Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 292 posts

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

#211

Post by jwr »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #13
samwillis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Paddle becomes a middle man in the transaction taking on all international tax responsibility. They pay you out after paying all tax/vat local to the customer. This massively simplifies international sales, particularly for EU business. I also believe that an awful lot of small online SASS and digital good sales by companies are committing (unintentional) tax fraud in the countries of their c…

A simple solution is to do a b2b company only and thanks the EU for complicating the situation so much. Another thing I used to do was to just sell to everyone except European customers (explicitly written on the website). The funniest thing is that the EU ostensibly did it to make "Amazon pay their fair share" while most small merchants that used to run e-commerce have moved to sell on Amazon or eBay just not to hav…

This.

(B2B Saas founder here)

People often ask me why PartsBox doesn't offer inexpensive B2C plans to hobbyists and I have to explain that it would not make business sense: the costs of dealing with the idiotic EU VAT MOSS rules would exceed the revenue from subscriptions. Plus it would take a significant amount of time, effort and maintenance to support, thus presenting opportunity costs.

If you run a B2B business, things are reasonably straightforward (although still far from obvious), but B2C is a nightmare in the EU (as a side note, I have no idea how people expect to run sustainable small B2C businesses, this is really difficult).

Also, Paddle might be the only reasonable solution, because they do the invoicing themselves. If you can accept that your customers will be getting invoices from someone else, this simplifies things a lot. There is no company that does invoicing for your SaaS correctly if you are based in some EU countries, even though many claim to do so.

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

#212

Post by texasbigdata »

polote wrote: post #117
Sebguer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

200x ARR? Not taking away from your examples but those are 2020 valuation unicorns.

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

#213

Post by puranjay »

lmm wrote: post #143
puranjay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?!

Cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Basic research can take hundreds of years to put into practice. The Swedish government has a couple of nice national parks that were originally oak forests planted to supply the navy in a few hundred years. While there are definitely advantages to the discipline of having to make a profit, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with building a company over long timescales…

It’s an app that delivers food through contract labor earning minimum wage.

Its not a cathedral or a forest.

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

#214

Post by fsckboy »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #188
bogomipz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but that concentration in the Bay area has historically been because of its proximity to Sand Hill Road no? Or am I misunderstanding your point?

Well that’s basically is my point. The thesis I was responding to was that tech unicorns don’t exist in Europe due to taxes and regulations. If we are to take the content of your post at face value, that thesis is wrong. It was due to sand hill road being where sand hill road is. That may have something to do with taxes and regulations to a degree, but that isn’t a sufficient explanation.

taxes and regulations could be a sufficient explanation for why unicorns are birthed in the US.

and within the US, "why SV?" might simply have another orthogonal explanation.

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

#215

Post by oh_sigh »

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.

On average, yes, but any given employee may be a net negative and not really earn their keep.

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

#216

Post by lifeisstillgood »

majormajor wrote: post #149
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…

I don't really follow your examples, but I think there's a part of startup comp structures that's worth calling out in general. Equity distribution ratios are way different than salary ones. Your boss in a mature company may make 20% more than you, give or take. Your boss in a early stage startup may have 10x (or more!) more equity than you. Even if they don't have 10x to lose.

Yes I think that is more or less what I am talking about.

In a democracy the tendency is towards fairer equitable distribution of wealth (why FDR was called a traitor to his class, why Jim Crow laws exist etc).

It is one factor in why companies are not democracies- but I think (hope?) we may see much experimentation in democratic decision making to try and make it as speedy as hierarchical companies

(hmm - there is likely to be a speed / stability / waste trade off here?)

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

#217

Post by randomsearch »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #111
wbsss4412 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a cultural difference not regulation, at least according to every VC and mentor I’ve ever met who has worked in both the US and Europe.

I know of American VCs who have been just as ambitious investing with U.K. startups as with American ones.

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

#218

Post by xmprt »

edanm wrote: post #199
jollofricepeas wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 give…

> 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

I genuinely believe that a league made of the 500-1000 rank players would be just as (or at least almost as) entertaining as one with the top 500 players. Relative rank is what matters and it's why NCAA March Madness is so popular despite being made up of relatively low ranked players.

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

#219

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

>to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees.

Assuming those numbers are correct, I believe he got that 100 billion over time and over time he has had much more than 1 million employees, although probably the most amount of employees he has had at any one time was 1 million.

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

#220

Post by AlchemistCamp »

andy_ppp wrote: post #209
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Interesting... I've spent a fair amount of time looking at Stripe docs while working on various projects over the years and never seen the openapi link before!

Purely in terms of seeing what structs are used in what what on what endpoints, the docs are fine. It's really when it comes to guides that it falls over since they invariably lean on language-specific API clients. This makes it easy to miss how headers are constructed, the required security-related details for webhooks, etc.

Post reply on HN