniuses, and I ended up just derping around Asia and frittering away my youth.

What did I do wrong? I blame WoW :P

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#59

Post by johndavidback »

mmahemoff wrote: post #20
eggbrain wrote: post #2

If you are wondering how Stripe could even start with just 7 lines of code, it's a bit misleading: With Stripe, all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments: What once took weeks was now a cut-and-paste job. I.E. the simplicity of the Stripe platform (taking only 7 lines of code for developers) was how they succeeded, not that they built a startup at first with just 7 lines of co…

So it's the equivalent of saying "How this inventor made $X billion with the flick of a switch" after they spent decades inventing the light bulb.

It was a bit interesting to see, and perhaps not at all surprising, that they've been around since 2010. And they crossed the billion-dollar-valuation threshold 4 years later.

Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

#60

Post by ryebit »

komali2 wrote: post #56
Kluny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand, it's these 7 lines. (Actually 12) - more or less. Maybe not precisely that, but it's the bit where you add a payment form to your website. It's a nice headline, but it really leaves out the tremendous amount of back-end work that went into making that front end easy to use.

Wait, the /your-server-side-code bit seems like the most difficult. Did Stripe not implement this aspect as well? I would have no idea how to securely process credit card transactions server-side.

If I remember how they worked (last did stripe integration a ways back), the script instruments your form's submit event to do an (ajax if possible) POST to stripe's server, which processes everything, and returns back a (merchant specific) "token" representing a redeemable charge to the customer. The form is then posted to your server, but all it gets is the "token", which it can then use your private merchant key to redeem behind the scenes with their server.

So you get an anonymous "charge" token that you can revoke if a later part of the checkout process fails, and CC data never touches your system.

(I think the markup for that was a little bit different than what was posted above though).

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