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Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

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Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#61

Post by [deleted] »

toptal wrote: post #26
haaen wrote: post #22

Some valuation context, although I'm fully aware that Stripe is a private company and that many of its investors could have investing or striking privileges. Stripe: 20 billion. Adyen (stock symbol: ADYEN) 19 billion. Shopify (stock symbol: SHOP) 17 billion. Square (stock symbol: SQ) 39 billion. Paypal (stock symbol: PYPL) 107 billion. Paypal cofounders Elon Musk and Thiel are early Stripe investors. Former Paypal EV…

Adyen is actually 23b as the 19b you mentioned is in Euros. It’s also noteworthy that Stripe has about 1/2 the revenue and the same growth as Adyen, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the public markets given that they have nearly identical business models.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#62

Post by fanzhang »

chadash wrote: post #51
haaen wrote: post #17

Stripe 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 l…

And this is why Y Combinator may not be right for your startup. The 100 billion dollars of valuation listed on YC's website may not be up to date, but it's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots. And they also invest in multiple competitors in the same space in the hopes that one will pan out. So if you're building the kind of company that mi…

What is an accelerator or a funding group for whom the portfolio is not following that power law? For example one where the top 20 companies each comprise say appx 2% of the portfolio?

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#63

Post by colechristensen »

chadash wrote: post #51
haaen wrote: post #17

Stripe 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 l…

And this is why Y Combinator may not be right for your startup. The 100 billion dollars of valuation listed on YC's website may not be up to date, but it's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots. And they also invest in multiple competitors in the same space in the hopes that one will pan out. So if you're building the kind of company that mi…

the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots

This is just a power law thing and what would be expected with any large group of companies.

Success isn't linear or a bell curve, people seem to understand those two distributions rather well power law distributions rather poorly.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#64

Post by jm20 »

chadash wrote: post #51
haaen wrote: post #17

Stripe 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 l…

And this is why Y Combinator may not be right for your startup. The 100 billion dollars of valuation listed on YC's website may not be up to date, but it's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots. And they also invest in multiple competitors in the same space in the hopes that one will pan out. So if you're building the kind of company that mi…

YC does not invest in multiple competitors 'in the hopes that one will pan out'. They just don't use competition as an exclusionary criterea like many VCs do. They invest in founders first and ideas second. When the idea is a secondary metric, inevitably you end up with competitors. Sometimes they even end up with competitors anyway, just because the founders pivot.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#65

Post by azernik »

jczhang wrote: post #35
superasn wrote: post #5

The thing I love most about Stripe is that they have invested quite a lot of resources in their Atlas program to help people from around the world get a level playing field. Before Stripe Atlas there was not a single resource that would allow a non American to setup a bank account for their company totally virtually without ever visiting US (i know because I spoke to at least a dozen of different people and everyone…

How did Stripe bypass the law here?

They didn't. It was all stuff that was technically legal, but required founders to hire a US lawyer to handle the paperwork for them and to make lots of micro-decisions about a legal system with which they were unfamiliar.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#66

Post by Beefin »

collision wrote: post #37
neximo64 wrote: post #30

Now only if it didn’t take 7 days to get your payment processed

Which country are you in? We're working on speeding up payout times around the world -- it's something people are (rightly) very sensitive to. If you email me at john@stripe.com I can look into it for you.

Impressed you took the time to find critique and respond to it.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#67

Post by 0bfus »

haaen wrote: post #17

Stripe 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 l…

More specifically this is probably closer to a Zipfian distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#68

Post by chadash »

colechristensen wrote: post #63
chadash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why Y Combinator may not be right for your startup. The 100 billion dollars of valuation listed on YC's website may not be up to date, but it's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots. And they also invest in multiple competitors in the same space in the hopes that one will pan out. So if you're building the kind of company that mi…

the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots This is just a power law thing and what would be expected with any large group of companies. Success isn't linear or a bell curve, people seem to understand those two distributions rather well power law distributions rather poorly.

> "This is just a power law thing"

Yes, every group of companies is going to have some winners and some losers. But VCs and (even more so) accelerators operate in a space where the power law produces a curve that is especially steep. The vast majority of their investments will fail entirely. In order to make up for this, they need a few big winners in order to make an overall rate of return that their investors expect.

If I'm investing in large cap consumer goods company stocks, that curve is likely to look much less steep since, for example, a company like Unilever is unlikely to fail completely.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#69

Post by ashelmire »

haaen wrote: post #22

Some valuation context, although I'm fully aware that Stripe is a private company and that many of its investors could have investing or striking privileges. Stripe: 20 billion. Adyen (stock symbol: ADYEN) 19 billion. Shopify (stock symbol: SHOP) 17 billion. Square (stock symbol: SQ) 39 billion. Paypal (stock symbol: PYPL) 107 billion. Paypal cofounders Elon Musk and Thiel are early Stripe investors. Former Paypal EV…

Payments are and probably always will be a huge market. I think it's a good space to be in, even if you aren't the biggest in it.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#70

Post by woolvalley »

gamblor956 wrote: post #56
aczerepinski wrote: post #44

Pretty annoying that it’s illegal for me to invest in any of these newish tech companies.

It's not illegal for you to invest in Stripe. It's simply illegal for Stripe to try and sell you their stock. If you happen to have personal connections to Stripe leadership, and they haven't hit the regulatory shareholder limit (after which they must start filing disclosures with the SEC), you could legally buy all the Stripe stock you could afford.

So the accredited investor requirement doesn't apply in the case you stated?
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