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Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

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Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple thoughts on why this isn’t a fair comparison: - Goldman is profitable but the employees extract most of it via compensation. - Goldman has to rewin their business every year. Very little recurring revenue and they are one recession from imploding. - You can’t really compute valuation on a very small investment. It’s not like the entire float is trading, and the small investment (relative to valuation) can ha…

I think your third point supports the OP original point. Stripe probably isn't "really" worth that much now. EDIT: wanted to mention that my impression is that they're a great company, just not worth $35B.

They are great. Don’t undersell the benefit of recurring revenue. Compare the valuations of credit card companies vs GS too.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#42

Great company but it’s too hard to infer value from such a small investment.

Not really. Some people infer value without any investment -- only based on P&L and year-over-year growth. (Stripe is consistently making money, after all)

That’s not what the listed valuation is based on.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#43

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

Generally consensus is a recession is going to happen in the next year or two, and the next good time to IPO won’t be for several years after it that.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#44

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

Incentivizes short-term thinking?

My main question then is how do you create liquidity for employees? Unclear if these rounds include secondary offerings for employees.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#45
post #11

Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Ove…

>their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs I used Stripe about 7 years ago. I used it because their APIs were simple and PayPal etc. was complex and bloated. It seems that this cycle repeats throughout b2b startups. Is there now an opportunity to create yet another simple lightweight API but one that doesn't cover all use-cases?

Always, in every part of the stack.

The world of software APIs breathes in and out in waves of complexity.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#46

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

Why would you want to become a public company? Being public means more complex accounting, transparency, extra legal fees, focus on quarter-to-quarter profits, etc. Other than liquidity (especially for founders/VCs), I don't see much of a reason to and a lot of reasons not to.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#47

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

Generally consensus is a recession is going to happen in the next year or two, and the next good time to IPO won’t be for several years after it that.

Yep. That's why we've seen a glut of public offerings in the past 18 months, as CFOs push to get them out before the drought.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#48
post #11

Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Ove…

We do want to optimize for those simple needs. Which parts do you think are bloated? Would love to hear how we can de-bloat. (Feel free to email me at edwin@stripe.com too.)

It would be great if the UI allowed you to mass-delete entries, at least in test mode.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#50
post #11

Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Ove…

We do want to optimize for those simple needs. Which parts do you think are bloated? Would love to hear how we can de-bloat. (Feel free to email me at edwin@stripe.com too.)

Not OP but I've used the Stripe API extensively (I know it nearly end to end due to implementing one of the framework client libraries) and to me the parts that come to mind if I think "bloat"/"unintuitive" are SKUs, Coupons, and most likely what GP is talking about the new payment intent APIs, even though I don't think there's a real way you could implement them any better given the PSD2 requirements.

By far Stripe has the cleanest experience of all. I wish you'd treat your APIs more like amazon treats theirs though, that is to say: no private internal-only APIs; I should be able to reimplement the Stripe Dashboard in my own app if I so wanted (just like how the AWS console only uses public APIs). That'd also make for some cool potential projects like a Terraform plugin for Stripe.

Feel free to reach out if you like, email on my profile.

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