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Stripe to move to South San Francisco

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#211

Post by closeparen »

rayiner wrote: post #128
baby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a national issue and SF is a symptom. Instead of pushing for healthcare, housing, more aids, and so on, people are just blaming it on mental health.

It’s not “national issue.” Aid and housing are local issues. San Francisco and California in general have much worse homelessness problems than many other places in the country. (For example, Mississippi has one of the lowest homelessness rates in the country.)

It’s a national issue because people are mobile and will go to wherever the services are best. If San Francisco decides to house every homeless person who appears on its streets, it’s going to have to house every homeless person in America.

Coordination at the federal level could even out geographical imbalances in services and also prevent all services from having to be delivered in the few places where it’s most expensive to do so. Doing all the free housing in the most expensive market is crazy.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#212

Post by driverdan »

abalone wrote: post #115

This blows, not so much because Stripe is leaving SF, but because it's going just over the border for tax purposes so 100% of employees who live in SF will stay in SF. The company just won't pay their fair share to the city to offset their impact. The line about this being about space and not taxes is hard to believe.[1] And for good reason. Last year Stripe funded an anti-homeless campaign just $1 shy of the reporti…

Good. A gross receipts tax is absurd and businesses should move out of the city in protest.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#213

Post by thr0waway43234 »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #80
cjlars wrote: post #5

Articles misses that this is in response to SF's gross receipts tax. Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city.

> Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city. Stripe charges %2.9 + $0.30 per transaction. That is not an "ultra low margin" by any means in the CC processing domain. Actually, that is a massive markup when compared to other ISO's and VAR's. Depending on the Merchant's processor and their volume, significance, and sophistication, their Discount…

Regarding their pricing to low-touch customers, like anyone just signing up on the website, yes, it's a very good margin for a payment processor. But the trick is that nobody processing a million a day + is going to pay that. They'll negotiate, hard, or change providers. I suspect most of them are in more traditional cost plus contracts: 5c-50c take per transaction, even though the entire bank processing fee is counted in revenue. In those cases, the local tax would put SF companies at a major disadvantage vs Adyen, which doesn't pay a tax on revenues.

Given that Stripe is already not a major player for those very large companies, 1% of revenues on merchants that have high average transaction sizes means they might as well not show up to the negotiating table, as their break even point will be more expensive than other's best offer.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#214

Post by rhacker »

adventured wrote: post #110
baby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a national issue and SF is a symptom. Instead of pushing for healthcare, housing, more aids, and so on, people are just blaming it on mental health.

Your premise doesn't align with the facts . Poverty and homelessness are near all-time lows in the US right now, comparable to Canada. You wouldn't know that by looking at the streets of San Francisco (or Los Angeles for that matter). At a national level homelessness has declined dramatically since 2000. While San Francisco's problem has only kept getting worse. The US as a whole isn't seeing the homelessness problem…

Very oddly doesn't align with my eyes.

Along the i5 from Seattle to San Diego the encampments have been growing. There are a few places where it goes away but mostly because of individual city efforts to do something. Source - been driving the route very actively last 5 years.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#215

Post by dmode »

mc32 wrote: post #170
ghaff wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, significant HQ moves often have a major cut in headcount as a well-understood side effect if not an actual motivation. But, yes, companies can and have moved their HQs a lot more than ten miles. It's probably harder in an industry and at a time when more people figure a job with a given company is pretty ephemeral though.

Maybe but I think people will figure out the talent deserts have more oases than people think. There are more options for talent than just SV. Remember much of the US talent in SV come from other parts of the country. Many would stay local if given the opp to stay local. So instead of drawing talent to SV, SV could seek the talent in those markets (where talent is growing).

It is not about an oasis, it is about top of the funnel. To hire 1 eng, you have to interview 5-10, and have to phone screen 20-30, and have have hacker rank tested 100-200. Now scale that to a 1000 person eng team

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#216

Post by wbronitsky »

giarc wrote: post #166
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #23

I can tell you recruiting for South San Francisco was way harder than recruiting for SF. If I lived in SF without a car, that'd be a deal breaker for me. They're going to start losing people, or see a huge spike in chronic working from home. I guess they have to move somewhere at some point, and no move is without trade-offs. Regarding the gross receipts tax, couldn't they just move their HQ-on-paper to any place tha…

Google Maps tells me this is a 14 minute drive (old HQ to Oyster Point Park). 16-30 minutes if you want to arrive at 8am. Is that correct? Is that such a game changer? Do that many people not own vehicles or can't carpool to work?

When I commuted into the Stripe office by car from Oakland, it would take me about 45 minutes to get there, and well over 60 minutes to get home. With this move, you can add about 30 minutes, at least, on to each end. And that's on a good day and assuming you are already commuting by car.

From Oakland/the East Bay, there is no good way to get to South San Francisco by public transportation. You are looking at a 2+ hour commute in each direction to go < 15 miles

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#217

Post by ergocoder »

abalone wrote: post #118
darawk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, what? San Francisco taxes revenue of businesses that are there? I had to google it to check because I couldn't believe a city would actually do something that stupid. But it seems its real: https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/gross-receipts-t... This is just....staggeringly stupid. It just penalizes low margin businesses, for no reason. How can anyone possibly think this is a good idea?

> This is just....staggeringly stupid. It just penalizes low margin businesses, for no reason. How can anyone possibly think this is a good idea? You might want to ask sf.citi, the SF tech industry lobbying group who came up with it in 2012. Here's a video of Jack Dorsey campaigning for the gross receipts tax as CEO of Square. [1] The argument then, of course, was that we shouldn't tax early stage pre-revenue tech co…

It's unfair because Square pays more tax than Saleforce. Not because they have to pay tax.

It would be great next time if you can mention the whole reason around. unfairness.

Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1053312151136362496

Do you think that's fair?

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#218

Post by dehrmann »

lukeschlather wrote: post #45
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payment processing rates in China are ____ Payment processing rates in USA are ___ Can somebody help me double check something? I don’t know the answers to those questions I feel like I read WeChat processes payments at 0.1% while Stripe/PayPal are still around 2%

I have a credit card that gives me 1.5% cash back on every transaction. I'm reading that Visa typically charges 2.3% to merchants, and Stripe charges 2.9%, ignoring per-transaction fees. So Stripe itself probably gets around 0.6% of each transaction, and at least on average 1% of each transaction goes to cardholder bonuses, and the card issuer gets around 1.3%. Of course both Stripe and the issuer have some fraud pre…

> I have a credit card that gives me 1.5% cash back on every transaction

Some of this is paid for by people carrying balances. The bet is that cash back will attract enough people to get and use the card that, in aggregate, interest will make up for cash back.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#219

Post by wbronitsky »

olingern wrote: post #2

> The company will move more than 1,000 employees just 10 miles south of its current South of Market headquarters, which it plans to vacate. Click bait. They're moving ten miles south of their current office ...

Why comment if you are obviously ignorant of the situation? To you, 10 miles might mean 10 minutes or less. In this situation, it could lengthen an already lengthy commute for many employees by 30 minutes or more in each direction. I know this because I worked at Stripe and commuted from Oakland to their office South of Market by car.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#220

Post by Keloo »

tshaddox wrote: post #109
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The feel of San Francisco is already lost, when a small single apartment runs $3000 a month. > And homeless are everywhere. Maybe a $3k per month "small single apartment" contributes to "homeless are everywhere."

When people say “homeless are everywhere” regarding SF, they’re probably referring to the extremely troubled people who are conspicuously doing drugs or screaming incoherently on the streets. I don’t think those people would suddenly be fine if only the SF apartments were $500 a month instead of $3000. Of course, there are a lot more homeless people in SF than the very conspicuously unwell people I mentioned. There a…

I'm not from US and I'm not very informed about the homeless problem.

But I wonder why homeless people don't move to another city. If I'd be in their situation (living in a city where I can not afford to rent a house and live a normal life) I'd go to another city where with a regular job I can afford a normal life and just build my life there.

Sorry if it's a stupid question.

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