I just met Greg Brockman a few minutes ago, but I'm already showing him my credit card number. Brockman is the chief technology officer at Stripe, the billion-dollar online payments startup backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and he wants to show how easy it is to use the company's technology. In under four minutes, after a few keyboard taps on his laptop, Brockman has set up what amounts to a mini-web service that takes a payment from my credit card. In even less time, he creates a way of sending money to my card. And he pays me back.
Stripe's tech is meant for the world's software developers, the builders of the countless apps, sites, and services that involve taking and making payments in one way or another, and Stripe wants them to know: you don't have to worry about this part anymore. In fewer than 10 minutes, with an email address and a little cut-and-paste, you can set up all the tools you need to handle online transactions, drop in a snippet of code and an API key, and get on with building what you actually want to build. You don't have to try to navigate the arcane networks for processing credit cards---built over the decades for brick-and-mortar merchants, not online services---and tie your systems into theirs.
"If you're impatient, you just want to get playing with it," Brockman says. "You just want to see how it feels." By "it," Brockman is talking about Stripe, the company's services, and the corresponding APIs, or application programming interfaces, that let developers speedily integrate the Stripe services into their sites and apps. But "it" could also refer to the global infrastructure for financial transactions, the maze of technological and business networks that underlie the way money moves around the world in the digital age.
>'As you give people better and more powerful tools and infrastructure, you change what it is that's possible to be built.'
The young co-founders of Stripe, brothers Patrick and John Collison, began the company in 2009 as a project to make accepting credit cards easier but soon saw a grander opportunity in building a better interface for the messy systems that power the digital transfer of money---a black box that makes enabling online transactions as easy as embedding a photo or video in a blog post. They weren't the only ones to have the idea, but they have gained the support of the most famous names and firms in Silicon Valley, who see not just a compelling product with huge growth potential but in its founders the possibility of two Zuckerbergs for the price of one.
Stripe's pitch is that it has created a kind of shorthand that lets coders access and leverage all the power of that infrastructure without having to learn its entire lexicon. Many businesses are already biting. Stripe says it handles billions of dollars in transactions annually for thousands of businesses, particularly startups, including online-ride-hailing startup Lyft and internet-grocery-delivery outfit Instacart.
Stripe's technology for accepting credit cards online makes it just one entrant in a crowded---some would say overcrowded---field. Everyone from Amazon to PayPal to startups such as Balanced is trying to make it easier for individuals and businesses to take card payments over the internet. But Stripe's motivation in creating its tools, the company's founders say, transcends plastic. Their ambition extends beyond any particular payment method to the more basic problem of moving money around the internet. As the internet becomes more sophisticated and mobile, online payments are no longer simply about mimicking the offline version. They're about creating new services and apps that not only wouldn't have been possible, but wouldn't have made sense, in the past.
For Stripe, making payments easier for developers is about creating the abstraction layer that makes the circulation of money online as easy and accessible as the circulation of information. "It's not just payments," says Stripe co-founder John Collison. "It's more broadly that as you give people better and more powerful tools and infrastructure, you change what it is that's possible to be built."
>Especially since the advent of smartphones, the template for online transactions has changed dramatically.
Not so long ago, spending money on the internet overwhelmingly meant a process grounded in real-world metaphors. You filled a virtual shopping cart with the stuff you wanted to buy, then you went to a virtual checkout counter to pay. Especially since the advent of smartphones, however, the template for online transactions has changed dramatically. For example, a passenger who gets a ride using Lyft doesn't enter a credit card number every time he or she gets out of the car. What's more, a Lyft transaction is two-sided: The rider pays, and then the driver gets paid for the ride, minus a cut kept by Lyft---the kind of multi-part, mobile-powered transaction Collison is talking about.
John Collison.
