I find it hard to believe they should be worth more than Twilio. They get a cut of revenue but they are still developer focused, which limits ultimate upside. It is about making developers lives easier not about building a network that scales
The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
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Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#152I find it hard to believe they should be worth more than Twilio. They get a cut of revenue but they are still developer focused, which limits ultimate upside. It is about making developers lives easier not about building a network that scales
I don't find it hard to believe that "Twilio, but for money", could make more money than Twilio
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#153It'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.
I've learned over the years that most people overlook the bottom part of the iceberg.
Stripe nailed everything else about the business. They made everything that sucked about old credit card processors good. It wasn't just the transaction. It was everything that led up to it (simple integration, debugging, good dev documentation, sane APIs, etc) and everything after. Eventually, they even made the transactions better with alternative methods, fraud, and recurring payment pass-through.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#154Earlier 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?
Some employees negotiate contracts where they are paid partially or fully in stock. Other employees negotiate contracts where they are paid all in cash. A lot of people don't want to wait for a payout or take on risk.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not hearing about Klarna and Deliveroo is surprising. Klarna is everywhere I turn in the US.
Klarna is like a layaway program? I'm like the GP never heard of these companies other than Spotify and the Klarna website isn't very helpful
It’s kind of like a payday loan type of micro-lending that integrates with merchants similarly to PayPal. I’ve never understood the appeal, it feels super predatory. But most creditors do, I guess. I first heard of it a few years ago when they did a huge ad campaign with a lot of the popular queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#156FWIW - 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…
As a data point, I interviewed recently for a leadership role and had a somewhat similar experience to the link you provided. A change of the interviewer at the last minute, and the interviewer seemed to have a particular answer in their mind and was not open to engaging.
I can understand when it comes to interviewing for a leadership position, some of the interview may be based on 'fit' rather than just the display of problem solving skills w.r.t the interview question, but to me it didn't seem like they were particularly interested in testing either. I have 10+ years of experience operating in a large $XB FinTech and my expertise was an almost exact match for the work the position they were looking to hire.
I'd like to think that it was that specific group within Stripe that had that issue, but the posts on Hacker news have me thinking otherwise.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not hearing about Klarna and Deliveroo is surprising. Klarna is everywhere I turn in the US.
Klarna is like a layaway program? I'm like the GP never heard of these companies other than Spotify and the Klarna website isn't very helpful
Layaway is the opposite: pay now, buy later.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Klarna is like a layaway program? I'm like the GP never heard of these companies other than Spotify and the Klarna website isn't very helpful
It’s kind of like a payday loan type of micro-lending that integrates with merchants similarly to PayPal. I’ve never understood the appeal, it feels super predatory. But most creditors do, I guess. I first heard of it a few years ago when they did a huge ad campaign with a lot of the popular queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race.
It’s frequently way less predatory: merchants pays the finance charges and payoff time is much shorter.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Checkout.com, Klarna, Revolut, Transferwise, Mollie, Deliveroo, Spotify, Hopin, Trustly.
So that's the full list of successful startups for a developed economy polity with twice the population of America over the past 25 years... Not exactly impressive.
But possible.
Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ev…
I don't think it's down trending at all. Just look at the most recent Hiring thread on this forum!
Based on what I've been seeing, Elixir has been growing faster the past year or two than it was previously. Elixir Forum's posts and active users are going up and that's where people tend to ask their questions, rather than Stack Overflow. In fact, the lack of support from companies like Stripe is the single top complaint I hear. Most users are very happy with the language, tooling and community.
FWIW, I'd like to see a Stripe Rust lib, also. But it's far more important to just be make the guides better for people who aren't using a Stripe API client and maybe even make a guide for making a compliant API client. That way, you can be programming in something truly niche like Janet and still have a great experience with Stripe.
The information is all there, but it takes way more digging than it should to get at it.