1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
Why will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?
Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
131–140 of 253 posts
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stripe has been doing annual tender offers. Their stance on not being public yet is that they don't need to be, as an IPO is mainly a way to raise money. As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
I hope they never go public (also as an ex-Stripe!) I can't really see a net-positive benefit to having public shareholders and reporting requirements. Do we think Stripe's leadership needs feedback from random investment advisors or analysts? Do employees need the distraction of daily-updating stock prices? Would quarterly reporting incentivize better decision making? In my opinion: ehhhhhhhhhhhh I see the benefit,…
I get the feeling that the founders will not bend and invest for long term and not quarterly, as a non ex-stripe at least judging by their patience to IPO
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#1341.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
Why will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?
I find it inspiring. I relate to the Collison brothers. They're a couple of hackers from Ireland. It blows my mind that a couple young guys like that can build something and in 20 years capture 2% of the entire world's economic activity.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t they already get to participate in secondary markets to liquidate?
They can, but it's orders of magnitudes less liquid than the public stock market. Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.
I see, thanks for the clarification.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't we extend this to the risky public manipulated stock market?
Because the odds of you losing all your money on private tech company shares are nearly 100%, and the odds of you losing all your money in SPDR or VFINX are nearly 0%.
Still seems silly when meme stocks exist and the establishment (like entire media and news apparatus) can and do collude to mess with things (like “Black Monday” ~2021 when all the media and news lied and said wall street bets and meme stonk people had moved on to silver) and within days all the meme stock gains across over a dozen companies were entirely wiped out.
Not saying meme stocks should be a thing but no one gets investigated or in trouble. Nothing is done. If they cared about the average person something would be done.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#137I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff. Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you ha…
Fair point, though a lot has changed from 15 years ago. A lot of what you mentioned is sort of the new baseline most payment gateways ship with, and working on code you haven't touched in a while is certainly a lot easier nowadays with agents too. All that said, if you're satisfied with the price and the product I am not here to convince you to swap.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reporting isn’t the drawbacks of being public, it’s the investors. They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition). They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them. Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.
The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is. IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#139Ludicrous valuation
Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
#140> Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details m…
Not sure what that letter said but open source^ isn’t good and I’m what people would incorrectly stereotype as someone who would love open source as a Marxist [sympathizer].
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.