Stripe's awesome. I'm in YC's startup school and used Stripe Atlas to incorporate. I got an email from Stripe, sharing an opportunity to post your landing page and get feedback from Stripe's design team. That Friday I got an awesome teardown from Stripe's design team. The page (https://nanagram.co) still has quite a ways to go, but I incorporated most of their feedback and I'm super happy with it. Another cool thing — Through the grapevine I found out Patrick mentioned NanaGram at an all-hands meeting. I sent him a quick email to say thanks for the mention, not expecting a reply whatsoever, and within a few hours he responded. Stripe's kind of mind-blowing in their ability to not only build a great product but also to serve the community and be human.
Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
101–110 of 180 posts
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#102So 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 al…
One thing I have personally seen that, they have lower threshold for accepting clients. Maybe they rely more on fraud detection than on pre-signup verification.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#103I 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?
At Uber’s scale, sure, but for smaller companies you have to understand that before Stripe you needed to get your own merchant account and that meant dealing with a bank. That’s one. You also had to deal with a payment gateway, which was pretty horrible before Braintree, and Stripe was another step function, that’s two. The processors are the middleman, and here there is all kinds of details and clever ways fees are sliced. Ubers of the world have the scale to invest in optimizing this but companies smaller than <500 generally don’t and an integrated solution like Stripe just solves a lot of headaches even if it more expensive in the end. Having the expertise to even understand how to optimize payment commissions is non-trivial.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#104So 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 al…
Stripe is a payment processor, so when you type in your credit card info, that’s Stripe processing that payment.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#105So 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 al…
The little box you type your credit card in is a huge pain in the ass for companies larger and small due to some compliance requirements from financial institutions called PCI. I can’t understate the ass pain, system complexity, legal review, etc etc that this can bring. Doesn’t matter if you are big or small, it’s painful and can be costly. Big companies can pay to handle that, smaller companies can’t and have relied on historically clunky solutions to take payments.
Stripe can make that little box you type your credit card painless, seamless and highly accessible for small and large companies. They are generally delivering a high quality experience throughout their process and many of their staff are generally awesome.
Full disclosure, I work at a big company and we use Stripe. I used to work at startups in the early 2000s and handled payment solutions. The world is better with Stripe.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#106Stripe 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…
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Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#107Should we celebrate this? This is exactly what fuels inequality in the first place.
Stripe should be nationalized and profit should be distributed among the poorest of the Americans.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#108I 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?
We've spoken Edwin. After our first exchange I didn't hear back from you. The first exchange was great, and unexpected, and maybe it set the bar a little too high. If you didn't have an answer, or had a bad answer, saying anything is better than saying nothing at all.
You unintentionally proved my point. It's not like I'm hiding behind this username.
I just emailed you and the other relevant parties. Going on the record: Not expecting to hear back. Just wanted to leave my thoughts in the open.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#109So 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 al…
The little box you type your credit card in is a huge pain in the ass for companies larger and small due to some compliance requirements from financial institutions called PCI. I can’t understate the ass pain, system complexity, legal review, etc etc that this can bring. Doesn’t matter if you are big or small, it’s painful and can be costly. Big companies can pay to handle that, smaller companies can’t and have relie…
You didn’t answer the question. What makes stripe different from Square?
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that their API is great, but there's so much more to building a business - most of all perseverance. Many people can make a good or great API but very few can execute on the rest.
Well in this case their API is backed by a connection to credit card systems... the hard part. The card companies could have done it, but they needed Stripe to show how obvious it is.
The reason Stripe exists is because the card companies couldn't do it. They were incompetent, unimaginative, lazy, slow, arrogant, etc.
Exactly what you typically see out of entrenched goliaths.
It's the same reason several of them that have tried can't catch up with Stripe, despite trying for years, despite vast resources, and despite Stripe showing them how to do it.
It's only in a non-reality-touching theory that the card companies could have done it (ie if you entirely disregard everything about them and only focus on resources and then give them attributes they don't possess). In actuality, they couldn't do it.
Microsoft and Nokia couldn't have produced the iPhone. IBM couldn't have produced AWS. AOL couldn't have produced Google. Disney couldn't have produced Netflix. Facebook couldn't have produced Instagram. Xerox couldn't have produced the Apple II. Sony and Microsoft couldn't have produced Steam. GM and Ford couldn't have produced the Model S. Boeing and Lockheed couldn't have produced the Falcon 9. Wyndham and Hilton couldn't have produced Airbnb. The taxi cartels couldn't have produced Uber or Lyft.
Culture acting as an innovation blockade is the unifying impediment between them all, not lack of resources or that something was technically too challenging.