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The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

forbes.com

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Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#61

Post by noneeeed »

samwillis wrote: post #11
mooktakim wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand what Paddle offers to SaaS. As a dev I thought maybe easier integration. But it doesn't seem all that different from Stripe Invoice.

My understanding is that Paddle becomes a middle man in the transaction taking on all international tax responsibility. They pay you out after paying all tax/vat local to the customer. This massively simplifies international sales, particularly for EU business. I also believe that an awful lot of small online SASS and digital good sales by companies are committing (unintentional) tax fraud in the countries of their c…

I'm so glad I've read this today. I've been thinking about building a little SaaS product and one of the aspects putting me off was the VAT/Sales Tax problem. I'm a stickler for the rules, I don't feel comfortable YOLOing something like that the way so many seem to be.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#62

Post by BbzzbB »

fredsted wrote: post #18
samwillis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Paddle becomes a middle man in the transaction taking on all international tax responsibility. They pay you out after paying all tax/vat local to the customer. This massively simplifies international sales, particularly for EU business. I also believe that an awful lot of small online SASS and digital good sales by companies are committing (unintentional) tax fraud in the countries of their c…

Exactly. Paddle saves me so much time and money. I couldn’t even imagine what my accountant would bill for something similar.

Does the 5% + 50c include the whole payment process on top of the tax-handling? As in, the alternative is paying 2-3% anyway to someone like Stripe for integrating payments, so that the cost of off-loading all int'l VAT and co headaches is around 2-3% (the 50c is negligible for my use case)?

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#63

Post by puranjay »

rvz wrote: post #30
newaccount2021 wrote: post #8

absolutely ZERO chance they could get a $95B valuation in public markets today HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... if Stripe went public today, I would say they would be lucky to crest at a $30B valuation, even that may be lofty...PayPal has 3x market share as Stripe and has a $92B valuation

> HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... Exactly. The hype squad have been screaming about the valuations of these companies and now look at them as soon as they IPOed. Neither of them are profitable companies. It just means the VCs, insiders and everyone else who got was in before the IPO made a windfall in their stock and by now cashed out. The news hypin…

I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high school/college at 18-22 and start making money - “being profitable”, so to speak.

There are starups right now that were founded before 2010, went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years time

That’s 18-20 years without a profit!?!

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#64

Post by newaccount2021 »

puranjay wrote: post #63
rvz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... Exactly. The hype squad have been screaming about the valuations of these companies and now look at them as soon as they IPOed. Neither of them are profitable companies. It just means the VCs, insiders and everyone else who got was in before the IPO made a windfall in their stock and by now cashed out. The news hypin…

I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high school/college at 18-22 and start making money - “being profitable”, so to speak. There are starups right now that were founded before 2010, went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years time That’s 18-20 years without a profit!?!

No post body was provided.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#65

Post by paulpauper »

kareemsabri wrote: post #60

I know the Collisons are brilliant founders and I have long admired Stripe (I've used their Golang API client as inspiration many times in my own code) but it's kind of unfortunate how founder lore really minimizes employees. Stripe has 4,000 people working there, this article mentions only two other employees in passing (the CPO and CFO). Surely many others were brilliant contributors to Stripe's becoming a $95B uni…

I am sure a good chunk of those employees are millionaires will will become millionaires after the IPO.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#66

Post by paulpauper »

m00dy wrote: post #20

Let's see what will happen for them in this bear market.

The Nasdaq fell as much as it did during Covid, but without any obvious cause or catalyst for the selling. the bear market is probably over now. More likely this is the bottom.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#67

Post by paulpauper »

newaccount2021 wrote: post #8

absolutely ZERO chance they could get a $95B valuation in public markets today HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... if Stripe went public today, I would say they would be lucky to crest at a $30B valuation, even that may be lofty...PayPal has 3x market share as Stripe and has a $92B valuation

Stipe is in a way better position than Lyft and Peloton ever were

The $90 billion is without the IPO pop. It would be worth $90 billion after the IPO pop maybe today. In late 2021, maybe $120 billion.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#68

Post by paulpauper »

ElFitz wrote: post #45
newaccount2021 wrote: post #8

absolutely ZERO chance they could get a $95B valuation in public markets today HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... if Stripe went public today, I would say they would be lucky to crest at a $30B valuation, even that may be lofty...PayPal has 3x market share as Stripe and has a $92B valuation

I have no idea on how to figure out a startup’s valuation. But I wouldn’t compare an infrastructure / platform like Stripe to B2C nice-to-haves for rich-ish people like Uber or Lyft or cute expensive jokes like Peloton.

yeah, Stipe is a not something that can be dismissed as a fad like Palaton. no comparison.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#69

Post by SilverBirch »

lambda_lord wrote: post #37

Is it unusual for a successful company like Stripe to take so long to go public? It seems like their house is in order, and they are profitable, but employees aren't liquid.

I think this is almost a case of a company being too successful. The general pattern is that you grow, you raise money, you grow, you raise money, you grow, your IPO. At each stage of growth there's a different investor. Initially you have Angels and YC style places. Then you have various stages of VC, then you finally have the public market.

What normally happens is that you become too big and that's when VCs step out of the way, you IPO and everyone takes their gains. But in the case of stripe you have $100Bn company that the VCs will still happily plough money into. So there's no reason to IPO. You can get all the liquidity you need privately. On top of that, Stripe doesn't really need capital, they aren't some uber buying market share with loss making. They are real SAAS, they can scale and see a drop in their earnings:cost ratio.

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