9 ms·
How did Stripe come up with its name? (2015)
- fsckboy 3y agoFTA: "The company's name is said to have been inspired by the word "strip," a reference to the simplicity and elegance of the company's platform, which "strips away" the complexity of traditional payment systems." the magnetic strip on a credit card is called a stripe and it rhymes with swipe. I find it extremely hard to believe the origin is not more directly that.
- dfex 3y agoChatGPT is providing the "answer" with the "strip" reference and being completely contradicted in the next answer by Greg Brockman, the former CTO of Stripe, who was, you know, actually there.
- userbinator 3y agoExcellent example of how AI is often confident and wrong, but you wouldn't know if it weren't for an authoritative source providing the truth. (Stripe in context evokes the magstripe of a payment card for me too.)
- flangola7 3y agoWhat does AI or ChatGPT have to do with this story?
- Sebguer 3y agoNothing with the story, but the incorrect reference to 'Strip' came from the ChatGPT-generated answer Quora provides if you click on the question on their site. Which they seem to favor over an answer from the person who literally helped come up with the name... The AI generated answer in full (which the article apparently linked to when the first OP here responded): Stripe, the company that provides a suite of payment APIs and tools, was founded in 2010 by brothers Patrick and John Collison. The company's name is said to have been inspired by the word "strip," a reference to the simplicity and elegance of the company's platform, which "strips away" the complexity of traditional payment systems. Additionally, the company's logo features a stylized blue and white stripe, which also contributes to the name.
- dendodge 3y agoQuora's ChatGPT answers are, as far as I can tell, more often confidently wrong than they are right. For example, for the question "Which monarch in history had the highest regnal number?" it generates > The monarch with the highest regnal number in history is Sobhuza II of Swaziland, who reigned for 82 years and 254 days which is clearly incorrect (2 is not a very big number), and yet gets its own nice answer highlight at the top of Google (where the AI generated nature of the answer is not noted at all).
- andirk 3y agoAnd I find it hard to believe anyone ever asked where the name came from because it is so obvious. More interesting is how PayPal was supposed to be some stupid company X.com that did everything. That didn't stick nor did the premise nor did the person who thought of it (Elon Musk).
- dang 3y agoI think your quote is from a different answer than Greg's (https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/answer/Greg-Brockman https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/a...), which was the submitted URL. Unfortunately our software replaced it with the generic https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/ https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/ because that's what Quora is listing as the canonical URL. We've corrected this in the submission link above. Sorry for the confusion!
- lewiscarson 3y agoAs per PG: “It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken. So make a list and try to buy some. That's what Stripe did. (Their search also turned up parse.com, which their friends at Parse took.)”
- wodenokoto 3y agoMade me think. What are non-obviously bad names that were allowed to stay and weren’t? Off the top of my mind: - Siri means ass in Japanese. Apple kept the name and except for some initial memes people seems to be used to it. - Colgate apparently sounds similar to hang yourself in some Spanish dialects (Argentinian according to google). I’m a bit uncertain if it kept its name there - Kalpis (Japanese soft drink) changed its name overseas as marketing feared it sounded too similar to “cow piss” - Moana/Vaiana. Disney used different names for this movie between America and Europe, allegedly because of a name clash with an Italian politician/adult movie star. The name change wasn’t an afterthought as the original cast recorded all relevant lines and songs with both names for a simultaneous release across markets. - the 2002 movie “XXX” was read by many as an word for pornography and top result on google for the name returns porn sites along with IMDb. Unabashedly the studio went on to create 3 movies in the franchise. I think that shows even obviously bad names can work. XXX was advertised on billboards and prime time TV across territories.
- andirk 3y agoSquare is a better name. Strip would have been the best name.
- evaneykelen 3y agoWhile square sounds cool, it also means old-fashioned. Strip seems not a good choice either (seedy or "strip off your money"). Stripe was a good choice.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoNot sure if it predates Stripe, but there's another payments company called Square. They do the little square (get it?) credit card readers that people plug into their phones' headphones jack if they have, like, a booth at the farmer's market or whatever. I'm actually not sure how those work now that 3.5mm jacks are critically endangered. Probably in the USB/Lightning port instead?
- michelb 3y agoHaven’t they been made obsolete a decade ago by ‘tap to pay’ or chip-card systems? I know in The Netherlands I haven't seen a magnetic stripe payment system since 2012.
- dharmab 3y agoIn the US, it's common enough to encounter swipe-only POS systems that you still have to carry your physical cards.
- sgerenser 3y agoSwipe only is very rare in my neck of the woods (only one I can remember is someone at a craft fair in the past year who still only had the original square stripe reader). Perhaps you’re thinking of places that don’t support tap to pay but only chip (and thus don’t support Apple Pay)? Those I run into all the time (looking at you, Lowes and Home Depot).
- geocrasher 3y agoI always figured it was a play on words based on the stripe on the back of a credit card, the magnetic strip.
- a3w 3y agoFinally, someone tells me what a stripe would have to do with payments. I was searching online for "stripe offline payment meaning -stripe.com" but overlooked "swiped (Magnetic stripe)" from linkedin content. Now it makes sense, that this kind of stripe is meant. My cards have a dummy stripe in that place, since the early 2000s I have not seen actual magnetic foil in that place on my cards in germany.
- zarzavat 3y agoThe original version of the stripe website had a black stripe as the top border, evoking a credit card, so the association was clearer.
- tough 3y agoI always thought it was the case just because there are card strip readers
- shawnz 3y agoHow can you tell that it's not actually magnetic foil on your card? It's possible that the foil can be coloured, and my understanding is that the foil is still required today for international use cases
- wodenokoto 3y agoI also think that is why they ended up with stripe over all the other candidates.
- wmf 3y agoIt always bothered me that Square reads the magnetic stripe but Stripe does not.
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoI always thought /dev/payments was a cool name.
- ghaff 3y agoIt's a cool name for nerds. It's weird for everyone else. And is going to be consistently mis-spelled etc. in half the news stories written about the company.
- Tempest1981 3y agoAnd what would the domain name be? Maybe some users would try "devpayments.com" or "slashdevslashpayments.*" but others will try "/dev/payments.com" -- lots of marketing needed to educate.
- ghaff 3y agoMost people admittedly get to domains through Google these days so, assuming sufficient Google juice, that probably doesn't matter much. but yeah if I'm naming a company/product I probably go with a single word either just initial cap or fairly conventional camel case.
- Tempest1981 3y agoTrue, although then why all the angst about buying stack.com for 7 figures, I wonder... vs just going with stackfinance.com?
- andrewshadura 3y agopayments.dev
- Tempest1981 3y agoI guess 2015 was a different time for TLDs. .dev wasn't available until 2019, iirc.
- gjvc 3y agothe magnetic strip(e) on a payment card
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y agoI'm kind of surprised they didn't pivot when they had some success and make that multi-million dollar bid for stack.com. It's actually refreshing to see them sticking to their guns and keeping going with stripe.
- bragr 3y agoThere are multi-million dollar domains [1], but stack.com, especially assuming no significant existing traffic, doesn't seem like it would rank that high as compared to these. Maybe it would be worth tens or hundreds of thousands, but such a high ball starting price is going to end negotiations before they begin. [1] https://www.godaddy.com/resources/skills/the-top-20-most-expensive-domain-names https://www.godaddy.com/resources/skills/the-top-20-most-exp...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cperciva 3y agoThe story should end there. However, we'd separately come up with the name "PayDemon" and had already purchased both paydemon.com and paydaemon.com (we just couldn't let go of our UNIX references, apparently). Despite being so common, the word "Stripe" was interestingly free of any existing brand associations. And everything it evoked was at least vaguely positive — racing stripes, striping across a RAID array, the magnetic stripe on a card. But we had to decide whether a nice name was worth the price we'd have to pay, whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains. paydaemon.com seems like it would be an awesome domain for a directory of BSD operating system projects in need of funding. "BSD is free, but it can be much better if you pay the daemon!"
- ricardobayes 3y agoSo interesting to see the early days of startups when even $20 is a considerable sum to lament about. I love these kinds of stories.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoI thought that part was just a joke.
- sokoloff 3y agoPresumably they’re talking about what they’d have to pay to buy stripe.com, not what they already paid to register the two forms of payda?emon. > In total, I sent several hundred emails that day. Of the plausible responses I received, stripe.com was the clear winner.
- pipe01 3y ago> whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains.
- sokoloff 3y agoYou either inadvertently or cleverly cut out the first part of that sentence: > But we had to decide whether a nice name was worth the price we'd have to pay, whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains.
- djmips 3y agoThey took a common English word and stole it's mindshare. Thanks a lot!
- gjvc 3y ago"took a common English word and stole its mindshare" -- Thank you! I've been struggling to express what Microsoft did by calling their operating system "Windows". (I always called it "hijacking the word", but I prefer "stole its mindshare".)
- anon373839 3y agoHuh. This makes me realize I have no association between windows and Windows. Neither one makes me think of the other at all.
- gjvc 3y agohave you no visual imagination whatsoever? https://www.deviantart.com/dos-commander/art/Microsoft-Windows-3-11-Logo-99966270 https://www.deviantart.com/dos-commander/art/Microsoft-Windo...
- anon373839 3y agoI’m aware of the intended brand association, thanks. It just didn’t work on me.
- gjvc 3y agoA complete zero? What other brand associations are you immune to?
- dinkleberg 3y agoIt is all about context. When I’m thinking about physical windows, I don’t think at all about Microsoft. I saw something the other day that the word “run” has like 600 different definitions, and yet we are able to understand it just fine based on context. When someone runs for office, I don’t think about them physically running. Same with my server running my application. My brain doesn’t get confused because my computer doesn’t have legs!
- Version467 3y agoOT, but I didn't know Greg Brockman was CTO at Stripe, or that he dropped out of school.
- kwanbix 3y agoSquatters are delirious, so many times. I didn't renew my wife's last name .co domain. I regretted it and wanted to get it back. They are asking for 9000 dollars. She is non-famous, her last name is not a famous last name, and there is no one famous with that last name. Still, they want 9000 dollars. 450 times the cost.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoTell me about it! I accidentally let [my first name].au lapse. Shitty registrar, all that was available during the initial .au sale period, their renewal emails went to spam. Whatever. I still get that it’s all “on me” and someone has the right to register an expired domain. I don’t have a common first name. The other .au derivatives of my first name are silly early Internet era sites for local businesses that probably barely exist anymore. I know what the market is like for my first name on most public namespaces. Alas, a squatter wants several thousand dollars for it. I didn’t bother responding to the email. They’ll hopefully realise that they’ve bought a dud and let it go.
- throw__away7391 3y agoOne of the weirder things I’ve seen is that many of the squatter sites include a “moral justification” page for lack of any better description where someone from the squatting agency handling the domain has written how their customers have made smart investments and deserve to be paid, replete with all kinds of analogies comparing domain names to other investments.
- cipheredStones 3y agoIs that really the stated argument?! "We put money into this, therefore we deserve to earn money off of it [regardless of the fact that it never did anyone any good and is purely rent-seeking behavior]" certainly encapsulates a particular investment ethos.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
- ineedasername 3y ago[flagged]
- HuangYuSan 3y agoGood look, hope you're doing okay out there :-)
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoThis is similar to my approach for finding usernames on most online services these days (not HN). I look for unused strings that are preferrably short, single words (two is not too bad), with no numbers or special characters, and choose one of the best ones more or less at random. Ideally I'd like to have the username I've been using since the 90s everywhere, but it's a single very common english word. It's always snapped up by some rando who arrived first and proceeds to never do anything with it (sometimes bots, I'm sure). You can't get too attached to the names you really want.
- Royaljj 3y agoWhy choose this username for HN?
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoIt's the same as the one I have in another service, but cut short because HN has (had?) a 16 character limit. To be fair it still is a single word with no numbers or special characters, just not a short one.
- karaterobot 3y ago/dev/payments and paydemon are definitely two names that engineering founders would come up with, but which would not inspire confidence from anyone else. I liked the anecdote about not realizing that "forge" was not a good choice of names for a payment company. Naming is hard, just go with something simple and neutral, that you can live with. Stripe is boring, which is good.
- jimmydddd 3y agoNot sure if this is accurate, but it seemed to me that early on they were originally targeting selling code snippets for developers to integrate into their systems? So the nerdy name would have had meaning that narrow customer base?
- jcutrell 3y agoThey sorta still do this as a part of their business for sure.
- karaterobot 3y agoDevelopers implement Stripe into products, but they aren't always the owners of the products, or the ones making the decision on what service to use.
- fragmede 3y agoThe claim via Bloomberg is that it took only seven lines of code to integrate Stripe into your website and for you (as a developer) to start accepting payments. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-01/how-two-brothers-turned-seven-lines-of-code-into-a-9-2-billion-startup https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-01/how-two-b... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902696
- jl2718 3y agoHmmm… apparently unrelated, but… The dominant payments startup at the time was “Square”, which was named because they made a square-shaped device that read a magnetic stripe into a phone audio port.
- hackernewds 3y agooh how the kings have fallen. Square could have been Stripe, Shopify, Toast, Doordash, Venmo if not for Jack's part time focus as leader
- Kibae 3y agoAlso, Vine could have been TikTok.
- rvz 3y ago[flagged]
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoA little story about domains. Back in 2004, when Ubuntu came out, I bought Ubuntu.it (and later Kubuntu.it) to host my blog, which was about Linux and Ubuntu. The blog was in Italian, hence my interest for the .it TLD. I used them for a couple of years or so, then was approached by some of the Italian Ubuntu community members, as they wanted to be able to use the domain. I decided to donate both domains to Ubuntu, with a simple condition: at the bottom of the page I wanted a small phrase which would say "kindly donated by Ubuntista". The phrase stayed there for a few months, then disappeared. I decided not to complain, even though I still don't like the fact that they didn't stick to their promise. p.s. I like Ubuntu, I met and am a fan of Mark Shuttleworth, and I advocated Ubuntu for several years, even when I was at AWS.
- dorianmariefr 3y agoYou can keep control of the domain while pointing the DNS to some IP
- gurchik 3y agoIt looks like the domains aren’t used anymore, I get redirected to Ubuntu-it.org. I tried to do a WHOIS search but the .it TLD isn’t supported.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jraph 3y agoOn the other hand, they could have sued you over trademark infringement and didn't, couldn't they?
- hitekker 3y agoTheir power to hurt the GP doesn’t excuse breaking an agreement made in good faith.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoThat likely depends on whether they had registered trademarks in Italy beforehand.
- amelius 3y agoI know nothing about this. But my first guess would be that it refers to the dark magnetic tape stripe on the back of most bank cards. Of course it is a bit silly since everybody uses the chip interface now.
- somsak2 3y agoTurns out, the link actually would help you learn instead of guessing!
- r0m4n0 3y agoIn my armchair opinion, this is a bad name. Most of my clients and non technical friends refer to it incorrectly every time. Funniest I’ve heard them say is “strip” I think it’s because it’s too short, simple, and one word. It doesn’t really sink in with any visual. A stripe is a thing but I think it’s too abstract. Good names: Wix, PayPal, google, Venmo, Microsoft Bad names: quora, redis, and palantir (unrelated but hard to pronounce), apple (they are unique in that they commandeered a common word but did really well with the logo and brand. Arguably one of the best brand creations of all time because they went against the odds), hinge. Honestly I’m not sure any other Fortune 500 company has picked a more basic word that isn’t unique They lucked out because their product was good enough it didn’t matter!
- somsak2 3y agoAlphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Oracle, Caterpillar, Booking, BlackRock, Progressive... not quite so unique. Progressive is by far the worst in this small selection, but I'm sure we could find even worse ones if we did a proper Fortune 500 audit. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=alphabet%2Camazon%2Ctesla%2Coracle%2Ccaterpillar%2Cbooking%2Cprogressive%2Cstripe&year_start=1800&year_end=1980&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=alphabet%2Cama...
- r0m4n0 3y agoI think Alphabet is a horrible name too, but they already were successful when they adopted it. Progressive and Booking are real bad. Tesla, oracle, Amazon etc are pretty unique names, I’m not sure I use those words in my normal vocabulary in a regular month, can’t complain about them. Most people didn’t know who Tesla even was. I’m annoyed for him Musk stole his name. I wonder what he would think of that now
- fragmede 3y agoAnother reason is name collision with Square. Single syllable, five letter word in the payments area.
- wkat4242 3y agoWeiiiiiird story. I always instantly associated it with the magstripe on cards. Very weird that that association isn't even mentioned.
- SergeAx 3y agoI really hope that some day the ridiculous requirement to have a .com domain will become null and void. I really despise cybersquatters.