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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

#81

Post by masahiko »

dmode wrote: post #62

As someone who has worked in South SF for years, it is pretty bad for employees. It is a cultural wasteland with few restaurants or interesting things to do. Transit is also poor as both BART and Caltrain are in awkward locations. And the fog is worse. This will be like Uber’s move to Oakland, which got rolled back pretty quickly

Fog is worse than where? I work in SSF as well... A) its where businesses like Stripe should be in the coming years (it wont be creative, it'll be internet infrastructure) B) there is a ferry to Oakland (to help alleviate the absurd traffic jams over the bay bridge) and C) bring some variety (right now SSF is all pharma and med device) into SSF.

There is no reason why SSF couldn't be a thriving, cool place to live and work. It takes companies like Stripe to take the lead and have a vision.

Right now downtown SSF is totally boring but add a good grocery store (ahem, Berkeley Bowl) a couple cool coffee shops, wine bars and great restaurants and it would be a perfect fine place to live and work - half way between the south bay and SF.

Buy, renovate or build a place or open a restaurant in SSF now while you have than chance. It will be corporate, funky but potentially cool in 5 years with your creative and financial energy in it.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#82

Post by baby »

These days I was thinking about San Francisco and wondering how it had come to that. There’s so much demand, so many people want to move to SF, yet its population has barely moved in the last decade. Why is that?

If anything had gone right, SF should be a HK-like dystopian city filled with electronics and high-tech.

But instead we have a horizontally limited place, that is filled with homeless and restricts new advances like shared kick scooters.

It’s sad.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#83

Post by baby »

lacker wrote: post #79
taurath wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be honest though. I’m not sure new housing can actually work to lower prices, with all the incentives for real estate locked towards ever increasing prices. Maybe over decades, while losing the entire feel of the city?

The feel of San Francisco is already lost, when a small single apartment runs $3000 a month.

And homeless are everywhere.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#84

Post by paulie_a »

dmode wrote: post #76
paulie_a wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll be plenty house as talented people continue to flee. Meanwhile juniors flock. If a CEO of a sizable Corp can't get by without a roommate something is wrong. I certainly wouldn't work there for less than a half plus million a year. Shit weather and fog I'd rather work in North Dakota.

This is surely exaggerated right ? I know CEOs of large startups who live in mansions in Woodside, Berkeley, Mill Valley etc

My sample size is small but a company that raised 40 million and the CEO is considering leaving sv because his wife need to make rent with a roommate is not a great sign of the real estate. Sv isn't special. People are going to other tech hubs which are sprouting like crazy. Sv was when it made products. But sass can be done anywhere.

People are leaving sv and housing prices are the reason. It's going to lead to brain drain. Why bother with that congested hell hole when you can live anywhere else and cut your cost of living by 50 percent. Your average founder is 30 and they are not into partying. Sv is for 20 year olds

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#85

Post by baby »

henrikschroder wrote: post #53
ergocoder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the tax oddly targets Stripe and Square. People don't talk about this very much. But it seems extremely unfair that Stripe/Square pay way more tax than Saleforce in terms of ratio to their revenues. (I don't recall the numbers. Anyone?) Jack Dorsey tried to raise this point multiple times. But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless :S

> But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless JFC, it's not because of a lack of money that SF has a problem with homeless people, and it's not that more money would make the problem magically go away.

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.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#86

Post by _jal »

dmode wrote: post #76
paulie_a wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll be plenty house as talented people continue to flee. Meanwhile juniors flock. If a CEO of a sizable Corp can't get by without a roommate something is wrong. I certainly wouldn't work there for less than a half plus million a year. Shit weather and fog I'd rather work in North Dakota.

This is surely exaggerated right ? I know CEOs of large startups who live in mansions in Woodside, Berkeley, Mill Valley etc

I'm sure there are "startup CEOs" in that situation. I doubt there are many whose firms have office space and employees.

In my experience, the serial startup execs mostly don't live in the city. In the 90s, I knew several who also had an apartment near the office, but that's much less common now that the sort of place they'd want is going for $8K/mo.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#87

Post by AdieuToLogic »

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…

Your conflating fees charged to Merchants (by processors) and rewards offered to Card Holders (by issuers).

While often the same bank performs, or is a partial owner involved in, both processing and issuing, the percentages you quote are largely disjoint.

> I'm reading that Visa typically charges 2.3% to merchants ...

The Discount Rate[0] a Merchant pays varies significantly based on the line-of-business, charge-backs, processing contract, and a bunch of other things.

> ... at least on average 1% of each transaction goes to cardholder bonuses ...

Again, issuer costs have no bearing on Merchant fees nor the profitability of processors.

0 - https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/glossary/term-d...

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#88

Post by baby »

paxys wrote: post #35
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…

I'd say that's an exaggeration. I know tons of people who commute from the city to south bay and vice versa. Plus South SF is pretty well connected by transit.

I live in SF next to a muni station and to get there I would need to take the muni, then the bart, then the bus. For a total of one hour at least. Driving in no traffic would get me there in 20min.

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#89

Post by AdieuToLogic »

wmf wrote: post #48
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.

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.

> The real question in my mind is why does Stripe bother to exist if they're barely breaking even.

Stripe has a valuation of $35,000,000,000 USD[0].

The real question I have is how anyone thinks Stripe is "barely breaking even."

0 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/donnafuscaldo/2019/09/19/stripe...

Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco

#90

Post by baby »

benatkin wrote: post #28
forthwall wrote: post #19

Kilroy Oyster Point is a pretty inaccessible area from San Francisco, you would need to take a limited train via Caltrain that's around 40 minutes to get there. I'm pretty sure this is definitely a blowback from the gross receipts tax and nothing more, even for commuters from the Peninsula would still have to get to the really strange south SF station which is also only accessible via limited express...or commute int…

It's right on the freeway, and there's a ferry. I think it's probably about as good as where the AirBnb and GitHub offices are, which are half a mile from BART. I think a lot of their employees are going to be driving in at times that avoid rush hour.

Wat. Airbnb is super well located in soma. Unless Stripe has shuttles it’s going to be rough.
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