Stripe is on a mission to increase the GDP of the internet and this is their story!

We all remember that decade that began after 2000, from 2001 to 2010, with the internet booming like never before. Businesses across the United States and the World are swimming in endless business opportunities only to be pulled back by the real, more tangible problem of the complex, tiresome process involved in setting up a way to accept credit card payments, more specifically online and across countries. Connecting online businesses and payment processors required working with an existing merchant services company and setting up complex systems and integrations. And for upcoming businesses built outside of the United States, there was absolutely no hope!

And one of the solutions came from a brother duo, Patrick and John Collison, from Dromineer, a postcard village in Ireland. They built their first SaaS company, Auctomatic at 17 and 15 years and became World’s youngest self-made millionaires at 18 and 16.

By 2007, online payments were meant to be addressed, while the brothers built their APIs. With PayPal being founded almost a decade ago by some of the GOAT entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin, the revolution in fintech that followed, however, was more of a case of banks diversifying their portfolios, which set the payment rails for any eager startup to ride on. The accounts used for cards and payments were still controlled by the banks, who confirmed identities.

The major problem was intermediation, with the annual cost of financial intermediation in the US being roughly 2 percent, which had remained constant since the late nineteenth century and had yet to show efficiency gains over 130 years. That’s a little over more than a century and a quarter.?

The underlying payments technology pulled the growth from the expansion of e-commerce behind for many years. Businesses looking to transact had to visit a bank that handled payments and set up a gateway to link the two. It involved a lot of people, time, and fees! Banks, credit card companies, and financial intermediaries created most of the current software and were decades old.

This was around the time when PayPal was built to make payments simple but instead, made things worse with limits such as, once a company's revenue reached a particular threshold, Paypal automatically placed the business on a 21 to 60-day rolling reserve, meaning that up to 30% of its earnings might be locked up for up to two months. And developers were caught in what I’d call a proverbial hell by having to choose between this and the intricate legacy systems created by banks.

This was when Stripe chose to build a developer-friendly product; the guys in charge of making the code for all their prospects as against all the current players who were creating and following the legacy systems with the CFO as the key decision makers. The CFOs, back in the day, would assume all the systems to be the same and bid for the cost-effective one.

Patrick and John wanted to build a product that was for a developer building the next big SaaS company with a two-member team, essentially coding their way through the entire product but need a way to integrate a payment system that is relatively simple and would not require other hundreds of hours of coding to figure that out, for the simple reason that, it is not their code product. Along with that, what came from their own struggles a few years ago of constantly changing APIs, was to build a simple payments API that – once installed – didn’t keep changing.

Those are the crucial pillars Stripe was built on. They came up with seven straightforward lines of code that anyone could insert in their app or website and use to connect to a payments provider, along with a promise that no other changes were needed. Developers who integrated the Stripe API would only have to touch it for a while. A procedure that used to take weeks to develop and maintain was now a simple copy-and-paste task.

And Stripe was an instant hit amongst developers. They got their first few clients through word-of-mouth from developers across communities for developers like Stackshare and had a 100X fanbase as compared to PayPal and Ayden, their then competitors.

Stripe was an instant blessing for marketplace and e-commerce companies like Shopify that had to manage payments between thousands of clients, small vendors, or drivers at a time. It would have taken six months to construct an accounting infrastructure to handle these to and fro funds were now replaced by a click of a single on-screen button. By processing payments on its own servers, Stripe made it easy for buyers and sellers to connect.

Stripe also helped business owners overcome the classic problem that PayPal posed as an intermediary for every transaction; Stripe operated like a white-label merchant account, processing payments, checking for fraud, and taking a small percentage which gave the businesses autonomy over their payments.

In their next leg of growth, Stripe wanted to focus on the bigger problem. Helping all sellers, small and big, across the globe, sell anywhere in the world. That’s when in Feb 2016, they launched the Stripe Atlas platform, designed to help entrepreneurs start a business from across the world.

In July 2016, to enable companies and individual sellers on online marketplaces to accept payments using Stripe, Stripe created Stripe Connect. This provided customers with a means of getting paid via Stripe, whether renting out their flat on Airbnb or delivering food via DoorDash, in response to the rising demand from a new generation of marketplace enterprises. Shopify, an e-commerce platform, was one of the earliest users.

To serve the fast-expanding subscription e-commerce business, Stripe also debuted its Billing solution in 2018; the product provided an end-to-end billing and subscription management platform. To cut down on card declines and keep more of their money, businesses could experiment with pricing models, adapt their billing procedures, and expedite the recurring billing process.

Stripe launched Stripe Issuing, a virtual card issuance product in the middle of 2018 that supported corporate expenses and digital banking. The Stripe API allows businesses to design and distribute cards. The entire process is completed in a few clicks as opposed to taking a few months. Spending caps permitted merchant categories, and other options are configurable by users.

In late 2019, Stripe launched Stripe Capital, an SMB Lending product, through which existing Stripe users can apply for flexible small business financing and automates repayment as a fixed percentage of daily sales and disburses payments within one business day.

During the same period, they also launched the Stripe Corporate Card for high-growth startups and small enterprises occasionally underserved by current card issuer services because of issues like scant credit history and thin income statements.

And Stripe introduced Stripe Treasury in December 2020. With the help of the service, Stripe users can offer banking services to their customers.

Here are all products Stripe has built over the years.

The success of Stripe is based on the success of its customers: the more customers Stripe has, the larger the opportunity for payment volume. In turn, Stripe seeks to expand the realm of online businesses and streamline the start-up process for new ones and is concentrating on 2 major growth drivers: lowering obstacles to new business development and expanding into overseas markets to broaden the funnel of qualified enterprises.

Until today, Stripe has raised over $2.2B in over 21 rounds and is valued at close to $100 Billion. Stripe has maintained a laser-like focus on facilitating online trade and expanding the internet economy's distribution network. Stripe also wants to be completely indispensable to its merchant partners as it introduces new goods and researches new markets. Stripe's primary client, the developer, has been the company's focus with great success.

More importantly, the developer, Stripe's primary client, has been the company's focus and has stayed true to its initial ideology for its customers; Stripe earns only when the customers earn, sacrosanct.