The Story of Stripe! From 7 lines of code to $40B+ in 9 years

The story of Stripe's founding has a lot of lessons on building a company.

What Patrick & John Collison have done over the last decade is truly mind blowing!

Prior to Stripe, the Collison brothers started Auctomatic, an online auction management company.

They sold Auctomatic to Live Current Media for $5M.

They thought they’d just start a company with this $$$ but quickly found out that it wasn’t nearly enough.

With the idea of creating a PayPal alternative to power online payments, the Collison’s realized they needed something that can’t be programmed.

To convince people that they are qualified to handle money, they needed “credibility”.

Selling a company for $5M wasn’t enough.

Knowing that credibility could come from partnering with top tier firms, they raised a $2M Series A from the likes of Peter Thiel, A16z, and Sequoia.

Stripe is built by developers for developers.

This made sense since developers were the ones tasked with implementing payment technologies.

Because they allowed developers to integrate Stripe with 7 lines of code, they created a raving fan base.

Developers fucking love stripe!

Stripe won over the hearts of their users (including me).

And in 10 years they turned 7 lines of code into a $40B+ invaluable business! 🤯