A journey I desperately want all young programmers to read about.
Photo from YoutubeThe Collison brothers build a 7-line code solution that developers can put on their website to get paid.
This 7-line code solution resulted in a company called Stripe.
Stripe empowered every developer in the world.
Pre-Stripe companies had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish their own payment channel.
With Stripe, all businesses can set up their payment page in minutes. The Stripe team handled everything seamlessly on the backend.
They handled the credit card companies and all the legal and regulatory headaches. This made it easy for any startup to accept payments with the help of Stripe.
Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.
Where did the Idea of Stripe come from?
Both Patrick and John Collison were born in Ireland.
When they were in college they used to make iPhone apps. They used to pay college tuition with revenue from those apps.
Both of them had a habit of working on side projects.
They soon realized that it was easy to make money with iPhone apps. The reason was that it was easy to charge money on the iPhone app.
They thought that we created a lot of side projects online in the last few years and that we couldn’t charge for anything. It was because of the difficulty of accepting payments online.
In the month of October 2009, one day, both Patrick and John were returning from dinner together. They had been thinking of building something to accept payments online.
John told Patrick that:
“Eh, you know, we should just build a prototype together. It won’t be that hard.”
Stripe’s journey began this way. Stripe’s previous name was /dev/payments.