Businessweek Profiles Stripe Co-Founders Patrick and John Collison

Ashlee Vance, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek:

One way to justify the number: Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon.com Inc., the largest and most sought-after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal — which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website — but it could help Stripe greatly increase its transaction volume. (Amazon had no comment.)

Seven years in, however, Stripe’s mission is less to send more books, vacuums, and grooming kits into the world than to “increase the GDP of the internet,” Patrick says. To do this, the company is beginning to move beyond payments by writing software that helps companies retool the way they incorporate, pay workers, and detect fraud. It’s part of an ambitious bid to revamp how online business has been conducted for 20 years and to give anyone with a bright idea a chance to compete. “We think giving two people in a garage the same infrastructure as a 100,000-person corporation — the aggregate effects of that will be really good,” Patrick says.

The key to Stripe’s success was their laser-like focus on developers. They made Stripe the easiest way to add payments to any system, and they have a great reputation for security and reliability.

★ Tuesday, 1 August 2017