Stripe Aims to Reinvent E-Payments

When Patrick Collison began trying to sell Marc Andreessen on the need for a drop-dead simple way for website owners to accept credit cards, the venture capitalist and creator of the Netscape browser cut him off. “I know!” Andreessen said excitedly before launching into a story about how he and the original Netscape team had wanted to make payment processing as fundamental to the Web as the ability to e-mail or display pictures. They were foiled by the complexity of working with banks, credit card companies, and other essential partners.

Stripe aims to pick up where Andreessen left off. Founded by Collison and his brother John, both Irish emigrés and college dropouts, the four-month-old service is winning praise from Web developers. E-commerce sites typically accept credit cards online by connecting with PayPal software, which some say is hard to use, or by spending time and money to set up a merchant bank account and build a network for storing card information. Big companies such as Amazon.com have already mastered this; Stripe lets Web developers of any size do the same thing in minutes. “Using Stripe is almost as easy as embedding a YouTube video into a website,” says Mike Moritz, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital. The Collisons expect that ease of use to inspire entrepreneurs to proceed with ideas they might have scuttled due to the hassle of getting paid. Making payments easier “doesn’t just make it more pleasant. It also changes what gets done,” says Patrick.