Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 195 posts

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

#91

Post by Nilef »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #36
willlll wrote: post #9

> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal—which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website—but it could help Stripe greatly increase its trans­action volume. So, reading into this, amazon presumably invested in stripe, then gave it some transaction traffic to juice…

This is quite interesting. What does Amazon have to gain from using Stripe?

Amazon's overall goal is to take a cut of pretty much every piece of economic activity. Taking a cut off of every payment made on the internet outside of their own stores is an objective greatly aided by a stripe acquisition

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

#92

Post by quickthrower2 »

tedunangst wrote: post #19
dschiffner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate click-bait headlines as much as anyone else... but nowhere in this headline does it say that they started with 7 lines of code.

The typical interpretation of "turned 7 X into Y" isn't "7 X plus another million X turned into Y". Last night I turned a pat of butter into a steak dinner. Never mind I also started with a steak, thats an irrelevant detail.

Jesus turned water into wine. But really he had a bottle of Pinot to start with.

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

#93

Post by adventured »

jameskegel wrote: post #80
jacquesm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To add to the other list (all plausible):

Google, dozens of international companies (eg Softbank or SAP), Walmart, Target, Costco, IBM, Oracle, and numerous others.

Basically, several dozen companies are serious potential buyers. And that's before getting into the secondary list, which includes companies like Intel, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc.

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

#94

Post by pas »

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…

Amazon needs data to know where to expand, how to price things. Stripe has a lot of exactly that. Maybe...

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

#97

Post by free2rhyme214 »

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…

That's exactly what I was thinking. The API is definitely more than 7 lines of code.

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

#98

Post by eterm »

dboreham wrote: post #75
anonacct37 wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

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.

One of my best upvoted stackoverflow answers is about a paypal sandbox bug (or "undocumented feature") where it would disregard the port in the pingback url.

Just generally the sandbox was horrible, it had a weird 'double login' system where it often got confused between whether you were 'inside' the sandbox logged in as a fake user or outside logged in as your paypal account.

And you're right about their woefully confusing documentation, it was definitely hard to understand which payment flow you were trying to use and which was appropriate.

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

#100

Post by Lordarminius »

rdiddly wrote: post #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.

“They have the advantage of coming to California without being tainted and polluted by what’s in the water supply and air of Silicon Valley,”

That made me laugh.

But you are right: to create something really new, you must bring in a different perspective. Frequently, this is possible only as an outsider.

Post reply on HN