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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #60
erikpukinskis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of an IPO is to A) create liquidity, and B) divest some of the risk to a bigger pool of investors. If you are cash flow positive, and have only long term investors, there’s no real monetary benefit. You’re giving away your dividends to other people. It’s a question of whether you want to discount your own risk or hold it. IPOing allows you to price your risk and sell some of it off. But if you’re a long ter…

While those are the "theoretical" reason for IPOs, let's not ignore a primary reason for an IPO, which is to let early investors and employees cash out (though these days many companies, e.g. Slack, are just doing a direct listing instead).

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by mtgx »

scient wrote: post #31
joshmn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty popular in the Europe and is a Dutch company.

Its only "popular" because for a long time it was the only choice in Europe pretty much. In several countries it still is. It also was total garbage developer friendliness wise ~5 years ago.

Well, Stripe still isn't available in like one quarter of the European countries.

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

#63

Post by Xixi »

I remember when we launched our Japanese tea service [1]: we wanted to switch to Stripe so badly that I was emailing them at the very least once a month, until we made it in their beta program. I'm not sure the youngest remember what the payment landscape was before Stripe, but it wasn't great. Stripe lifted the whole industry up from mediocrity.

Around 10 years ago I had the pleasure of setting up payments with a French bank: instead of a web API we had to use an opaque binary installed on our server. In terms of setup it took many weeks and several in person meetings to get approved. There was a (big) setup fee and a (not so small) monthly subscription. And then of course transaction fees.

In Japan for startups targeting foreignland it was even worse: only PayPal supported payments in anything other than JPY! [2] Interestingly it seems that with Stripe Japan everything coming from outside of Japan goes through USD. I have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY. So I would expect an EUR/JPY transaction to occur in the middle, yet oftentimes the USD/EUR exchange rates ends up leaking on our customer receipts... I wonder how it works behind the scene...

[1] https://tomotcha.com for those interested.

[2] Maybe banks were offering this service directly, but for what was only an experiment at the time, I was expecting the setup cost to be prohibitive (at least in time, if not in money).

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

#64

Post by jamiegreen »

mathattack wrote: post #20
kchoudhu wrote: post #3

Stripe is cool -- I use it every day -- but is it really worth, oh, half a Goldman Sachs? I dunno man.

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…

- Goldman has to rewin their business every year. Very little recurring revenue and they are one recession from imploding.

Haven't they weathered a fair few recessions already?

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

#65

Post by pc »

warent wrote: 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…

> Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases

You're right. We're fixing this. Stay tuned.

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

#66

Post by nickjj »

scrollaway wrote: post #50
edwinwee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ... 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.

Yes, definitely this.

Payment intents is so much more complicated and convoluted than the previous "Charges" API. Stripe went from one of the easiest bits of my app to develop to one of the most difficult, to the point where I'll admit it even temporarily killed my motivation to work on my app solely due to Stripe's API. I stopped working on the checkout process just to take a break and work on other parts of the app and it pains me to think about even touching the checkout flow again even though I know I have to in order to release my app.

For any real app that's beyond the most trivial case you're likely going to be stuck using the "manual" payment intents workflow. Just figuring out which method to use was a huge ramp up of difficulty vs the old Charges API.

I went as far as even emailing their support for advice and even they weren't able to give me a straight answer. Their primary advice was to recommend not using it and instead use their new Stripe-hosted checkout system (which will not work for most people since it's so limited) or continue using the old Charges API and lose out on payments due to authorization issues that will come with not being able to deal with the new user verification strategies that are required by some banks and cards.

Like you I have no idea how to implement it any better, it's just the reality of the situation of the world we live in today but the bar has certainly been raised to consider accepting payments with Stripe now.

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

#67

Post by rasz »

thinkingkong wrote: post #7

Before we start piling on about whether or not its really worth 35B just keep in mind how private companies are valued. Someone paid a lot of money for a chunk of stripe so thats what its “worth”. Personally I think stripe is close to worth - as another commenter put it - half of goldman sachs. The recent launch of loans, credit card issuing, etc are all bets or exercises that put stripe in an incredible position to…

>Someone paid a lot of money for a chunk of stripe so thats what its “worth”

No, someone paid a lot of money in order to make even more using greater fool theory.

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

#68

Post by benologist »

scrollaway wrote: post #50
edwinwee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Second that for having all of the API be public. Being able to purge test data via API in a single call is long overdue too and would be a delight compared to the process now - sign in and navigate to the delete page and wait however many hours it takes to finish deleting records individually or silently crash. During this time the API credentials are blocked too.

It would be really nice if there was a freeze on breaking API changes that amount to tweaking grammar too.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #60
erikpukinskis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of an IPO is to A) create liquidity, and B) divest some of the risk to a bigger pool of investors. If you are cash flow positive, and have only long term investors, there’s no real monetary benefit. You’re giving away your dividends to other people. It’s a question of whether you want to discount your own risk or hold it. IPOing allows you to price your risk and sell some of it off. But if you’re a long ter…

While those are the "theoretical" reason for IPOs, let's not ignore a primary reason for an IPO, which is to let early investors and employees cash out (though these days many companies, e.g. Slack, are just doing a direct listing instead).

[deleted]
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