Stripe

Stripe made payment integration take seven lines of code instead of six months and $100,000. But that simplicity required 10× more engineering effort than exposing raw complexity - the 'seven lines of code' promise was a costly signal that competitors couldn't fake. When Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in 2010, every payment processor claimed to be 'developer-friendly.' Stripe chose documentation as its unfakeable signal, investing $10 million+ annually (20%+ of resources) when revenue was under $50 million: technical writers with engineering backgrounds, code examples in seven languages, genuinely helpful error messages. The result: $95 billion+ valuation built primarily through developer word-of-mouth, with no sales team until hundreds of millions in revenue.

Stripe's early growth strategy exemplifies cotyledon allocation - shade-tolerant approach optimizing for early adopters rather than chasing enterprise customers. The company allocated 70% to developer experience, 20% to regulatory minimums, and 10% to everything else. This isn't balanced allocation; it's extreme specialization on the scarcest resource: developer trust. Stripe also demonstrated threshold-based scaling, implementing a '$5M ARR rule' - not hiring a VP of Sales until reaching $5 million annual recurring revenue. Like bacterial quorum sensing, this ensured the organization was ready before triggering coordinated behavior change. When Stripe recognized the developer tools mast year (2010-2014), they raised $230 million and allocated 70% to growth, capturing market before the window closed.

Stripe now processes $640 billion annually, functioning as 'phloem for money' - enabling bidirectional financial transport for millions of businesses. As Level 2 platform infrastructure capturing 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, Stripe demonstrates that patience compounds. The company lowered the cost of validation for subsequent startups by eliminating the need to build payment systems from scratch, enabling companies like Instacart to germinate. That's ecosystem thinking: building infrastructure that makes other organisms viable. Most companies optimize for their own growth; Stripe optimized to be essential infrastructure, then captured value as the ecosystem scaled.