Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club • Hacker News Board

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#121

Post by colinbartlett » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 2:43 PM UTC

kulkarnic wrote: post #56

This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious. The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company b…

Even if that $1 Billion number was actually a revenue number and not just a "valuation", Stripe wouldn't even register in the top 300 private companies in the US:

http://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/#page:1...:

Large private companies are nothing new. Cargill has $136 Billion in annual revenue. What does Stripe have?

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#122

Post by marktangotango » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 3:14 PM UTC

kulkarnic wrote: post #56

This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious. The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company b…

kulkarnic just arrived from 1975 when a billion was a lot of money :)

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#123

Post by yesimahuman » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 3:24 PM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #34

pc wrote: post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

Seeing this comment makes me realise how much of a crazy technical risk I made choosing to use Stripe when I did. My company started charging for things in April 2012, but I made the decision to use Stripe months before that, something like January 2012. Only 4 months after you launched! We only did 1500 transactions on our launch day, yet at the time it was enough to break your service for a little while due to load…

Yep, same here. Had our first customers in February 2012 on Stripe. Glad it worked out, but we always knew it would :)

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#124

Post by silverbax88 » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 3:55 PM UTC

So fanstastic. I love Stripe. A lot. I use it. A lot. I will continue to use it.

A lot.

Congrats on their success. They deserve it for creating a product that beats the competition, hands down.

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#125

Post by michaelschade » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 4:12 PM UTC

TomGullen wrote: post #117

pc wrote: post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

Stripe is great, we're really enjoying using it! I have three comments though if you're willing to listen! - I think your customer service department (although they do a good job) the quality has gone down, I often have to now wait several days for a reply. I guess this is the inevitability of growth though. In an ideal world it'd be nice to go back to when I got same day replies :) - We're a UK business. We take pay…

Thanks for the feedback, Tom! I understand how the USD -> UK transfers would help; we're looking into making that an option.

For accounting, we've found that better reporting tools usually solve the need for less frequent transfers. Would one of the options at https://support.stripe.com/questions/reconciling-transfers-w... make this easier on you? Feel free to email me if not so I can understand more about your setup. Every part of Stripe should be incredibly simple, including accounting, and I want to make sure we get this right.

Re support: you're right that the replies have been slower than they should be, though that's getting better. Basically, our userbase grew massively in 2013 and our support hiring didn't keep up with it. I spend all of my time on scaling the team, and we've more than doubled the size of the team in the past couple of months. More hires are on their way. I realize our internal machinations aren't very relevant—you just care that the result is excellent—and I'd like to be clear that we're working on this. You should expect to see significantly faster replies and more ways to get in touch with us over the coming months.

While you should already be seeing improvement in this area, feel free to get in touch with me directly at michael@stripe.com anytime. I'd love to hear any other feedback, and am more than happy to help with whatever questions you have.

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#126

Post by jareau » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

groks wrote: post #116

steveklabnik wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve from Balanced here. I'm in charge of the API. You can look at this comparison in a few ways. We share a lot of the same investors: Both YC, SV Angel, a16z, etc. They've gotten a lot more funding than we have, and so have a bigger team. You get paid faster with Balanced: we have _same day_ payouts to Wells Fargo customers, and _next day_ payouts to any other bank. Stripe is seven days. Feature wise, we provide a…

> To say some more good things about Stripe, they have launched in a few places internationally, and we are still US only. We can accept foreign credit cards, but merchants need to be in the US. Hoping to fix that, regulations are hard. You should have a form on your website where I can add my email address and then you can tell me when Balanced is available in my country.

(Balanced co-founder here)

Good suggestion. We'll work on adding that [1]. Right now, we have those interested +1 on a GitHub issue tread [2], so we can contact them later, but you're right something a bit cleaner would be easier for you and us.

[1] https://github.com/balanced/www.balancedpayments.com/issues/... [2] https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#127

Post by ChrisNorstrom » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 5:23 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

Dear Stripe. I love you. Please add Micro-Transactions support like PayPal at the 5% + 0.05 cents transaction fee for payments under $12 dollars. Patiently waiting, Chris Norstrom.

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#128

Post by 23andwalnut » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 5:53 PM UTC

cschmidt wrote: post #81

Congratulations to the Stripe team. Strips is one of those excellent companies that make the tech world a better place. I actually spent the day working on adding Stripe integration to a Django application for my startup. Since there seem to be a number of Stripe people on this thread, I thought I might give some feedback. It was fairly straightforward to add a custom credit card form, but not as easy as I had expect…

I'm working on something to solve this problem right now - a drag and drop stripe form builder.

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#129

Post by coreymgilmore » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 7:13 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

great job guys. i've used stripe and it definitely works well. love the "checkout" and the customization i can do with integration into my own page. pretty seamless compared to other vendors.

only quip: price! would love to see a different pricing scheme for cheaper products. $0.30 fixed fee is a lot for carts that are only a few dollars!

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#130

Post by majani » Thu, Jan 23, 2014, 9:19 PM UTC

ezl wrote: post #114

I'm curious about what one of these decks looks like. When you raise money, you presumably have some notion of how you are going to spend that money. $X for new engineers, $Y to build out the London office, etc. What does a plan for SPENDING the $80m they raised in this round even look like?

check out IPO roadshow presentations for an idea of what goes on at that level