> Wordlessly offered a credit card reader, Collison says he’d rather pay cash. Wonder why. Competitors’ device? Privacy concerns?
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The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
81–90 of 292 posts
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#82I 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 think that this is not just a story-telling problem.
It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees.
Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions made in UK / US legal circles since before the USA was a USA.
These decisions have been part of 200 years of the most phenomenal growth in global human wealth ever, so there is a lot of baby in the bathwater. But look at say the German mittelstand - a different approach to local business banking. And compare european social-democracy to US welfare states.
There is a lot of room and flexibility between "totally dampen growth and human innovation" and "more equal sharing of life's burdens".
Oh and lest we forget, it is in the main scientific advances that have bought us the last 200 years, not founders or entrepreneurs, and those advances were funded almost fully by government out of ... tax revenue. So the last 200 years of growth can be seen as a story of government funded and directed scientific achievement, given reign to rollout in a benign business climate, and the workforce provided via mass education and health programs, all of which funded by taxing the successful companies.
Is that an over simplification - hell yes. But so is "young founder has great idea and works hard".
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
EU generally can’t make good (tech) legislation. Cookie law is the goto example. It’s too complicated. Too many cooks.
More like: US companies can't handle good tech legislation, which the EU makes. I enjoy my rights. And "cookie law" is very simple.
If your idea of "good legislation" is "bureaucratic hellpit that promises the solution to all problems to the electorate, but in reality just makes things slightly more expensive to big companies and destroys any chance of smaller players to disrupt the market", then yes, EU legislation is great.
Cookie law is "simple", but what does it achieve? How are our lives better after knowing that every website uses cookies? Is there any website you thought "oh wow, they are telling me they are using cookies, this totally changes my perception of how they operate!"?
GDPR is the same: did it make any difference in the amount of surveillance capitalism we are subject to? No! Did it make any of the sites you use to reduce the amount of data collected? No! Did it make money for a fuckton of lawyers who went after Small/Medium Businesses who had a website and had no idea if they were complying or not, leading the majority of them to just close down and move to Facebook Pages? Of course it did!
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#84FWIW - Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264 I know Stripe is a darling YC company but if you look for it, you can find some usually anonymous detractors. "+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of…
> but if you look for it, you can find some usually anonymous detractors. Seems like a vacuous statement. Isn’t that true of anything/anyone in life?
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Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#85It's a really amazing case of a business going into a crowded space and building a solution to what anyone would have called a thoroughly-solved problem and still managed to disrupt it. They didn't really "invent" anything or make a new market, they just did something better than everyone else. And, I think, got incredibly lucky with entering the market at the exact right time.
While I see your point, I went through several scammy credit card processing solutions (one from an intuit subsidiary, one from a local bank) back around 2013 before I found stripe. You wouldn’t think that “it’s easy to use and not scammy” Would have been an innovation, but at that stage, I think it was.
Man, we got burned with a "contracted" credit card solution, complete with horrible support, service and billing.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#86I 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 think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…
To an O(n) rounding error he also has 0 dollar and 100000000 employees
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#87I 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 think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…
If Amazon’s board decided to reallocate the CEO’s compensation package and grant it to employees, it would increase the entry level salaries of warehouse workers from $18/hour to $18.45/hour.
Not a bad bump, but also historically low by Amazon pay bumps. But it’s also not going to solve income inequality… And very likely there are few people qualified to be CEO of Amazon who’d do the job for $18.45/hour.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#88What the hell is a unicorn at this point? Just say "successful private company". Because of the craziness in valuations, $1B pre-public isn't that rare any more, so "unicorn" is not apt. But Crunchbase says they've had 20+ funding rounds, and there should be some limit at the D or E round.
Nothing against Stripe, Stripe is great.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…
If Amazon’s board decided to reallocate the CEO’s compensation package and grant it to employees, it would increase the entry level salaries of warehouse workers from $18/hour to $18.45/hour. Not a bad bump, but also historically low by Amazon pay bumps. But it’s also not going to solve income inequality… And very likely there are few people qualified to be CEO of Amazon who’d do the job for $18.45/hour.
Not to mention the financial fallout of not having an experienced leader at the helm. Sure, it would coast for awhile without a leader, and I'm sure someone will try to explain to me how it could be run completely democratically, but eventually a competitor with a competent leader would eat their lunch.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…
If Amazon’s board decided to reallocate the CEO’s compensation package and grant it to employees, it would increase the entry level salaries of warehouse workers from $18/hour to $18.45/hour. Not a bad bump, but also historically low by Amazon pay bumps. But it’s also not going to solve income inequality… And very likely there are few people qualified to be CEO of Amazon who’d do the job for $18.45/hour.
the issue here is owner compensation, not CEO compensation. that is, wealth accrued by virtue of "owning" a company that other people are merely "employees" adding value to, but not receiving any of that value.