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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

#111

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #107
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. The reality is that it's just not possible to start these kinds of Unicorn companies anywhere except in the USA. The EU's extreme policies contribute to an overwhelming burden of tax and employment regulations, which results in risk-averseness. So entrepreneurial Europeans go to USA to start their company.

That thesis is hard to square with the fact that it’s not that these unicorns are started in the US, it’s that they are almost all started in one metropolitan area . The distinguishing factors here aren’t simply European regulations and taxes.

It's a matter of locality sure. But also access. SF and NYC have easy access to startup incubators and venture capital. Do you have a great idea and looking for an angel to give it a chance? You'll probably find it in New York or San Francisco. Pretty unlikely in Munich or Paris.

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

#112

Post by CPLX »

daenz wrote: post #98
jeromegv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ind…

No post body was provided.

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

#113

Post by reducesuffering »

andy_ppp wrote: post #78
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've used their Golang API client as inspiration many times in my own code For the last five years, I’ve requested an Elixir client. I wish they would either build one or greatly improve the docs for people who aren’t using one of their first party API client libraries. It’s not like Stripe lacks the resources. In fact an argument could be made that ignoring all but the most popular handful of languages runs counte…

Completely agree, I also had this problem but I guess that is one downsides of using a language that isn't particularly mainstream. Still with thousands of programmers it would be worth the return on the small investment.

They have libraries for: iOS, Android, React Native, Javascript, Ruby, Python, Go, PHP, Java, .NET. Have you seen how prevalent Elixir is statistically? It's actually pretty niche and downtrending[0]. Where do you draw the line? Where's the Nix, Julia, Nim, Rust, and Crystal libraries? It's good to express the desire for it so that it might be next in line, but these comments make it seem like it's an expectation, even when those libraries are all open source and are able to be whipped up by the community. You're correct that these are the downsides in building on something that isn't very mainstream.

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=java%2Cjavasc...

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

#114

Post by choppaface »

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…

“Founder Lore” like this, especially from Forbes, assumes an audience of investors who have money and non-investors who have essentially no power. These articles are purely about marketing and looking for lift among those who have money. The list of names who were involved in creating the article are a lot more important than the content.

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

#115

Post by pbreit »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #105
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…

> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. The reality is that it's just not possible to start these kinds of Unicorn companies anywhere except in the USA. The EU's extreme policies contribute to an overwhelming burden of tax and employment regulations, which results in risk-averseness. So entrepreneurial Europeans go to USA to start their company.

Checkout.com, Klarna, Revolut, Transferwise, Mollie, Deliveroo, Spotify, Hopin, Trustly.

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

#116

Post by pbreit »

kareemsabri wrote: post #99
polote wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think polote is mostly right.

"You think the Collisons are... creating and maintaining a high performing engineering culture"

Yes.

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

#117

Post by polote »

Sebguer wrote: post #110
polote wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be very talented and do a ton of work without having a bigger business impact than another person doing 50% less than you. At the end whether you have a design system, if you have infinite scalability, if you use node or Ruby, having that feature or that other feature it doesn't matter. The only thing that matter is the revenue the company make. If what matters was the people then ngo would be unicorns

I'm curious where you've worked to be so confident in this opinion.

At 4 saas b2b unicorns mostly between 5m and 50m arr.

+ interviews with people working in hr and culture at other ones.

And to give you more concrete data, the significant employees where :

1. The ceo founder (work hard play hard culture) b2b enterprise martech

2. The ceo founder + cto founder (chill + excellence culture) b2b enterprise productivity software

3. The ceo founder + vp of sales (micro management culture) b2b enterprise martech

4. The ceo founder ( chill + low expectation culture) b2b smb martech

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

#118

Post by pbreit »

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.

It's too bad that most of the gains will accrue to private, wealthy investors instead of common public investors.

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

#119

Post by gondo »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #39
samwillis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so much, Stripes innovation was making it so much easter to integrate a payment api. Paddles innovation is making international tax/vat a complete none issue to new businesses. They are doing everything small business want to make online digital goods sales painless from an admin point of view.

As someone currently looking exactly at this kind of provider, I’m curious about other Paddle competitors whose price model is only revenue based, without a fixed monthly fee. Gumroad is another merchant of records, but developer documentation is worse, fees are higher and it seems to support only USD pricing. Other alternatives requires a somewhat hefty monthly fee, which is a non starter for my use case.

I am not sure if you meant to imply the opposite, but Paddle's price model IS only revenue based.
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