
Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B - tempsy
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fintech-company-stripe-joins-silicon-valley-elite-with-35-billion-valuation-11568912443?mod=rsswn
======
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.

~~~
ravenstine
Besides your product, I thank you all at Stripe for setting an example of what
_real_ API/SDK documentation is.

~~~
speedplane
> I thank you all at Stripe for setting an example of what real API/SDK
> documentation is.

It's not just their documentation, Stripe's versioning, backwards
compatibility support, and fast improvements probably make it the single best
API I've ever worked with.

I have new projects that use the latest and greatest Stripe API and features,
but also older projects that use their 5 year old APIs, and both work without
a hitch.

~~~
CSMastermind
> It's not just their documentation, Stripe's versioning, backwards
> compatibility support, and fast improvements probably make it the single
> best API I've ever worked with.

I completely agree - I consider Stripe the gold standard for an API. Best I've
ever used.

~~~
p0nce
Now if the fee was under 3% instead of being the very same price as Paypal,
that would be a nice welcome bit of competition.

~~~
forgot-my-pw
Their newly announced corporate credit card has good benefits (US only):
[https://stripe.com/en-ca/corporate-card](https://stripe.com/en-ca/corporate-
card)

At least you get some cash back from expenses.

------
thorwasdfasdf
Before stripe, I used paypal and it was sooo painful! There are so many
terrible APIs out there that waste so much time needlessly.

Then I found stripe. What a treat. Everything was documented and the
documentation itself was both readable and didn't go in endless circles like
the paypal ones. The error messages were helpful. And every api endpoint had
an example, which is hugely helpful: HUGELY! All the other API developers out
there can learn from this: you can't underestimate the value of having a
working example. Not only that but the testing is much easier in stripe, and
there's no need for a bunch of seperate accounts and sandboxes that don't make
sense.

Oh and did I mention that the variables describe themselves: the first 3 or 4
letter of an ID says what it is (subscription or etc). Genius! It's little
things like this which make Stripe stand out orders of magnitude above the
rest of all the APIs in the world.

I hope you guys rule the marketplace for payment processing and wish you all
the success you deserve.

Stripe's success in payment processing sends a clear signal to the Paypals and
API developers of world: If you're producing an API that sucks, it creates an
opportunity for someone else to come eat your lunch. :)

~~~
theturtletalks
Paypal also came out and said they will no longer refund seller fees when a
customer is refunded. Before, they used to just keep the $0.30, but now they
will keep the 2.9% as well. More the reason to switch to a new processor like
Stripe.

~~~
nickjj
> More the reason to switch to a new processor like Stripe.

For a lot of merchants it's not a matter of switching to Stripe.

It's using Stripe but also including PayPal as an option because a huge
percentage of buyers want to use it to pay for things -- especially 1 time
purchases of digital goods.

About 40% of my course sales are through PayPal.

By the way if anyone reading is curious, that new PayPal refund policy goes
into effect October 11th 2019 (you probably got the User Agreement email to
notify you of this too if you're a merchant).

------
Xixi
I remember when we launched our Japanese tea service [1]: we wanted to switch
to Stripe so badly that I was emailing them at the very least once a month,
until we made it in their beta program. I'm not sure the youngest remember
what the payment landscape was before Stripe, but it wasn't great. Stripe
lifted the whole industry up from mediocrity.

Around 10 years ago I had the pleasure of setting up payments with a French
bank: instead of a web API we had to use an opaque binary installed on our
server. In terms of setup it took many weeks and several in person meetings to
get approved. There was a (big) setup fee and a (not so small) monthly
subscription. And then of course transaction fees.

In Japan for startups targeting foreignland it was even worse: only PayPal
supported payments in anything other than JPY! [2] Interestingly it seems that
with Stripe Japan everything coming from outside of Japan goes through USD. I
have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY.
So I would expect an EUR/JPY transaction to occur in the middle, yet
oftentimes the USD/EUR exchange rates ends up leaking on our customer
receipts... I wonder how it works behind the scene...

[1] [https://tomotcha.com](https://tomotcha.com) for those interested.

[2] Maybe banks were offering this service directly, but for what was only an
experiment at the time, I was expecting the setup cost to be prohibitive (at
least in time, if not in money).

~~~
aidos
“Wasn’t great” is an understatement! I dealt with it as a developer both in
New Zealand and the Uk and it was outright terrible. Oh, you didn’t apply for
a merchant account 6 weeks ago...yeah, you’re not gonna go live this month.
You just go right ahead and book in a meeting with you bank manager and get
down on your knees to plea for an account.

~~~
gridspy
I know right?

But I thought I would just set up stripe here in NZ just now and it was...
wonderful! I just needed to offer business info and it's ... done? There is
nothing else to worry about?

------
emdowling
You know you have a killer product when your customers will literally fly half
way around the world just to use it.

When I started my company (since acquired) in 2012, Stripe was so game
changing I flew from Australia to the US to open a bank account so we could
use it. While we could incorporate in the US online, we had to turn up in
person at a bank to open an account.

The only alternatives in Australia at the time were PayPal, which had
outrageous fees and a terrible experience for recurring SaaS billing, or a
merchant account with a bank which was going to require a $30k deposit.

It cost me $750 to incorporate a US entity, $1250 for airfares and hotel (oh
to remember SF was that affordable!!). I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb, which
conveniently has a Chase branch right next door, and 1 day later we had a US
bank account and could turn on our Stripe integration. We didn’t look back.

I love Stripe Atlas, because I intimately relate to the problem, and wish we
had it in 2012.

~~~
edwinwee
Ha! Glad you were able to find a way. We _still_ think it could be easier,
even with Atlas and Australia support now. Would you be up to chat more?
edwin@stripe.com

------
warent
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.

Overall I'm really not surprised at the valuation. Stripe is one of the best
products/services out there.

~~~
edwinwee
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.)

~~~
scrollaway
Not OP but I've used the Stripe API extensively (I know it nearly end to end
due to implementing one of the framework client libraries) and to me the parts
that come to mind if I think "bloat"/"unintuitive" are SKUs, Coupons, and most
likely what GP is talking about the new payment intent APIs, even though I
don't think there's a real way you could implement them any better given the
PSD2 requirements.

By far Stripe has the cleanest experience of all. I wish you'd treat your APIs
more like amazon treats theirs though, that is to say: _no_ private internal-
only APIs; I should be able to reimplement the Stripe Dashboard in my own app
if I so wanted (just like how the AWS console only uses public APIs). That'd
also make for some cool potential projects like a Terraform plugin for Stripe.

Feel free to reach out if you like, email on my profile.

~~~
nickjj
> ... most likely what GP is talking about the new payment intent APIs, even
> though I don't think there's a real way you could implement them any better
> given the PSD2 requirements.

Yes, definitely this.

Payment intents is so much more complicated and convoluted than the previous
"Charges" API. Stripe went from one of the easiest bits of my app to develop
to one of the most difficult, to the point where I'll admit it even
temporarily killed my motivation to work on my app solely due to Stripe's API.
I stopped working on the checkout process just to take a break and work on
other parts of the app and it pains me to think about even touching the
checkout flow again even though I know I have to in order to release my app.

For any real app that's beyond the most trivial case you're likely going to be
stuck using the "manual" payment intents workflow. Just figuring out which
method to use was a huge ramp up of difficulty vs the old Charges API.

I went as far as even emailing their support for advice and even they weren't
able to give me a straight answer. Their primary advice was to recommend not
using it and instead use their new Stripe-hosted checkout system (which will
not work for most people since it's so limited) or continue using the old
Charges API and lose out on payments due to authorization issues that will
come with not being able to deal with the new user verification strategies
that are required by some banks and cards.

Like you I have no idea how to implement it any better, it's just the reality
of the situation of the world we live in today but the bar has certainly been
raised to consider accepting payments with Stripe now.

~~~
GordonS
Yep, I came across the Payment Intents stuff - holy crap, it's _complicated_ ,
and the documentation actually isn't great - it's good for details of API
calls and such, but not for explaining what the hell you actually need to do,
and why.

I also upgraded our Stripe API version recently, as a result of the new SCA
regs - the whole experience was _really_ frustrating! It felt like it should
have taken me 4 hours max (test time inclusive), but it ended up taking me 5
days - the docs were just... not good.

This all seems very un-Stripe like, and TBH has me a little worried.

~~~
edwinwee
Hrm, I've seen most who migrate spend a similiar time to your estimate. I know
you've already migrated, but I'm really sorry it took that long, and I'd
really like to hear where we can improve the docs. Would you mind emailing
dev-feedback@stripe.com (and feel free to CC edwin@stripe.com).

~~~
Chris_Newton
[Not the GP, but 100% in agreement with them, except that we abandoned
updating our integration.]

 _I 'd really like to hear where we can improve the docs._

IMHO, the fundamental problem is that as the data model and API have become
more complicated, the explanatory documentation has become less coherent. It
feels like jumping around a Wiki now.

More specifically, we couldn’t find anything to show us the big picture of how
SCA _actually works_ with Stripe’s system. We also couldn’t find useful end-
to-end walkthroughs with code samples to learn by example, hence my suggestion
in the other comment you replied to. Lacking a frame of reference from one
source or the other, all the detailed documentation about Stripe.js and APIs
doesn’t help very much, because you don’t know what you need to look up in the
first place or how anything fits together.

This was compounded in our case because after spending considerable time
swapping messages with Stripe support, in which we did explain that we’d read
all of your documentation and we did also describe our (very simple) existing
subscription set-up process in terms of specific Stripe.js and API calls, the
responses were just boilerplate references to documentation pages we’d already
read. Of at least five different people from Stripe who replied to me over
more than two weeks, not a single message mentioned any specific function in
Stripe.js or the API or any specific webhook, despite several explicit
requests and sending specific details on that level from our side at Stripe’s
request.

To put this in perspective, please consider that when we first integrated with
Stripe, it took one Stripe.js call, usually one API call and one webhook to
tokenize card details, set up a Customer and Subscription with that card, and
then act on each successful payment. I wrote that code myself in less than an
hour, and I think it was described start-to-finish on no more than two or
three pages on Stripe’s documentation site.

At the risk of making this comment antisocially long, but with the suspicion
that we have not been the only ones following this path, I’ll describe what
happened this time instead. The first of several links I was sent by Stripe
support in one of those emails went to a page about saving card details for
later ([https://stripe.com/docs/payments/cards/saving-cards-after-
pa...](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/cards/saving-cards-after-payment)).
Within just the first step of that page, there are at least six different
concepts we hadn’t previously used in our integration that were mentioned,
most of them without any sort of introduction, definition or link. Some of
these are clearly very important concepts in SCA world, like a new
PaymentIntents API and distinguishing on-session from off-session payments.
OK, so we need to learn about those. Off we go to the API documentation, where
we do find PaymentIntents, which in turn refers us immediately to the
PaymentIntents API explanatory page
([https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-intents/creating-
pa...](https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-intents/creating-payment-
intents)). This gives us a general idea of what PaymentIntents do (remember,
when we integrated before, you didn’t even have concepts like Invoices in your
API) but then starts talking about manual and automatic confirmation. So
before we’ve finished reading the introduction on that page, we already have
two more new concepts, and there’s a third link to a comparison between them,
but that refers to one-time payments and we’re trying to set up a
subscription, so now we’re jumping context and don’t know whether what we’re
reading is actually relevant to our use case or not.

That last paragraph could continue for literally several more days of finding
our way around, often going in circles. We’ll later be confused by the
difference between PaymentIntents and SetupIntents, several similarly named
but apparently quite distinct functions in Stripe.js v3 that might replace the
old call to create a token, the difference between a source and a payment
method, which actions happen synchronously and which are or might become
asynchronous in the new world of PaymentIntents and SCA, and many other such
questions. We’ll also wonder how any of this fits in with things like Dunning,
which was the other big improvement we had hoped to make back when we first
started reading about the latest APIs and contacted Stripe support for advice.
One important thing you’d notice by the end of the story is that at no point
did we ever discover what triggers step one on that very first documentation
page to start with — is it a replacement for the old tokenization using
Stripe.js, a replacement for the old Customer.create API call, something we
have to do in addition to those things at some point?

This comment is already far longer than I had intended, but I hope that gives
you some idea of how the current documentation and support systems are not
working as well as they used to, from the perspective of a long-time Stripe
merchant just trying to update their integration to the new APIs to maintain
the equivalent of functionality we already had.

If I were tasked with improving the docs then I would start with an exercise
to identify all of the explanatory pages for the new PaymentIntents API, SCA
migrations, Dunning, and anything else related. Then I’d get someone,
preferably someone who doesn’t already intimately understand how SCA works and
Stripe’s API, to go through and highlight every concept or technical term that
hasn’t yet been explained before it’s used. I suspect that would identify many
points of potential confusion, but with several recurring themes. Next, I’d
take a step back, look at how SCA works, look at how the Stripe data model and
new APIs work, determine which are the foundational concepts that keep coming
up but haven’t been explained first at the moment, and then write a one-page
introduction to the big picture and how these concepts fit together. _That_ is
the key page that is completely missing at the moment. And then ideally, I’d
go from there straight to the kind of walkthrough mentioned elsewhere, showing
how to set up a subscription or a one-off charge using the new Stripe.js, APIs
and webhooks with reference to the main concepts from that overview page. From
that starting point, there is a frame of reference, and the more detailed
explanatory pages and full API specs might make more sense to someone starting
an integration essentially from scratch with little prior knowledge.

~~~
nickjj
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who had issues with the "support circle".

Usually Stripe is on the ball but I dunno, I had a very non-productive back
and forth with them. Non-productive in the sense that it took a long time to
get anything that was in response to my initial email and that in the end I
didn't learn anything I didn't know before I sent the first email.

Their first couple of replies just tried to get me to use their hosted
checkout even though I mentioned needing coupon codes early on which is not
supported by that. I also included a super detailed explanation of my workflow
(bullet points, using headers, in depth break down of everything) and it was
clear their hosted checkout was no way possible to use -- not even the
automatic payment intents was viable due to the lack of validation I had to do
server side when using automatic PI. Manual PI with a million hoops to jump
through or forfeiting sales with Charges was the only option.

It really felt like the support person didn't read the request. It felt like
they skimmed it for 5 seconds for keywords (or maybe this was algorithmic) and
then made a copy / paste suggestion from a script just to make sure they hit a
daily quota of "emails answered". It took a number of these until I started to
get responses back from someone who sounded like they read the initial email.

I'm thankful Stripe exists but the worst possible thing you can ever do in
support besides ignoring a customer is having the customer spend 45 minutes
writing the most detailed request for help possible and then getting a canned
response that was already deemed not able to be used in the original email
that was sent. It's just in your face proof that support didn't even read it.
Then you have to spend 5 back and forth emails over a week just repeating what
you wrote in the first email.

I wish multi-billion dollar companies hired support people who cared as much
about the company as the CEO. I guess this is why solo devs and smaller teams
tend to offer the best support -- simply because the person answering emails
is the person running the business or is massively invested in it.

~~~
edwinwee
Not good. Sorry about that. Could you forward me that support thread
(edwin@stripe.com) and I can look into what went wrong?

~~~
nickjj
I just want to follow up with after emailing edwin, I was put in contact with
someone who is on a different level than the support team I've talked with
originally.

We got in touch late Friday so a resolution wasn't made (not enough time), but
it's clear he spent more than 1 minute skimming the support message and it
felt like he really put in serious effort to help me in my specific situation.
I think everything will be crystal clear in the end after a couple of emails
(and these aren't just repeating emails, it's to deal with moving forward with
new info after implementation).

I wish this type of support was the default. It never would have happened
without this post on HN happening. There's a lot of value in having in depth
emails about specific problems because it leads to documentation improvements
that benefit everyone (plus it makes your paying customers happy on the spot
because they got help using your product).

~~~
Chris_Newton
Interesting comment. I hope it works out for you.

I wonder whether that might also be what the last person from Stripe support
meant when they mentioned sending us to some sort of specialist. Unfortunately
by that point we’d already spent more than two weeks going back and forth with
numerous people replying but no actionable advice, so we declined and made
other arrangements. However, I did also send them some notes similar to my
comments here, so perhaps the negative experience in our case could at least
be helpful for improving their documentation for others in the future.

------
neom
A lot to live up to, but those Collison brothers are hella ambitious and
execute like champs, the whole team at stripe is seriously world class. No
surprise here and incredibly well deserved. Keep up the good work folks.

------
thinkingkong
Before we start piling on about whether or not its _really_ worth 35B just
keep in mind how private companies are valued. Someone paid a lot of money for
a chunk of stripe so thats what its “worth”.

Personally I think stripe is close to worth - as another commenter put it -
half of goldman sachs. The recent launch of loans, credit card issuing, etc
are all bets or exercises that put stripe in an incredible position to build
platforms for financial capabilities.

~~~
pmart123
What about Stripe versus Adyen or Square?

~~~
ashelmire
Does the existence of other financial firms make Goldman Sachs worth any less?
I don't think it does.

We're used to winner-take-all when it comes to these unicorns, but I'm not
convinced it will stay that way. With many of these service niches, there's a
ton of money to be made and enough needs / feature differentiation for
competition.

~~~
arcticbull
Not the parent poster but I don't think that's what they were going after. I
think they were asking whether the valuation is fair relative to other
companies that are operating in a very similar space with similar ambitions.
GS is an investment bank. A fairer comparison would be SQ, PayPal, Adyen or
First Data.

Square's market cap is $25B today on the public markets with a 2019 estimated
net revenue of $4.5B and almost $100B in transaction volume. I don't have any
insight into Stripe's numbers, though I'd guess it's probably not 40% more
than that? Willing to be surprised of course, it's a great company.

The real question being asked here is: "Is Stripe's valuation likely to hold
up when they go public one day?"

~~~
pmart123
Exactly. I've really liked Patrick Collison in interviews and I've long
admired their API documentation. Square Capital was first to offer loans to
SMBs that amortize over the transactions so Stripe isn't the first mover
there. Some bigger companies like eBay and Burberry have chosen Adyen as a
payment solution and I think Booking uses Braintree? Are there reasons outside
of costs to choose Adyen or Braintree over Stripe?

Can Lyft develop their own payment tech because they only transact in the US
and Canada, and global transactions are where things get complicated?

I like most things about Stripe, but Shopify is also growing like crazy, has
an awesome founder, and provides the only alternative to Amazon right now and
is valued at $35B.

~~~
arcticbull
> Are there reasons outside of costs to choose Adyen or Braintree over Stripe?

IMO costs are the worst reason to pick one of these providers at scale.
They're all operating with a very similar cost basis, so you know they can
each more or less match eachother, and if you come in with sufficient scale
they'll offer custom pricing. Their costs are determined by the payment
networks and their ability to mitigate risk and fraud. Stripe got a rep for
being willing to match anyone even if they lost money in the process.

------
GeneralTspoon
I quite like Stripe - but them forcing the recent switch to Checkout V2 has me
a bit miffed.

Previously it was super simple to add dynamic card payments to a site - just
drop the JS in, make a call to your server and then call Stripe from your
server. Done. And it's all done in a popup on the same page (so no context
switching UX for the user).

Now it seems they've killed the simplicity of that in favour of a more PayPal-
like experience - where the user gets pushed out to the Stripe website to
checkout. And it becomes more complex to implement too - due to everything
being async and webhook based. At this point I think Paypal might actually be
easier to implement for a certain class of simple one-off payments (although
their sandbox servers are cripplingly slow).

I'm a little bit skeptical of this change because I think it's partially a
strategic play by Stripe (with the smokescreen of SCA-compliance + Apple Pay
support) to become more of a user-facing online "wallet", rather than just a
behind-the-scenes payment processor.

~~~
edwinwee
A wallet isn't the intent. It's almost the opposite!

If you remember the previous version, your customers used their saved card
within Checkout. The new version of Checkout lets your customers use whatever
payment method is easiest for them, and wherever it is. That's why we're big
fans of things like Apple Pay (some have seen a conversion increase of 250%!),
local bank payments in Europe, or even saved cards in Chrome (rolling out
now).

From its inception, Checkout was designed to be the fastest way to accept
payments, and I think it's now faster (and _even faster_ for customers). You
can just drop in a single line of code—and that code doesn't have to be
server-side. :)

~~~
ENGNR
But the whole question of "which payment method do you want to use?" is
unnecessary complexity if they're sitting there with a card in their hand.
Wouldn't it be better to let the front end service handle that question, and
then use the appropriate Stripe APIs in the front end?

The whole revelation of stripe was that if a customer was sitting there with a
credit card, they just put it there into the same screen and it was done. It
was the other crappy products that forced you out into a merchant gateway then
back again

I'm never going to send retail customers out a payment gateway with someone
else's brand/colors/html, mostly because it's just too confusing to introduce
more concepts at that critical stage when they're about to actually make the
payment

~~~
Chris_Newton
_I 'm never going to send retail customers out a payment gateway with someone
else's brand/colors/html, mostly because it's just too confusing to introduce
more concepts at that critical stage when they're about to actually make the
payment_

This is one of the concerns we have with SCA. By the nature of the additional
authentication steps, they are necessarily hosted off-site in some situations.
Handing your customer off to some other service in the middle of your payment
flow and hoping they make it back is the only choice you have. It seems likely
that this will reduce conversions, just as anything else that lengthens or
complicates the payment flow usually does. What we don’t really know yet is
how much difference it will make in practice.

~~~
GeneralTspoon
_This is one of the concerns we have with SCA. By the nature of the additional
authentication steps, they are necessarily hosted off-site in some
situations._

Is this a necessity though? Couldn't they just enter the 2FA code in the same
manner that they enter their card details on the merchant site? i.e. After
entering their card details, it will just prompt them for more info if
necessary.

~~~
Chris_Newton
I’m not sure exactly what PSD2 requires in this respect without checking it
again, but in practice I think all of the major schemes for card payments that
actually exist do work that way, so it’s probably beyond the ability of any
service like Stripe to avoid at the moment.

------
puranjay
Anybody who doubts whether Stripe is worth $35B just needs to read this
comments section

I don't think I've seen a unicorn get this much love from developers

~~~
hobofan
Developer love isn't everything. There are some projects on here that just as
much dev love, but are not even able to fund a single person. There are also
quite a few products I've used that have an amazing API but an otherwise awful
product.

Yes, dev love is a big part of what allowed Stripe to become stripe, but it's
probably not a good indicator whether Strip is worth $1B or $10B or $35B.

------
spencerwgreene
> 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?

~~~
seansmccullough
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.

~~~
joering2
... 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-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-
wont-have-michael-dell-to-kick-around-anymore/)

~~~
ceejayoz
> which has absolutely nothing to do with going IPO

Sure it does. You can't do an IPO in a day. A company starting the process now
risks having the recession start before the IPO goes live.

------
rblion
Only ~10% of the world's GDP runs through the Internet right now, Stripe is
working to raise that number and I fully support them. Their brand, their
message, their product is stuff I study as I work on my own projects.

I feel this valuation is well-deserved. I rarely feel that way nowadays. This
company will be around and still relevant a decade from now. I'd love to see
them challenge the dinosaurs in the financial sector.

------
kchoudhu
Stripe is cool -- I use it every day -- but is it really worth, oh, half a
Goldman Sachs?

I dunno man.

~~~
mathattack
A couple thoughts on why this isn’t a fair comparison:

\- Goldman is profitable but the employees extract most of it via
compensation.

\- Goldman has to rewin their business every year. Very little recurring
revenue and they are one recession from imploding.

\- You can’t really compute valuation on a very small investment. It’s not
like the entire float is trading, and the small investment (relative to
valuation) can have all kinds of liquidity preferences and special rights.

~~~
tryitnow
I think your third point supports the OP original point. Stripe probably isn't
"really" worth that much now.

EDIT: wanted to mention that my impression is that they're a great company,
just not worth $35B.

~~~
mathattack
They are great. Don’t undersell the benefit of recurring revenue. Compare the
valuations of credit card companies vs GS too.

------
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.

~~~
buildawesome
What do you feel like you need if Stripe gives you capital for your future
receivables for you to go hire more engineers?

~~~
adamqureshi
They offered me capital. I'd prefer Stripe engineering in exchange for equity.

------
toptal
Adyen seems to have higher revenue, a faster growth rate, and stronger overall
financials. By nearly double.

They're at $25b.

How is $35b justified?

~~~
oli5679
The culture and product are exceptional. In the long run I think they will
outcompete rivals.

------
lasryaric
At Producteev, my old start-up, I implemented the payment system using Paypal,
omg, it was so hard, and so painful for the following reason: \- poor
documentation \- I never knew how to get an up to date documentation \- very
slow api and website \- very hard to understand the meaning of the
undocumented data etc.

Once, my co-founder @Ilan Abehassera sent me a link to an article about Stripe
on Techcrunch:

I signed up to Stripe, within minutes I was able to charge my own credit card
through a CURL bash call, everything was clear, recurring payment perfectly
handled, discount, etc etc. And this was at the very beginning of Stripe. Then
I had to come up with why we should quickly switch from Paypal to Stripe.

Anyway, very good memoery, you definitely set the standard for how an API
should be designed and I can't thank you enough for that!

------
ent101
Well-deserved. One of the best dev platforms in existence right now with a
clear value prop that is perfectly executed on at 100%.

I'm excited to see what the future holds for them.

------
tempsy
I wonder how Square missed the boat so hard with a developer payment API. I
know they have one, but of course never hear about anyone using it.

~~~
icelancer
I have no idea. I kept hammering them on this for years until Stripe came and
ate all their lunch. And only THEN did Square release an API.

------
the-trev-dev
We implemented stripe as an add-on a little more than 6 years ago and left it
mostly untouched. After some recent TLC we now facilitate $100 million a year
through Stripe. Our next hurdle is trying to integrate Stripe terminal for
thousands of customers but $300 a pop is a tough sell.

~~~
edwinwee
For huge Terminal device orders like that, we can help with a volume discount.
Just email in to support@stripe.com with how many you need (feel free to CC me
at edwin@stripe.com).

(BTW, if you didn't see, we have a $59 device too. We're also working on
supporting more.)

------
mrweasel
It's not that I don't like Stripe, but was it really so difficult to process
payments before? When I start working with online payments in 2007/2008 we had
multiple easy to use solutions for processing at least credit and debit cards.

You could have a test account in less than an hour, and be ready to process
real transactions in less than a week.

Stripe has plenty of competition, most of which have been around longer. You
could argue that Stripe have a better API and that certainly has value.

------
Teichopsia
Stripe is one of many services I would like to use but can't because they
simply don't work in my country. I understand it can get somewhat complicated
due to legalities I probably don't understand (or maybe the market is too
small to even bother). But if your Navy can go through the country I live in,
could you folks (in general and not directed at anyone) please try a little
harder?

~~~
edwinwee
Where do you live? Our roadmap—literally—is quickly expanding to many more
countries (we just launched in 8 new countries last week). And this new
funding round will be put to use for that. :)

~~~
Teichopsia
I wasn't expecting a reply, but it was nice to get one. I was just venting my
frustration.

Panama, Central America. I signed up for the email notification - years ago :)

------
apexalpha
Your competitor Adyen sits a few streets away from me in Amsterdam. Seems like
a very thriving and interesting market you both operate in.

Congrats and best of luck!

------
didip
Well deserved. They are actually trying to do good + interesting scaling
challenges by enabling small business all over the world.

------
guanzo
Please allow international, independent charges/transfers. This is a huge pain
point in our Stripe experience.

~~~
edwinwee
We announced a beta for this last week! You can send money to 45 countries.
(We're turning this on for businesses in the US first, and we're working on
more countries soon.) [https://stripe.com/connect/payouts#request-
invite](https://stripe.com/connect/payouts#request-invite)

------
jeffnappi
Stripe has made building payments related products fun for me when previously
I had suffered through working directly with banks and various poorly designed
gateways. Stripe is still the gold standard to me when it comes to developer
APIs, documentation, and smart iteration. Kudos to everyone at Stripe!

------
jiveturkey
> [Chief Product Officer] Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said
> it had no plans to go public.

How's that possible? At this valuation they aren't looking at acquisition,
right? VC aren't investing to the tune of $250mm (in this round alone) without
an exit strategy, right?

What exit strategy if not IPO?

~~~
ceejayoz
They're not _ruling out_ an IPO in the future. They just don't have plans to
do it right now.

I have no plans to buy ice cream, but that doesn't mean I'll _never_ buy ice
cream. In fact, it's highly likely I _will_ buy ice cream _at some point_.

------
zapstar
Here's their original Hacker News post, which is always a fascinating read:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883)

------
mathattack
Great company but it’s too hard to infer value from such a small investment.

~~~
danesparza
Not really. Some people infer value without any investment -- only based on
P&L and year-over-year growth. (Stripe is consistently making money, after
all)

~~~
mathattack
That’s not what the listed valuation is based on.

------
harryh
Why is Stripe still private?

~~~
babl-yc
There's two main incentives to go public: raising money and liquidity.

They don't need to tap public markets to raise money. And investors are likely
OK holding off on liquidity if the valuation continues to rise.

Going public typically requires a significant amount of effort across the
company, which can reduce focus on other initiatives key to growing the
business.

~~~
tempsy
I'm not sure what Stripe's policy is on selling shares on secondary markets,
but another reason is that at some point employees need liquidity too.

~~~
thr0waway43234
Look at the valuation increases: Almost 2x year to year for quite a while. I
don't expect most people seeing that kind of valuation increases looking to
liquidate any part of their position unless they really can't help it.

If their fundamentals growth slowed to rates resembling the regular market,
then sure, but as is, all a company with that growth rate might need is let
tenured employees add, say 5% of their equity to the round so they can get a
bit of liquidity to keep them quiet.

~~~
tempsy
No one can predict what the price will be in a year. Diversifying before a
possible recession would be prudent, especially since payment processing
volume is presumably highly correlated with consumer spending.

------
jedberg
I'm curious as to why they chose to raise $250M via VC instead of raising in
the public markets? Of course there are trade offs and advantages to each, I'm
just curious as to their calculus.

~~~
somebodythere
Can get a higher multiple from VCs probably.

------
Allvitende
Congratulations to the Stripe team. Truly great product and company. The fact
that WeWork truly thought that they were $12B more valuable than Stripe is
insane to me.

------
sam1r
[Random techie]

This makes total sense. Stripe is driving the example for OSS for all
countries to follow.

Thank you Stripe Co-founders. I appreciate your work and effort to bring GH
where it is today.

------
artur_makly
also their support for startups via their communities, atlas, and weekly free
feeback is what truly makes them shine. keep up the great work!

------
czbond
I've always wondered: What was Stripe's actual MVP when they started? How did
they MVP in a few weeks, and start charging cards?

------
PixelPaul
I still wish I could accept multiple currencies with strip without conversion
and spend them via a CC. Only reason I am still with PayPal

------
leesec
Amazing and congrats! I'm curious if anyone knows how much revenue/profit
Stripe is making? Or is it all still under wraps?

------
mandeepj
> Still, a raft of younger startups, such as Checkout.com, are raising
> hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to challenge Stripe.

There is a paywall link for more details. I'm curious to know what they are
looking to challenge (especially given the rave reviews that Stripe gets here
at HN)

------
nicky19890202
This is a very reasonable value.

------
shadowtree
So their business is still not sustainable without outside funding? Why do
they need training wheels?

------
Quekid5
I'm calling it now. New bubble.

------
ganitarashid
No way that’s worth as much as Airbnb

~~~
BenoitEssiambre
What do you mean? They look like they're on a fast path to disrupt like all of
banking! The banking industry has to be bigger than the bed and breakfast
advertising industry.

~~~
Apocryphon
Not to mention they are more regulatory compliant, and so likely deal with
fewer lawsuits and have to spend less on lobbying.

~~~
dymk
> Not to mention they are more regulatory compliant

Source?

~~~
Apocryphon
Here's a few:

[https://www.jotform.com/blog/is-stripe-
psd2-compliant/](https://www.jotform.com/blog/is-stripe-psd2-compliant/)

Linda Scott of Silicon Dales in the U.K. uses Stripe and isn’t surprised that
the payment processor is in compliance. “We have found Stripe to be proactive
and open around legislative changes.”

[https://www.paymentssource.com/news/stripes-next-step-is-
bui...](https://www.paymentssource.com/news/stripes-next-step-is-built-on-
strong-authentication-compliance)

Stripe hasn't exactly been in the news for lawsuits or controversy, unlike
AirBnB.

~~~
dymk
Not being in the news has nothing to do with being regulatory complaint.

You’ve provided articles that Stripe is compliant, which is fine, but nothing
there indicates that Airbnb isn’t compliant.

What regulations specifically is Airbnb breaking that Stripe isn’t?

~~~
Apocryphon
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-19/airbnb-
ip...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-19/airbnb-ipo-why-new-
york-city-is-making-investors-nervous)

[https://www.wired.com/story/inside-airbnbs-guerrilla-war-
aga...](https://www.wired.com/story/inside-airbnbs-guerrilla-war-against-
local-governments/)

[https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-
benef...](https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benefits-of-
airbnb-no-reason-for-local-policymakers-to-let-airbnb-bypass-tax-or-
regulatory-obligations/)

~~~
dymk
First link: That's hosts not complying with the law, not Airbnb. There is a
big difference between the two.

Second link: Still not in non-compliance with regulation, this is a story
about lobbying.

Third link: Still not breaking any current regulations, it's about lawmakers
considering regulating the business in the future.

Still looks like Airbnb is compliant with current regulations. Same as Stripe.

~~~
Apocryphon
I will concede that perhaps I am wrong about AirBnB being less compliant than
Stripe. Bravo to them for doing so in an environment that rapidly changes,
sometimes designed to hem them in.

However, I will move the goalposts to rephrase my original point- AirBnB
appears to operate in an environment that has more regulatory challenges,
especially new ones, than Stripe, which operates in banking, which while
regulations-heavy, which doesn't seem to be moving at nearly the same clip.
And so my original point about AirBnB's problems still holds- the consequences
of dealing with more lawsuits and having to spend more on lobbying.

