Anyone who dealt with Authorize.net should have seen the opportunity in making these payments simpler... But I didn't.
I vividly remember how difficult it was. You had to print pages off and fill out all this stuff and mail it to someone.
How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
111–120 of 195 posts
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#112Earlier 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…
Amazon needs data to know where to expand, how to price things. Stripe has a lot of exactly that. Maybe...
I setup my brother's small business stripe integration, and I wrote and tested the API calls to charge customers. Stripe doesn't know anything about his business except transaction sizes, and a bunch of info they definitely can't resell (TIN) or is already public knowledge (business name, billing address). I doubt they have anything helpful for pricing, though they might be able to analyze gross transaction rates and geography. I have never checked what their contractual obligations are with that data, I imagine if they started sharing it that would get out pretty fast, and result in them losing customers rapidly.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#113If 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.
More like how turning on lights is easy for billions of people because someone else did the hard work of the power lines, generators, switches, light bulbs, etc.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#114If 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 feel like I just wasted 15 minutes digging for that and being disappointed that their MVP wasn't a 7-liner. Guess I should have come to the comments first.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#115> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions.
Take this with a large, disclosed portion of salt. Amazon is big enough to pay essentially nothing in processor markup. Not to mention they sell their own payments service. If Stripe is actually handling any Amazon processing they are making no money on it, and quite possibly taking a loss to buy the volume.
Think Square's deal with Starbucks. They ended up losing $56M.[1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/square-ipo-filing-shows-starbu...
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#116Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#117> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Take this with a large, disclosed portion of salt. Amazon is big enough to pay essentially nothing in processor markup. Not to mention they sell their own payments service. If Stripe is actually handling any Amazon processing they are making no money on it, and quite possibly taking a loss to buy the…
Since, as you point out, they're probably not making money on the processing directly, maybe there is another reason Stripe would find it useful to process a large amount of transactions...
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
More like how turning on lights is easy for billions of people because someone else did the hard work of the power lines, generators, switches, light bulbs, etc.
Actually, it would be more like all of that stuff already existed, but it was a woeful and Byzantine process to get all of it lined up for your particular lightbulb.
Re: How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe
#119[deleted]