Why did Stripe happen in 2010 and not 1999? Why did Column happen now vs 10 years ago? It feels like the use cases where already there - what was missing? TAM?

Does anyone know about this?

https://web.archive.org has the answer.

Re Stripe, compare any website 1999 vs 2010.

The web was basically homepages trying to figure out why they existed.

But Amazon/Viaweb/etc. showed ecommerce was a real thing, right?

They were gaining steam, but the small business/services thing just wasn’t tenable. Most hadn’t used a cc on the internet yet, and were  generally uncomfortable doing it.

Setting up an online store in 1999 was something like rocket science. Even hosting a simple dynamic website. The software was not there, hosting was REALLY expensive, skilled devs and admins were rare. Stripe would have like 10 customers.

bingo

it was budding, but concentrated and still a blip relative to retail

3PL and card networks opening up to smbs may have played the larger role... https://i.imgur.com/LWDr3oA.jpg