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Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

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Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#161

Post by bryanlarsen »

overfeed wrote: post #138
bryanlarsen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is. IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.

The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.

Neither of which would be relevant in the Stripe case, because if Stripe IPO's they'll release a negligible number of shares. It'd be impossible for either group to amass a substantial number of shares.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#162

Post by bryanlarsen »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #104
bryanlarsen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is. IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.

Harder for activist investors to get into a private company than a public one imho. Keeps out those who would squeeze the business and bail, and potentially kick out the founders. With sufficient cashflow (which Stripe most certainly has), you can buy out existing investors without going public. (not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for…

You'd need to amass 50% of the shares to kick out the founders. That'd be impossible for a hostile party to do if Stripe IPO's because they wouldn't release anywhere close to that number of shares.

The only way to kick out the Collison's would be for the VC's to do it. They currently own 80%. It's easier for the VC's to do that if Stripe stays private than if Stripe IPO's.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#163

Post by gmd63 »

ericmay wrote: post #158
gmd63 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask…

> If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them. That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is. But what I do not want to see as a…

I'm saying if the populace wants taxes to fund open source and votes for it, and maintainers just stop working on open source otherwise that's also the free market. Doing stuff for free and then complaining about when it benefits greedy folks in an outsized way is a negotiation tactic with the public that people are allowed to do.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#164

Post by overfeed »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #161
overfeed wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.

Neither of which would be relevant in the Stripe case, because if Stripe IPO's they'll release a negligible number of shares. It'd be impossible for either group to amass a substantial number of shares.

Why IPO at all, if they will release a "negligible number of shares"?

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#165

Post by bryanlarsen »

overfeed wrote: post #164
bryanlarsen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of which would be relevant in the Stripe case, because if Stripe IPO's they'll release a negligible number of shares. It'd be impossible for either group to amass a substantial number of shares.

Why IPO at all, if they will release a "negligible number of shares"?

A low liquidity IPO would likely result in a massive share price increase: the number of interested buyers would vastly outnumber the number of shares available.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#166

Post by hibikir »

testfoobar wrote: post #143

This feels rich. Compare: Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance. PayPal: $41.51B right now. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/

It does seem like a lot, but if you look at growth rates, the differences are significant.

Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.

They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#167

Post by colesantiago »

tptacek wrote: post #151
skinnymuch wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still seems silly when meme stocks exist and the establishment (like entire media and news apparatus) can and do collude to mess with things (like “Black Monday” ~2021 when all the media and news lied and said wall street bets and meme stonk people had moved on to silver) and within days all the meme stock gains across over a dozen companies were entirely wiped out. Not saying meme stocks should be a thing but no one…

When people investigate meme stocks the people complaining that they can't get on Stripe's cap table take the side of the meme stocks!

Why do you think that is?

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#168

Post by tptacek »

colesantiago wrote: post #167
tptacek wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people investigate meme stocks the people complaining that they can't get on Stripe's cap table take the side of the meme stocks!

Why do you think that is?

Because they watched a small group of people win a roulette straight bet when the ball landed on 32 and now think federal action is needed to allow everybody to bet straight 32 on everything.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#169

Post by ericmay »

gmd63 wrote: post #163
ericmay wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them. That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is. But what I do not want to see as a…

I'm saying if the populace wants taxes to fund open source and votes for it, and maintainers just stop working on open source otherwise that's also the free market. Doing stuff for free and then complaining about when it benefits greedy folks in an outsized way is a negotiation tactic with the public that people are allowed to do.

Sure, people can do anything. As a person/citizen/voter I would probably vote against using tax dollars for open-source work. I'd prefer a less convoluted and more honest approach. Doing something for free and then complaining about not getting paid for it later is super cringe and passive aggressive regardless as to whether or not "greedy people" are using it.

Being an open-source maintainer is just some thing people decide they want to do. There's nothing special about it. If you want to get paid, figure out that arrangement for yourself. If you want to do it for free and give it away because you love it, that's great too. That's what free association is all about.

Taxing me to pay for other people to fund their hobby seems ripe for 2 bad things: 1. if the government is funding it, the government gets a say - doesn't bode well for open-source, and 2 it creates market inefficiencies in a bad way - we fund thing we shouldn't fund and we do so to support a lifestyle or hobby instead of what is truly economically valuable for all.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#170

Post by fragmede »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #76
cwbrandsma wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPOs also kill a lot of companies. Now you have a new list of investors you are obligated to attend to, and what those investors what is not always to make your company more successful, if it can make more money now.

The reverse is much more true. When private equity takes a public company private, there's a 50% chance they'll kill the company. Also, private companies fail at a much higher rate than public ones do.

Private equity is vs not going public in the first place though. Private equity is also the wrong measure because there's good private equity and bad private equity, and we most commonly hear about bad private equity. Eg Toys'R'us. Typically when buying a company, in order to but the company in the first place, PE saddles the company up with debt in order to make the purchase in the first place (which is bananas in the first if you think about it). So then the distressed company now has additional debt payments to make. Making their already distressed situation even worse. Now, the theory is that PE is able to make the company more "efficient" with their PE know-how, and sometimes they do. There's no time machine too go back and undo the PE purchase of Toys'r'us and see what would have actually unfolded, but what we can say is having to make additional debt payments hastened their demise.

So it's true PE taking a company private has a high failure rate as far as the continuation of the company, the question is if the goal of PE is for the company to continue in the first place, or if that gets in the way of them extracting as money as possible as fast as possible. So 50% is certainly a statistic, but not useful for comparison, especially if we're looking at a private company staying private.

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