愛爾蘭的天才兩兄弟啥箭，一個(gè)就讀于MIT，另一個(gè)是哈佛的爹梁，都學(xué)習(xí)蓋茨中途輟學(xué)右犹，創(chuàng)業(yè)去了。他們創(chuàng)辦的Stripe Inc.公司的主營業(yè)務(wù)就是幫助處理在線信用卡交易卫键，只要在網(wǎng)頁中嵌入他們公司開發(fā)的7行代碼傀履，就可以馬上實(shí)現(xiàn)信用卡交易虱朵，連接銀行和線上收費(fèi)莉炉。在以前，這是一項(xiàng)非常繁瑣的工作碴犬，費(fèi)用繁多絮宁，歷時(shí)幾個(gè)星期才能讓銀行’網(wǎng)關(guān)‘正常工作。而7行代碼成就的上百億美元的公司服协，也讓他們成了硅谷最年輕的億萬富翁绍昂。
Stripe 是傳統(tǒng)巨頭Paypal和Square的新興競爭對(duì)手，現(xiàn)在正和亞馬遜合作偿荷，以更多地掌控全球商業(yè)流向窘游。
原文鏈接：https://www.bloomberg.com
抄錄：
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 trans-actions 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 trans-action 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.
