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Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

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Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#71
post #51
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…

Even though the top 99.9th percentile companies account for half of YC's return, it's possible that the 90th percentile companies nevertheless all produce a great return, more than sufficient to subsidize the 1-89th percentile, and YC just aims for that.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#72
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. I wonder why? Amazon must have insane deals with the credit cards. This must be to access some tech that amazon doesn’t want to replicate for some small slice of its business - maybe on the fraud side.

I would imagine that they have an integration with dozens of providers. It makes sense to spread it out so your business cannot be bullied by any single third party dependency and you can pit them against each other to get favorable terms across the board.

When you are as big as Amazon, there's a lot of money left on the table if you're running payments through a third party.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#73
post #71
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…

Even though the top 99.9th percentile companies account for half of YC's return, it's possible that the 90th percentile companies nevertheless all produce a great return, more than sufficient to subsidize the 1-89th percentile, and YC just aims for that.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#74

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#75
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine that they have an integration with dozens of providers. It makes sense to spread it out so your business cannot be bullied by any single third party dependency and you can pit them against each other to get favorable terms across the board.

When you are as big as Amazon, there's a lot of money left on the table if you're running payments through a third party.

Not necessarily. You can likely bring your own processor and the deal you negotiated with them.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#76

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?

The first principles changed. From Elad Gil in First Round Review: “In the tech world, particularly after PayPal was sold to eBay, the dogma for many years was ‘Don't ever do payments, it's too hard and fraud will blow up and destroy you.’ And during the first internet wave, that was true. It was a challenge to get the type of data and information you needed to really deal with fraud at scale,” he says. “But fast for…

> It seems that the fraud problems weren’t as bad as we thought

Fraud is only as bad as we know. And it's very bad, payment providers just aren't going to go around telling you about it.

I worked for a payment provider and it's very very difficult to eat fraud because it wipes out low-margin profits quickly. It's a tough dance - there isn't a lot of wiggle room between being too harsh in rejecting payments and being too lenient in allowing payments. And criminals are very, very good at moving on to another attack vector once you figure out what they are doing.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#80

So happy to hear. They deserve it! Couldn't remember the name for a second, but so glad I never have to deal with authorize.net again ... ever!

I once wrote an OLE control from Authorize.net that used XML in Powerbuilder to communicate with a Lisp server to do my payments. Stripe is better :)
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