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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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

#421

Post by dx034 »

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

From experience, (1) isn't really a problem. If payments bounce they do so within a few days due to insufficient funds or fraudulent use. After that, refunds are extremely rare. Esp. since most European countries have easy systems for small claims which allow you to claim the money back.

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

#422

Post by GarrisonPrime »

pianoben wrote: post #374
alkibiades wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

might be nice for employees but borders on negligent when private markets are practically begging for you to take their money and going public has alot of hoops and disclosures

I will never argue that the founders are not acting wisely - they've got no moral imperative to go public. As you say, there's far cheaper capital on offer. Rather, it's a systemic failing. They would pay an undeniable cost by going the IPO route, but it would be to the benefit of their employees and the public at large. Private markets being so flush with cash while regular folks are strapped, on the other hand, is…

>...we should be re-purposing those dollars for societal benefit. _There_ is the moral failing.

To see such a dangerous, totalitarian ideology expressed so casually is terrifying.

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

#423

Post by dx034 »

m11a wrote: post #401
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…

> If any non-EU companies know a cheaper way to process transactions in the EU, I'm all ears... Depending on your volume, it's really not expensive to setup a legal entity in the UK. Since UK is leaving (unsure if EU financial access will continue) Ireland is a good alternative. A UK company costs Perhaps there's merchant-of-record services too, that are incorporated in the EU and I believe legally act as an agent to…

In pretty much every country you need a director or similar who's a resident of that country. There are agencies doing that for you but that's not cheap and not without risk. Running a company without residence is usually not worth it for small companies.

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

#424

Post by sholladay »

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…

I need destination subscriptions - subscribe a customer on my platform to a plan on my platform and share some of the revenue with a Connect account. The workarounds needed to solve this use case are very clunky.

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

#425

Post by brongondwana »

dx034 wrote: post #416
brongondwana wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For example, if you're processing $100k/year and refund 5% of your payments (which would be on the high end of normal), it works out to about $12/month". Patrick, please don't do that. It's scummy maths and unworthy of you. Either "if you're doing $8k/month it work out to about $12/month" or "if you're doing $100k/year it would work out to about $145/year" would be better. Using different units for the two different…

I don't think it's scummy. Revenues are usually measured on an annual basis, fees for many subscriptions come monthly. I believe this gives a good idea on monthly expenses for a business of a certain size.

Everything you say is true and yet - it also makes the amount look lower than it is (about .15%), which is still pretty small but it's O(100) vs O(100k) rather than O(10) vs O(100k).

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

#426

Post by GarrisonPrime »

classics2 wrote: post #361
3pt14159 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for FreshBooks and three other invoicing or payment related companies, and I have lots of friends that work at Shopify or run online stores. Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved. It will probably be fine, of course, but I've seen it happen and personally, if I were in a high margin business, I'd stick to Stripe. Espec…

PayPal is fine until it isn’t. They ban hammer people “for life” and tell them it cannot be appealed for cryptic and often inscrutable reasons they won’t elaborate on or even bother to speak to you about.

I suspect they don’t talk about it or consider appeals at all, because they feel they have no need to bother with any sort of customer service. They are king of the hill, and always have millions of more users eager to sign up. There seems to be little reason for them to bother resolving any issues. Much easier for them to just ban the user and ignore them.

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

#427

Post by GarrisonPrime »

fbelzile wrote: post #245
swat535 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you saving fees on paypal ? Looking at https://www.paypal.com/ca/for-you/fees It looks like the fees are exactly the same as Stripe, what am I missing ? Can you elaborate ? Are you a charitable organization?

A majority of my sales are from US customers buying in USD. With PayPal, fees are: 3.7% + $0.30 USD With Stripe, fees are: 2.9% + $0.30 CAD + 0.6% (international card charge) + 2.0% (currency conversion fee)

Wow, so expensive either way. European card processing is around 1.7% from what I’ve seen. American banks are atrocious. Is the Federal Reserve rate responsible for this.

American banks also take forever to transfer payments, which drives me mad. There is this massive amount of money just in limbo, a sort of shush cash pile, which the banks make interest off of while the owners of the money fume waiting for permission to use their own money. Grr. /rant

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

#428

Post by ahh »

patio11 wrote: post #355
wikibob wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many headcount do you have open for SRE?

Stripe doesn’t make the distinction between software engineers and SREs that some firms do. We’re all responsible for shipping things that work for our customers, regardless of whether we’re working on a product team or an infrastructure team. You can see our open roles at https://stripe.com/jobs/search?t=engineering (some corresponding to multiple people). They’re very real. We hire hundreds of engineers every year.

I should point out that the way you phrased it sounds very much like "Yeah, you're gonna carry a pager and like it. Deal with it." This, if true, entirely disqualifies Stripe for me as a potential employee; I am not interested in ever being on call, unless I'm getting an absurd slice of the upside that a company Stripe's size is not offering.

Do you want to clarify your phrasing or is that actually how you operate? :(

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

#429

Post by lisper »

carapace wrote: post #382
lisper wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally think of "rights" as a kind of useful fiction that gives a kind of psychological "leverage" in politics. Yes, of course. Rights are whatever we as a society decide they are. That's why I wrote, "should be considered a basic human right" rather than " is a basic human right." > One way I can interpret what you're saying is that governments shouldn't attempt to outlaw that. The devil is very much in the…

We're basically on the same page. (Which is nice: I respect you a lot.)

Thanks :-)

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

#430

Post by bluehatbrit »

mikeappell wrote: post #238
gen220 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I want to third this, this last week I've been integrating payments and I'll soon be adding in Connect as well. It took me quite a bit of back and forth on whether to use Checkout or Elements and I then ended up with 2 different recipes which resulted in the same thing but both highlighted different "important information".

Eventually I just picked one and it seemd to work out really well though. I've also recently been working with the slack docs and they're the total extreme, 8 different guides with similar names and various different deprecation notices around.

On the upside I felt like having both recipes was really useful to get a good overview of the options and possibilities. I'm really happy with my implementation now and I don't think slotting in Connect should be too tricky. Using the stipe docs was a breath of freshair compared to the Slack api docs which I've been using recently and have been an abysmal experience filled with hundreds of open browser tabs.

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