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

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

#161

Post by Artemis2 »

bigtunacan wrote: post #156

My comment/question isn't about Stripe per se, but rather the surcharges of payment processors in general. It seems like 2.9% + .50 is about average, but then I see a site like https://sendmoneytoschool.com/ and they are charging a $1.00 processing fee for credit card payments to put lunch money in my kids' school account. Is there some way to get super low processing fees if you don't use something like Stripe? Or a…

It depends a lot on the card type, the location, the volume of the business and it’s risk profile, but eventually can get to a pricing scheme called interchange+, which is a fixed fee (generally In the US this varies a LOT depending on the card type, but most consumer cards are approx 1% interchange + a small fixed fee. In Europe these interchange rates are regulated at 0,3% for consumer cards. There are cases of special schemes (eg. CB in France) where processing can be even cheaper.

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

#162

Post by _zl9i »

Alupis wrote: post #74
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.

> 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 ju…

But why would anyone use a shitty company over a good one, no matter the service levels?

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

#163

Post by _zl9i »

wang_li wrote: post #48
riazrizvi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to some of the other commenters I think figuring how the title is true is an interesting game. It's the type of clickbait I don't mind.

"How two brothers from Ireland raised prices and added friction to the flow of money."

Looking forward to a proper cryptocurrency that will eliminate all middle-men!

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

#164

Post by ruairidhwm »

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.…

I interviewed with Stripe early this year, and whilst sadly we couldn't go forward due to the fact that I'm British and was too late for an H1B - it was one of the most pleasant interviews I have ever had.

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

#165

Post by surfmike »

gnaritas wrote: post #127
ryebit wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember how they worked (last did stripe integration a ways back), the script instruments your form's submit event to do an (ajax if possible) POST to stripe's server, which processes everything, and returns back a (merchant specific) "token" representing a redeemable charge to the customer. The form is then posted to your server, but all it gets is the "token", which it can then use your private merchant key t…

Correct, and the big reason for that is it means you don't have to be PCI compliant since the card never touches your server, only stripes. That's why Stripe blew up, Paypal had no such offering for allowing you to use your own checkout form but not have to pass the card through your server.

Not true, PayPal Payments Pro offered that.

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

#166

Post by surfmike »

jonknee wrote: post #126
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.

The PayPal form also involved redirecting all your users over to PayPal. Stripe has always integrated into your site/service which is part of what made that form so nifty.

PayPal also offered a service called Payments Pro which did not do any redirects.

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

#167

Post by Kluny »

komali2 wrote: post #57
akhilcacharya wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read these stories and feel like I was the only good kid that actually focused in class.

I read them and see how all these smart entrepreneur types dicked around in class reading books, just like me, except they turned out to be geniuses, and I ended up just derping around Asia and frittering away my youth. What did I do wrong? I blame WoW :P

Haha, same here. I always used to feel so justified for all the time I spent reading scifi novels in class instead of paying attention, cause all these millionaires were doing it too... and here I am, a junior developer facing a layoff, 5 years into my career. Such success!

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

#168

Post by Qub3d »

komali2 wrote: post #57
akhilcacharya wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read these stories and feel like I was the only good kid that actually focused in class.

I read them and see how all these smart entrepreneur types dicked around in class reading books, just like me, except they turned out to be geniuses, and I ended up just derping around Asia and frittering away my youth. What did I do wrong? I blame WoW :P

Survivorship Bias [0]. It happens to be that a certain type of rebellious/free thinking personality is the most likely to end up making a successful tech company; but that doesn't mean everyone who exhibits that trait succeeds.

[0]:https://xkcd.com/1827/

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

#169

Post by icebraining »

_zl9i wrote: post #162
Alupis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

But why would anyone use a shitty company over a good one, no matter the service levels?

Because you may live in a dark patch: https://stripe.com/global

EDIT: Nevermind: "Currently, PayPal Payments Pro is available in the US, UK, and Canada."

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

#170

Post by hobofan »

smsm42 wrote: post #70
tracker1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??").

Which is already a better picture than what most people have when I tell them I attended a hackathon: "So you all get together to try and hack the security system of a company?"
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