Collison: PayPal was designed for consumers, not scalable business integration
Patrick and John Collison · Stripe: Patrick and John Collison · May 7, 2018 · at 14:38
Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison explain why incumbent payment processors like PayPal failed to meet the needs of internet developers.
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“So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building, you know, a website, if you're building a new marketplace, something like this, PayPal works okay for sending, you know, 20 dollars from Joe to Jane. Where it works much less well is when you want to do this at scale. You want to sort of build an automated integration into your website where you're running a business with it. PayPal just isn't designed for the business use case. It was built for eBay where you're kind of one-off sending a hundred dollars manually from this person to that person.”
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