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Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

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

#151

Post by tptacek »

skinnymuch wrote: post #136
tptacek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When people investigate meme stocks the people complaining that they can't get on Stripe's cap table take the side of the meme stocks!

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

#152

Post by shimman »

fastball wrote: post #39
throwaw12 wrote: post #26

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

It is not 5x bigger, it is 5x more valuable. Obviously Stripes 2x higher revenue is part of that equation, but not all of it.

5x more valuable in a private market is meaningless, until they go public it's all magic numbers used to push whatever narrative they need.

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

#153

Post by shimman »

tptacek wrote: post #102
colesantiago wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So someone who inherits $100 million (11 year old or not) doesn't have take the exam, but someone who knows about the industry inside out has take an exam to participate? Seems "fair" to be honest. I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.

We don't care if people with $100MM make a bad bet on a tech company.

Maybe we should, seeing how disastrous unregulated tech has been for society.

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

#154

Post by jamesdelaneyie »

hmokiguess wrote: post #95

I 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)

In the EU and had to switch from Stripe to Mollie due to Stripe thinking the client was a cruise company because they rent 'cruiser' boats for river leisure. Mollie was super easy to implement for them, and fees much better

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

#155

Post by j45 »

baxtr wrote: post #79
j45 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private companies have the right to be private until if or when they decide not to be private. Navigating the risk and growth allows them to navigate their growth and rewards while maybe in the drivers seat a bit more.

No one said they don’t have the right. But for the good of all of society, it would be better if they did.

How would becoming a public company be better for all of society?

Stock markets are not entirely logical from my understanding.

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

#156

Post by wasmainiac »

quesera wrote: post #150
snowhale wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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?

Same question, this is not the first time I’ve seen random 's.

I think it’s a bot, look at the post history with the weird repetitive hyphens.

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

#158

Post by ericmay »

gmd63 wrote: post #94
ericmay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well when you're giving away your product for free... maybe open-source maintainers who want payment for their "free" products should consider going to business school? I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start ch…

We have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask…

> If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.

That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is.

But what I do not want to see as a citizen and taxpayer is "we want to build this for free, ope now we want to get paid and it's totally not fair that Meta took our free thing and did something productive with it and we need taxpayer dollars.". That's not fair to anyone, and solving that by "mandating" or "requiring" things is anti-free market, and against the free spirit of human creativity and entrepreneurship.

> When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations

Let's not call it all charity though. You get invited to conferences, you get job opportunities you otherwise wouldn't get, you get to feel great about the thing you are working on - there's a lot of unpaid benefits, and under-the-table ones too.

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

#159

Post by 0xy »

testfoobar wrote: post #143

This feels rich. Compare: Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance. PayPal: $41.51B right now. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/

PayPal is steadily decreasing in share of web payments, with the one redeeming part of their business being Venmo, which appears to be crushing Cash App.

Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.

Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".

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