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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

#241

Post by tut-urut-utut »

gondo wrote: post #119
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone currently looking exactly at this kind of provider, I’m curious about other Paddle competitors whose price model is only revenue based, without a fixed monthly fee. Gumroad is another merchant of records, but developer documentation is worse, fees are higher and it seems to support only USD pricing. Other alternatives requires a somewhat hefty monthly fee, which is a non starter for my use case.

I am not sure if you meant to imply the opposite, but Paddle's price model IS only revenue based.

Yes, Paddle is revenue-based. I was just wondering about the alternatives.

Something about Paddle that I can't define is putting me off, whether it is website, wording, attitude, "contact me for the quote" and such things makes it feel old school and bureaucratic. I learned over time to listen to my gut feeling, so I'm not gonna use it.

Gumroad looks much more relaxed, although more expensive and lacks many features.

Here in this thread, someone mentioned https://www.getrevin.com, which lets you use Stripe and provides a tax shield merchant of record for 1% on top of Stripe fees, which makes it interesting.

I also found out https://www.lemonsqueezy.com which is priced similarly to Gumroad, but it lacks documentation to be able to compare it.

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

#242

Post by tsimionescu »

chii wrote: post #233
tsimionescu wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This values capital over labor to a far too large extent. The value of a (successful) company is overwhelmingly dominated by labor - including the labor of the founders and CEOs, to be clear - not by original capital investments. But, ownership is only afforded to those who contribute capital, and ~0% to those contributing labor (this does vary between companies, as some do offer equity as part of the labor contract,…

> The value of a (successful) company is overwhelmingly dominated by labor but those labour only decided to contribute their labour because they are guaranteed a wage - which is capital being spent. If you put up a job offer, where your wage is tied to the profitability of the business (aka, if you worked but the business didn't make any revenue or profit, you don't get paid), then you'd find that there aren't many w…

> but those labour only decided to contribute their labour because they are guaranteed a wage - which is capital being spent.

That's only capital being spent if the company is not profitable. Otherwise, it's just reinvesting revenue back into the business. And a company that is going bankrupt may well become unable to pay employees' promised wages, which does happen occasionally.

> If you put up a job offer, where your wage is tied to the profitability of the business (aka, if you worked but the business didn't make any revenue or profit, you don't get paid), then you'd find that there aren't many who would take this offer.

While there are definitely people who are not happy with this kind of arrangement, it's not entirely unheard of either. Early stage start-ups often hire people on equity instead of wages; and co-ops where all (or most) workers are owners and only get paid if the business is successful also exist.

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

#244

Post by danschmitt »

chii wrote: post #224
lmm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source. So? A worker has already paid all kinds of taxes in their life, but they still get taxed on their income. > 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. Your original capital is yours, but if you get income from it, you should be taxed the same as any other income. My time is…

> Your original capital is yours, but if you get income from it, you should be taxed the same as any other income. capital is what makes future productivity improvements possible. If you took a risk investing your capital, but that return is taxed the same as wage income (which has zero risk associated with it), you would be discouraged from investing that capital, and instead consume more of it (ala, why invest in y…

> capital is what makes future productivity improvements possible. If you took a risk investing your capital, but that return is taxed the same as wage income (which has zero risk associated with it), you would be discouraged from investing that capital, and instead consume more of it (ala, why invest in your business buying plant and equipment, when you could just go on a lavish vacation!).

The fairy tale that no one would invest if, instead of 100%, they were only allowed to keep, say, 50% of the profits is far-fetched. The game would go on, only with more (in the optimal case) redistribution and less accumulation among the already well-off. The issue here is the relative inequality caused by capital gains, which in the long run tears societies apart, because the middle class can no longer afford apartments/houses and vacations, and the lower class can no longer afford basic needs (food, health care, mobility).

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

#245

Post by thrixton »

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…

I doubt this to be honest.

If you could hire 2 or 5 of the next best engineers for the price of a top pick 'NFL' engineer, you'd be ahead in output in most situations.

The same does not go for the NFL.

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

#246

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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…

>but it's kind of unfortunate how founder lore really minimizes employees

Yes it is, And none more pronounced than those involving celebrity founders like Elon Musk; The achievements of SpaceX and Tesla are often showcased like 'his' alone in media like Iron Man waving his hand and Jarvis building the products.

One thing these founders are proven to be good at is getting very talented people to work for them and perhaps lately taking credit for all their efforts.

P.S. Not implying that Collison Bros are like that, I don't know enough about them and I like Stripe as a product.

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

#247

Post by kareemsabri »

bogomipz wrote: post #174
pbreit wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/statistic…

Agreed, Spotify is a Swedish company in a pretty limited capacity. I know so many ex-Spotify people in NYC.

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

#248

Post by Emphere »

colinmhayes wrote: post #53
tomatowurst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPO right now is very difficult as the door is closing, and investors are wary about paying a premium like they have before. They delayed it too long and have missed the window, it is unlikely from a year from now they will be able to get any bids for the current market valuations.

I mean why didn't they IPO last year with everyone else?

PC has spoken admirably of Koch Industries and he thinks there's some merit to remaining private. That's probably why. I don't have the source at hand but probably one of his podcasts.

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

#249

Post by rglullis »

benoketamad wrote: post #240
rglullis wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your idea of "good legislation" is "bureaucratic hellpit that promises the solution to all problems to the electorate, but in reality just makes things slightly more expensive to big companies and destroys any chance of smaller players to disrupt the market", then yes, EU legislation is great. Cookie law is "simple", but what does it achieve? How are our lives better after knowing that every website uses cookies ?…

GDPR: At least you have the means to hold a company accountable in the EU, without spending a shitton of money on lawyers. In the US it's like the wild west. Steal as much data as possible, without any repercussions whatsoever. Neutered congress and other amusing institutions add to the mix.

I think you are missing the point. You can have all the "accountability" you want, in practical terms, nothing has changed. Your data is still being taken and exploited, but now thanks to the bureaucracy we can no longer say that it is being "stolen".

It's akin to saying that assault is now okay because the people are being forced to sign consent forms before getting punched in the face.

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

#250

Post by tjs8rj »

tsimionescu wrote: post #223
tjs8rj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While you're right that you have to account for the entire organization, not just the engineers (obviously), the gap between what the owners earn compared to all other employees combined is still wildly disproportionate. It's of course hard to precisely quantify these things, but the worsening gap between worker and owner incomes is quite obviously not proportional to any change in how much value owners add to a corp…

This same argument also applies to owners. If the org makes $100k in revenue and the owners take $10k of that, why don't you just leave to start your own firm and keep it all?

It's because there ARE contributions from the owner, even a passive owner has what I called "dividends from stored labor": they took on the risk, created a functioning company solving a problem, did the work of organizing the systems/structure that run the thing, and so they are entitled to a piece of the revenue as well (as that revenue couldn't have been earned without their contributions either).

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