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Stripe acquires Clerky

clerky.com

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Re: Stripe acquires Clerky

#11

Post by akrolsmir »

Oh awesome! I love Stripe Atlas overall for the fast/excellent UX, but Clerky supports PBCs and a higher degree of customization (eg useful for incorporating for https://manifest.is since we had previously agreed on an informal equity split with a bunch of people).

Hoping that now they'll have the best of both worlds!

Re: Stripe acquires Clerky

#12

Post by gkoberger »

Huge congrats to Clerky. They've been doing thins for a very long time, and have awesome support + a solid product (that just... does what it's supposed to do). Congrats Darby and team!

Re: Stripe acquires Clerky

#14

Post by hibikir »

codemog wrote: post #13

What’s with all these acquisitions? Stripe realizing it’s going to slowly become PayPal 2.0 because infinite growth doesn’t exist?

Doing just payments is a really low margin industry, and the larger the contract you are after, the lower the margins. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to try to sign up startups, as their growth is your growth. And to win in the startup market, you don't win by lowest costs, but by how much generic work you can save them. Cut their headaches, and they'll be happy giving you a wider cut.

Thus, a million little acquisitions to make the possible Stripe bundle for small companies stronger, as they become the moat. The opposite of, say, the Adyen play, when you want to lower your own costs, and make money on tiny margins to do processing for really large companies.

Re: Stripe acquires Clerky

#15

Post by testbjjl »

codemog wrote: post #13

What’s with all these acquisitions? Stripe realizing it’s going to slowly become PayPal 2.0 because infinite growth doesn’t exist?

I think about their IPO and what seems and likely still is a promising offering seems a little less so with AI offerings. I also wonder if these businesses, suffering from the same AI uncertainties are a good value?

Re: Stripe acquires Clerky

#17

Post by benatkin »

hibikir wrote: post #14
codemog wrote: post #13

What’s with all these acquisitions? Stripe realizing it’s going to slowly become PayPal 2.0 because infinite growth doesn’t exist?

Doing just payments is a really low margin industry, and the larger the contract you are after, the lower the margins. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to try to sign up startups, as their growth is your growth. And to win in the startup market, you don't win by lowest costs, but by how much generic work you can save them. Cut their headaches, and they'll be happy giving you a wider cut. Thus, a million little acqu…

AI is making it a low-moat industry too. It's a lot quicker to build some API docs, a behavior tracking JavaScript library, and some fraud detection, with LLMs.

Re: Stripe acquires Clerky

#18

Post by chupchap »

I think Stripe is looking at companies using their services and identifying companies to acquire. This reminds me of Facebook looking at data from pixel data to identify apps with heavy usage they could acquire.
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