Biography|Patrick Collison — The Yogurt Shop on Emerson That Served as Stripe's First Room

Stripe did not begin in a glass headquarters. In 2010 Patrick and John Collison were in Palo Alto, writing payment code in an apartment and taking meetings in a yogurt shop.

John later named the shop: Fraiche Yoghurt on Emerson Street. The brothers used a private booth there for customer and investor conversations before they had a real office.

Public records and old listings put Fraiche at 200 Hamilton Avenue, on the Emerson corner in downtown Palo Alto. The shop is permanently closed. The pin is that commercial block, not anyone's current workplace.

They incorporated what was first called /dev/payments, then Stripe, in 2010. The pitch was short. A webpage could take a card in a handful of lines of code, against a payments industry that still wanted days of merchant paperwork.

In 2011 the company raised a $2 million seed that included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. It moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco in 2012.

Patrick is Stripe's chief executive. John is its president. Both are living; this memory stops at the public founding geography and does not follow them home.

The booth itself was later removed from the shop when it closed. The street is still walkable.

Photo: Patrick Collison, 2015, JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons