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Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

wsj.com

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Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#51

Post by erikpukinskis »

spencerwgreene wrote: post #38

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

The point of an IPO is to A) create liquidity, and B) divest some of the risk to a bigger pool of investors. If you are cash flow positive, and have only long term investors, there’s no real monetary benefit. You’re giving away your dividends to other people.

It’s a question of whether you want to discount your own risk or hold it. IPOing allows you to price your risk and sell some of it off. But if you’re a long term investor there’s a good chance you value your risk higher than the market, which means you’ll lose money in the long term by selling it.

It also depends on your other investment opportunities. If you have other places to invest, then your money has a high time value and you’re paying more “interest”, so-to-speak, on the risk. If you don’t have anywhere better to park your money then the time value is very low and holding that risk is cheap.

There are other factors as well, like government limits on buying other assets, that could make a private investor want to hold.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#53

Post by Zaheer »

edwinwee wrote: post #24
warent wrote: post #11

Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Ove…

We do want to optimize for those simple needs. Which parts do you think are bloated? Would love to hear how we can de-bloat. (Feel free to email me at edwin@stripe.com too.)

Would be interesting to have an entirely separate 'Getting' section for folks on-boarding for first time just getting a handle on basics. Potentially even going as far as new 'Simple' APIs. Mention all the caveats up-front and direct them to documentation if they need more functionality. I'd imagine it would speed up adoption.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#54

Post by pc »

[Stripe cofounder]

Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want to build".) I always appreciate hearing from HN users (even if I don't always have time to respond): patrick@stripe.com.

For anyone thinking about what they should work on: I started building developer tools when I was 15 and "tools for creation" is still, IMO, one of the most interesting areas to work in.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#55

Post by thaumasiotes »

warent wrote: post #11

Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Ove…

> I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for.

If your customers are at all price-sensitive, you might want to give this a little more consideration. Banks and payment processors always offer "We handle currency conversion for you! How convenient!", and they pretty much always do it by charging several times the normal conversion fee (in the form of converting at an extraordinarily unfavorable exchange rate).

I hate merchants who use those services; I have a credit card that will pay you in any currency and only charge me a 1% conversion fee. Please charge me in your currency, not my currency.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#56

Post by joering2 »

seansmccullough wrote: post #43
spencerwgreene wrote: post #38

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

Generally consensus is a recession is going to happen in the next year or two, and the next good time to IPO won’t be for several years after it that.

... which has absolutely nothing to do with going IPO, since they would cash out/in and get access to stockholders money at the exact day of their IPO, not "next year or two".

If you do not need to raise money there are limited reasons to go public, however you have much stricter reporting requirements, and general things you cannot do anymore since you are publicly traded, not to mention hostile takeovers, etc. Dell's story is a great example why you want to go public / go back private.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-...

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#57

Post by hartator »

pc wrote: post #54

[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want…

Congrats on Stripe. Producing and marketing for developers first is indeed a passionating topic.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#58

Post by dmarlow »

pc wrote: post #54

[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want…

Thanks for all that you, John and Stripe have done for startups. Question for you, how will you continue to remain focused on helping startups if/when you go public and have shareholders to appease?

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#59

Post by adamqureshi »

I use STRIPE as my payment Processor for my 1 man shop. They are great. Stupid simple. They even offered me a cash advance. All i need now is for stripe to be my bank to keep all my money in there and pay my business bills from it. One stop shop to run my business, would be great! What would even be more useful to me then lending me money, is if they help me build my v2 and take a slice from my business. Finding engineers is hard and very expensive for a small online business like mine.

Re: Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

#60

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #51
spencerwgreene wrote: post #38

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

The point of an IPO is to A) create liquidity, and B) divest some of the risk to a bigger pool of investors. If you are cash flow positive, and have only long term investors, there’s no real monetary benefit. You’re giving away your dividends to other people. It’s a question of whether you want to discount your own risk or hold it. IPOing allows you to price your risk and sell some of it off. But if you’re a long ter…

While those are the "theoretical" reason for IPOs, let's not ignore a primary reason for an IPO, which is to let early investors and employees cash out (though these days many companies, e.g. Slack, are just doing a direct listing instead).
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