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Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

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

#171

Post by hibikir »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #113
krainboltgreene wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.

Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target. A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.

Stripe was already a big target for basically anyone and anything 10 years ago. Fake merchants, card testers, the works. People were selling guides to defraud Stripe. And we are not even counting just losees due to nonsense like the Fyre festival.

You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.

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

#172

Post by hibikir »

the_bear wrote: post #133
woodruffw wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this true? I would expect most of Stripe's fraud overhead to be statutory in nature, not something they hire for because they're a concentrated target. (They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)

When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine. I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuabl…

Look at what happened to, say, Cards Against Humanity: You don't have to be a really bit store for some random card tester to ruin you.

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

#173

Post by Rexxar »

wasmainiac wrote: post #156
quesera wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adyen is cleaner as a business but it's basically a payments rail. stripe's embedded finance products ... Where in your comment authorship pipeline were these errors introduced?

Same question, this is not the first time I’ve seen random 's. I think it’s a bot, look at the post history with the weird repetitive hyphens.

The account is strange, two years old account with barely any comment for two years then a lot of comments in the last 3 days. The 3 first comments of the account capitalise the first letter, everything is lowercase in the last 3 days. He never replies to comments under his own comment. Sadly, a comment of someone who was telling it was a bot account has been flagged ...

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

#174

Post by fourseventy »

onion2k wrote: post #13
fourseventy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give liquidity to investors.

The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though. It's fairly safe to assume that as there isn't an IPO yet the investors want to hold rather than cash in returns. They probably believe there's more growth potential, and that the board are the right people to deliver it.

The early VCs have been in Stripe for 16 years already. They need Stripe to IPO so they can get liquidity in order to provide returns to their LPs. VCs can't hold onto the stock forever, they need to provide DPI otherwise they won't be able to raise future funds.

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

#175

Post by colesantiago »

tptacek wrote: post #168
colesantiago wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no other way for that group of retail investors to build wealth other than go into these highly and extremely risky assets that you and I hate and do not recommend. (even more risky than secondary markets)

Sure, they can invest in public companies but if lots of these high growth companies stay private, the gains will not be shared towards retail especially for their pensions.

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

#176

Post by fragmede »

colesantiago wrote: post #69
jonas21 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't meet the financial requirement ($200K annual income or $1M net worth), you can also qualify as an accredited investor by passing the Series 65 exam and filing a form with the SEC. So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.

So someone who inherits $100 million (11 year old or not) doesn't have take the exam, but someone who knows about the industry inside out has take an exam to participate? Seems "fair" to be honest. I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.

If you'd like to petition the SEC to make it so that you also have to be, say, 25 to be accredited so as to remove that particular loophole and make it even harder to become a accredited so 11 year olds don't get accredited because of a rather specific scenario, send me the change.org petition. I don't think 11 year olds should be accredited. Might make me elitist, but I've been called worse things.

Still, the theory is that having $100 million, even as an 11 year old, means you have about $90 million more than most people to lose before it even becomes an issue. Hence "accreditation". Accreditation isn't about "can you make smart investments" but about "will you be broke and destitute soon", and having $100 million makes it harder than I'd $400k is your life's savings, and you're about to put it all into NFTs.

Is the theory, anyway.

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

#177

Post by anpat »

Rexxar wrote: post #173
wasmainiac wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same question, this is not the first time I’ve seen random 's. I think it’s a bot, look at the post history with the weird repetitive hyphens.

The account is strange, two years old account with barely any comment for two years then a lot of comments in the last 3 days. The 3 first comments of the account capitalise the first letter, everything is lowercase in the last 3 days. He never replies to comments under his own comment. Sadly, a comment of someone who was telling it was a bot account has been flagged ...

On top of that, almost every single recent comment has “—“, that is enough signal in opinion.

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

#178

Post by fragmede »

hmokiguess wrote: post #125
krainboltgreene wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.

Sure, though not every small project needs to worry about that. Perhaps the payment workflow is a tight loop that has KYC through physical memberships (ID + Photo), say a gym membership for example, and the entire system is private just needs a gateway to do transactions.

Stealing someone's identity and pretending to be them and buying a gym membership with a fake id and a stolen credit card might seem far fetched to you, but Stripe doesn't want to be on the hook for that, especially if the scammer signs up for, say, Equinox and it isn't discovered for year+. (ex-Stripe; didn't work directly on fraud, however)

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

#179

Post by colesantiago »

tptacek wrote: post #112
colesantiago wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse. This means that no wealth will be created for people who actually want to invest. With Stripe's non IPO example, many will follow and will stay private. So more gatekeeping.

Again: you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you). It has nothing at all to do with accreditation though. You're pining for access to companies that wouldn't take your money even if you were a well-known institutional investor. They get to pick which VC/PE firms they work with, and they know it, and it is the…

I love this projection you're providing to me, how much money did you lose on these companies?

I am in and have invested in YC startups, because I know which ones have growth potential and upside.

> you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you)

I didn't say they had to be a public company, you can invest in Stripe via the secondary market (which I have done before with other companies) but even then this is for accredited investors.

There are lots of unprofitable public companies on the stock market that also return $0 to investors and have no dividends.

But this trend of many private companies choosing to stay private obviously isn't going to help those except the very rich and accredited investors.

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

#180

Post by antiford2049 »

hibikir wrote: post #166
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 a…

Adyen is behind Stripe when it comes to small enterprises but ahead on large enterprises and especially global merchants. They also have scaled back on digital merchants which you can lose easily and focus more on unified commerce, their growth is a lot higher quality. They also report growth differently - ex fees to schemes and banks. Stripe will be on the hook if banks and schemes raise their fees. You also dont know what margin stripe has, just say robust which is enough for the crowd on wallstreet of course but I digress. The fact is Stripe is a good company, but its valuation is set in a room while Adyen's valuation is set on the market 80% of which is pods trading back and forth.
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