Stripe realized their core APIs were fundamentally wrong and had to rebuild

quote about, the, or is it Deng Xiaoping?

27:29 / 28:15

quote about, the, or is it Deng Xiaoping? About the, the French Revolution. You know, it's too soon to judge. Mhmm. And so back in 2022, I believe, we I mean, to this discussion about data models and abstractions, we realized that a couple of the core abstractions in Stripe were just not the right long term abstractions and we, we had to fix that. And so we designed a bunch of v two APIs. Fortunately, we had contemplated the possibility of this early at Stripe. So, you know, most of the, the, you know, rest URI's that, people, are familiar with in Stripe are prefixed with slash v one. They've been prefixed with slash v one from, you know, 2010.

About this clip

Patrick Collison reveals how Stripe discovered in 2022 that some of their core data abstractions were fundamentally flawed for long-term growth, forcing them to design v2 APIs. He explains how they fortunately planned for this possibility from the beginning by versioning their REST APIs with '/v1' prefixes since 2010, making the transition manageable.

Why this clip

This reveals a major technical pivot at one of the most successful fintech companies, showing how even industry leaders must rebuild core infrastructure as they scale.

27:29 - 28:1545sfounder story

Share

LinkedInX

More from this guest

Patrick Collison

1 appearance · 6 clips

What they said next

Stripe achieved 99.99986% API uptime - just 44 seconds down all year

23:23 - 41s · tactical advice

More from this episode

Similar clips from other shows

From the blog

Want clips like this for your podcast?

We find your top 5-8 clips, write the hooks, and deliver ready-to-post content. First 2 episodes are free.

Get 2 Episodes Clipped Free