https://stripe.com/global shows a continent with no lights on.
Please come to Africa. The lights are on here.
Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
151–160 of 180 posts
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#152Stripe'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…
I love Stripe as well, but one thing keeps me wondering - why do their bank payouts take so long? My company is based in Norway, and I see funds arriving a week after they are marked "on the way to your bank". Money get sent like that every day, but arrive only after a week from a local bank. I know that local bank transfers are reconciled multiple times a day, and I can't see why there is a delay. The money sending…
US banks (maybe most banks?) are just slow as hell from my experience. I pay several bills here in the USA from US banks to US banks / credit card companies and it takes a week for it to fully sync up on both my person bank account and on the statement balance. But if I were to pay with a debit card I would see the transaction instantly, though in such case it would say pending for days and days.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rec…
I'm looking forward to seeing how this one plays out!
I don't know if there is any RemindMe! bot in HN, but it would definitely be useful in this scenario.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is that it is very hard to tell, early on, if you have a potential $10M or $10B company. You're right: if YC had a crystal ball where we could somehow only invest in the $10B kind of company and never in the $10M kind of company, we'd do that. But I don't think such a crystal ball is possible, because companies morph too much. Famously, Microsoft's first product was an interpreter for Altair Basic, which ha…
> The thing is that it is very hard to tell, early on, if you have a potential $10M or $10B company. I (kind of) disagree with one part of your comment. YC can't tell whether a startup has the potential to be a $10B kind of company, but a person starting a company can certainly decide whether they want to go for a $10B company. Many people do - a lot of startup founders are trying to be the next Google. But some of t…
Many people find that once they have built something to satisfy their original ambition, they enjoy growing and want to keep doing it. And some find they want to stay small and customer-focused, and some cash out and spend their days windsurfing. You can’t be sure which you will choose until you have the choice.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#155Stripe'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…
I love Stripe as well, but one thing keeps me wondering - why do their bank payouts take so long? My company is based in Norway, and I see funds arriving a week after they are marked "on the way to your bank". Money get sent like that every day, but arrive only after a week from a local bank. I know that local bank transfers are reconciled multiple times a day, and I can't see why there is a delay. The money sending…
Doing transfers from France to Japan often, regular banks are scandalously slow and the slowness of their transfers prevents a lot of international possibilities IMO. I started accepting bitcoins as an alternate payment method.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#156Pretty 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.
Have you seen an example of a regular middle-class person actually doing this? Because in all the stories I've heard, company leadership just say "no, you need to be an accredited investor to do that", and that's it.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#157Stupid 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
That means the investor agrees that at the time he buy stocks, the company is no longer worth $9 billion but it's worth ($20 billion - $245 million). Basically because they developped their business, their technologies, hired/trained people, they "created" value and the company is worth more than before.
The funding itself doesn't increase the company valuation, but it validates it. Before funding the board can declare that the company is worth $XX billion, but the fact that an investor agrees to put money on the basis of that valuation makes it real.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I agree. What I meant by "could" is it was right in their backyard, as are all your examples.
Their failure is representative of bigco culture.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#159The 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…
In addition to focusing on international, they are still focused on very small companies. I went to a conference for small solo entrepreneurs this year, and they had a heavy presence. They also acquired/supported indie hackers. Now that they are giant, it would be so easy for them to write off the small customer, but they continue outreach. Its strange that I have such positive feelings about a payment processor, because payment processing isn't a major issue for our business, but they have just been good to do business with compared to the 3 other processors I had before, and that makes me like them.
Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
#160Earlier 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 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 so…
Pretty smart!