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The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

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

#191

Post by danielmarkbruce »

tootie wrote: post #5

It'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.

Is that amazing? It might actually be the standard way.

Google - better search. Search was "solved", just not well. Zoom - better video chat. It was "solved", not well. Amazon - they've never done anything original, always just better. Online books was done, colo servers were a thing. Apple - same. Telsa - better electric cars. Airbnb - better short term rental market. Salesforce - better CRM. Snowflake - better data warehouse.

And on and on and on. It seems nobody actually wants new things. They seem to want better on some dimension.

There are exceptions, but they are few.

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

#192

Post by danielmarkbruce »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #181
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"just" has an implication, "only" or "solely" would be more neutral words.

Nope, people say "just" all the time for this case. You might think they should use "only" or "solely", but they say "just" frequently.

Sometimes "just" does have an implication.

If you assume the writer isn't being a dick, it's easy to see what they meant.

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

#193

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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.

It's about how and why the deal was structured that way.

Amazon is structured so that there is net 100,000 dollars of wealth in the deal betweeen you and him that goes to him (whatever goes to you, he also gets 100k.

I am sure you have no complaints, but why the 100k? why can't that be 50k to him and 50k to you.? Or 33, 33 and 33 extra in tax? or ...

And is the particular arrangement something that is fundamental and inviolable to creating the wealth Amazon did? Or is it just that because it was that way Amazon could beat the alternative universe Amazon ?

what is the phase space of "still generate wealth" and "society looks different"?

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

#194

Post by jollofricepeas »

notfromhere wrote: post #183
philwelch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

By its nature, you get more value out of an employee than you pay in wages. Otherwise, there would be no point to hiring anyone.

Exactly.

Fundamentally, tech workers don’t seem to understand this point mainly because they are making more money than “everyone else.”

The other reason is that we as humans don’t understand big numbers. Big ape brains can’t understand the gap between $1 million and $1 billion let alone 100 billion.

If software engineers would have banded together a long time ago to get a larger piece of the pie like professional athletes, then….

- Senior engineers would make NFL wages

- And quants would be making NBA/NFL wages

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

#195

Post by greenhorn123 »

jhugo wrote: post #150
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I realise it's maybe clear from the context of the thread, but it's worth reiterating that this is only true for unicorn-scale. There is plenty of startup capital available for good ideas in both Paris and Munich as well as many other European cities, they are just unlikely to breed unicorns.

And if perchance they do some US company will buy them.

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

#196

Post by franciscop »

samwillis wrote: post #21
encoderer wrote: post #2

Paddle buying ProfitWell is big. Paddle would also take over all my billing support. I don’t want to do a billing migration right now but if I did I probably would switch to Paddle. The first real contender to Stripe in a long time.

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.

Out of curiosity, how about https://stripe.com/tax? Do they compare similarly? I was considering using Stripe ~1 year ago and my only stopper was exactly international taxes, but it seems like they've integrated tax collection since then?

Disclaimer: I'm joining Stripe in a month :)

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

#197

Post by CallMeJim »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #193
philwelch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's about how and why the deal was structured that way. Amazon is structured so that there is net 100,000 dollars of wealth in the deal betweeen you and him that goes to him (whatever goes to you, he also gets 100k. I am sure you have no complaints, but why the 100k? why can't that be 50k to him and 50k to you.? Or 33, 33 and 33 extra in tax? or ... And is the particular arrangement something that is fundamental and…

Do you genuinely believe that dividing net wealth by total employees gives a meaningful figure?

If Amazon employed me tomorrow, would their revenue immediately and automatically increase by $100k?

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

#198

Post by lifeisstillgood »

CallMeJim wrote: post #197
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about how and why the deal was structured that way. Amazon is structured so that there is net 100,000 dollars of wealth in the deal betweeen you and him that goes to him (whatever goes to you, he also gets 100k. I am sure you have no complaints, but why the 100k? why can't that be 50k to him and 50k to you.? Or 33, 33 and 33 extra in tax? or ... And is the particular arrangement something that is fundamental and…

Do you genuinely believe that dividing net wealth by total employees gives a meaningful figure? If Amazon employed me tomorrow, would their revenue immediately and automatically increase by $100k?

That depends on what the figure is used for. That's almost like "do you really believe in statistics"

It is always useful for fish to ask what is water.

Otherwise people accept knee-jerk political phases like "free market" or "business friendly policies", without considering if it is optimal

There is a continuum of ways to arrange government, labour and private ownership. The particular point labelled "USA early 2000s" is not the only one.

That is what I genuinely believe - and I want to look around to see what the rest of the continuum looks like - the good and the bad parts

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

#199

Post by edanm »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #194
notfromhere wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By its nature, you get more value out of an employee than you pay in wages. Otherwise, there would be no point to hiring anyone.

Exactly. Fundamentally, tech workers don’t seem to understand this point mainly because they are making more money than “everyone else.” The other reason is that we as humans don’t understand big numbers. Big ape brains can’t understand the gap between $1 million and $1 billion let alone 100 billion. If software engineers would have banded together a long time ago to get a larger piece of the pie like professional at…

> - Senior engineers would make NFL wages

That is an absurd exaggeration, unless by "senior engineers" you are including people who do a lot more than "just" engineering, e.g. build companies, build products, etc.

The reason NFL wages are so high is not just that they bring in a lot of money, it's that the players are to a large extent irreplaceable. If you take the, say, 500 most talented players in the US at a given time, you can't just replace them with the next 500 most talented players and get the same outcome. So each of them commands a very large salary - because the alternatives are worse, and will lead to worse outcomes, which will lead to less money for the team.

And at the top end, the best players are a massive draw that makes teams tons of money.

Compare that to engineers. We are, to a much larger extent, replaceable. If Amazon can't hire the 1000 "best" engineers, going to the next 1000 will probably not noticeably impact their product. I'm not denying that there are talent differentials between engineers - I think it's even more than the commonly cited 10x. But it's still not that big, definitely not bigger than the difference in NFL players (since engineering is not competitive.)

Note that if you stretch the definition of software engineer to include people building and launching brand new products, building huge successful teams, etc, then you're getting into the realm of CTOs, CEOs, founders, etc, which are far less replaceable (I'm a good engineer, but I couldn't have built Stripe). But then we're talking about the people who are adequately compensated for their work.

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

#200

Post by kortilla »

notfromhere wrote: post #183
philwelch wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

By its nature, you get more value out of an employee than you pay in wages. Otherwise, there would be no point to hiring anyone.

You used that employee’s labor in conjunction with a bunch of other things to produce more value than the wages. If the value was in just the work alone and not the work directed at the right things in the right environment, there would be no point in working for Amazon and you could just collect the entire revenue yourself.

This is the main reason it’s completely illogical to expect that an employee receive most of the revenue their labor helped generate.

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