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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

#181

Post by dboreham »

eterm wrote: post #98
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.

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 co…

I suspect also that the marketing folks re-branded the various services on a regular basis so you weren't even sure if two different names for something actually referred to the same thing.

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

#183

Post by kennydude »

shimon_e wrote: post #23
Kluny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Actually processing the response is significantly easier with Stripe.

Before Stripe, PayPal was some clunky API with a endless amount of different accounts with different pricing structures.

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

#184

Post by kennydude »

jacquesm wrote: post #67
pieterhg wrote: post #65

Earlier 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 sick of seeing really good startups being bought out. Makes you not want to trust any of them long term

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

#185

Post by FLUX-YOU »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #47
mschaef wrote: post #4

~12 years ago, it was Patrick Collison that was named young scientist of the year for developing a dialect of Lisp called Croma: http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html I'm glad to see he has continued to do well.

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

Most of it is fluff anyway. You could conveniently remember your own history in a different way if it helped to gain an "entrepreneur" label. No one's going to bother calling them out on it even if it weren't true.

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

#186

Post by jonknee »

surfmike wrote: post #166
jonknee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and it was quite a bit more work to integrate. Stripe hit the sweet spot of being easy as possible and integrated into your site.

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

#187

Post by gnaritas »

surfmike wrote: post #165
gnaritas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not exactly, the Paypal transparent redirect one still bounces you through paypal's URL; the Stripe one never leaves your domain.

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

#188

Post by edwinwee »

kodir wrote: post #182

Dear Stripe team! I am trying to activate my Stripe account but after I press the "Activate Account" button, keep getting "An unknown error occurred" message. Wrote about this in the "Feedback" form, but haven't heard back. Please help.

Weird, sorry about that. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into this?

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

#189

Post by smsm42 »

hobofan wrote: post #170
smsm42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Surprisingly, that description may be exactly true if you understand the word "hack" just right :)

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

#190

Post by bigtunacan »

Artemis2 wrote: post #161
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 spe…

Thanks. I wasn't familiar with this. That's definitely significantly cheaper (transaction cost wise at least), but even then doesn't leave enough room to profit on the transaction fee alone so I'm assuming they must be charging the schools for the service and partially subsidizing with the convenience fees.
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