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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

#61

Post by adam12 »

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…

The only reason why I started to read the article. I guess that's why they call it clickbait.

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

#62

Post by adam12 »

forkLding wrote: post #8
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…

I'm thinking for the layman who doesnt code which Bloomberg also targets, this distinction is pretty negligible so in a way its not totally clickbait because its still seven lines of code, for developers it seems to be the code you write whereas the title could go anyway Also really appreciate Stripe, registered for Delaware with them

I think it would be even more misleading for a layperson.

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

#63

Post by Symbiote »

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"

There's discrimination against red-haired people in Ireland.

https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/discrimin...

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

#64

Post by anonacct37 »

ckinnan wrote: post #52
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.

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.

As someone that selected stripe to process orders for a product were were launching somewhere around 2012, it was because of the APIs and developer sandbox.

Paypal was ugly to work with, felt crufty, etc. Stripe had pip installable modules, awesome documentation (live code samples in docs and sandbox), and was easy to integrate into our tests.

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

#65

Post by pieterhg »

downandout wrote: post #32

I don't know Patrick, but he has personally jumped in here on HN where appropriate, publicly given out his own email address to handle issues, etc., and continued to do so even after Stripe achieved a $1b+ valuation. While most of their billionaire Silicon Valley contemporaries are very hard people to root for, I am rooting for these guys. They seem like genuinely good people whose success is well deserved, and so fa…

Patrick is awesome! He asked me to have lunch after I tweeted feature suggestions about Stripe. Indeed, which founder of a billion dollar company does that (or has time for that)?

Another time, I had trouble getting the Stripe code to work and Stripe's former CTO Greg Brockman debugged my PHP code (!) to fix it for me. I'm not making this up.

The CEO wants to have lunch with me (a nobody) and the CTO debugs my code.

It's one of the few VC-backed companies I really root for.

Stripe has a great product, great service, solid business model (it can't get more simple than % on transactions really), great engineering (their USP is/was their API) and it seems they really support small and medium business owners (and bootstrappers especially).

My only hope is anyone who will acquire them (and I think this will happen soon) keeps the product at this level.

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

#66

Post by jacquesm »

anonacct37 wrote: post #64
ckinnan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone that selected stripe to process orders for a product were were launching somewhere around 2012, it was because of the APIs and developer sandbox. Paypal was ugly to work with, felt crufty, etc. Stripe had pip installable modules, awesome documentation (live code samples in docs and sandbox), and was easy to integrate into our tests.

And most importantly: Stripe does not randomly decide your funds are suddenly theirs for the next 6 months to a year.

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

#67

Post by jacquesm »

pieterhg wrote: post #65
downandout wrote: post #32

I don't know Patrick, but he has personally jumped in here on HN where appropriate, publicly given out his own email address to handle issues, etc., and continued to do so even after Stripe achieved a $1b+ valuation. While most of their billionaire Silicon Valley contemporaries are very hard people to root for, I am rooting for these guys. They seem like genuinely good people whose success is well deserved, and so fa…

Patrick is awesome! He asked me to have lunch after I tweeted feature suggestions about Stripe. Indeed, which founder of a billion dollar company does that (or has time for that)? Another time, I had trouble getting the Stripe code to work and Stripe's former CTO Greg Brockman debugged my PHP code (!) to fix it for me. I'm not making this up. The CEO wants to have lunch with me (a nobody) and the CTO debugs my code.…

My hope is they will not be acquired and will keep this stand-alone as a true alternative rather than be eaten and then to lose all their advantages. Acquisitions of companies like this usually spell the end of the line. Here's to hoping Stripe will IPO and will go on to acquire who could now potentially acquire them.

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

#69

Post by tajen »

forkLding wrote: post #8
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…

I'm thinking for the layman who doesnt code which Bloomberg also targets, this distinction is pretty negligible so in a way its not totally clickbait because its still seven lines of code, for developers it seems to be the code you write whereas the title could go anyway Also really appreciate Stripe, registered for Delaware with them

It participates to negating the difficulty of building and delivering a product, thereby giving said laymen a sense of entitlement over "undeserved wealth".

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

#70

Post by smsm42 »

tracker1 wrote: post #26
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…

There's a few misconceptions in the article beyond that. and the more modern bits are written by banks, credit card companies, and financial middlemen, none of whom are exactly winning ­hackathons for elegant coding. Hackathon code is never elegant... it's always piecemeal at the end in order to get it "done."

I suspect whoever wrote that sentence has an extremely vague idea of what a hackathon is ("some coding contest??").
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