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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

#201

Post by rswail »

sdf131 wrote: post #170
lmm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the risk of losses supposedly why capital holders make a profit at all? So they shouldn't be paid twice for it.

The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source. Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business. I’m the one taking the risk yet the government benefits if that risk pays off but doesn’t compensate me if it doesn’t.

Realized capital gains should be taxed as income. They are income.

Your second sentence applies to labor as well: "I'm the one doing the work, yet the government benefits..."

Either "all taxation is theft", or "taxation is the government charging for providing the services necessary for work and business to operate".

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

#202

Post by lmm »

throw123123123 wrote: post #186
lmm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Stop giving discounted tax rates for capital gains, make people pay the full income tax rate for any kind of income - Abolish step-up basis, which allows dynasties to build tax-free wealth via "invest, borrow, die"-type strategies. Also other tax avoidance strategies used by the rich e.g. 503cs. - Stop giving corporations special treatment under anti-trust law compared to other ways of organising. Give unions, work…

Why is the solution to "uneven tax structure" always to raise taxes? can we just lower income tax to same as capital taxes instead? Thats real money in your pocket.

Because most of the time when there's an "uneven tax structure" it's because one special interest group got themselves a tax break. Specific penalty taxes are quite rare.

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

#203

Post by rswail »

triceratops wrote: post #138
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike wages, capital gains can be negative. And generally IRS doesn't compensate for losses, except for minuscule amount. Otherwise imagine Treasury having to refund trillions to Bitcoin bag holders. So lower rate reflects higher risk.

A lower rate for the same amount of income in capital gains compared to salary makes sense. But why is the top rate for capital gains only 20% when it's 38% for income? (plus whatever the state adds on top). Why aren't there more brackets that go higher for capital gains as well?

> A lower rate for the same amount of income in capital gains compared to salary makes sense.

Why? This argument is often given as an axiom without any reasoning behind it.

There is often handwaving about "risk", but a worker has risks due to not being able to supply the labor that they are selling. They invested in their labor through paying for education and training.

Why is their "risk" not considered the same as capital "risk"?

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

#204

Post by kortilla »

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.

Owners are not compensated unless a dividend is issued. Is your problem with how much people are willing to pay for Amazon stock?m

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

#205

Post by kortilla »

rswail wrote: post #203
triceratops wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lower rate for the same amount of income in capital gains compared to salary makes sense. But why is the top rate for capital gains only 20% when it's 38% for income? (plus whatever the state adds on top). Why aren't there more brackets that go higher for capital gains as well?

> A lower rate for the same amount of income in capital gains compared to salary makes sense. Why? This argument is often given as an axiom without any reasoning behind it. There is often handwaving about "risk", but a worker has risks due to not being able to supply the labor that they are selling. They invested in their labor through paying for education and training. Why is their "risk" not considered the same as…

> but a worker has risks due to not being able to supply the labor that they are selling.

Modern worker agreements (a.k.a most normal jobs) do not have downside risk if you can’t deliver. You just lose your job and stop gaining money. With capital investments you can easily undo 5 years of gains in 1 bad year.

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

#206

Post by rswail »

puranjay wrote: post #63
rvz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... Exactly. The hype squad have been screaming about the valuations of these companies and now look at them as soon as they IPOed. Neither of them are profitable companies. It just means the VCs, insiders and everyone else who got was in before the IPO made a windfall in their stock and by now cashed out. The news hypin…

I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high school/college at 18-22 and start making money - “being profitable”, so to speak. There are starups right now that were founded before 2010, went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years time That’s 18-20 years without a profit!?!

> you graduate high school/college at 18-22...

> That's 18-20 years without a profit!?!

Same same, but different.

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

#207

Post by Thorrez »

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…

>1 million employees

1 million employees right now, or all time? Amazon is ~28 years old. $100B/28 years = $3.6B/year.

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

#208

Post by tjs8rj »

kortilla wrote: post #200
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.

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…

This is the answer and why the labor theory of value tends to fall flat without due consideration to the labor of managers and the cumulative returns of labor.

If your work earns $100k/y in revenue for a company, that doesn't mean your work created it entirely. The continued dividends of organization of the company, customer acquisition, legal apparatus, support of your entire organization made that revenue possible and are entitled to a share of it too. It took a village to make that revenue, unless it didn't, in which case: quit and do it yourself to keep all that money.

This is a self-correcting system that ensures everyone gets paid approximately what they contributed.

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

#209

Post by andy_ppp »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #160
reducesuffering wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 complai…

I wonder if there is a format for API -> client automation that can be good enough, in the end Stripe have a rest API, with enough description it should be possible.

Okay so after a quick google it appears Microsoft are the "Simpsons already done it" of the programming world: https://github.com/Azure/autorest/

It'd probably be a good idea to add an Elixir backend for that and point it at the Stripe's API here: https://github.com/stripe/openapi

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

#210

Post by tjs8rj »

rswail wrote: post #201
sdf131 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source. Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business. I’m the one taking the risk yet the government benefits if that risk pays off but doesn’t compensate me if it doesn’t.

Realized capital gains should be taxed as income. They are income. Your second sentence applies to labor as well: "I'm the one doing the work, yet the government benefits..." Either "all taxation is theft", or "taxation is the government charging for providing the services necessary for work and business to operate".

Think the point they are making is the repeated taxation is semi-ridiculous.

1. Work a job and pay income tax 2. Invest remaining income, capital gains are taxes when liquidated. 3. Buy a car with the remaining gains, pay sales and property tax 4. Sell car, pay sales tax again 5. Reinvest money, earn gains, pay taxes on them 6. Repeat

The same money just keeps getting taxes. His point is that the money should be taxed once and only once.

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