价值92亿美元的7行代码
爱尔兰的天才两兄弟，一个就读于MIT，另一个是哈佛的，都学习盖茨中途辍学，创业去了。他们创办的Stripe Inc.公司的主营业务就是帮助处理在线信用卡交易，只要在网页中嵌入他们公司开发的7行代码，就可以马上实现信用卡交易，连接银行和线上收费。在以前，这是一项非常繁琐的工作，费用繁多，历时几个星期才能让银行’网关‘正常工作。而7行代码成就的上百亿美元的公司，也让他们成了硅谷最年轻的亿万富翁。
Stripe 是传统巨头Paypal和Square的新兴竞争对手，现在正和亚马逊合作，以更多地掌控全球商业流向。
原文链接：https://www.bloomberg.com
抄录：
How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code Into a $9.2 Billion Startup
By Ashlee Vance, www.bloomberg.com August 1st, 2017
Now, Stripe’s Patrick and John Collison are teaming with Amazon to grab even more control over the global flow of commerce.
By
Ashlee Vance
@valleyhack
Every day, Americans spend about $1.2 billion online. That figure has roughly doubled in the past five years, according to the Department of Commerce, and it’s likely to double again in the next five as the internet continues to devour traditional retail. So it might come as a surprise that the web’s financial infrastructure is old and slow. For years, the explosive growth of e-commerce has outpaced the underlying technology; companies wanting to set up shop have had to go to a bank, a payment processor, and “gateways” that handle connections between the two. This takes weeks, lots of people, and fee after fee. Much of the software that processes the transactions is decades old, and the more modern bits are written by banks, credit card companies, and financial middlemen, none of whom are exactly winning hackathons for elegant coding.
In 2010, Patrick and John Collison, brothers from rural Ireland, began to debug this process. Their company, Stripe Inc., built software that businesses could plug into websites and apps to instantly connect with credit card and banking systems and receive payments. The product was a hit with Silicon Valley startups. Businesses such as Lyft, Facebook, DoorDash, and thousands that aspired to be like them turned Stripe into the financial backbone of their operations.
The company now handles tens of billions of dollars in internet transactions annually, making money by charging a small fee on each one. Half of Americans who bought something online in the past year did so, probably unknowingly, via Stripe. This has given it a $9.2 billion valuation, several times larger than those of its nearest competitors, and made Patrick, 28, and John, 26, two of the world’s youngest billionaires.
But payments is a brutal battleground. Countless startups, big banks, and companies such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc. are trying to grab what pennies they can with their own systems. This competition, combined with the industry’s minuscule profit margins, has left pundits asking whether Stripe’s lofty appraisal makes sense. “We’re a ways out before they can satisfy that valuation,” says Brendan Miller, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “They’re valued higher than a lot of players who have been around for years with thousands of employees, tremendously more volume, and clients all over the world.”
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 Collison brothers were born in Limerick and moved around as kids before settling in Dromineer, an idyllic village in central Ireland. Their parents had scientific backgrounds—father Denis in electrical engineering, mother Lily in microbiology—then became entrepreneurs. Denis ran a 24-bedroom hotel on the shore of Lough Derg, while Lily operated a corporate training company from the family’s home. “Entrepreneur is a long, fancy French word, but it didn’t seem like something you aspire to,” Patrick says. “It seemed normal, because whatever your parents do seems normal.”
The boys went to a school with fewer than 20 kids per grade. When bored in class, Patrick read books. “I would line up the angles so I was hidden from the teacher’s view,” he says, adding that he found out years later that an enlightened principal had instructed teachers to allow it. Patrick spent his last year studying at home so he could take the required standardized tests early and graduate at 16. (“Surely the smartest redhead in Ireland,” read one headline about 16-year-old Patrick being named Young Scientist of the Year for developing a programming language and artificial intelligence system.) He condensed what’s normally a two-year test-taking process into a 20-day period in which he aced 30 exams. Then he ran a marathon to celebrate.
