Bill Ready , the unlikely dot-com entrepreneur who became CEO of Braintree and Venmo
Founded in 2007 , Braintree became the digital expert at taking all of the various steps that make up an e-commerce transaction — the 10 to 15 different handshakes and data submissions and switches and verifications — and bundling them up so they can be integrated easily into a website .
Ready ’ s goal for Braintree was simple : “ How can we democratize access to the tools that have been the exclusive domain of only the biggest e-commerce players and give them to everybody ? How do we take the fire from the top of the mountain and give it to the masses to make sure that it benefits the many rather than benefiting the few ?”
Braintree ’ s software allowed merchants who wanted to accept payments online to offer their customers an easy , frictionless shopping experience , just as good as Amazon or eBay . Braintree could handle all of the technical and regulatory complexity so that merchants could focus on the products they wanted to sell .
Braintree created , in essence , a plugand-play shopping cart that the whole internet could use . For anyone running a small business online , this was revolutionary . But when Ready took over Braintree in 2011 , the company pivoted in a direction that no one else saw coming and created the innovation that would power so much of the fintech and e-commerce we have today .
Ready thought Braintree should start building a platform for mobile shopping . In the first years of the iPhone , people weren ’ t using them much for shopping . The experience was just too terrible . By 2011 , the iPhone had been out for four years and the App Store had been open for three , and three of its bestselling apps were Angry Birds , Skee-Ball and The Moron Test . The bleeding-edge smartphone of the day was the iPhone 4 , which ran on a still being-developed 3g network that was slow and unreliable . Smartphones weren ’ t being used for serious things , including serious shopping .
If people did want to shop on their iPhones , they had to visit websites that hadn ’ t yet been optimized for mobile — so they would have to pinch and zoom just to see what they were buying . Then they would have to type in their credit card information with their thumbs — all of it : name , billing address , the 16 digits of the credit card and the CVV number .
By 2011 , Amazon had implemented 1-Click purchasing on its site , but generally , websites weren ’ t saving credit card credentials ; they were asking users to type in their card information every time they made a purchase . Collecting and storing credit card data always carries some risk , and storing this data with PCI compliance requires ongoing expense and care . There just weren ’ t enough reasons for most vendors to go to all that trouble . As long as people were shopping through their desktop and laptop computers , they had access to full-size keyboards , and typing in their payment details each time didn ’ t seem like much of a bother . On a mobile device , it was a pain in the ass .
www . MoAF . org | Fall 2020 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 15