i worked for a startup (eVend) that tried to tackle the 'hard problem' stripe tackles way back in 1997. You read that right - 1997! From Stripe's home page: "y

i worked for a startup (eVend) that tried to tackle the 'hard problem' stripe tackles way back in 1997. You read that right - 1997! From Stripe's home page: "you don't need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account." The problem was - not schlepp blindness - but the fact that this problem was completely impossible to solve in 1997. Sure, maybe our execution was lacking (I was just a junior programmer at the time) but what really killed it was the banks and especially the credit card companies. Mastercard and Visa just said no. We will not allow this to happen. Whoever charges the card must be responsible for delivery. We pivoted to take this into account (digital content delivery anyone) but reality was. This schlepp was too hard at that time. People have been banging on the 'making payment easy' door, for a long, long, time. The fact that Stripe is making progress now is more a fortuitous confluence of events than the fact that nobody else had tried.