Mind-boggling fun fact: Last year, 50% of online transactions were made through Stripe. In fact, you probably make payments on Stripe all the time and aren't even aware of it.
Order a Lyft? Stripe. Buy something on Amazon? Stripe again. Book a room on Expedia? You guessed it … Stripe! The list continues. Basically, if you pull out your wallet to buy anything online, you can bet two Irish boys are smiling somewhere.
While other kids in school were playing video games, Stripe’s founders John Collison and Patrick Collison were busy selling their first company for $5 million. That’s before graduating high school, by the way.
“Wait, what do you mean there’s no school valet for Lambos?”
As time went on, the brothers continued to build online businesses and found themselves increasingly frustrated with the absence of a decent payment processing platform. So, they did what all great entrepreneurs do: They turned their frustration into inspiration.
The Collison brothers would proceed to lay the foundation for what would become the internet's standard payment system. The rest is history.
Perhaps Stripe has the best business model of any company: Take a fee on everyone else's debit/credit card transactions (2.9% plus $0.30, for each successful transaction.
That may seem like a small amount of money, but after processing a trillion here and a trillion there, soon enough you're talking about "real money".
VCs love Stripe (to the tune of a $35 billion-dollar valuation, based on the startup's most recent funding) so much so, that its founders now share the title of the youngest "billionaire bros” on earth.
Do you use Stripe? Let us know in the comment section below!
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