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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

#91

Post by tempnow987 »

kpennell wrote: post #48

FWIW - 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…

And for everyone of these stories is a story of a startup that screwed its employees during a buyout by another big firm while founders walked in the gravy.

I've found a lot of the "secrets" really aren't that. The ideas are usually pretty public, and the questions come down to ability to execute and integrate etc. Stripe has a good position from which to expand linked lines.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

BbzzbB wrote: post #62
fredsted wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by daenz »

zem wrote: post #90
jdavis703 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone can buy Amazon stock. Then you own some of the company and will benefit financially if the value goes up!

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

#94

Post by jonplackett »

jdavis703 wrote: post #87
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

Don’t confuse compensation with his wealth.

CEOs often have hardly any salary. But his shares nearly doubled in value over the pandemic - increasing by $84 billion.

Divide those billions per employee instead and they get $84,000 each. And Bezos is still as rich as he was before the pandemic.

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

#95

Post by polote »

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…

> Surely many others were brilliant contributors to Stripe's becoming a $95B unicorn, and staying one, beyond just the Collison Brothers.

From my experience working at several saas unicorns, in each companies there was 2-3 max people who where responsible for the success of the company. It is not that all others were useless but they all could have been replaced easily without having any impact in the success of the company.

I know this is difficult to hear as an employee but this is the truth. 99% of us are replaceable.

In my opinion and experience, working with skilled and nice people VS working with stupid and coward people for example has only an impact on the happiness of the employees but has no link with company performance. (company culture has no impact on company performance)

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

#96

Post by kareemsabri »

jdavis703 wrote: post #87
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

This is technically true, but of course there are many other methods of increasing warehouse worker pay beyond reallocating the CEO's compensation package. The pie is not zero sum. For example, stock splits often result in market cap increases due to more liquidity / access. Amazon could issue some (or more?) stock options to its employees in the warehouse or elsewhere if they desired to do so, and it's not a foregone conclusion it would adversely affect their ability to retain a top tier CEO. Who knows, perhaps Amazon would see better worker retention resulting in increased efficiency if they had a more generous package for warehouse workers (not making this claim, but I disagree with the zero sum framing here).

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

#97

Post by jeromegv »

daenz wrote: post #93
zem wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone can buy Amazon stock. Then you own some of the company and will benefit financially if the value goes up!

So you're advocating for employees to "buy" stock from where they work in order to get compensated?

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

#98

Post by daenz »

jeromegv wrote: post #97
daenz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can buy Amazon stock. Then you own some of the company and will benefit financially if the value goes up!

So you're advocating for employees to "buy" stock from where they work in order to get compensated?

>in order to get compensated

That language is based on the assumption that they're not already being compensated.

Their compensation is what they agreed to accept as payment for their labor. So they're already being compensated. If they want to "own" part of the company outside of this agreement, they need to buy a piece of it. If you want that as part of your employment agreement, negotiate it beforehand, either individually, or as part of a union effort. If you can't negotiate it through those efforts, then accept the fact that the employer believes they can get a better deal on the labor.

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

#99

Post by kareemsabri »

polote wrote: post #95
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…

> Surely many others were brilliant contributors to Stripe's becoming a $95B unicorn, and staying one, beyond just the Collison Brothers. From my experience working at several saas unicorns, in each companies there was 2-3 max people who where responsible for the success of the company. It is not that all others were useless but they all could have been replaced easily without having any impact in the success of the…

It's not difficult to hear, it's just not true. I don't know what sort of companies you've worked at where employees are completely fungible, but I've had the opposite experience, working with many talented and hard working people who make major contributions that help deliver hundreds of millions in revenue. Perhaps you joined them when they were already unicorns and the playbook / moat was already developed, but at startups there's nothing BUT the people. You think the Collisons are writing all the code and conceptualizing all the new products and figuring out how to take them to market, or creating and maintaining a high performing engineering culture, or [50,000 other things that need to happen to reach $95B]?

If that were true, it would be weird that companies work so hard to acquire, retain, and develop talent.

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

#100

Post by danielmarkbruce »

jonny_eh wrote: post #71
bcbrown wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think saying "a really amazing case of a business [that executed] better than everyone else" is dismissive and diminishing?

"Just" implies it wasn't a big deal.

Warren Buffett just focuses on business all day. Tom Brady just thinks about football all day.

The word 'just' is used in many cases to show someone did one thing and not other things. Doing lots of things is often just stupid.

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