271–280 of 374 posts
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Investors will only invest in AI plays. They don’t seem to care for fintech.
...and Blockchain!
I know individual investors get pretty crazy for blockchain, but I don't recall any major companies doing big investments.
At most, I was asked about it briefly, explained what the usecases were, and it never came up again.
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Stripe has for years helped non-EU companies to do tax fraud in the EU, and in a just world their management would be charged. Every time a customer in the EU pays with Stripe, they exactly know if they are a private customer or not and in which country that customer is located in. Stripe also knows who the counterparty is ("their merchant"). Yet Stripe systematically enabled their merchants to avoid paying appropria…
How is this any different to US users? Do you think stripe is correctly remitting US sales and county taxes? The obligation has always been on the company making the sale not the processor.
You tell me. Would the same people who help evade tax payments in the EU really do the same in the US? That's unbelievable! /s
> The obligation has always been on the company making the sale not the processor.
That's incorrect. At minimum, the processor needs to tell me exactly who the money goes to, so I can reach out to them.
And that's a "legal reach out" kind of information including company name, company type, company registration number, and company country of incorporation.
Stripe makes it easy for merchants to obscure that information and is actively hiding it from the customers who paid the merchant.
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Setting your incredulity aside, I'm curious why you think using a debit card would be so shocking. I effectively don't use a credit card at all: I use a debit card (or an equivalent Apple Pay representation thereof) exclusively. From my perspective, if I want something and I have the money, I'll pay for it. If I want something and I don't have the money, I won't pay for it. I don't often want things outside my budget…
Credit cards are strictly better in all aspects (rewards, protection, free working capital, etc) UNLESS you are bad with money/finances. So there is actually no good reason to use debit cards. I say this as a former user. Makes no sense at all once you think everything through.
As the sellers get bigger and bigger and electronic cash payments become more normalized, I think we'll see more and more sellers charge at least 3%, if not 5% extra for credit cards so that all of their merchant fees and chargeback risk are covered.
Right now, it's just a bet that having the same price for credit card and non credit card will result in sellers willing to pay a higher price (a psychological phenomena), but more and more sellers are not betting on that.
I wonder if the effect of people being more willing to pay higher prices is seen in discretionary purchases, so travel/non staple retail will continue to incentivize credit card usage, while most other businesses will not.
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That's like asking "what does rent have to do with property prices?". Just because you've managed to be on the top of this perverse social summation of usury doesn't mean it isn't predatory and a net negative for society. Credit cards are one of the most insidious ways that banks extract money from those living closest to the margins of poverty. The benefits you gain are a fraction of the profits gained from raking t…
It has been legal for sellers to ask buyers to pay more if they use a credit card for 15 years now. There is no "moral" quandary. Sellers that have the same price for credit and non credit payment methods are simply betting that people using credit will be more willing to pay higher prices overall and still buy from them compared to their competitors' with lower prices who charge more for credit cards. Every year, fe…
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It seems unlikely that regular employees would be issued RSUs. Tax is due at vest, and you can't liquidate to fund the tax bill.
Nope, you as a company owner are highly motivated to shift to RSUs once you hit a certain valuation and number of employees. Everyone does it.
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It seems unlikely that regular employees would be issued RSUs. Tax is due at vest, and you can't liquidate to fund the tax bill.
The usual move here is "double trigger" RSUs that don't vest until a liquidity event, thus no taxes due until said liquidity event.
Sold for $5.15B. Brex last raised $300M in Oct 2021 at a $12.3B valuation.
That is a 50% discount, which isn't great for those who got into the latest round. Seems like Capital One is very excited on the deal and announced it earlier while Brex hid the announcement and made it hard to find. (It's on the Brex [0] journal directory, but you cannot see it featured on its front page) What (really) happened? [0] https://www.brex.com/journal
hence few fare well in the public markets or when its time for acquisition
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> Your circular argument about costing the evil company money therefore makes your purchases justified, doesn't make sense. You are saying they make money off of interest which of course is correct. But I don't pay any interest so by your own logic I'm not contributing to this evil company's profit so how is it a moral dilemma? And how is my argument circular? > The rest of the western world is proof that you do not…
> I don't pay interest so I'm not contributing to [their profits]... That's true, but by accruing rewards, you are indirectly incentivising the CC company to increase interest rates to subsidize your usage. If every single CC user didn't carry a balance, there would be no rewards (see Europe). I think we ended up at a better place here at the end so I will end with the last point. When I was 17-19 year old, I had a s…
This is not really true. Europe has much lower merchant fees which is why the rewards are lower.
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many/most employees
Employees get options at common stock prices. The valuations you see, like $12bn, are for preferred stock. So no employees got stock priced at $12bn, but all of them get paid at a $5.15bn valuation. Not saying they did well, but depending on the 409a valuations, they still might have made money. Edit: friends, if you’re going to downvote please leave a comment as to why. It’s okay to disagree! There’s a lot of mislea…
More specifically, when employees are granted options contracts the strike price of those contracts is based on the last valuation of the company prior to the grant. If all is going well and the valuation is increasing those options are also increasing in value. Here we have a sale which values the company lower than the prior valuation. Recent option grants will likely be underwater, earlier grants would still be profitable.
> The valuations you see, like $12bn, are for preferred stock.
No, the valuation is for the whole company, all of its shares, preferred and common. How this value is distributed among shareholders depends on the deal, but generally there is a “seniority”, roughly: creditors (debt holders) are paid first, preferred shares next, then common shareholders last. This order can be negotiated as part of the sale.
> So no employees got stock priced at $12bn, but all of them get paid at a $5.15bn valuation.
It’s just not possible to know what each individual employee’s outcome is. We don’t know how much of that 5.5 billion will be left over for common shareholders including the employees. Note that employees have received salaries so their overall outcome is greater than zero dollars, but perhaps their total compensation outcome is lower than they hoped for the time they put in.
> Not saying they did well, but depending on the 409a valuations, they still might have made money.
Yes, some might have and some might have not. We just don’t know without more details.
Edit: singron’s answer (sibling comment) attempts to model the employee outcome in a rough but reasonable way.