How did Stripe come up with its name? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

How did Stripe come up with its name? (2015)

quora.com

202 pointsmellosouls136 comments

The 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!"

So interesting to see the early days of startups when even $20 is a considerable sum to lament about. I love these kinds of stories.

I thought that part was just a joke.

Presumably 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.

> whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains.

You 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.

outside of the linux nerd bubble, demon would not have positive connotations for a large swath of the populace. the religious uproar would not be a quiet one.

Yep. My eldest's boyfriend's parents won't buy Apple products because there's a bite out of the Apple. Imagine what FreeBSD would do to them!

Edit: I was winding them up the other day about how everything in their house is made by godless communists in China.

I was trying to understand why this would be. Is it an adam and eve and the serpent thing? because the apple has a bite out of it?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I've never heard of that aversion to apple and want to check I'm understanding right?

Probably and I have heard that same thing from certain strains of evangelical. The irony is that the "Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" (that Adam and Eve ate in the story) isn't said to be an apple anywhere in Genesis. That's just something that artists did when they depicted the scene later. They should have chosen a much more decadent fruit like a fig imo.

Interesting. Wikipedia[1] suggests that the Jewish tradition has fig as one of the possibilities, alongside grape, wheat and etrog. It says there is some possibility that the use of an apple in art and literature later is a pun because the latin noun for "apple" (malum) is also one of the forms of "malus" or evil (opposite of "bonus", meaning good). So by eating the malum, they unleashed malum (evil). Or something like that[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/30/526069512/pa...

Yes, I'm inclined to say that they dodged a bullet there. The BSD community has been dealing with this for decades (which is one of the reasons Beastie is FreeBSD's mascot but not our logo).

Sounds like a good name for a debt collector.

A 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.

You can keep control of the domain while pointing the DNS to some IP

It 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.

On the other hand, they could have sued you over trademark infringement and didn't, couldn't they?

Their power to hurt the GP doesn’t excuse breaking an agreement made in good faith.

That likely depends on whether they had registered trademarks in Italy beforehand.

No, they couldn't. It wasn't trademarked in Italy.

Meanwhile the Linux distro Gentoo decided to ceast-and-desist us over using gartoo as domain name, a real estate search engine. They don't sound familiar, they're clearly not competitors, color and logo completely different. Sadly my employer at that time caved and moved the product to a different domain.

I always figured it was a play on words based on the stripe on the back of a credit card, the magnetic strip.

Finally, 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.

The original version of the stripe website had a black stripe as the top border, evoking a credit card, so the association was clearer.

I always thought it was the case just because there are card strip readers

How 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

I also think that is why they ended up with stripe over all the other candidates.

It always bothered me that Square reads the magnetic stripe but Stripe does not.

As 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.)”

Made 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.

When the makers of Irish Mist whiskey liqueur decided to start selling to the German market it caused them some laughs but afaik they stuck with the name

The Rolls Royce Silver Mist got a rebrand to Silver Shadow because German.

I always figured XXX was an attempt to prevent people from finding it on torrent sites.

That would be impressive since the movie came out in 2002, one year after BitTorrent was invented.

Well, there were lots of other file-sharing systems as well that were older, that it would have been just as effective on. I just misremembered the timeline.

I always liked the name of the Chevy Nova. "No Va", meaning "doesn't go" in Spanish, and somewhat close to it in Italian, Portuguese, etc.

Pinto is slang for small penis in Brazil. Apparently, the car sold better once rebranded to Corcel (horse).

Mitsubishi Pajero is another great one:

Mitsubishi marketed the SUV as the Montero in North America, Spain, and Latin America (except for Brazil and Jamaica) due to the term "pajero" being derogatory (meaning "wanker") in Spanish

This is apparently a myth, and the Nova sold just fine in Spanish speaking countries.

I mean, it's not a myth that it sounds like "doesn't go". It was perhaps a myth that it affected sales to a strong degree...though I didn't say anything about sales.

Hyundai Kona is named Kauai (after another Hawaiian island) in Portugal, since "cona" is slang for female genitalia.

"Colgate" sounds and it's spelled exactly like "hang yourself" in Uruguayan/Argentine Spanish, and I grew up there using that brand of toothpaste. There's even a very obvious children's joke based on the ambiguity.

> Siri means ass in Japanese.

Not exactly, that’s shiri. It’s just that si doesn’t exist as a sound in Japanese, so they approximate it with shi.

It’s also a form of shiru = to know, as in shiriai = acquaintance, so not totally inappropriate.

Only Westerners who use Hepburn would write it as shiri. Most native Japanese speakers use Nihon-shiki where they would absolutely write siri.

Wouldn't they write シリ? Why would they use a romanization at all?

To type kana with their keyboards on their computers.

Wix sounds like a word for masturbating in German.

As someone who has been involved in product line naming a number of times, it's something that's simultaneously fun, a PITA, and probably rarely makes much of a difference--especially for non-consumer products.

One in particular I was very involved with was a pretty good name but ended up as something that could have been confused with something else that became pretty popular for a time and various other branding associated with the name ended up being dropped relatively soon. (And the product itself was essentially redone from the ground up fairly soon as well.) The name had essentially nothing to do with anything.

Squatters 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.

Tell 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.

One 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.

Is 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.

It was pretty weird, I am 100% sure it was inspired by real conversations the author had. In general everyone needs to justify their behavior to themselves at least. I've heard people blatantly ripping people off say things like "if I don't take their money someone else will", just usually these are not things they put on their website.

The problem is that it costs almost nothing ($150-180 over 10 years) to keep it registered vs the anticipated payday from selling it (over $9000!).

A former friend has been doing a ”trick” for a few years with godaddy domain auctions. He finds a domain that is quite good on Godaddy auctions whos registration is expiring soon (most people set the auction end date to when it expires) and uses a back order service or two to capture it if it were to expire. Using one of a number of alternate fake Godaddy accounts, he bids absolute bonkers amounts that he has no intention to pay for. When the auction ends, he ignores payments demands, the next guy in line won’t pay their bid because they’ve already moved on. Domain expires without a winning bid, owner doesn’t notice that it wasn’t paid before it gets released. His backorder provider will then snatch it up. He’s made about $50,000 from reselling domains he got for cheap this way, even though it costs his about $1000 per year to maintain all these accounts. As scummy as it is, his rule is that if it doesn’t sell during the next two registration years, he will let it expire.

Ah yes the old make a fortune with fraud routine. Works every time.

There is a reason why I said Ex friend. Turns out, people who pull crap like this are not the best to close to. I just didn’t realize the extent of what he did until just before (and being the primary cause for) me cutting off contact with him.

My reply had no judgement against you or your choice of friends. Only that the friend was committing literal fraud to make their money.

It’s a pleasure to see that your choice seems to have benefited you and your conscience in the end.

I got a multi-thousand dollar domain name for a few hundred dollars, I just kept up a regular dialog with them and made it clear what I was willing to pay. They kept negotiating, I kept to my number. Eventually we came to a reasonable compromise and it's mine. It wasn't something others would be interested in so it was clear after a couple of years years I was their only buyer.

/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.

Not 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?

They sorta still do this as a part of their business for sure.

Developers 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.

The 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-b...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902696

Hmmm… 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.

oh how the kings have fallen. Square could have been Stripe, Shopify, Toast, Doordash, Venmo if not for Jack's part time focus as leader

Also, Vine could have been TikTok.

This 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.

Why choose this username for HN?

It'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.

I 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.

Turns out, the link actually would help you learn instead of guessing!

I'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.

There 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-exp...

OT, but I didn't know Greg Brockman was CTO at Stripe, or that he dropped out of school.

I always thought /dev/payments was a cool name.

It'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.

And 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.

Most 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.

True, although then why all the angst about buying stack.com for 7 figures, I wonder... vs just going with stackfinance.com?

payments.dev

I guess 2015 was a different time for TLDs.

.dev wasn't available until 2019, iirc.

Weiiiiiird story. I always instantly associated it with the magstripe on cards. Very weird that that association isn't even mentioned.

It was mentioned.

Oh ok I missed it sorry

I really hope that some day the ridiculous requirement to have a .com domain will become null and void. I really despise cybersquatters.

In 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!

Alphabet, 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%2Cama...

I 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

Another reason is name collision with Square. Single syllable, five letter word in the payments area.

the magnetic strip(e) on a payment card

FTA: "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.

ChatGPT 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.

Excellent 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.)

What does AI or ChatGPT have to do with this story?

Nothing 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.

Quora'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).

And 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).

I think your quote is from a different answer than Greg's (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/ because that's what Quora is listing as the canonical URL. We've corrected this in the submission link above. Sorry for the confusion!

Square is a better name. Strip would have been the best name.

While 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.

Not 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?

Haven’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.

The US adopted chip card systems much later. You can still find magnetic readers in use, although they are officially deprecated and I've read merchants that haven't upgraded have higher fees and less protection against charge backs.

In the US, it's common enough to encounter swipe-only POS systems that you still have to carry your physical cards.

Swipe 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).

I had a plumber show up with a metal slide and CARBON paper. The vintage swipe.

Many of my cards no longer have embossed numbers, so that has to be dicey.

They take checks too of course

Not sure of the last swipe-only reader I used, but it's still there as a fallback on many of them if chip and/or tap doesn't work for some reason.

Gas pumps were the last holdouts on swipe reads, in my area anyway.

My son was recently telling me he still knows of people who use the original Square swipe reader on their phone, which surprised me as I had guessed Square no longer supported it, and many phones don't even have the 3.5mm headphone jack that the reader plugs into.

Bluetooth

https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7948-identify-your-s...

The name Square is extra genius because it also means “all debts settled”, like “After this final payment the two of us will be square.”

This usage is derived from code language used by Freemasons, because of their strong association with the carpenter's square device. It has basically entered the common vernacular at this point, but in combination with other symbology, it may signal that you are seeing a conversation between Freemasons.

https://www.masonic-lodge-of-education.com/square-and-compas...

Ha! I’ve used that phraseology for yeeears and only just learned about the Masonic connection. I think it’s safe to say that it has fully entered the common vernacular.

Along with "on the level".

I wonder why they chose 3.5mm in the first place instead of making an USB thingy. Just because it used to be more universal compared to like 5 different standards for the charging/data port? There are some theories online but no definitive answer as far as I can tell.

USB wouldn’t have worked with iPhones, so they would have needed separate hardware for android and iPhone. I’m amazed they were able to do anything with the 3.5mm port though, it seems like some clever engineering

The microphone part of the jack provides a small amount of power to serve as a microphone bias. This can be used to power a few small analog electronics as needed. The mag stripe reader may not have needed anything but a reader coil, though, and the phone can probably decode the "sound" that comes from swiping the magnetic stripe.

The 3.5 jack device required no digital hardware. It was literally just a magnetic read head wired directly to the jack. This generated voltage just like a microphone. The phone app would then “listen” for the cards data. Incredibly clever and dirt cheap hack for making a phone into a portable payments device.

Universal has got to be it. Afaik, you couldn't plug something into a iPhone charge port and use it with an app; you probably still can't?. Doing it on Android would be a nightmare. Other platforms (which wasn't out of the question at the time), who knows.

But every platform will let you use a plugged in mic, and likely detect that one is plugged in. And if the bias voltage for the microphone isn't enough, you can play a sine wave to the headphone contacts (or one of them) to deliver power.

Square has diversified. Within the POS category, their current 'little square reader' connects using BLE (and reads chip, tap, and phone payment). They also sell more built up POS systems, up to and including full terminals.

I would expect strip.com to be NSFW

They took a common English word and stole it's mindshare. Thanks a lot!

"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".)

Huh. This makes me realize I have no association between windows and Windows. Neither one makes me think of the other at all.

have you no visual imagination whatsoever?

https://www.deviantart.com/dos-commander/art/Microsoft-Windo...

I’m aware of the intended brand association, thanks. It just didn’t work on me.

A complete zero? What other brand associations are you immune to?

It 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!

Windows stole my Windoze mindshare

Funny how people's brains are wired different; to me, when I open/close/drag an "application window", the association is clearly as a viewport. Though I guess they could have called it 'Doors' and my brain would stretch to make it work hah

I think because of how application windows are opaque and stackable, the connection to physical or even metaphoric windows (“windows to the soul”) seems misplaced to me.

not to talk about what some companies are doing with some common fruits.

apple and blackberry taste nice with custard.

Of course, windowing systems long predated Windows. I guess it's a logical name--never really thought about it--but I never had a particular association between computer windowing systems and the windows in my house.

You may not have, but non-computerists likely did.

You wouldn't steal a mindshare.

You got downvoted into the ground but I think it's true. Personally I don't think companies should be allowed to do this. Every technical term used in AI is now also the name of some AI company. Even words like Windows and Stripe and Square I mean come on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com