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OpenRouter is joining Stripe

openrouter.ai

91–100 of 532 posts

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#91

I'm not happy about this. Having used OpenRouter a lot and enjoying the experience, I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.

curious as a non-user, but what does openrouter have to do with stripe? Ignoring the corpo-speak about mission statement.. the missions don't really seem aligned in reality.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#93
post #32

Hm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?

Stripe execs said "we should own some AI"

Founders found out that they could finally afford to pay their medical, tax, housing bills if they said yes

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#94
post #41

This is before Stripe completing their acquisition of PayPal (which will happen). [0] Maybe there is some plan to pump Stripe's valuation to over $1TN before an IPO. Who knows. [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer...

I think the PayPal acquistion is to buy something that throws of real cash, to prevent a down round for Stripe when valuations reset.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#95
post #65

It is amazing how we watch from the sidelines these aquisitions and think .... why such big bill ? But it takes a good team to sell and everytime someone is successful it is because probably they have great sellers who believe in their value and demand a price. It is certainly not an easy task to get to the finish line for a startup and pay back their investors.

Curious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right?

OpenRouter is already the entrenched go-to router tbh. There's competitors (Vercel) but they're already well known. Stripe can also make them more competitive because they can waive / profit off the transaction cost. Considering stripe takes like a 3% fee, and the openrouter markup is 5%, that's a pretty big boost.

Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I'm not too sure. I guess they're betting realy big that these sorts of model routers will gain explosive token usage in the future

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#96

It is amazing how we watch from the sidelines these aquisitions and think .... why such big bill ? But it takes a good team to sell and everytime someone is successful it is because probably they have great sellers who believe in their value and demand a price. It is certainly not an easy task to get to the finish line for a startup and pay back their investors.

If you meant that generally: because productivity is increasing; the world is getting richer. Not all of it flows down, but some does; top SV salaries are up too. By a lot.

edit: Inflation does not account for the observed growth.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#97
post #65

It is amazing how we watch from the sidelines these aquisitions and think .... why such big bill ? But it takes a good team to sell and everytime someone is successful it is because probably they have great sellers who believe in their value and demand a price. It is certainly not an easy task to get to the finish line for a startup and pay back their investors.

Curious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right?

OpenRouter’s “moat” is currently “why would I use anything else?”.

Stripe has presumably only purchased them because they think there’s consumer-surplus to monetize here, which presumably will soon be giving me lots of reasons to use something else.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#98
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like Stripe's long-stated mission ("To increase the GDP of the Internet"). Also corporate speak. Their mission is take their cut of the Internet's GDP. Nothing against them, they provide real value for that cut. But that's what the actual mission is.

That feels unfair to read it that way. The mission as stated is that they will not only take a cut of the pie but grow the pie. If the total value they add is greater than the value they capture, everyone wins. You might not believe them, but that’s what the words are supposed to mean.

> You might not believe them, but that’s what the words are supposed to mean.

It's corporate bullshit not because I don't believe they can grow the pie, but because that's not their motivation.

In fact, a nice formula for coming up with your corporate mission statement would be:

1. Ignore your company's ground-truth financial incentives

2. Find a positive 2nd order effect E (or a plausible one) that you don't really care about, but maybe you genuinely think is nice

3. Claim your "passion for E" is what drove you to start your company, and keeps you working, because, of course, all great companies must have a "deeper purpose"

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