Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#51

Post by thoraway1010 » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

twakefield wrote: post #32

pc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. This is in fact a problem area that our Billing ( https://stripe.com/billing ) team is actively thinking about. You should reach out to ark@stripe.com if you want to discuss -- he can connect you with the right folks.

There is a pretty simple feature that would alleviate a lot of pain with Stripe’s billing service when invoicing enterprises - allow for attaching a pdf of the invoice in the automated email. Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.

It's not just enterprise - many small / mid size places are much much happier (myself included) with an invoice attached.

AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#52

Post by thoraway1010 » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

xoxoy wrote: post #19

Just me or does anyone else think there’s going to be a reckoning in interchange regulation in the US like Europe soon? Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace. The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi…

My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#53

Post by thoraway1010 » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #48

pc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has , I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.

Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes),…

The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up.

So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.

I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.

Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.

So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#54

Post by rmorey » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #50

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this just spam? The linked article is only tangentially related to stripe, and makes no clear argument against anything in specific. It’s a handy wavy “they took our rights!” but never presents an example. The whole thing almost reads like a scam ad you see on Craigslist or in your spam folder

No it’s not spam. Stripe stopped payments to Gab, which is mentioned in the article in the greater context of Silicon Valley companies having too much power in our society, controlling our speech/thoughts/politics/values. We should not put trust in Stripe and give them the same undue power given to Visa and MasterCard over payments in our society, unless they refuse to abuse that power.

Cry me a river, Stripe isn’t the government. Gab is clearly a platform for hatred, and it was totally in their purview to drop them as a customer - and oh look: Gab’s still here anyway. Baloney.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#55

Post by xoxoy » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 5:43 AM UTC

thoraway1010 wrote: post #52

xoxoy wrote: post #19

Just me or does anyone else think there’s going to be a reckoning in interchange regulation in the US like Europe soon? Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace. The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi…

My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.

there’s probably very little fraud with touchless payments like Apple Pay - most issuers require some verification to add the card to a phone in the first place. if that becomes a growing % of in person payments i don’t see the justification for high card present rates.

also some data suggests people have moved to more debit transactions during Covid over credit which are cheaper to process anyway and usually means less fraud - so maintaining a fixed processing rate means margins for processors are probably even better right now

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#56

Post by andrewxdiamond » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 5:52 AM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #50

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this just spam? The linked article is only tangentially related to stripe, and makes no clear argument against anything in specific. It’s a handy wavy “they took our rights!” but never presents an example. The whole thing almost reads like a scam ad you see on Craigslist or in your spam folder

No it’s not spam. Stripe stopped payments to Gab, which is mentioned in the article in the greater context of Silicon Valley companies having too much power in our society, controlling our speech/thoughts/politics/values. We should not put trust in Stripe and give them the same undue power given to Visa and MasterCard over payments in our society, unless they refuse to abuse that power.

Stripe pulled out of Gab because they violated their policies on adult content. This has nothing to do with conservatives or hate speech.

And even if it was to do with the hate speech, have you considered the rights of the companies providing these services? I am sure there are many Jewish people inside of Microsoft, and plenty on Azure. You would force those people to provide services to someone who actively calls for their humiliation or even death?

The US has already had this discussion decades ago. Hate is not a protected class of citizen, you absolutely can push out people who deserve to be outcasts.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#57

Post by moneywoes » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 6:01 AM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #39

What are some good alternatives to Stripe that don't engage in censorship of speech ( https://reclaimthenet.org/andrew-torba-free-speech/ )? I find the notion that a payment utility service can block a customer based on their speech/thoughts/political views to be absolutely abhorrent. It is no different from when Visa and Mastercard blocked payments to Wikileaks ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07…

Wrong thread?

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#58

Post by closeparen » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 6:49 AM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #48

pc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has , I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.

Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes),…

At the time EC2 became popular, self-service rental of virtual machines was already a well-established business, but it was called "VPS" instead of "cloud."

Uploading source code to your provider and letting them figure out how to serve HTTP traffic from it was also a dominant pattern, but was called "shared PHP hosting" instead of "serverless."

I'm not even old. But I guess most people my age probably did not have HostGator accounts when they were 11...

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#59

Post by bigyikes » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #58

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes),…

At the time EC2 became popular, self-service rental of virtual machines was already a well-established business, but it was called "VPS" instead of "cloud." Uploading source code to your provider and letting them figure out how to serve HTTP traffic from it was also a dominant pattern, but was called "shared PHP hosting" instead of "serverless." I'm not even old. But I guess most people my age probably did not have H…

You have me beat, I don’t think I got my HostGator account until I was 13. Also not old.

My girlfriend got a traditional CPanel hosting setup a couple of months ago. Being so caught up in my tech bubble, I kind of forgot such quaint things existed.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I’m bothering to write a service with JavaScript, fiddling with webpack, or deploying to Digital Ocean or Heroku or some other overpriced tech-hype VPS service, when I could instead simply drag and drop a .php file into FileZilla and get on with my day?

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#60

Post by shivasword » Thu, Aug 06, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #56

throwawaysea wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not spam. Stripe stopped payments to Gab, which is mentioned in the article in the greater context of Silicon Valley companies having too much power in our society, controlling our speech/thoughts/politics/values. We should not put trust in Stripe and give them the same undue power given to Visa and MasterCard over payments in our society, unless they refuse to abuse that power.

Stripe pulled out of Gab because they violated their policies on adult content. This has nothing to do with conservatives or hate speech. And even if it was to do with the hate speech, have you considered the rights of the companies providing these services? I am sure there are many Jewish people inside of Microsoft, and plenty on Azure. You would force those people to provide services to someone who actively calls f…

Wouldn't it be easy to destroy a competitor or startup with racist bots? Anti-competitive behavior seems to be the modus operandi of west coast capital.