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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

#101

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

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…

It is misleading. It deemphasizes what can be learned from the article. What helped this company get traction was ease of use, the 7 lines of code made it easy to use, and also, that the reason this company even got off the ground is the 2 brothers and their focus on getting the company to where it is. It seems to me that whatever they would have chosen to do would have had some success.

Again, it highlights the point that it's not the idea, they're a dime a dozen, it's the people that implement the idea.

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

#102

Post by stickfigure »

hawflakes wrote: post #88
dboreham wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sandbox was a big hack. I worked there internally and it was a pain even inside. Maybe it's a bit different now, but I haven't looked back. :-D

It's actually gotten worse.

PayPal tried to "modernize" their old crufty SOAP API with a REST-based API but ended up creating a separate half-functional, poorly documented, buggy layer on top of it that actually loses payments sometimes. I processed millions of payments through it and actually have their support people admitting the problems.

Their only hope is a reverse-takeover from Braintree. I'm not holding my breath; I've done my last PayPal integration. Forget all the "paypal will hold your money" concerns - the real problem is that they will loose your money in the wonky Rube Goldberg machine they've created to process payments.

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

#103

Post by jajern »

fpgaminer wrote: post #89

I hadn't worked with payment systems for a number of years, but recently added Stripe to a quick MVP I built (bitcoinvoice.com). It took two hours. I couldn't believe how easy it was, and how nice the UX of the whole thing was. I imagined the usual song and dance of writing a bunch of back-end code to handle all their weird requests, worrying about double checking everything in the requests to make sure nobody can sp…

I had pretty much the same experience. I programmed an API to talk to a payment gateway connected to a chase merchant account some years ago. It was not fun. When I setup Stripe I was confused when it was done and there weren't 25 more steps before it works.

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

#104

Post by mullsork »

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.

Ease of development was our number one reason to use Stripe for sure. We did end up adding Paypal after and it was a pain to work with.

Stripe was so reliable that we had clickety-test that used their real sandbox API to make sure in our CI that payment kept working.

Whenever someone brings up Stripe it always brings happy memories. I've never worked with a third party API that was as nice as theirs. Their Ruby SDK helped with that of course.

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

#105

Post by kafkaesq »

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.

It's a "nice" headline for Bloomberg's advertisers (and hence, for Bloomberg) in that it gets people to click on the link.

But in terms of information content, it's a horrible headline (for the reasons you so succinctly describe).

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

#106

Post by Silhouette »

crazypyro wrote: post #12
cperciva wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an analogous agreement, but it's hidden behind 'terms and conditions' which you click through without reading.

Isn't part of the innovation the fact that almost all users can click through that part of the process instead of spending lots of time in bureaucracy? Is there justification for everyone who wants to process payments needing to understand that type of legal document? Is there some major liability that people are agreeing to when they accept the T&Cs? I honestly just don't know anything about card redemption agreemen…

Is there some major liability that people are agreeing to when they accept the T&Cs?

The agreements between payment services and merchants are some of the most one-sided legal contracts you are ever likely to encounter. Unless you are a huge merchant, they are probably non-negotiable. Typically they grant the payment service and/or its associates the authority to literally take money straight out of your bank account, impose often unspecified levels of fees for vaguely defined transgressions, etc. They will also typically make the merchant responsible for almost anything that goes wrong in terms of fraud, other than perhaps a few specific exceptions where facilities like 3-D Secure were used.

Stripe seems to be little better than anyone else with much of this, though as I understand it that is partly because the card networks impose their own terms and intermediary services like Stripe are essentially just passing them on without having much say about it themselves either.

To give credit where it's due, I've never personally encountered Stripe actually abusing those sorts of terms, and getting signed up with them in the first place was dramatically easier than the alternatives available at the time other than possibly entry-level PayPal (+ accompanying horror stories, depending on who you ask).

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

#107

Post by magic_beans »

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"

Because redheads are so unbelievably common in Ireland, calling him the "smartest redhead in Ireland" is a clever little joke that draws a contrast between his exotic intelligence (building an AI system, desigining a programming language) and his incredible ordinariness (having red hair in Ireland).

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

#108

Post by kbenson »

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 don't think it's misleading, it's just that there are different preconceptions based on the audience. If there was an article about "How two brothers turned a 3 oz piece of metal into a billion dollar startup" and it was a highly machined part that fit a really useful case in the auto industry, we would rightly assume they were talking about what they sold, and that a lot more work went into actually making and perfecting it. If the same article was read by machinists, they might take issue with it like people are taking issue with this headline, but that's because of the context they are perceiving it in.

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

#109

Post by discombobulate »

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…

Heard Patrick on The Ezra Klein Show[0]. Astute af.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/best-of-tech-startups/the-ezra-klein-...

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

#110

Post by pbreit »

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.

Question is when will Stripe (or someone else) operate even =more= like a merchant account (ie, interchange+ pricing).
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