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The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

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Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#141

Post by simpsond »

jdavis703 wrote: post #87
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…

If Amazon’s board decided to reallocate the CEO’s compensation package and grant it to employees, it would increase the entry level salaries of warehouse workers from $18/hour to $18.45/hour. Not a bad bump, but also historically low by Amazon pay bumps. But it’s also not going to solve income inequality… And very likely there are few people qualified to be CEO of Amazon who’d do the job for $18.45/hour.

Look at his sales in the last years. https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/amzn/insider-a... … he sells a few hundred thousand shares here and there, and frequently receives new shares. That is also a form income.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#142

Post by dcolkitt »

pbreit wrote: post #115
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. The reality is that it's just not possible to start these kinds of Unicorn companies anywhere except in the USA. The EU's extreme policies contribute to an overwhelming burden of tax and employment regulations, which results in risk-averseness. So entrepreneurial Europeans go to USA to start their company.

Checkout.com, Klarna, Revolut, Transferwise, Mollie, Deliveroo, Spotify, Hopin, Trustly.

So that's the full list of successful startups for a developed economy polity with twice the population of America over the past 25 years... Not exactly impressive.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#143

Post by lmm »

puranjay wrote: post #63
rvz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company... Exactly. The hype squad have been screaming about the valuations of these companies and now look at them as soon as they IPOed. Neither of them are profitable companies. It just means the VCs, insiders and everyone else who got was in before the IPO made a windfall in their stock and by now cashed out. The news hypin…

I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high school/college at 18-22 and start making money - “being profitable”, so to speak. There are starups right now that were founded before 2010, went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years time That’s 18-20 years without a profit!?!

Cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Basic research can take hundreds of years to put into practice. The Swedish government has a couple of nice national parks that were originally oak forests planted to supply the navy in a few hundred years.

While there are definitely advantages to the discipline of having to make a profit, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with building a company over long timescales.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#144

Post by daniel-cussen »

zht wrote: post #36
ambicapter wrote: post #33

> Wordlessly offered a credit card reader, Collison says he’d rather pay cash. Wonder why. Competitors’ device? Privacy concerns?

wonder if it's privacy concerns like Zuck taping over his webcam

It's so basic. You gotta limit the cam. It's just too easy to do the spycam, I have a friend who did it to himself to see how hard it was. It was really easy.

It's from like 2002, when they first came out.

You know what I just did? I put a band-aid a guy sold me on the street, 2 cents, it's perfect, the cotton part over the camera and it doesn't leave residue. Restickable. Hardware kill switch right there...but for this problem, it's just a band-aid.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#145

Post by kareemsabri »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #139
kareemsabri wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP claimed only 2-3 people in each company are "responsible" for the success of said company. You do not need to be the only person in the world who can do a job to have some, or even major, responsibility for the success of an organization.

I think you may be misinterpreting what OP meant (or perhaps I am, that's a real possibility). I read that as "There are only 2-3 specific people whose skills and contributions were so essential to the orgs success that the org would have failed without them specifically." Where you might have a front end developer who is technically "responsible" for facilitating millions of online transaction, there are likely thou…

The case I was making is, it takes many people to turn a startup into a unicorn, and many of them are integral and make massively important contributions that, without them, would not have occurred. The degree to which those people are replaceable is difficult to say precisely, as it varies per person and per company, but I don't think being irreplaceable is the bar for being considered responsible. If a fireman pulls a kid out of a burning building, we don't care that many other fireman could have also done the same thing. The individual who did the critical work is responsible.

I have been at unicorn companies with C-suite executives that are clearly useless, or worse, net detractors playing political games that the people under them have to work around to get shit done. I have been at companies where one engineer is single-handedly keeping parts of the lights on, or conceptualizing and architecting critical systems, having an outsized impact well beyond their title and compensation. There seems to be a false idea here that the way companies run is "top down" - ie. the Collison brothers set out all the goals and strategies and products, and then the employees just execute their vision like pawns. Maybe there are companies like that, but I've never seen one, particularly a fast growing one.

I guess I just disagree that the number of people who would be deemed "responsible" for Stripe's success is 2-3. That seems, frankly, unbelievable to me having worked in companies with hundreds or thousands of employees and seeing how many different people it takes to build something massive, innovative, with multiple product or business lines. Not just taking marching orders but exercising their creativity, judgement, expertise, leadership skills etc.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#146

Post by daniel-cussen »

lmm wrote: post #143
puranjay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high school/college at 18-22 and start making money - “being profitable”, so to speak. There are starups right now that were founded before 2010, went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years time That’s 18-20 years without a profit!?!

Cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Basic research can take hundreds of years to put into practice. The Swedish government has a couple of nice national parks that were originally oak forests planted to supply the navy in a few hundred years. While there are definitely advantages to the discipline of having to make a profit, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with building a company over long timescales…

Basic research can take a lot less than hundreds of years in special cases. So for me, I got my AI algorithm, my first one, to produce a result I did not already know about within a year of starting the code. It discovered negative modulo. That was it.

But! That was something I myself did not know. Not really important that eg wikipedia already knows about negative modulos getting the last elements of a list.

That was the point of AI. From that day I had much more confidence in the basic premise of the basic research, that this could be done and it slowly would develop.

And why did I come up with a result so fast with my own basic research? Desperation. Solitude, isolation. Silence. Single-mindedness, determination, that AI was all I actually cared about, no secondary reason to live. It got all my resources.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#147

Post by tomatowurst »

colinmhayes wrote: post #53
tomatowurst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPO right now is very difficult as the door is closing, and investors are wary about paying a premium like they have before. They delayed it too long and have missed the window, it is unlikely from a year from now they will be able to get any bids for the current market valuations.

I mean why didn't they IPO last year with everyone else?

Your guess is as good as mine but they likely thought that the status quo in market would continue.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#148

Post by mrtesthah »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #133
CPLX wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The entire concept of Amazon being a company at all is a legal fiction granted as a privilege that can be revoked as easily as it was given. Ok, but how does getting rich because of moving boxes at Amazon rather than Walmart make more sense?

Maybe our goal as a society shouldn’t be to decide who gets rich, but rather to do what it takes to ensure fair distribution of resources such that everyone’s basic needs for food, housing, healthcare, and education are met.

That’s difficult to do when wealth is concentrated among a very small group of people.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#149

Post by majormajor »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #82
kareemsabri wrote: post #60

I know the Collisons are brilliant founders and I have long admired Stripe (I've used their Golang API client as inspiration many times in my own code) but it's kind of unfortunate how founder lore really minimizes employees. Stripe has 4,000 people working there, this article mentions only two other employees in passing (the CPO and CFO). Surely many others were brilliant contributors to Stripe's becoming a $95B uni…

I think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…

I don't really follow your examples, but I think there's a part of startup comp structures that's worth calling out in general. Equity distribution ratios are way different than salary ones.

Your boss in a mature company may make 20% more than you, give or take. Your boss in a early stage startup may have 10x (or more!) more equity than you. Even if they don't have 10x to lose.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#150

Post by jhugo »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #111
wbsss4412 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thesis is hard to square with the fact that it’s not that these unicorns are started in the US, it’s that they are almost all started in one metropolitan area . The distinguishing factors here aren’t simply European regulations and taxes.

It's a matter of locality sure. But also access. SF and NYC have easy access to startup incubators and venture capital. Do you have a great idea and looking for an angel to give it a chance? You'll probably find it in New York or San Francisco. Pretty unlikely in Munich or Paris.

I realise it's maybe clear from the context of the thread, but it's worth reiterating that this is only true for unicorn-scale. There is plenty of startup capital available for good ideas in both Paris and Munich as well as many other European cities, they are just unlikely to breed unicorns.
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