How Two Irish brothers 7 Lines of Code Turned Into a $36 Billion Empire
Two Irish brothers in their 20s outplayed the finance industry with seven lines of code On June 24 last year, Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, posted a Tweet saying Hit our engagement metrics this weekend! The Tweet was accompanied by an engagement ring — which explained the kind of metrics Patrick was talking about. Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mixpanel, was quick with a response: That’s one way to increase user retention. Yeah, it’s safe to say these guys have a great sense of humor. Which isn’t surprising, considering their seemingly absurd solution to online payments. Instead of chasing 1000-hour programming contracts to build clunky payments solutions for each individual client, the Collison brothers built 7 lines of code that developers could simply plug into their websites. The result is Stripe — a company that has more cash than it knows what to do with. Here are the two main reasons why this worked so well. 1. They empowered developers When Stripe was la