Stripe origins and early company history

Stripe continued to recruit unusually hands-on generalists after launch. Alex MacCaw joined after meeting John Collison through San Francisco's startup community, while Amber Feng joined as one of the company's first ten employees and went on to write much of the original Stripe Connect implementation.

Team size six months after launch

23 people · Patrick Collison's 2012 Startup Grind interview compared this with roughly eight people at launch.

Alex MacCaw

Former Twitter engineer and technical author; he later described meeting John at a housewarming party before joining Stripe.

Amber Feng

Joined as one of Stripe's first ten employees and became an early builder of Stripe Connect and financial infrastructure.

Alex MacCaw · ChartMogul · Forbes · Startup Grind

Ludwig Pettersson became Stripe's first designer as the company prepared and refined its public product. In November 2011 he contacted Belgian designer Benjamin De Cock, beginning a long-running collaboration that helped establish Stripe's visual and product-design language.

Ludwig Pettersson

Stripe's first designer and an early teammate of Patrick and John Collison.

Benjamin De Cock

Began contributing remotely after Ludwig contacted him in November 2011; the relationship eventually lasted eight years.

Compound Manual · Silicon Valley Business Journal

After roughly a year spent rebuilding the infrastructure behind its prototype, Stripe opened its developer-focused payments product to the public. The launch team was about eight people, and Patrick Collison later said four or five had first encountered Stripe as users.

Approximate launch team

8 people

User-to-employee hires

4-5 people · Patrick Collison's recollection in a 2012 interview.

TechCrunch · Startup Grind

The company initially incorporated as SlashDevSlashFinance and called its product SlashDevSlashPayments at devpayments.com. With only about five customers, the founders adopted the short name Stripe and bought stripe.com for an amount Patrick Collison later recalled as between $10,000 and $20,000.

amount

$10,000-$20,000 for stripe.com

Customers at rename

About 5

The Tim Ferriss Show

Several early contributors arrived through the product itself or the founders' technical network. Ross Boucher, Stripe's first production user, and Saikat Chakrabarti pushed the API toward a RESTful design; Anurag Goel joined as the fifth engineer and later led risk.

Ross Boucher

An engineer at 280 North whose application became Stripe's first production integration; he later joined the team.

Saikat Chakrabarti

A startup builder hired as Stripe's second engineer after meeting people involved with the young company.

Anurag Goel

Joined as Stripe's fifth engineer, helped launch the product, and later became Head of Risk.

Airbrake · Storied San Francisco · alphalist.CTO Podcast · Startup Grind

John Collison took leave from Harvard in fall 2010 to work on Stripe full time, joining Patrick Collison after his return to the project that summer. Darragh Buckley, a family friend from Limerick, became Stripe's first employee, while Harvard student Greg Brockman joined as an engineer and built foundational backend systems.

Darragh Buckley

Stripe's first employee; he grew up in Limerick, his parents were friends with the Collisons, and he reconnected with them while studying in Boston.

Greg Brockman

A Harvard student planning to transfer to MIT; he joined in 2010 and worked on Stripe's servers, card vault, recruiting, and engineering culture.

The Harvard Crimson · Greg Brockman · Alliance for Innovative Regulation · Wharton FinTech Podcast · Startup Grind

Patrick and John Collison spent the winter break in Buenos Aires building the prototype in cafés. Within roughly a week they had a production user, Ross Boucher at 280 North, even though the founders were still completing parts of the payment flow manually behind the scenes.

Time to first production user

About 1 week

Startup Grind · TechCrunch

After attending Y Combinator's Startup School in Berkeley, Patrick and John Collison discussed the difficulty of accepting payments online. On the walk back from dinner, John argued that they should build a prototype themselves, turning Patrick's 'SliceHost for payments' idea into a concrete project.

UC Berkeley Haas News · Startup Grind

John Collison entered Harvard after completing Ireland's Leaving Certificate with top marks, while Patrick Collison returned to MIT after his post-acquisition period with Auctomatic in Vancouver. Their overlapping time in Cambridge set the stage for the payments project they began that academic year.

Irish Independent · The Irish Times · Startup Grind

Live Current Media, then named Communicate.com, acquired Auctomatic about ten months after the company was formed. The reported consideration was $5 million in cash and stock, giving Patrick and John Collison an early exit before either had completed college.

amount

$5 million in cash and stock

TechCrunch · The Irish Times

During the Auctomatic period, Patrick Collison and a collaborator identified only as Brian built an early toolchain for jailbroken iPhones and an offline Wikipedia application. Patrick later said the app reached hundreds of thousands of installations and that Brian subsequently worked at Stripe.

Reported installations

Hundreds of thousands

Startup Grind

Patrick and John Collison entered Y Combinator with Shuppa, an idea for easier online selling. At Paul Graham's suggestion they combined forces with Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, forming Auctomatic to build tools for high-volume eBay sellers.

Startup Grind · The Irish Times

Patrick Collison began studying at MIT at 17. John Collison, then 16, used Ireland's transition year to align his schedule with Patrick's and work on internet-business ideas, creating the opening that led to their first startup together.

Startup Grind

As a teenager, Patrick Collison traveled to Stanford for the International Lisp Conference after emailing the organizers to explain that he could not afford the trip. The visit connected his self-taught programming interests in rural Ireland with the wider software community.

Startup Grind

At 16, Patrick Collison won the Esat BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with CROMA, a Lisp-like programming language he designed. The award is the clearest public milestone in his technical work before college and his first startups.

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