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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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

#151
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Stripe for several years and love it. Switching to payment intents this year was seamless. One thing I'd love you guys to do is create your own QuickBooks connection app. Most companies offer their own - yours is through Sush.io with your logo and bad ratings. I can't get it to work and I'm not the only one.

Good feedback -- thank you. We'll take a look.

And while you're here, have you read Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies"? He is a very underrated thinker in the lack-of-progress area you've shown interest in.

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

#152
post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transaction…

Those arent issues, they are the reasons for the valuation.

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

#153
post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transaction…

Completely agree on #3. Felt like a big blow to have Stripe do this.

A lot of subscription based businesses were built around "no-hassle refunds" as a core feature enabled by Stripe and will now need to rethink this.

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

#154
post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

I found some difficulty with the documentation around submitting dictionary values since the "curl" documentation didn't include any examples. Example being address which wasn't obvious needed to be sent as address[city]=value instead of address.city=value

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

#155
post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

Stripe seems to have understood Sequoia's Black Swan memo well.

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

#156
post #41

How about opening your business to new markets. Stripe feels like you have to have your business in the top first world countries only. It's unusable even in some EU countries nowadays.

We're still working hard on this. (We just expanded our beta in Bulgaria last week!)

The Indian rollout has been extremely slow, Stripe launched the beta in December 2017 and still hasn't come out of preview. What kind of challenges did you face that delayed the launch by more than two years?

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large companies have more power than smaller ones. This could be the power to offer poor products at inflated prices, or power to alter political processes to their favor.

Also small companies often employ and are owned by my neighbors.. Amazon doesn't and is owned by a bunch of hedge funds and a dude who buys $200M houses.

Large companies also employ my neighbors, and clearly for a better value as otherwise they would be with smaller ones. As for ownership, Amazon is part of the S&P 500 which is quite literally owned by millions of folks in their savings, 401k's etc. Hence the reality is not that simple.

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

#158
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just very high level for those of us who only know "they charge a flat fee and a percent which makes microtransactions hard". That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging…

> batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky) Maybe batch them per user per website, that will solve statement descriptors a bit

At a very high level the batching-with-refunds issue sounds like the kind of problem that the Lightning network on bitcoin tries to solve, or bilateral netting in other financial contexts.

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

#160
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transaction…

Great feedback... thank you. In case it's useful, some context on them: On (1), we started an FX team this year. (There are a lot of legal complexities here around how the funds move, who has title to what at which moment, and so on.) But we're investing significantly in improving it and it should get better soon. On (2), the core issue is card network pricing rules -- by design, they discriminate on the basis of whe…

Just want to say thanks for being so transparent with your answers in this thread, really appreciated. As a fly on the wall to most of this -- I don't have a business myself, yet ;) -- I'm learning a lot so far.
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