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Acquired · December 2, 2024 · 200m

Stripe

Patrick and John Collison built Stripe from 7 lines of code into a $65B payments infrastructure company. How two Irish brothers dropped out of MIT and Harvard to make internet payments work for developers, becoming the plumbing of the internet economy.

Canon

Before Stripe, integrating payments took weeks of bank paperwork and hundreds of lines of code. Stripe reduced it to 7 lines. By removing friction from the developer environment, they changed the behavior of an entire industry.
Patrick and John Collison are legendary readers who built their business frameworks from books. Patrick's reading list — spanning economics, history, science, and literature — shaped Stripe's long-term thinking and ambitious scope.