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Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

stripe.com

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Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#141

Post by beambot »

aliljet wrote: post #25

The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.

The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#144

Post by aliljet »

beambot wrote: post #141
aliljet wrote: post #25

The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.

The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).

The path to declaring yourself accredited is uniquely easy. Just say it. The whole space is deeply unregulated and unaudited. What makes it insane is that those middleman are making a small fortune exploiting this loophole protecting large companies from being forced to go public. The number is 2000 private investors. Rest assured, more than 2000 individuals have money in Stripe today. It's a total scam.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#145

Post by aliljet »

dyauspitr wrote: post #80
aliljet wrote: post #25

The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.

How exactly?

The easiest way? Angelist.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#146

Post by Stromgren »

hmokiguess wrote: post #137
Stromgren wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea it wasn’t meant as a counter argument either.

To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#147

Post by Centigonal »

rprend wrote: post #73

1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.

Well, it's not exactly a fair comparison, since they're comparing a volume number with GDP, which is total value produced in a year. Volume numbers are usually much bigger than production numbers, since money moves around a lot.

If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#149

Post by woodruffw »

the_bear wrote: post #133
woodruffw wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valuabl…

Oh, that makes sense. I was thinking fraud as in AML requirements, not fraud as in scammers and card theft.

Re: Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

#150

Post by quesera »

snowhale wrote: post #148
throwaw12 wrote: post #26

Congratulations. But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?

[dead]

> adyen is cleaner as a business but it's basically a payments rail. stripe's embedded finance products ...

Where in your comment authorship pipeline were these errors introduced?

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