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Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

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Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#191

Post by throwawayzRUU6f »

paxys wrote: post #176
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #47

Every time I see one of these announcements, the valuations go up and up and up and up. I remember not long ago being wowed by a 1B acquisition. That was called a unicorn because of how incredible it was. And now we're at 29B. Is this just because money is all a joke?

Back when 1B acquisitions were considered incredible most of the world did not know what the internet was. If the size of the pie grows 30X the amount of money in it will as well.

Just several years ago, Facebook IPO-ed at ~$90B valuation, before sliding all the way down to ~$45B. Facebook was already a giant global corporation with close to a billion active users, nearly all of them from western countries.

AfterPay's valuation puts it at two thirds of mid-2012 Facebook. Up until now, I've never heard of them

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#192

Post by jeeeb »

nsonha wrote: post #163
djrobstep wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're underselling Sydney a bit there - there is a google campus, Atlassian, and a lot of finance companies offering high salaries. Not SV level, but pretty close. Melbourne is pretty decent for high end tech jobs, but not as good as Sydney. Certainly real estate is extremely expensive and broken, but it's not like New Zealand where the real estate is almost as expensive but the pay is much lower. I had to l…

> a lot of finance companies offering high salaries. Not SV level, but pretty close. How close? let's say AUD 300k (I'm honestly curious, does Optiver/Atlassian/Google even pay that much here?) which is a mind-blowing salary in Australia, tops all kinds of taxes, it converts to USD 220K give or take, adjusted for higher taxes and cost of living, down to about 200k. So a top earner 0.1% in Sydney makes as much as a st…

I’m not overly familiar with US salaries but it looks to me like you’re comparing net salary for a high paid job in Sydney, to gross salary for a FAANG role in SF.

Presumably they have to pay taxes and have a high cost of living as well :)

I don’t know how accurate it is but the 2020 SO developer survey puts the median salary for an engineering manager in the US at $152k and an SRE at $140K.

In my experience that’s maybe slightly higher than going rates in Melbourne and probably about the same as Sydney.

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#193

Post by ComputerGuru »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #106
Clewza313 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia has gone 20+ years without a recession, meaning many people have grown up without ever seeing anything except full employment and house prices going up up up. It's thus been a "safe bet" to leverage yourself up to your eyeballs to get on that "property ladder", and while many (including myself) thought this would finally pop last year with COVID, nope, after the briefest hiccup the property market has gone…

If you look at interest rates from 1990 to now, and average household debt, it's easy to see why the economy has been up up up up. People have been spending way more money than they make for 30 years in Australia. That will make any economy boom. The difficult thing is... when does it stop? The above could have been said 10 years ago, just replace the 3 with a 2. Should it have stopped then? Now? In 10 more years?

That type of economy (powered by extreme consumerism beyond the customers’ means) isn’t unique to Australia. It’s only sustainable so long as the target population continues to increase (kind of like social security). The forecasted global population drop that will hit home in the next 15-20 years is going to completely destroy economies propped-up by fake money.

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#194

Post by elvinyung »

systemvoltage wrote: post #101
chrisseaton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being more charitable, I think it's marketed as a way for people who budget monthly to spread their charges.

The point is that if they're stretching payments over multiple weeks/months then they can't afford it.

Would you say the same about a house? A car?

You might say that buying a house on credit isn't frivolous but a pair of shoes on credit is, but where do you draw the line in the middle?

(Disclaimer: I work at Square, but I am otherwise completely uninvolved with this acquisition or product area.)

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#195

Post by redact207 »

LilBytes wrote: post #186
shell0x wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not American, so I have less insight than you perhaps, but I'd say America is much more affordable than Australia. In Australia most jobs are in Sydney and Melbourne. Perth is mostly for mining and Brisbane doesn't have many tech jobs. Real estate prices in Sydney and Melbourne are in the million(s), but incomes are ~100+k AUD. Some people earn 200k+ as a principal engineer, but that's pretty much it. In America…

Brisbane has plenty of tech jobs. I'm netting $250,000 inc bonuses as an SRE and the markets rife for oppertunity. Not FAANG either.

woah, you guys have any openings?

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#196

Post by hashmush »

shell0x wrote: post #93
ttam wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, Klarna, a Swedish-founded company, is pretty big in the BNPL market according to https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-buy-now-pay-later-wave... "In Sweden, home to BNPL provider Klarna, installments accounted for 23% of e-commerce transactions last year."

Sorry, I should have said Germany instead of Europe since the European market is pretty diverse. The German word for debt is schuld(Schulden) , which has the same meaning as guilt and is associated with something bad.

Unsurprisingly, the same word in Swedish is skuld, with the same double meaning.

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#197

Post by kiwijamo »

yardstick wrote: post #180
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the cards my bank offers seem that enticing: https://www.kiwibank.co.nz/personal-banking/credit-cards/rat...

It’s a shame the NZ market hates credit cards so much. In the UK they are widely accepted - as in I struggle to think of a shop that didn’t accept them. Including dairies and food trucks (thanks Square!). Btw I find it weird that EFTPOS cards have no annual fee, but debit cards do, but some credit cards don’t (eg ASB Visa Light has no ongoing fees). I sometimes have to pay £1 via card when in a shop activating a serv…

In New Zealand, the local EFTPOS network is basically a home-grown network that the major NZ banks established in the 1980s's and have continued operating on a shoe-string budget ever since. For the most part merchants only have to pay a low fixed cost to access the network, whereas customers usually don't pay a fee (as most banks either bundle free EFTPOS transactions in a fixed monthly fee package or even offer it for free entirely for certain account products).

Visa/Mastercard on the other hand has Merchants paying 1-3% of all transactions as well as customers paying an annual fee (usually around $25 or so for standard non-reward cards but can go up to hundreds of dollars for higher end cards) for many card products (so a tidy profit from the merchants as well as some annual top-up from the customers).

From a typical New Zealand merchant's perspective it doesn't always make sense to offer Visa/Mastercard if they can decide to only accept EFTPOS cards (which almost everyone in New Zealand has) and keep the 1-3% that they would otherwise lose to Visa/Mastercard.

Visa/Mastercard offer more modern benefits (e.g. Paywave) which is not offered by EFTPOS which I suspect is partly due to the fact New Zealand's EFTPOS network does not generate much of its own income (just the small fees merchants pay to access the network I believe) so they just continue with the minimum amount of investment.

Personally I have an zero-fee American Express card that earns Air New Zealand Airpoints. As a fallback at merchants that don't accept Amex, I have a Wise (ex TransferWise) Mastercard on my phone (for NFC payments) as well as a physical Kiwibank Visa card. When none of these are accepted I fall back on to my EFTPOS card which is more or less on par with cash in New Zealand. I estimate around 50% of my expenses are on Amex, 10% on Visa/Mastercard and the balance through EFTPOS with the occasional cash for markets and the like.

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#198

Post by extraAccount »

hnick wrote: post #164
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an early 20s Kiwi zoomer, so somewhat similar demographic. I don't have a credit card and see no point in it. I use a debit card for everything. I don't think most of my friends have credit cards either, but maybe they do and I don't notice.

Insurance, points, cashback, chargebacks. It's also a one month interest free float of your funds if you pay in full each month, meaning you earn some interest. I know some debit cards are getting closer to credit cards in these areas but at least when I first got one, they were just plastic cash. You spend it you lose it, the bank won't support you with clawing it back.

I read about this online, but it seems to be mainly a US only feature. Credit cards in my country have very very little benefits of using them apart from the usual feature of paying a lot and paying it back later. There is very little incentive to get one. Our banks are probably more risk-averse or don't want to bother with partnering with airlines, insurances, etc for points.

The principle is also using the bank's money, not your money. So you make a purchase and now you owe the bank. Unless I am very strapped for money or there is an incentive program, I see little use in using one.

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#199

Post by sillysaurusx »

jmeister wrote: post #185
sillysaurusx wrote: post #34

I got hopeful when I read "Scheme Implementation," but unfortunately lisp for financial services doesn't seem to be the goal. Maybe someday.

Brazil’s Nubank is all-in on clojure: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36297/nubank-buys-firm-... Sweden’s Klarna seems to be using Clojure along with other FP languages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23379264

This is awesome! Thank you for pointing out some cool finance-related companies that use lisp.

Re: Square to acquire Afterpay for $29B

#200

Post by Toine »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #188
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #47

Every time I see one of these announcements, the valuations go up and up and up and up. I remember not long ago being wowed by a 1B acquisition. That was called a unicorn because of how incredible it was. And now we're at 29B. Is this just because money is all a joke?

Yes money is all a joke right now. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

Is that the amount of cash circulating right now ? That is terrifying...
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