Your competitor Adyen sits a few streets away from me in Amsterdam. Seems like a very thriving and interesting market you both operate in.
Congrats and best of luck!
Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
91–100 of 263 posts
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#92Earlier 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…
- 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?
They weathered the last one. Lehman and Bear didn’t.
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#93[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want…
Congratulations! Stripe has consistently made my life as a developer and entrepreneur significantly easier. I still remember that feeling of relief some 5-6 years ago thinking, "Yes! I don't have to use PayPal's API!"
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 brea…
Yeah I wonder why the purge-test-data job is blocking and long-running. I suspect it's just low priority to fix it, but I imagine it would be doable to "unlink" the user's entire "test database", provision a new one, and wipe the old one in the background whenever convenient (and not even necessarily the same day).
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#95Stripe 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?
Is there now an opportunity to create yet another simple lightweight API but one that doesn't cover all use-cases?
I think so.
One of my businesses has used Stripe since they launched in the UK, around the same time we were launching ourselves. Like many others, we appreciated the straightforward API, excellent documentation and easy integration. I’ve been happy to recommend Stripe personally on many occasions since then.
Recently, we were trying to update that original integration to take into account the new SCA rules that came in across the EU last weekend. Unfortunately, after reviewing Stripe’s current documentation site in its entirety and other SCA-related material, followed by a lot of discussion with Stripe’s support team, we were still struggling to understand the model of how SCA fits in with Stripe’s current API. That left us unclear about the structure that our integration needed in terms of Stripe.js, the API and webhooks. Essentially, after a lot of effort, we still didn’t really know where to start, and inevitably there came a point where it wasn’t viable to continue and we had to look at other options.
Of course Stripe has grown a lot more than we have in those intervening years and it’s understandable that their data models and APIs will have become a lot more complicated to meet the needs of their wider target audience. But sadly, the simple API, clear documentation and top-notch support that made them so attractive originally do seem to have been casualties along the way.
Given that SCA seems to be causing a lot of bother across the whole industry in Europe, to the point that several EU member states seem to be deferring its implementation because so many people aren’t ready for it despite years of advance notice, it does feel like there’s an opportunity for someone to disrupt the online card payments market in Europe now with a back-to-basics approach that is enough to meet the new regulatory requirements. One interesting question is whether it will actually be another card payment service that does so, given that a lot of other payment methods are popular in various European countries and some of them do have significant advantages including fewer complications due to SCA. We live in interesting times, as they say.
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#96[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want…
I respect the scale of your ambition and the suite of services/products you guys offer to realize it.
I love the copy on Stripe's website. Who wrote it?
Godspeed.
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#97I 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 Fr…
My guess is that Stripe has a service internally which predicts "how much of each currency am I going to have, and how much of each currency do I need to pay out at the end of the day?" Then, they balance whatever currencies they can internally, and for the rest, convert to USD, before paying out to customers.
The reason here is because Stripe wants to mitigate exposure to non-USD price fluctuation, e.g. if EUR dives against the dollar. Many companies do (or should do) some version of this rebalancing, e.g. FB cited on an earnings call last year that they lost a large amount due to forex fluctuations.
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#98You know you have a killer product when your customers will literally fly half way around the world just to use it.
When I started my company (since acquired) in 2012, Stripe was so game changing I flew from Australia to the US to open a bank account so we could use it. While we could incorporate in the US online, we had to turn up in person at a bank to open an account.
The only alternatives in Australia at the time were PayPal, which had outrageous fees and a terrible experience for recurring SaaS billing, or a merchant account with a bank which was going to require a $30k deposit.
It cost me $750 to incorporate a US entity, $1250 for airfares and hotel (oh to remember SF was that affordable!!). I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb, which conveniently has a Chase branch right next door, and 1 day later we had a US bank account and could turn on our Stripe integration. We didn’t look back.
I love Stripe Atlas, because I intimately relate to the problem, and wish we had it in 2012.
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#99[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want…
Congratulations! Stripe has consistently made my life as a developer and entrepreneur significantly easier. I still remember that feeling of relief some 5-6 years ago thinking, "Yes! I don't have to use PayPal's API!"
Customers still want PayPal though :(
Can't wait for Stripe to integrate PayPal as one of the options. Seems unlikely to happen, but I keep my fingers crossed.
Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
#100Before stripe, I used paypal and it was sooo painful! There are so many terrible APIs out there that waste so much time needlessly.
Then I found stripe. What a treat. Everything was documented and the documentation itself was both readable and didn't go in endless circles like the paypal ones. The error messages were helpful. And every api endpoint had an example, which is hugely helpful: HUGELY! All the other API developers out there can learn from this: you can't underestimate the value of having a working example. Not only that but the testing is much easier in stripe, and there's no need for a bunch of seperate accounts and sandboxes that don't make sense.
Oh and did I mention that the variables describe themselves: the first 3 or 4 letter of an ID says what it is (subscription or etc). Genius! It's little things like this which make Stripe stand out orders of magnitude above the rest of all the APIs in the world.
I hope you guys rule the marketplace for payment processing and wish you all the success you deserve.
Stripe's success in payment processing sends a clear signal to the Paypals and API developers of world: If you're producing an API that sucks, it creates an opportunity for someone else to come eat your lunch. :)