
Stripe Raises $20M From General Catalyst, Sequoia, Thiel - jamesjyu
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/sexy-payments-startup-stripe-swipes-20m-from-general-catalyst-sequoia-thiel-and-more/
======
blantonl
Congrats to the Stripe team - this will hopefully allow them to expand their
platform outside of the US. I am one of those "anti-funding" guys, but I also
understand cases where capital is needed to take it to the next level. This
would be a classic example.

I am spinning off a portion of my business into a new startup this year and
Stripe is at the top of our list as our subscription/payment provider. We've
been playing in their sandbox and cannot wait to get going to production.

------
jhuckestein
It's growing like square? Wouldn't it be better to grow like exponentially?

~~~
Me1000
'Growing exponentially' is an overused phrase, and people actually forget what
it means. Exponential growth makes a lot more sense when you're describing the
number your user base, where generally speaking each user is worth the same to
you. How sustainable is actual exponential monetary growth? I mean, I can't
speak for Stripe, but I seriously don't think they're getting exponential
growth in transaction.

~~~
jhuckestein
Heh, my comment was just an attempt at humor.

That said, most naturally occurring growth is exponential. In the case of a
webservice, whenever a new user increases the chance of another new user
signing up by at least some constant factor, no matter how small, you have
exponential growth. Things working against that are churn and later, like in
the case of Facebook, the saturation in your market. If you discount for those
factors (I don't think they hugely affect Stripe right now anyway), EVERY
application that has even the tiniest viral co-efficient, even just
traditional word of mouth, will grow exponentially.

The specific case of Stripe transactions is particularly interesting. They
grow in both the number of companies using Stripe as well as the size of each
of those companies. I have no knowledge of Stripe metrics, but I am fairly
certain they've seen exponential growth over the past months. Much like Square
btw ;)

------
rurounijones
Woohoo, Stripe coming to other countries!

Stripe is one of the few companies I know of where people are literally
begging them to expand to their country which is a good indicator of their
potential.

------
pixie_
I just implemented Stripe and Paypal into my site. God PayPal's entire API and
documentation are beyond terrible. It's hard to put into words how bad the
experience was with PayPal. It's like they hate developers or something.

~~~
timaelliott
Paypal hates everyone, not just developers.

~~~
ajankovic
You just made me stop and think where this hate is coming from. I am imagining
a probable scenario were Paypal employees are hating their job. So their hate
is transferred to everything they do for Paypal. End product would be the hate
we feel by using their services.

~~~
jrockway
Probably not. The reason Paypal appears to hate its customers is because a
not-insignificant number of them are trying to steal Paypal's money. A poor
developer API, on the other hand, is probably due to bad programmers. I've
worked with a lot of bad programmers at other jobs, and one thing I've noticed
is that they're not very good at coming up with APIs. (Why does Paypal have
bad programmers? I don't know: why don't _you_ work for Paypal?)

Also, much of the complaining about Paypal seems to be in the form "I violated
Paypal's ToS, and then they closed my account." Well, maybe you should read
all those legal documents before entering into a business agreement?

~~~
talkingquickly
Very true re the not insignificant number trying to steal from them. PayPals
business is as much fraud detection and avoidance as it is payment processing
and they're very very good at the fraud detection bit.

The payment processing part seems to be great until it goes wrong but when it
does they have the minimal resource possible devoted to dealing with it.

------
BadassFractal
Guess what, second VC round we're seeing today that's going to companies that
actual provide customers and the high-tech community with a lot of tangible
value. This hopefully gives some gunpowder to those claiming that we're not in
a bubble.

~~~
Heinleinian
There's an argument to be made that there's not a macro-economic bubble right
now like there was in 1999, but that there IS a "Silicon Valley bubble". That
is, there are so many early-stage startups proliferating and getting angel
funding that there's a bubble for companies that provide services to other
startups.

If this is true, there's a doomsday scenario: if the SV bubble collapses (say,
due to some macro-economic change that dries up the glut of angel funding),
then a lot of those companies that primarily provide services to other
startups will collapse with it. There's more. As the companies go out of
business for lack of (other startup) customers, a lot of the remaining
startups that depend on those outside API's could go down for lack of
infrastructure to stand on. Things could spiral down to a bad place pretty
quickly.

~~~
capkutay
Many of the companies raising good funding today are innovative and create
value in the valley and in the world. I don't understand why people compare
that to the dotcom bubble where 6-month old web companies with no significant
value would raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Look at stripe for example, they're an excellent company that has proven their
product is in demand. It's much more reasonable for a company like this to be
allowed to scale versus the likes of pets.com.

~~~
lsc
because... facebook? twitter? colour.com? (what happened to them, anyhow?)
Drop.io? I mean, that one is a pretty nifty weekend project, but ten million?
come now. that's pretty silly.

I mean, much like drop.io, almost all of those companies have some value. Even
facebook is worth something, it's just, well, not worth 60 billion or whatever
it's selling for now. I mean, yeah, they do have the userbase (right now) to
beyond what google has done to advertising... but damn, that's hard to do. And
I don't think that Facebook has the deep understanding that google has that if
people start thinking of them as creepy, they are dead. (I mean, I think
google has the same problems as an autistic guy at a party; google
/understands/ that being creepy is bad... but google doesn't have a good
understanding of what creepy is. Facebook is the guy that read some "fast
seduction" crap and is now proud of being a total asshole. )

I mean, I think I understand why google can make so much money off advertising
and (very related) why people think facebook can make so much more; See, I
just bought some advertising in Mountain View Safeway stores. Go to the
mountain view safeway and you will see green on black prgmr.com logos on the
dividers you place between your food, instead of the usual pictures of real-
estate agents. I mean, all the people I know at google have talked to me about
it, and they thought it was cool, but I've been talking about this for a
while, so I don't know if they noticed it because they know me or what.
Figuring out the effectiveness of meatspace advertising is difficult. If i
bought ads on google, I'd be able to easily track how many customers I got per
dollar, right? Of course, anyone would be willing to pay more for advertising
if they knew what they were getting out of it; if you give me customers and I
make $10 off each customer, what's wrong with giving you $5? heck, I could
give you $9.

Problem is, I don't think that online advertising is as traceable as you
think. I mean, sure, I know that guy that just signed up clicked on to my site
through a google adwords ad, right? but you don't buy something the first time
you hear about it. Maybe that guy saw a blog about me last month? the google
adwords link might have just been more convenient for him than the organic
search results.

I think that online advertising, in general, is overpriced because of this.

I understand that the value proposition of facebook is that they (potentially)
can track buyers better. that blog you read about me last month? probably had
a facebook 'like' button. Maybe they could then use that to better measure my
actual advertising returns?

The biggest problem I see with that proposition is, well, that's a hard
problem to solve at all... and not only do they need to solve it, they need to
solve it and simplify the results down to the point where your average MBA can
understand them.

------
robryan
It may have made sense to try and raise more. There appears to be a land grab
going on in that local versions of stripe are popping up in other countries.
The quicker they get to other countries, the bigger their business might be as
with payment providers there are switching costs.

~~~
jhuckestein
The best practice for dealing with clones seems to be buying up the most
promising clones in each of the larger countries. If there really are
successful Stripe clones in other markets, I wouldn't be surprised at all if
Stripe raised a series C next year and bought some. It's much easier than
setting up operations from scratch everywhere.

~~~
robryan
True, the hard problem is the regulations. Clones that are out there would
have to jump that hurdle before they got anywhere.

------
pxlpshr
I've been one of the biggest fans of this service since it came out. Hugely
disruptive to PayPal, we integrated their service in minutes over PayPal's
laborious API, documentation, and error-prone sandbox.

Congrats to the team, much deserved and looking forward to what this product
becomes.

Request: quarterly subscriptions. I know they can be handled with hooks but it
shouldn't be that way. :)

------
lanstein
Exec’s "Justin Khan"?? Spelled wrong in two places?

------
moses1400
Love Stripe at our business! Best move we've made to date.

------
Juuumanji
hope this results in expansion beyond US residents.

~~~
dangrossman
> He’s focused on expanding Stripe outside the US; The company’s Canadian beta
> just started today and Western Europe is next.

~~~
chubs
I'd love to get a rough idea where australia fits on their timeline.

------
jhull
Took one month to integrate CyberSource payment infrastructure....Integrated
Stripe into our stack in a few hours. Congrats!

------
ZanderEarth32
I really like what Stripe is doing and am trying to get my girlfriend to use
it instead of PayPal on her ebook.

------
pbreit
Odd that they would raise only $20m just a year after raising the same amount.

------
calgaryeng
Maybe now they will support Canadian payments.... :)

~~~
jjb123
i highly suggest you read the article

~~~
bosch
I can't find any more information anywhere else on the beta... any ideas?

------
misiti3780
great service, great support, i am glad my company uses them

------
yedingding
Keep rocking. I really hope Stripe can speed up the expansion outside the US.
Checkouted many different choices and really how it works.

~~~
aaaa
mering

