I have heard for years people criticizing the payments industry as a low margin commodity biz. What has changed? Or they just got it wrong?
Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
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Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#12One of the few companies that I feel 100% deserves this kind of valuation.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#13I have heard for years people criticizing the payments industry as a low margin commodity biz. What has changed? Or they just got it wrong?
An explosion of e-commerce, partly initiated and made possible by Stripe
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#14It's easy to see how, taking a cut off the top of a huge percentage of online purchases is an insanely nice place to be.
I've personally found myself preferring Stripe-based payments when there are multiple options (such as PayPal and Amazon pay) as well. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I feel like dropping my credit card details into a Stripe window is more private than connecting to PayPal or Amazon accounts. It feels more like just swiping a credit card at a store.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
That also has the benefit of system redundancy, in case one goes down.
Large companies typically do payments in batches, not one-by-one, so the redundancy is not needed. However, if they're trying to do per ride auths, then they might need redundancy there. Hard to imagine they do that.
I don't think they auth per ride. I definitely had a "you owe us money" flow after getting food successfully delivered though Uber eats on a deactivated card.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive. At the scale of Uber, it may be worth keeping both systems running and split usage between the two to negotiate the best rates.
That also has the benefit of system redundancy, in case one goes down.
"Goes down" could include things like "we're going to increase your pricing by 10 cents per charge". It's a much stronger negotiating position that Uber is in if they can say "we can switch 100% of our volume to Stripe in a minute by going to admin.uber.com and flipping a single feature flag".
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#17Stripe is the second most valuable YC company. Total valuation of all companies that YC funded (more than 1,900) now exceeds 100 billon dollars.
Airbnb has a private valuation of 31 billion. Stripe has a private valuation of 20 billion. Dropbox has a public valuation (DBX) of 11 billion.
So the two most valuable companies account for about half the total value of all the YC companies. This is what a power law looks like!
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#18> Several large new customers have also been listed on Stripe's website this week, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Uber Technologies Inc. If Uber is now running payments exclusively through Stripe instead of Braintree, that is a significant blow. I heard that Uber's payments through Braintree was a significant portion of Braintree's total revenue, don't recall the exact number I heard, but it was something on th…
I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive. At the scale of Uber, it may be worth keeping both systems running and split usage between the two to negotiate the best rates.
True, but they are also at a scale where they can negotiate long term rates and contracts for predictable, long-term results for both sides.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#19> Several large new customers have also been listed on Stripe's website this week, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Uber Technologies Inc. If Uber is now running payments exclusively through Stripe instead of Braintree, that is a significant blow. I heard that Uber's payments through Braintree was a significant portion of Braintree's total revenue, don't recall the exact number I heard, but it was something on th…
I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive. At the scale of Uber, it may be worth keeping both systems running and split usage between the two to negotiate the best rates.
> I wouldn’t assume it’s exclusive.
Ahh yeah, and also at the international scale. The article also states that Stripe is expanding internationally (Didi Chuxing, Grab), so it could be that Stripe handles Uber's international payments, whereas Braintree handles the U.S. ones.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#20In 2017 e-commerce accounted for 9% of all retail sales. If I recall correctly, Amazon is the biggest e-commerce vendor and they are using Stripe.
There are no sure bets in business, but If I had to bet on a private software company's survival 20-25 years down the road I'd be hard pressed to bet against Stripe. I also think their leadership is very impressive w/ the Collision bros at the helm.