Taking money over the internet used to require months of integration work and a tolerant bank. Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in 2010 to replace all of that with a few lines of code, which sounds modest until you consider how many businesses could not launch before it existed.
Stripe became infrastructure. Startups, marketplaces and very large enterprises run their payments through it, and the product has widened into a full set of financial tools for anyone operating online.
They asked why accepting money online was so hard, then spent a decade making it invisible.
It is also one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world, and still independent — a combination that almost nothing at this scale manages to hold on to.
Collison himself is known for interests well outside payments: scientific progress, economic history, why institutions stop working. The building style follows from that — first principles, long horizons. Most people have never heard of him and use his work daily.