On June 24 last year, Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, posted a Tweet saying

去年6月24日，Stripe的联合创始人Patrick Collison 发表了一条推文，说

Hit our engagement metrics this weekend!

达到这个周末的参与度指标！

The Tweet was accompanied by an engagement ring — which explained the kind of metrics Patrick was talking about.

Tweet上有一个订婚戒指-解释了Patrick在谈论的指标类型。

Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mixpanel, was quick with a response:

Mixpanel的创始人Suhail Doshi很快做出回应：

That’s one way to increase user retention.

这是增加用户保留率的一种方法。

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.

是的，可以肯定地说这些家伙很有幽默感。 考虑到他们看似荒谬的在线支付解决方案，这并不奇怪。

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.

Collison兄弟没有追逐1000小时的编程合同为每个客户构建笨拙的支付解决方案，而是构建了7行代码，开发人员可以将其插入到他们的网站中。

The result is Stripe — a company that has more cash than it knows what to do with.

结果就是Stripe —这家公司拥有的现金比其知道的要多。

Here are the two main reasons why this worked so well.

这是效果很好的两个主要原因。

1.他们授权开发人员。 (1. They empowered developers.)

When Stripe was launched in 2010, it was essentially a community of developers.

当Stripe在2010年推出时，它实质上是一个开发人员社区。

“Stripe caught on because it didn’t sell to companies,” said Dmytro Okunyev, who is the founder of Chanty. “It sold to developers. That is, Stripe offered an alternative to PayPal and Authorize that was so much easier to implement that developers around the world were naturally inclined to use it.”

“ 条纹之所以流行，是因为它没有卖给公司。” 说过 Chanty的创始人Dmytro Okunyev。 “它卖给了开发商。 也就是说，Stripe提供了贝宝(PayPal)和授权(Authorize)的替代方案，该替代方案易于实施，全世界的开发人员自然倾向于使用它。”

See, back in 2010, setting up a payments system for your business was an extremely tedious process. Most integrations at the time took weeks and months to set up. It was an exhaustive process, involving several departments — from legal to accounting.

回想2010年，为您的企业建立付款系统是一个非常繁琐的过程。 当时大多数集成需要花费数周甚至数月的时间来建立。 从法律到会计，这是一个详尽的过程，涉及多个部门。

In most companies, financial integrations were a top-down decision that came from managers who knew little about the technical nightmare of the integration process. They would set arbitrary goals and deadlines, and pass the responsibility onto developers who had to outdo themselves in order to meet expectations.

在大多数公司中，财务整合是自上而下的决策，是由对整合流程的技术噩梦一无所知的管理人员做出的。 他们将设定任意的目标和截止日期，并将责任转移给必须超越自己才能满足期望的开发人员。

Stripe changed all that by giving developers a quick and reliable way to set up payments. As a result, they built an army of champions for their product, effectively bypassing the “decision makers,” most of whom would have never believed that 7 lines of code can replace custom integrations that took up to 6 months to build.

Stripe通过为开发人员提供一种快速可靠的付款方式来改变了这一切。 结果，他们为产品建立了一支拥护者的队伍，有效地绕过了“决策者”，他们中的大多数人都不曾相信7行代码可以取代耗时6个月才能完成的定制集成。

2.他们使付款非常简单。 (2. They made payments ridiculously simple.)

Banks. Credit card companies. Regulators. Yes, the payments industry has a lot of police officers. And you need to get approval from all of them before the dollars falling into your bank account are considered legal.

银行。 信用卡公司。 监管机构。 是的，支付行业有很多警察。 在您认为落入您的银行帐户中的美元合法之前，您需要获得所有人的批准。

“For years, the explosive growth of e-commerce has outpaced the underlying technology; companies wanting to set up shop have had to go to a bank, a payment processor, and “gateways” that handle connections between the two. This takes weeks, lots of people, and fee after fee.” — Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek

“多年来，电子商务的爆炸性增长已经超过了基础技术； 想要开设商店的公司必须去银行，付款处理器和处理两者之间联系的“网关”。 这需要几个星期，需要很多人，而且要收费。” — 彭博商业周刊Ashlee Vance

Stripe changed all that. Collison brothers spent 2 years testing their platform and building relationships with credit card companies, banks and regulatory institutions. John and Patrick spent countless hours presenting their product to authorities and building enough trust to partner with them. As a result, users only have to upload a couple of documents to set up their fully operational Stripe account.

条纹改变了这一切。 Collison兄弟花了2年时间测试平台，并与信用卡公司，银行和监管机构建立关系。 约翰和帕特里克花费了无数的时间向当局展示他们的产品，并建立了足够的信任以与他们合作。 因此，用户仅需上传几个文档即可设置其完全可操作的Stripe帐户。

Even Mike Moritz, one of Paypal’s first investors, agrees that setting up payments for businesses was way too complicated before Stripe:

甚至Paypal的第一批投资者之一Mike Moritz也同意，在Stripe之前为企业设置付款太过复杂了：

“The observation that accepting payments was still too difficult rang very true,” Moritz said.

莫里茨说： “关于接受付款仍然太困难的说法非常正确。”

Another reason why Stripe blew up is because it was so universal. Platforms like Shopify and Lyft rely on payment simplicity — each additional step in account verification can mean millions of churned users. Stripe’s 7 lines of core code worked just as well in any environment, enabling billions of emerging platform users with same-week verification.

Stripe爆炸的另一个原因是它是如此普遍。 诸如Shopify和Lyft之类的平台都依赖于付款的简便性-帐户验证中的每一步都可能意味着数百万的用户流失。 Stripe的7行核心代码在任何环境下均能正常工作，从而使数十亿新兴平台用户能够在同一周进行验证。

条纹=天才+谦虚 (Stripe = Genius + Humility)

There’s no going around the fact that the Collison brothers are aggressively smart. Patrick quit high school a year early to join MIT at the age of 16, only to drop out a year later to raise cash for his first startup, Shuppa. He soon sold the startup to Auctomatic for $5 million.

Collison兄弟都非常聪明。 帕特里克·帕特里克(Patrick)提前一年退出高中，并在16岁时加入麻省理工学院(MIT)，但一年后辍学为他的第一家创业公司Shuppa筹集资金。 他很快将这家初创公司以 500万美元卖给了Auctomatic 。

Tim Ferriss, who interviewed Patrick, says that the entrepreneur is probably the most aggressive reader he’d ever met — and that means a lot coming from a guy who’s interviewed hundreds of top performers. Derek Anderson, the founder of Startup Grind, has publicly called Collison a genius.

采访了帕特里克(Patrick)的蒂姆·费里斯(Tim Ferriss)说，这位企业家可能是他见过的最有进取心的读者-这意味着很多来自采访了数百名表现最好的人。 Startup Grind的创始人Derek Anderson 公开称Collison为天才 。

However, genius alone didn’t get Patrick to where he is today. The Collisons were born in a small Irish town, and their humble, problem-solving, product-first approach is what turned them into a massive success.

然而，仅凭天才并不能使帕特里克到达今天的位置。 Collisons出生于爱尔兰的一个小镇，他们谦虚，解决问题，产品至上的方法使他们取得了巨大的成功。

“Tsays Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital and a Stripe board member. “They’re more humble and well-rounded.”

“ T代表红杉资本的合伙人，Stripe董事会成员莫里茨说 。 “他们更加谦虚和全面。”

Apparently, then, the good guys do win from time to time.

显然，好家伙有时会赢。