The gross receipts tax was ridiculously misguided and is going to cause irreparable harm to the city's economy if not fixed. Square and other FinTech companies are most definitely next.
Stripe to move to South San Francisco
41–50 of 441 posts
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#42I'm surprised to not see any current Stripe employees in here commenting on the move. Usually you'd see one of The Brothers Collison in a HN Stripe thread.
As a former Stripe (ex-Stripe?), I do buy the story of running out of room. That office is lovely, but they keep growing on a pretty steep curve, and the floors weren't as dense in there as you might imagine. Decidedly cool interior design tho!
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#43> 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 ...
I mean, it eliminates the entire East Bay from its pool of possible employees, so that sucks for anyone who lives out there. That’s a pretty big deal for their quality of life.
Doesn't Stripe have remote workers?
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#44Or you know they could move to a much more accessible and cheaper city like Oakland
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#45Articles 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 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 prevention built-in, I don't know how much that amounts to (and how much more effective China is at combating fraud, though it's possible WeChat simply doesn't accept as much liability as American payment processors do.)
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#46I 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…
The law has you pay taxes of 1% of gross revenue * percentage of global employees working in an SF office. Even if the headquarters moved (and I'd guess it is already a Delaware registered company legally), they'd still have to pay.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
All locations south of the City of San Francisco are in a different county!
Hmm, the airport is technically part of the City and County, while distinctly being south of it.
Actually it is in San Mateo county. Wikipedia: "the airport is owned and operated by the City and County of San Francisco, despite it being located in San Mateo County."
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#48Articles 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.
It seems like raising prices from 2.9% to 2.93% would cover the tax. (I assume they don't want to go to 3% because that looks like a huge jump.) The real question in my mind is why does Stripe bother to exist if they're barely breaking even.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#49Articles 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.
It doesn’t miss that...it actually says it wasn’t a big factor (though take with grain of salt). I can buy that they needed more space, and that it would be cheaper there then elsewhere.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#50Articles 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.
It seems like raising prices from 2.9% to 2.93% would cover the tax. (I assume they don't want to go to 3% because that looks like a huge jump.) The real question in my mind is why does Stripe bother to exist if they're barely breaking even.
Low margin, high volume.