Live data from Hacker News

Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

bloomberg.com

91–100 of 180 posts

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#91
post #88

I want to love Stripe, and I do wish them well, but I've gotten such weird feelings about some of their offerings. On HN and other parts of the internet, representatives go out of their way to make themselves seem available if you have an issue, or have a problem. But when you finally do reach out, I haven't found them to be as receptive as they otherwise portray themselves to be. Maybe it's miscommunication internal…

I recently contacted Stripe about how their Stripe Billing invoices rendered in a confusing way in some situations. Within one week, they fixed the issue. I was pretty impressed by that responsiveness.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#92
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…

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?

Growth stage private equity buying out companies for multiples of EBITDA.

Whenever you're investing in early-stage companies with low marginal costs, that deal primarily in bits, not atoms, you're likely to end up with power law outcome distributions.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#93
post #88

I want to love Stripe, and I do wish them well, but I've gotten such weird feelings about some of their offerings. On HN and other parts of the internet, representatives go out of their way to make themselves seem available if you have an issue, or have a problem. But when you finally do reach out, I haven't found them to be as receptive as they otherwise portray themselves to be. Maybe it's miscommunication internal…

(I work at Stripe.) I'm really sorry to hear that...we do want to be available here any way we can, but something must've went wrong. I'd love to find out. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The accredited investor rules are limits on the company, not the investor. It depends on how many non accredited investors they have.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#95
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard about Amazon using Stripe before. Here's an article from 2017 talking about it: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-quietly-starts-using-st...

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 bet Amazon is only using Stripe for a small slice of their payments to cover gaps in their own payments stack. I'm sure it's worth it for them to be able to take payments at a higher rate than not be able to take payments at all. That's just a back-end optimization they can handle later.

I don't know what slice that is, but there's plenty of reasons you might go with a more expensive provider. Maybe they support some piece of technology you don't (like Apple or Google pay in browsers), or can process for a card type you can't (like one of the country-specific debit card schemes like EFTPOS in AU or Interac in CA), or just are set up to process payments in some country that Amazon doesn't have infrastructure set up yet. A quick google shows Amazon launched in India and Japan in 2017, so maybe one of those markets had some quirk they didn't want to bother supporting on their own until payment volumes got up.

It looks like Amazon and Stripe both launched in India in 2017, https://stripe.com/blog/india-private-beta

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#96
I must admit I don't really understand Stripe's competitive advantage. When Uber wants to charge a customer's credit card, their main concern is the payment processor's commission, isn't it? It seems like the ultimate commodity business. Why aren't there 10 payment processors all competing to charge Uber's customer's credit card for a razor-thin fee?

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#98
post #97

Stupid question: how does a $245 million dollars bring a company's valuation from $9 billion to $20 billion? Last I checked, $245 million =/= $11 billion

It means a VC paid $245 million to purchase 1.225% (which is $245M divided by $20B) of Stripe's stock.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#99
So maybe I don’t understand because I’m a dumb-dumb lay person, but what does Stripe do differently from all the other payment processors that has given its rise and hype.

Is Stripe popular because its developer friendly? What makes it better than Apple Pay, PayPal, and Square? Normally, when I shop online, I’m usually given an option to type my credit card info or use my PayPal account. Where does Stripe fit into all of this?

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#100
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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN