Stripe
Patrick and John Collison
Two brothers from Limerick built the financial plumbing of the internet.
For an Irish person watching from a distance, they moved the ceiling on what looked available.
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Start with the seven lines of code.
Stripe's original pitch was that a developer could take a payment in minutes instead of weeks. They found the narrowest possible wedge into an enormous market and made that one thing excellent.
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Sell to the person who has to use it.
Payments were sold to finance departments. Stripe sold to the developer doing the integration. Choosing a different buyer inside the same company was most of the insight.
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Do the integration yourself.
Early on they would sit down and implement Stripe for the customer there and then. Unscalable, and it taught them exactly where the product hurt.
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Being young is not the disadvantage it looks like.
They were in their early twenties in an industry built on institutional trust. Depth of knowledge closed the credibility gap faster than age would have.
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Read more than the competition.
Both are unusually well-read, and it shows in how far ahead they reason. Reading widely is a competitive practice, not a hobby.
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Documentation is product.
Stripe's docs were better than its rivals' products. If your buyer is a developer, the writing is the experience.
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Leave from a position of strength.
They sold their first company, Auctomatic, in their teens. Finishing one thing cleanly buys the credibility and the calm to start a harder one.
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Pick a market where being slightly better compounds.
Payments touch every transaction, so small improvements accrue forever. The size of the surface matters as much as the size of the idea.
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Write things down.
Stripe's internal writing culture is deliberate. Reasoning in prose exposes weak arguments in a way meetings never do.
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Geography is a smaller constraint every year.
Limerick to San Francisco was a decision, not a destiny. The distance mattered less than what they did after closing it.
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