The first version of Stripe was called 'slash depth payments' and lacked many features. It was so basic that even Twitch couldn't use it initially, but it was sufficient for early-stage startups to accept credit card payments.

The founders of Stripe worked directly with their customers to implement their API, which created strong connections and allowed them to learn about customer needs and pain points effectively.

We thought, why isn't there a straightforward payment solution like Slicehost for payments? This idea led us to build a prototype for Stripe in January 2010, which we launched to a few friends.

We realized that businesses were increasingly building complicated transaction-oriented services, which is where Stripe's tools and APIs come into play.

The first users of Stripe were mostly from the Y Combinator community or friends of those who had gone through YC, which helped us gain traction.

The founding story of Stripe isn't dramatic; my brother John and I started building iPhone apps together while in school, which helped us pay our college tuition.

Stripe was created to address the pain points that Y Combinator founders experienced with existing payment solutions, which were cumbersome and difficult to use.

The founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, started as young programmers without knowledge of banking deals, yet they succeeded in payment processing.

At Stripe, the design process is collaborative, with designers, engineers, and product managers working closely together to ensure a coherent user experience.