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Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

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Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#51

Post by chadash »

haaen wrote: post #17

Stripe is the second most valuable YC company. Total valuation of all companies that YC funded (more than 1,900) now exceeds 100 billon dollars. Airbnb has a private valuation of 31 billion. Stripe has a private valuation of 20 billion. Dropbox has a public valuation (DBX) of 11 billion. So the two most valuable companies account for about half the total value of all the YC companies. This is what a power law looks l…

And this is why Y Combinator may not be right for your startup. The 100 billion dollars of valuation listed on YC's website may not be up to date, but it's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots. And they also invest in multiple competitors in the same space in the hopes that one will pan out.

So if you're building the kind of company that might be worth $100 million someday but won't ever be worth $100 billion, VCs and startup incubators might not be right for you, but just remember that a rejection from them doesn't necessarily mean you aren't on to something great.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#52

Post by Operyl »

jczhang wrote: post #35
superasn wrote: post #5

The thing I love most about Stripe is that they have invested quite a lot of resources in their Atlas program to help people from around the world get a level playing field. Before Stripe Atlas there was not a single resource that would allow a non American to setup a bank account for their company totally virtually without ever visiting US (i know because I spoke to at least a dozen of different people and everyone…

How did Stripe bypass the law here?

I don’t think there were laws preventing it. Just skiddish banks.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#53

Post by lastofus »

xseven wrote: post #49
aczerepinski wrote: post #44

Pretty annoying that it’s illegal for me to invest in any of these newish tech companies.

Why is it illegal? How would you invest in them if it were legal?

They are probably referring to not being an accredited investor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#54

Post by was_boring »

ttul wrote: post #38
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard about Amazon using Stripe before. Here's an article from 2017 talking about it: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-quietly-starts-using-st...

Amazing. I wonder why? Amazon must have insane deals with the credit cards. This must be to access some tech that amazon doesn’t want to replicate for some small slice of its business - maybe on the fraud side.

I would imagine that they have an integration with dozens of providers. It makes sense to spread it out so your business cannot be bullied by any single third party dependency and you can pit them against each other to get favorable terms across the board.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#56

Post by gamblor956 »

aczerepinski wrote: post #44

Pretty annoying that it’s illegal for me to invest in any of these newish tech companies.

It's not illegal for you to invest in Stripe. It's simply illegal for Stripe to try and sell you their stock. If you happen to have personal connections to Stripe leadership, and they haven't hit the regulatory shareholder limit (after which they must start filing disclosures with the SEC), you could legally buy all the Stripe stock you could afford.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#57

Post by ergothus »

amelius wrote: post #45

How much money would it take to duplicate the offerings and marketing of Stripe. And shouldn't that be the actual valuation?

And when we have a formula that can express developing a user base and market trust, particularly in the face of a company that already has it, may be we will.

Until then, it's not terribly accurate to say "A team of 5 can write it in 6 months, so call it $2 mill valuation after hardware and support" because spending some money to have the exact product DOESN'T mean you have nor can get their customers.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#58

Post by hibikir »

dawhizkid wrote: post #11

I have heard for years people criticizing the payments industry as a low margin commodity biz. What has changed? Or they just got it wrong?

People approach payments in the same way they approach, say, twitter: They think of the simplest parts of the business, and think that's all there is.

If all you are doing is taking credit card numbers, taking money out, and handing it to merchants, then sure, there's relatively little value there, and the competition at that level can be fierce.

But what you find in companies like Uber or Amazon today is not just taking credit cards: They run marketplaces where signing on is easy. They will take very different payment forms in different countries: The world is not really all about credit cards in US dollars. You need to fight different kinds of credit card fraud, build a reporting infrastructure, integrate with some traditional accounting system, and connect it all to your logistics in some fashion. A large marketplace will have dozens, if not hundreds of people dedicated to payments, and that without caring of the little bit of taking credit cards. It's in those areas where payment companies don't have feature parity, and a big part of what you'd pick one over another, especially as a startup. And in differentiation there's money, not in taking all the physical retail sales for Walmart.

I suspect that eventually a few big players will really be feature complete with each other and margins will go down, but maybe there is a big winner there, who has an expensive to replicate product, or whose product relies on so much data that competition is impossible. If that were to happen, that kind of big winner's valuation would be far higher than what we see today from Stripe, Square, Paypal or Alipay.

Re: Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

#59

Post by mikeleeorg »

jaggederest wrote: post #33
SeanAppleby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My startup went through Atlas a couple years ago when it was in beta, and it was amazing. It let us focus on actually building the business rather than screwing around with generic corporate structure and banking, and the team seemed to be fully invested in removing as much legal noise from starting companies as they possibly could. Any problems we had they were there with us to make them disappear. John Collison app…

It's the classic "grow the pie" strategy - if you create more customers that feed into using your service, it's worth it even if you're running a modest loss. Think of it as a marketing or business development strategy, rather than a service of its own.

And such a great business development strategy at that. It's a win/win for everyone involved. Other online payment providers didn't have the foresight to create Atlas, and it's a testament to Stripe's brainpower that they had this idea and pulled it off so well.

I just noticed that their vision is to "build the economic infrastructure for the internet." That's ambitious. I wouldn't have guessed, from that vision, that they'd build Atlas. But in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.

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