I recently came across an article titled "How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code Into a $9.2 Billion Startup." It's the kind of tech success story we love - a neat, tidy story about entrepreneurial brilliance. See anyone can do it!  But as someone who's worked with payment systems, I know there's a far more interesting story behind those seven lines of code. It’s less a story of 7 lines of code and more a story about making the impossible look easy.

When Stripe launched in 2010, integrating payments into a website was a nightmare. Developers spent weeks wrestling with complex banking relationships, setting up merchant accounts, payment gateways, implementing security compliance, and jumping through countless other hoops. The market had established players like PayPal and traditional bank processors, but none had solved this core friction.

They took all the complexity of the financial system and hid it behind an interface so clean that developers could implement it in minutes. But maintaining that simplicity requires an enormous amount of work.

Think about what happens when you run those seven lines of code:

• Multiple banking systems need to communicate

• Anti-fraud algorithms spring into action

• Regulatory compliance checks kick in

• Security protocols verify everything

• Currency conversions calculate in real-time

• Error handling systems clean up errors

It all happens in milliseconds, with developers never needing to know about the complexity they're invoking.

When you look at how stripe evolved throughout the years you see that Stripe didn't succeed by just by making payment processing simple, they also simplified other aspects of building an online business. 

 Their involvement with online business gave them front row seats to witnessing the additional challenges that new online businesses struggle with. They were able to position it as "What else can we simplify?" 

Need to incorporate your company? Stripe Atlas turns the outdated process of company formation into a few simple form fields. Worried about fraud? Stripe Radar is a fraud prevention tool to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. Does your website need more than just processing payments?  Stripe Connect gives you a marketplace that takes care of all the complexity of managing multiple sellers and routing payments.

Each new product follows the same pattern - take something complicated, handle all the difficult parts behind the scenes, and give it a nice, simple interface.

Another big part of Stripes success is the developer community they've built. Developers who implement Stripe at one company often become advocates at their next job. This happens because Stripe makes integration easy and they have robust solutions to most payment needs. Stripe is renowned for having some of the best API documentation in the industry. Other companies have even started copying their documentation style. Stripe encourages sharing solutions within the community. Every time a developer shares a code solution or writes a tutorial, it makes Stripe more valuable for everyone else.

The genius of Stripe isn't 7 lines of code. Its their ability to make  incredibly difficult things look easy. Behind those seven lines of code lies years of work building relationships with banks worldwide, navigating complex regulatory environments, creating sophisticated fraud detection systems, and maintaining infrastructure that can handle millions of transactions reliably and securely.

And maybe the bigger lesson here is that innovation comes in many forms. This wasn’t about creating something new, but about making something complex become easy and simple. Perhaps they borrowed a page from Apple’s playbook.