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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#31
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right; this isn't new. We just decided that it was prudent to extend the round a little given the economic uncertainty.

In which book is $600M 'a little' :) Really, that's boatload of money by any standard.

Fair :-). "A little" relative to market cap. But, yes, $600M is a staggering amount of money in absolute terms.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#32

I want a bot that translates these advertisements to the equivalent phrasing used in public equity markets "Someone bought 1,000,000 shares of a company at a price of $20 in a secondary offering. Company's marketcap is now $36B" Private equity market lingo is dumb. Many companies don't state the valuation after a round and the ones that do deliberately do it for clout. It is confusing and counterintuitive because peo…

Down rounds are also bad news for previous investors (and other shareholders, like employees) due to how liquidation preferences typically work.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#34

So with Stripe, is it industry practice to keep the fee when refunding customers? For example, if I return something to Best Buy, are they still paying that 2.9% fee to their CC processor?

i don't know about best buy, they might be able to negotiate something better. but for small fish, it's standard practice to keep not just the fee, but twice the fee: when you charge a card, visa charges you 2.5% on the purchase amount. and then when you refund the card, visa charges you 2.5% on the refund amount.

as far as visa is concerned, they're both just transactions, regardless of the direction, and they want their fee.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#37
post #22
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-). True.

Is Stripe still hiring during COVID-19?

quite a few shops are hiring rn. i’ve been told google plans on easing up on hiring over the rest of 2020, but it wasn’t described to me as a freeze. there are a bunch of startups that managed to close funding before this broke open, they’ve been hiring as well if thats your thing

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#38
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-). True.

How does stripe plan to navigate through the current economic climate and recession?

We're focused on a few things --

- Staying secure, reliable, and available for our existing customers. Some businesses in Stripe are seeing huge surges in demand and others are seeing major shortfalls. In either case, we want to make sure we can that we can be relied on to provide flawless service.

- Keeping up with the surge of new customers. A lot of businesses are migrating online and many of the platforms we serve are also seeing significant spikes in signups. So, we're investing a lot of effort in making sure that we can scale effectively there and remove all unnecessary friction. (There's a very active project working on cleaning up our docs and improving the integration experience, for example.)

- Adding support for business models that were previously limited because of bank/card network restrictions. We just launched support for telemedicine last week.

- Figuring out ways to help businesses by enabling access to government programs (e.g. the PPP program in the US). These programs usually haven't thought much about the somewhat unique characteristics of online businesses. We're trying to help government officials understand what internet businesses need. (And, per the comment elsewhere in this thread, we're rolling out our first PPP loans this week.)

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#39
post #10

I love the quote from John Collison: "This is digital migration in a very compressed period of time, for both businesses and customers," Collison adds. "My mom recently asked me if I'd heard of 'this Instacart thing.' Yeah mom, I have."

Sadly, it’s also likely one of the largest and fastest transfers of wealth from small businesses to large corporations. As Amazon hires 100,000+ workers how many small businesses are shuttering for good?

Stripe is one of the “good” tech companies in this respect by helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses, but it’s not going to be enough.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#40

That's much higher than Square (25.2B) but lower than Shopify (60.5B) (Square and Shopify have 4.71B and 1.58B in revenue, respectively)

It's unfortunate that Stripe has remained private. Both Square and Shopify IPO'd in the low single digit billions in market cap, allowing plenty of retail investors to tap into their growth.
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