1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
this number is a little misleading, to put it mildly.
Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
181–190 of 253 posts
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#182Congratulations. But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
It is not 5x bigger, it is 5x more valuable. Obviously Stripes 2x higher revenue is part of that equation, but not all of it.
the valuable part is with a caveat though. Klarna and Figma were very valuable. i find these comparisons a little pointless (private vs public company). they process similar volumes, but one is in hyper growth mode (imagine quality of it) while the other has been scaling down growth and focusing on profitable growth. Has spooked investors but I understand that Adyen are pretty focused and they are scaling nicely their capital offering. But Stripe has good focus on stablecoins, more product focused and aggressive (as all US firms are). Both have like single % of the global payment market, and if you have issues with Adyen look at others in the market - nexi, paypal, etc. I believe both stripe and adyem will grow market share at expense of others over next decade. Plenty of growth for both, and Adyen has a unified platform solution which is smth stripe doesnt. So all have advantages, and the gap in valuation isnt' something id read too much about.
Besides, if AI replaces all white collar jobs, and crashes high spending consumer economy, all payment vols will go down.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think PE buyouts are the right comparison here; we're talking about companies that never go public versus the ones that do. And, of course private companies fail at a much higher rate. The set of private companies includes every company that doesn't succeed to the point where it has the realistic choice to go public. Again: wrong comparison.
when companies go public usually the easy money has been made, and for the growth to come back a lot of time might pass.
frankly i dont know why would one go public today unless money is needed badly. Quarterly calls, filings, are one thing, dealing with vest bros asking "so how should we think about" questions on round tables or "whats an incrimental margin" musings as they clack away at their mini keyboards filling out their model no body can make sense of.. and then someone will publish a blog saying their company is gonna be extinct because of AI ... this is not for everybody thats for sure...
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Again, scale matters here. I'm talking about small projects, think a local small city gym, run by maybe one person, family business, probably knows all the customers closely, used to run on cash, but wants to get their bookkeeping in order, needs credit card recurring transactions to avoid late payments from some of their members, and doesn't want to increase their pricing because of high fees on a brand new system.
Equinox Fitness is a major conglomerate and likely wants and cares about fraud detection software.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#185Earlier 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.
Even if that was true literally no payment processor cares about what a small project worries about and they never will.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
what happened with them? I'm not aware of it
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#187Earlier 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 needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.
This is not true. Every payment processor needs this effort because as soon as you broadcast that you're a payment processor you're going to get about 3-5 scammers a day.
As an aside I really think Mercury bank should audit their onboarding process.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is obviously not true. Most wealthy people do not build their wealth by gambling on meme stocks and tech companies. That's an extraordinarily Twitter-blinkered thing to believe.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Stri…
I'm a principal at Fly.io (W20). I'm familiar with the dynamic.
I don't invest in tech companies.
Most funded tech companies don't return funds to investors. Noncontroversial claim.
Investors invest in tech companies as a/in a portfolio strategy. They don't expect any one investment to succeed, and they allocate to the asset class in part to get exposure to decorrelated assets.
That's not at all what retail investors are doing.
You keep talking about accreditation. The companies you want to invest in don't want your money and they don't care that you're accredited.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#190This 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/
Of course, the thing to note about PYPL is the absolute jump it took today on rumors of a Stripe acquisition.