The seven lines of code that became Stripe
In 2010, accepting a payment online required a merchant account, a payment gateway, weeks of paperwork, and PCI compliance. The Collison brothers shipped a competitor that worked in seven lines of curl.
Patrick Collison · 8 min read
When Patrick and John Collison started what would become Stripe, they didn't lead with a pitch deck. They led with a curl command.
The entire onboarding flow for a competing payments product in 2010 looked like this: fill out a 40-page merchant application, wait two weeks for underwriting, pass a PCI compliance audit, integrate a 200-page SDK, deploy. Best case, you were six weeks from your first transaction.
The Collison brothers shipped a private beta where the entire integration was a single POST request:
curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges \
-u sk_test_xxx: \
-d amount=2000 \
-d currency=usd \
-d source=tok_visa \
-d description="Test charge"
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