At Stripe, we focus on building roads for technology, enabling others to build their own solutions, rather than just creating products ourselves.

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

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

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.

The first version of Stripe was built with basic tools and was enough to understand the product experience, allowing users to charge credit cards easily.

The magic happened when we aligned the needs of those wanting simplified deployment with those wanting simplified React and web application building. I struggled in the beginning to deliver the vision incrementally and meet the market where it was, which at the time was very static.

I think the future of business will empower small, passionate teams to focus on their core ideas, leveraging platforms like Stripe to scale efficiently.

Engineers at Stripe have strong instincts for building the right products, especially since we primarily build for other engineers.

Stripe succeeded because it addressed a known problem in credit card payment integration that many developers faced, but no one attempted to solve it due to perceived difficulties.