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Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

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Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#111

Post by canadapups »

Firebrand wrote: post #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 al…

For my side project website (see my profile), I started to implement PayPal and got seriously confused with the documentation and process (I'm not a professional developer). Mid-process I actually didn't even know if I was even dealing with PayPal or Braintree anymore. Then magically I received a package in the mail from Moneris. They shipped me a stack of those carbon-copy paper credit card slips and machine (that cha-chunk sound)... for my website. This was like 3 years ago.

I asked my professional dev friend what the heck was going on and he told me to use Stripe. Never heard of Stripe before that. Friend also told me his revenue was frozen for weeks/months by PayPal for his projects. A weekend later, I was done implementing Stripe.

My partner insisted I use PayPal because that's what everyone recognized/used, but I flat out refused after implementing Stripe.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#112

Post by meowface »

totoglazer wrote: post #90
Liron wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy that Elon Musk's top 3 founded companies (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) are higher valuation than YC's top 3 investment companies (AirBnB, Stripe, Dropbox). Interestingly PayPal and Stripe are both competing for some of the same integrations. PayPal increased our revenues by 20% when we started using it in addition to Stripe.

Although only spacex is clearly Musk founded.

PayPal wasn't founded by him, but X.com was.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#113

Post by moeamaya »

aacook wrote: post #101

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 thin…

That's great on Stripe, but tbh your product is awesome. If I was an angel investor, I'd happily put money into this and recommend you to my family. Keep up the great work!

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#114

Post by aidenn0 »

0bfus wrote: post #67
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

I would guess it's closer to a yule-simon distribution, as that is the limiting distribution of a particular form of preferential attachment that has many similarities with how equity is assigned.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#116

Post by aidenn0 »

ahstilde wrote: post #21
dawhizkid wrote: post #11

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…

I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but one of my favorite first-principles stories is the jet engine.

At some point in the 1930s a paper was written arguing from first principles that a jet engine could not work to propel a plane. Axial flow compressors were to inefficient and radial-flow compressors generated too much drag.

What the author didn't know is that another already written paper had come up with significant improvements to axial-flow compressors by using airfoil-shaped blades, which combined with improved metallurgy was more than sufficient for a working turbojet.

So it was a perfectly sound argument for why something was impossible, but it was still wrong because the assumptions were changing.

The tech industry looks like this all the time; in many of pg's essays he mentions that a lot of successful ideas look like toys, and part of the reason for that is this core concept; as the underlying assumptions change something can morph from a toy to big business overnight.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#117

Post by [deleted] »

aacook wrote: post #101

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 thin…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#118

Post by erikpukinskis »

Liron wrote: post #71
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…

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.

Ya just because I make most of my money selling hamburgers doesn’t mean I’m ignoring my regulars who come in for milkshakes.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#119

Post by lifeisstillgood »

aacook wrote: post #101

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 thin…

One minor nitpick - just tried to sign up, and if I was a USA user, then your page would have unhidden the pricing buttons. but as I was UK user, it did not unhide anything (not even a sorry!). As such i was left with the default waitlist boxes, and was confused as to whether I was signing up or not.

(it's possible it did unhide the sorry, but it was not clear on the smaller screen... maybe a splash of colour? Perhaps "Sorry based on your selections above we don't yet offer the service in your country - sign up below for notifications." You kind of do say that but like I said confused)

Anyway it looks a great service, and I am now on the wait list

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#120

Post by allenleee »

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…

In case you don't know, Y Combinator sold about half of its holdings(Dropbox) to other investors at around the same time as the series B financing round led by Index.

That’s the only time that Y Combinator has ever sold any portfolio company’s shares in a secondary transaction.

I don't understand why YC did that? It seems like not a good move.

Source: https://www.recode.net/2018/3/22/17150770/sequoia-dropbox-ip...

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