Live data from Hacker News

Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

ft.com

51–60 of 151 posts

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#51

This certainly makes Stripe the most valuable private startup in the world. Where does Stripe rank among the world's most valuable private companies, though? It's easy to find lists of dubious quality like this: https://news.yahoo.com/10-most-valuable-private-companies-21... , but I'm sure there are more lurking. What are they?

[deleted]

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#53
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't know about these lists. Cargill valued at 40bn when wikipedia says they own 60bn in assets and profiting... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill

Cargill is an agritrader. They are a big company but definitely not as valuable as Stripe (look at some of the other ABCDs). Trading businesses never get high valuations. But they throw off real cash. Different strokes for different folks.

True.

They don't get high valuations because their earnings fluctuate a lot, and their average profit margin is like 1-3%, as compared to like stripe or apple which probably has like 30%.

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#54
Stripe are an engineering first company. You even see the Collison brothers posting here on a regular basis. Creating great tech is built into the DNA of the company.

Great to see them investing further in their home country as well, and mentioning that some of their global leadership team will be based in Dublin.

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#56

How is stripe not bigger than PP.. i swear few people use pp these days

Paypal is a different type of payment option. If I pay via paypal my details are hidden from the store.

If I type in my credit card on the site they might use stripe or evopay or something else I wouldn't know either way. My details are save on the site.

On digitalocean you can pay via credit card or paypal. If you pay via credit card they take money out for service automatically. If you use paypal you manually buy the amount if credit you wish.

Different markets...

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#57
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is totally wrong, considering Stripe has enormous negotiating leverage. My employer never bothers switching to any competitor because Stripe match any deal that their competitors present to us. Could you, a single person and $500m of seed funding match Stripe's prices? Not without hemorrhaging cash. One of Amazon's moats is low pricing as well, which can only be achieved with eye-watering scale (their margins ar…

Fun fact: I presented Stripe an opportunity to meet or beat a proposal by Braintree. They countered with a microscopic fee decrease and wanted to lock us into a 2 year deal. Not only was the offer from Braintree way better, they gave us a better deal on PayPal fees as well. Stripe’s focus on their supplementary offerings, like Billing (which used to be effectively free) and Checkout show that they’re trying to eat mo…

I think that's known as pricing discipline! The opposite of chasing business no matter what the margin.

It'll probably go down very well with potential investors.

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure that was then, but that changed over the years. stripe is not cheap, i'm pretty sure if somebody came with the same UX many would switch, us including. We are B2B and with postpaid so the customers are using Stripe to pay Invoices. There are zero charge backs or fraud but still have to pay high fees.

You'll notice I didn't mention price! Sure you'd like an identical service to Stripe for a lower fee but the moat is that doing what Stripe does isn't easy at all. You're paying for that fact.

Sure it is not easy, but it is also not impossible. We accepted card payments before stripe came. There are a couple of clones. Most of our customers pay with bank transfer and not online. If we would have all our invoices paid with stripe i'm sure we would try the other solutions. Don't get me wrong i'm not trashing stripe and they captured huge part of the market that is growing daily. But i'm not sure most people care about stripe, and if somebody else came along people would use the that other provider. In europe a lot of alternative payment methods are popular.

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#59
post #12

I'm building a non-profit and Stripe fees eat into donations. Are there any good Stripe alternatives out there?

Make it clear where to send checks on your donation page - and encourage people to use their bank’s bill pay. Usually free to them and to you.

What would a non profit need to communicate externally for people to make bank transfers directly into their accounts? Does bill pay require a routing number to setup or anything like that? What are the prerequisites for setting that up?

Re: Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds risky; Stripe's standard rate for Amex is 2.9%.

Yes, because according to published information, all Stripe Amex transactions are at a loss.

I really doubt that. Amex and Visa/MC interchange rates have converged substantially over the last decade - Visa in particular is now more expensive than Amex on their Visa Infinite interchange rates IIRC.

https://thepointsguy.com/news/amex-now-accepted-in-as-many-p...

> There is now little cost difference between Amex and other card networks today — Nilson reports only a .04% difference between Amex and Visa and Mastercard (2.3% vs. 2.26% respectively).

> Amex attributes this shift in part to its OptBlue program. This initiative began in 2014 and provides a way for small businesses to accept Amex cards through a third-party processor (so long as that processor is partnered with Amex).

Stripe is one of those OptBlue processors listed on https://www.americanexpress.com/us/merchant/optblue.html.

Post reply on HN