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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

#171

Post by philwelch »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #82
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 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. 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?

I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.

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

#172

Post by philwelch »

jdavis703 wrote: post #168
jonplackett wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The CEO of Amazon has a $212mm compensation package. That’s what I based my estimate off. And I’m sure we can all agree that $212mm is more than “hardly any salary.” I could retire on that amount, have my alma matter name a building after me and still have more money than I know what to do with.

Jeff Bezos isn't the CEO of Amazon anymore.

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

#173

Post by chrisgd »

kopochameleon wrote: post #152
chrisgd wrote: post #151

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

I don't find it hard to believe that "Twilio, but for money", could make more money than Twilio

Twilio but for accepting payments. Mostly for a bunch of DTC and subscription businesses that are not getting another round of VC funding

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

#174

Post by bogomipz »

pbreit wrote: post #115
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.

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

I realize Spotify was started in Europe but they opened an office in the US in 2010. That's 8 years before they went public. And within a year they had a mega office. They were regularly in the NYC real estate news for the next couple of years after as well for adding and outgrowing existing office space. Statista shows the US presence has almost double the Swedish employees.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/813906/spotify-number-em...

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

#175

Post by bradlys »

simpsond wrote: post #141
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.

Look at his sales in the last years. https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/amzn/insider-a... … he sells a few hundred thousand shares here and there, and frequently receives new shares. That is also a form income.

To be fair - many people in the billionaire class don’t sell any of their shares. The reason being that they can open pledged asset lines using those stocks - and never have to pay taxes as long as they never get called on their lines.

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

#176

Post by pjbeam »

philwelch wrote: post #171
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. 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? I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.

Same here.

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

#177

Post by pjbeam »

jdavis703 wrote: post #168
jonplackett wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The CEO of Amazon has a $212mm compensation package. That’s what I based my estimate off. And I’m sure we can all agree that $212mm is more than “hardly any salary.” I could retire on that amount, have my alma matter name a building after me and still have more money than I know what to do with.

Divide that by 10--that's Andy's 10 year RSU grant, not his annual comp.

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

#178

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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.

Whether ROI is positive or negative is not the correct thing to consider. Opportunity Cost is more important. Why would they create an Elixir client if there is something else they could do which has higher positive impact?

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

#179

Post by kolbe »

paulpauper wrote: post #67
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.

I don't know why you keep harping on this IPO pop idea. It doesn't apply to funding rounds that took place 30% ago on the Nasdaq and 70% ago in growth stage equity. Frankly, up until the pandemic, it was looking doubtful that the idea was even relevant anymore. Facebook's "pop" was -20%, and it's much easier to believe that a rush of retail frenzy in 20-21 is the anomaly, and not the rest of the past 10 years

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

#180

Post by bogomipz »

pbreit wrote: post #158
cmckn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, perhaps they're not predatory in usuary rate sense but I feel like using celebrities like A$AP Rocky and Keke Palmer to appeal to Gen Z to load up on consumer debt feels a bit questionable.
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