We interviewed Patrick on TechZing back in 2012. Great guy.
http://techzinglive.com/page/939/168-tz-interview-patrick-co...
How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
71–80 of 195 posts
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yup, amazon has been all about acquisitions and broadening their horizons lately. When they acquired twitch, they had regulations put in place first test if things would stick. Then twitch was acquired after. Seems they're probably doing the same with Stripe.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#73I 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…
So far I didn't use their service, but I fondly remember their security CTFs, which were lots of fun, and very well run. Still hoping for another incarnation of those...
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#74Earlier 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.
> 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.
You're talking about PayPal Express, which is the PayPal form most of us are familiar with.
PayPal has a number of other services, such as Payments Pro, and PayFlow, which act just like a Credit Card Processor, ie. the customer has no idea it's PayPal on the backend - they enter their credit card info on your checkout form like normal and click submit. The customer's bank statement will state your company name, not PayPal.
Majority (all?) of the PayPal horror stories you hear are from folks using PayPal Express with large amounts of money coming from weird places. Payments Pro really is a different class of service, complete with your own representative you can call up 24 hours a day. You can also setup a nightly automated sweep of any funds to your real bank account.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#75Earlier 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.
PayPal had a developer sandbox back in 2010 when I wrote our client code. Honestly I don't remember it being difficult or tricky. The worst aspect was their confusing documentation which tended to mix up various different services and APIs such that it was hard to figure out which was the current, appropriate one. Perhaps that was the Stripe advantage: a single obvious course of action to take.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#76How Two Brothers Fought Against All Odds And Things As Such As That: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba9k5SWwE38
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Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
10% of Irish people are redheads while about a half carry the gene apparently. I'd be willing to bet the dark haired brother has forearms covered in freckles
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is how PayPal lost my business initially; now that I'm a part of the payments industry, I use PayPal sparingly for much else.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#79"There’s such an improbability to their story -— that these brothers from a little village would come to build what could well be one of the most important companies on the internet.”
But is it, in fact, improbable? If you believe Paul Graham, the most revolutionary ideas are always going to come from off the beaten path -- from some backwater, either of geography and/or of ideas.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure who'd have the ability to make that type of acquisition, to be honest. Maybe First Data? That would may even be a stretch.