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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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

#231

Post by hylaride »

antonkm wrote: post #217
adambyrtek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

Swede here. Really baffling for me too. My kids have pretty much never even seen cash. I use the nationwide app Swish to send money to people using their phone number (almost every Swede is connected since it's pushed by all big banks) and only use contactless credit card. How come Germany is so cash positive? Personally I think Sweden has gone a bit far, where some old people have been put in a weird spot where they…

As a Canadian (where most people use debit/credit) my first time in Germany as a tourist I once had to leave my passport as collateral at a restaurant to go find an ATM to pay for our meal as I didn't have €80ish in cash. It flummoxed me almost as much as seeing Germans eat a hamburger with a knife and fork! ;-)

When asking around I got several answers. Everything from a cultural aversion to debt (and spending via cash makes it easier to track your spending), not wanting to be tracked where you shop due to not wanting the government to know (comes from Nazi/East German past), and just being culturally conservative and not really liking change all that much.

I didn't like it as being a tourist meant I was eating out a lot, etc. I had to carry a lot of cash around that I'd only have to pay a fee to convert back if I had any left.

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

#232

Post by gingerlime »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #198
plantain wrote: post #136

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…

German checking in. One of the reasons why it’s hard to get us to use a CC is that many of us don’t have credit cards. And why would we? (Except for online payments and other fringe cases.) However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you. EDIT: This seems to have sparked some confusion. I'm not saying Germans don't do card payments, I was only speak…

Living in Germany and my company is based here. We tried SEPA but it’s a PITA to charge customers with it. Especially B2C which we are. Customers can arbitrarily chargeback even after several days. Not only that, they can ask for a refund, get the refund and then charge back. So we end up paying them! And there’s no way to prevent it. At least that’s the way it was a few years ago when stripe sepa was still beta.

The interesting thing however, we A/B tested with and without SEPA and basically saw no difference. Only German people used it, but when it wasn’t available they managed to find a credit card or use PayPal.

I’d love it if banks were making instant payments simple and verifiable, but SEPA feels like something from the 70s to me.

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

#233

Post by colinmhayes »

gk1 wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the question is, will the adoption of these services stick after things return to a more normal state? Certainly there will be some stickiness, but how much and for whom? To state the obvious, some adoption will be permanent but others not much. Where that will happen and by how much is a diff question. Example, will people go back to Starbucks or will they keep on making more coffee at home, maybe get an entry es…

The biggest barrier to late adopters is the learning curve and confidence: They worry that new tech will take too long to learn, and they're not confident it will work right. Right now a lot of people have no choice but to learn how to meet with Zoom, how to order with Instacart, how to communicate through Slack, ... And as they do, hopefully things are working out OK and they're building confidence in those technolo…

The biggest barrier to instacart is that the experience is awful. 80% of the time the deliverer calls to say they can't find half the items and half the time don't do what you tell them. Then it costs $10-20 extra, nah.

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

#234

Post by Cu3PO42 »

adambyrtek wrote: post #213
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German checking in. One of the reasons why it’s hard to get us to use a CC is that many of us don’t have credit cards. And why would we? (Except for online payments and other fringe cases.) However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you. EDIT: This seems to have sparked some confusion. I'm not saying Germans don't do card payments, I was only speak…

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

It's true Germany uses cash a lot more than other countries, but I wasn't trying to say we don't do card payments. I just said we don't use credit cards, we use debit cards instead which come by default with any standard bank account. However, these cards are neither MasterCard nor Visa and therefore do not work in online payment scenarios.

I have a credit card, but it is paid in full at the end of the month automatically, so for all intents and purposes it's essentially another debit card. Everyone I know in Germany who has a credit card uses it this way. In fact, my bank didn't even ask me if I wanted it set up any differently, so I have to imagine it's not just my social circle handling it this way.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

pc wrote: post #146
plantain wrote: post #136

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…

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by walshemj »

misun78 wrote: post #157
mikeyouse wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And plenty of small investors like me own Amazon via their manged funds

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

#237

Post by Cu3PO42 »

antonkm wrote: post #217
adambyrtek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

Swede here. Really baffling for me too. My kids have pretty much never even seen cash. I use the nationwide app Swish to send money to people using their phone number (almost every Swede is connected since it's pushed by all big banks) and only use contactless credit card. How come Germany is so cash positive? Personally I think Sweden has gone a bit far, where some old people have been put in a weird spot where they…

Other people have replied to your message already and pointed out that we do use cards, just not credit cards. I figured that was clear in my comment, but apparently it wasn't, so I'll go ahead and edit that.

As for why we're so cash positive: one of the factors is privacy. If you pay for everything electronically both your bank and merchants are in the position to build a profile on you. If you use a non-local scheme (e.g. MC or Visa), they can too.

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

#238

Post by mikeappell »

gen220 wrote: post #206
pc wrote: 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…

In the last few months, I put together a tiny static website for my SO to sell her photographs to clients, and I budgeted a lot of time for integrating a payments solution. Like many others will say, I was pleasantly surprised how little time the integration step took. I used the "beta" react hooks integration, and the UX of getting it all set up was basically flawless. I found the documentation (especially the quick…

> - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure.

Second this. Stripe's documentation is generally great, but when looking for recipes/tutorials you run into a lot of seemingly duplicative content which makes it confusing to figure out which is right for you. I had this issue trying to create Connected Payments, specifically.

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

#239

Post by toptal »

Adyen:

$25b market cap, with 2019 full year net revenue being $538m, up 43% year-on-year.

https://www.adyen.com/investor-relations/news/h2-2019-financ...

Stripe:

Significantly less than Adyen, as many have reported.

----

Same business model, with Adyen having a higher operating margin.

This should be interesting to see how this plays out. Either Adyen will skyrocket in value, or Stripe will decrease in value.

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

#240

Post by alanpearce »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #234
adambyrtek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

It's true Germany uses cash a lot more than other countries, but I wasn't trying to say we don't do card payments. I just said we don't use credit cards, we use debit cards instead which come by default with any standard bank account. However, these cards are neither MasterCard nor Visa and therefore do not work in online payment scenarios. I have a credit card, but it is paid in full at the end of the month automati…

For anyone confused about the debit card comment: A German debit card isn’t the same as any other. It doesn’t have Visa or MasterCard co-branding like other countries’ debit card, nor a 16 digit number, so it can’t be used online. I would rather have translated Girokarte to bank card, because there are actual debit cards with Visa/MC co-branding which are available in Germany, but less common than other kinds
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