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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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

#261

Post by plantain »

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…

>However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you.

1) SEPA has an 8-week no-questions no-appeal refund model, which is fundamentally incompatible with a SaaS business

2) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on Checkout

3) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on non-EU/US accounts

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

#262

Post by stass »

notJim wrote: post #179
core-questions wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no benefit to having a small business that provides inferior products or inferior service relative to a large company. Sure there is - in terms of where the profit goes. The profit in a small business goes to the owner(s), who usually live somewhere in the local community, and in turn that money stays within the community to be spent on other businesses there. When a Walmart comes along, the profits all mov…

I'm not so sure about the tremendous benefits of having locally-wealthy people instead of remotely-wealthy people. As I've gotten more involved in local politics, I've discovered that local small business owners have a quite toxic influence on local politics. Who funds the campaigns opposing density? Often it's small business owners. In Seattle, the city was trying to create spaces where addicts could safely use need…

I'm struggling to see how local people influencing local politics is a bad thing. Would you prefer for remote corporations to control local politics?

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

#263

Post by candu »

byefruit wrote: post #246
joering2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no. TransferWise is terrible at customer support and internet is full of horror stories of people founds being frozen. The are the new incarnation of good ole’ paypal. You will get your account frozen the moment you wire more than$1,500 as per my own experience with 3 different businesses giving them a chance. I hope Stripe which is amazing will never have anything to do with TransferFraud.

Not affiliated with TransferWise in any way but just want to say that this is totally the opposite of my experience and that of pretty much everyone I know who uses TransferWise. We've moved hundreds of thousands of dollars through them over the last couple of years with no problems on their end (we've had problems with banks failing to transfer correctly though..)

Also not affiliated with them, and have been very satisfied so far.

OTOH, I'm in Canada, and I've only used them for personal transfers. I have no idea how they perform for businesses, nor do I know whether they work well for individuals in other countries.

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

#264

Post by Cu3PO42 »

plantain wrote: post #261
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…

>However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you. 1) SEPA has an 8-week no-questions no-appeal refund model, which is fundamentally incompatible with a SaaS business 2) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on Checkout 3) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on non-EU/US accounts

Regarding points 2) and 3), I wasn't aware of those limitations. I admit to never having tried to use SEPA direct debit with Stripe, I just saw it in their docs.

Regarding 1): is it? Credit card payments can also be charged back, often for a period longer than 8 weeks. And both "aaS" products as well as certain retailers selling and shipping physical goods, do offer direct debit. I can't quote any fraud rates, but it certainly seems possible to do it.

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

#265

Post by pjscott »

kashura wrote: post #58

If they are so successful, why do they need to continuously raise money?

To build intuition for this, here's a contrived example. You own a widget-making company, and they're very successful: you get a profit of $1 for each widget sold, and each widget factory produces 1 million widgets per year. You currently have one factory, for a profit of $1M/year, and a new factory costs $8M to build. Suppose that four factories are enough to supply the world's widget needs, in which case you'll eventually be making $4M/year.

If you don't raise any money at all, you'll be able to build a second factory after 8 years, a third factory after 4 years, and a fourth factory after another 2 years. At that point you're making $4M/year and no longer expanding. Hooray! After 14 years of putting all the profits into making new factories, you can enjoy watching the money flow in.

Now suppose you were able to convince investors to give you $24M to build three more factories immediately, in exchange for some percentage of the business. You're immediately making $4M/year, minus whatever percentage goes to your investors. If the percentage that the investors get is low enough, this has a higher net present value to you than the slow-and-steady approach described in the previous paragraph.

Now what if investors aren't convinced enough to give you $24M, but they will give you enough ($8M) to make one factory? Well, you could open that factory, show investors that you're making double the profits now, and maybe that'll convince them to invest more now that your business has proven itself. There may even be multiple rounds of this. The rationale is the same: by expanding your business faster, you expand your revenue faster.

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

#266

Post by rdslw »

plantain wrote: post #136
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…

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…

ad3: I think it's the opposite youre saying. As a customer I can always use chargeback if you have any 'friction' about fulfilling my refund. chargeback works with my bank, no matter what stripe or vendor thinks.

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

#267

Post by Silhouette »

wilg wrote: post #185
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…

We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. We've moved to Paddle which takes care of that for us. Recommend!

We looked into Paddle recently as a possible way of handling the payment mechanics and the tax and compliance issues for a new business. It looked quite promising on both of those fronts.

Then we read their legal terms, found about half a dozen obvious deal-breakers, and lost all interest.

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

#268

Post by pianoben »

Jeez, just go public already! You've had employees waiting for nigh on a decade to realize the value of what they've built, but instead it appears that those gains are just going to VCs (and whoever is privileged enough to take money off the table during these raises).

Perhaps I'm being too cynical, and perhaps Stripe is taking a more enlightened view than I'm giving it credit for, but my goodness this trend of large businesses just raising money forever (and long after they cease being startups) is frustrating. At least at Google I know I can actually spend all of my paycheck at some point in the decade after I've earned it.

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

#269

Post by Silhouette »

antoniodf wrote: post #209
wilg wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had to move off of Stripe because Stripe doesn't handle tax collection and remittance. We've moved to Paddle which takes care of that for us. Recommend!

Hi! Thanks for this feedback. I work at Stripe on improving our tax reporting product. May you elaborate on what was missing exactly?

As far as I'm aware, Stripe has no tax product comparable to what a merchant of record like Paddle offers. Has this changed?

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

#270

Post by eknam »

plantain wrote: post #136
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…

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…

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