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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

#121

Post by markh »

pc wrote: post #54

[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…

Patrick, the way Stripe continues to engage with Hacker News and remains true to its roots is an inspiration. Congratulations!

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

#122

Post by aidos »

Xixi wrote: post #63

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 Fr…

“Wasn’t great” is an understatement! I dealt with it as a developer both in New Zealand and the Uk and it was outright terrible. Oh, you didn’t apply for a merchant account 6 weeks ago...yeah, you’re not gonna go live this month. You just go right ahead and book in a meeting with you bank manager and get down on your knees to plea for an account.

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

#123

Post by Chris_Newton »

nickjj wrote: post #66
scrollaway wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

> ... 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…

Upvotes don’t show on HN, so let me first say this is very much like our recent experience.

If those from Stripe who are reading this would like a hopefully constructive suggestion, may I suggest here the same thing I suggested to your support team?

Right on the front page of your documentation site (https://stripe.com/docs) you have a step-by-step walkthrough for setting up a basic subscription the old way.

If you follow through that process using one of the test cards for the new SCA behaviour (4000002500003155, say) you will see that the API effectively fails at a couple of points along the way.

Presumably either integrations need to do something extra at those points to take into account what needs to happen for SCA, or integrations need to follow different steps in the first place so they don’t run into those problems.

Either way, an equivalent step-by-step walkthrough showing how to use Stripe.js, the API and webhooks to set up a simple subscription in an SCA-compatible way would have been very helpful.

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

#124

Post by rolltiide »

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.

Privately traded companies and publicly traded companies use different terminology for the same things.

In the private markets "valuation" is a term that just means "someone bought a couple shares at this arbitrary price, here are the value of the other millions of shares at that same arbitrary price". Although the effects on all shareholder's balance sheets are real and useful, it is just broadcasted for marketing and hype.

In the public markets "marketcap" is the same term.

And finally, older public companies have low price to equity ratios because the hype has fizzled and they are predictable. It doesn't mean anything. Its not enough inputs alone for you to decide what the rest of the market will do.

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

#125

Post by edwinwee »

mehhh wrote: post #102
andygcook wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanted to hop in and say thank you for starting Stripe. At my first startup, we had to integrate with an old merchant processor for payments and it was a nightmare. With my current startup, we were able to setup Stripe in the first week of operations and take payments seamlessly without too much hassle. Freeing us up from thinking about how to take payments allows us to focus on our product and building out our compa…

Stripe has a slick API, but their banned merchant categories (anything telecom or networking related) have caused trouble for many potential clients, esp. as Ubiquiti integrated them as their first payment processor. The distinction between high risk consumer sales & B2B low risk sales is not drawn by Stripe.

Most of those categories are from financial institutions or card networks. Stripe has been working with them so we can support more businesses, and I know of quite a few networking equipment businesses that run on Stripe today. If you're still seeing any trouble, we'd love to take another look—our support team's at support@stripe.com (and my email's edwin@stripe.com).

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

#126

Post by tempsy »

thr0waway43234 wrote: post #103
tempsy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what Stripe's policy is on selling shares on secondary markets, but another reason is that at some point employees need liquidity too.

Look at the valuation increases: Almost 2x year to year for quite a while. I don't expect most people seeing that kind of valuation increases looking to liquidate any part of their position unless they really can't help it. If their fundamentals growth slowed to rates resembling the regular market, then sure, but as is, all a company with that growth rate might need is let tenured employees add, say 5% of their equit…

No one can predict what the price will be in a year. Diversifying before a possible recession would be prudent, especially since payment processing volume is presumably highly correlated with consumer spending.

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

#127

Post by edwinwee »

zbuf wrote: post #120
nickjj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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…

Yes, I feel Stripe has lost its edge with the new APIs. Interesting to hear 'demotivating' used as that's how I felt for a while. I needed many requests with Stripe support and could see the docs changing each time I returned to the task. The interesting one for me is the way the client triggers the transaction, and the server has to asynchronously process that. I'm pretty sure I'm still having dreams at night about…

>needed many requests with Stripe support

Could you forward one or two of those to me? edwin@stripe.com

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

#128

Post by Xixi »

edwinwee wrote: post #109
Xixi wrote: post #63

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 Fr…

The rates themselves show on your receipts? Are you using some sort of plug-in? Could you forward me a receipt at edwin@stripe.com? For the conversion itself, we automatically convert from whatever currency you've accepted the payment in, then send it to your JPY bank account. The conversion rate is the average of whatever people are buying and selling the currency at that hour, but some financial institutions add a…

The rates were not showing on our receipts. They were showing on the bank statements of our customers. They were charged an extra 2 EUR by their banks as a FOREX fee on the Tomotcha payment, on a line showing the USD/EUR forex rate, despite us charging in EUR. Very weird. That issue was only ever reported by two customers in France.

This is on top of my head, but I will forward you the relevant and exact information.

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

#130

Post by GeneralTspoon »

I quite like Stripe - but them forcing the recent switch to Checkout V2 has me a bit miffed.

Previously it was super simple to add dynamic card payments to a site - just drop the JS in, make a call to your server and then call Stripe from your server. Done. And it's all done in a popup on the same page (so no context switching UX for the user).

Now it seems they've killed the simplicity of that in favour of a more PayPal-like experience - where the user gets pushed out to the Stripe website to checkout. And it becomes more complex to implement too - due to everything being async and webhook based. At this point I think Paypal might actually be easier to implement for a certain class of simple one-off payments (although their sandbox servers are cripplingly slow).

I'm a little bit skeptical of this change because I think it's partially a strategic play by Stripe (with the smokescreen of SCA-compliance + Apple Pay support) to become more of a user-facing online "wallet", rather than just a behind-the-scenes payment processor.

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