
Hard Times in Silicon Valley? Not for the Payments Startup Stripe - Reedx
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/business/stripe-valuation.html
======
reilly3000
Gather round kids. There was once a day where processing payments online was
something that you signed up for with a fax machine, or a merchant processing
salesperson. You might even walk into a bank to get a merchant account, then
they would sell you an online gateway for $20-99/month plus transaction fees.
If you were lucky, it was Authorize.net, not some 5th party proprietary
garbage with a ColdFusion SDK. Not to say Authorize.net was any fun at all to
work with, but at least there was a Ruby Gem for it that mostly worked.
Payment processing was hard. PCI audits sucked. Millions of full credit cards
were stored in MySQL, unencrypted because it was left to the developer to
engineer security. REST API? Hah. Hope you know SOAP and XML, and you're using
the correct schema version.

Stripe made untold pain and suffering disappear. Congrats to them for getting
rewarded for doing so- they have unlocked billions worth of economic value by
making that process easier.

PS. Here's a fun little quote from the Authorize.net docs today, 2019-09-19:

The Authorize.Net API, which is not based on REST, offers JSON support through
a translation of JSON elements to XML elements. While JSON does not typically
require a set order to the elements in an object, XML requires strict
ordering. Developers using the Authorize.Net API should force the ordering of
elements to match this API Reference.

Do you know how to force a JSON object's elements to be specifically ordered?
I don't.

~~~
edoceo
Is simple. You construct the blob of JSON by hand, just cat some stings
together (or implode with "\n"). Then it's real easy to duplicate keys too.
(JK, it's stupid).

Fun fact tho, the PostgreSQL jsonb data type sorts the keys, and seems to put
shorter key names first, then keys with the same length in lexographix order -
neat!

------
outside1234
I am always going to regard seeing the simplicity of the first Stripe payment
widget, realizing it was amazing, and not immediately breaking down the door
to work there as a major career mistake.

That mistake will only be one upped by seeing the signs in the windows in Palo
Alto of the original Google logo and then typing it in at home, being amazed,
and not breaking down the door to work there. :)

~~~
ci5er
Ha! Jerry Yang used to camp out at my place or my friend's house in Tokyo when
he went to a VLSI seminar as a, I guess, poor VLSI PHD candidate/student.

We used to chat late at night, and I would say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to
advertise on your and Dave's bookmark list!

Oops.

------
olliej
Isn't it more "hard times for Silicon Valley companies that don't make money
and/or makes losses that grow with increased users"?

~~~
ummonk
The most egregious such company (WeWork) actually being an NYC company.

~~~
olliej
Uber and Lyft both make losses that are directly proportional to their usage.
Eg more users or more trips will only ever increase their losses.

WeWork makes a lot of money for the CEO - I recall he used a large amount of
money he cashed out during earlier rounds to _buy the building that We
leases_.

~~~
RandomBacon
That's equally genious and stupid. WeWork has to be successful to be able to
pay the lease. If WeWork is successful then he can continue to make money from
WeWork via being a CEO. He should have 'diversified'.

~~~
olliej
It's even better - people clearly need office space, so _even if WeWork fails_
he can lease to other people.

If WeWork fails to pay for their lease he can take them to court - and I would
not be surprised if there are some fun creditor priorities in the bankruptcy
terms of the lease agreements.

Seriously, I appreciate screwing the VC funders, but it does kind of
demonstrate the kind of guy he is.

~~~
jdsully
If WeWork fails it will likely be _because_ people don’t need office space
(i.e. a recession).

~~~
olliej
Much like Uber and Lyft, we work runs at a loss that scales with usage. In the
event that continually losing ever increasing amounts of money somehow results
in bankruptcy all of the people currently leasing office space will probably
try to lease the building space directly.

------
codesushi42
Google was founded right before the dotcom bubble burst.

Yeah, we are still headed for a downturn/correction/crash or what have you.

But valuable companies will continue to be.

~~~
RandomBacon
Stripe "sells shovels". People want to exchange money, that will always be a
basic tenet of commerce, and Stripe facilitates that. Bravo Stripe.

~~~
taneq
Stripe goes a step further, and makes it easy for the shovel-sellers and the
shovel-buyers to get what they want. Good on 'em!

------
weiming
How does everyone deal with sales tax/VAT collection with Stripe? If selling
software licenses for example. It seems like you have to use a third-party
solution [1] and wondering why Stripe doesn't provide such a service
themselves.

[1] [https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-
integration](https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration)

~~~
edwinwee
We introduced the Tax Rates API earlier this year to help with this:
[https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax-
rates](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax-rates). It doesn't do
everything just yet, but we're getting there!

~~~
weiming
Hey that's great! Thanks, will give this a go.

------
thrower123
Stripe has an actual product that businesses actually use. They aren't playing
the underpants gnome game of:

1.) Light money on fire to grow

2.) ???

3.) Profit!

~~~
jonas21
To be fair, WeWork has an actual product that businesses actually use too.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Selling dollars for 95c is a game anyone can play.

~~~
AznHisoka
... anyone that can seduce VCs, speak charismatically and preferably has a
prior track record.

------
tempsy
There is a reason why a little known company called Adyen is a $25b company on
its own. Despite being less developer friendly they have contracts with way
more big money enterprise firms...your Facebooks and Googles and Ubers of the
world.

Stripe might be great for small companies or regional ones but there are many
reasons why they haven’t won over high volume global enterprise cos yet.

~~~
Operyl
Amazon isn’t a big company? How about Target? Digital Ocean, Slack? Lyft?

[https://stripe.com/customers#b2b-platforms](https://stripe.com/customers#b2b-platforms)

This list isn’t exhaustive, it’s just a few of the companies that have OK’d
being put on the list.

~~~
tempsy
Depends on the company, but absolutely no way that Stripe processes all of
Amazon or Target’s payments. It is a minority of payments, at best. And the
WSJ article explains that Lyft is trying to in-house payments away from Stripe
to save money.

I’m not trying to rag on Stripe by the way, but I have worked in payments at
one of these large tech cos that did not work with Stripe. They didn’t start
trying to target enterprise customers as their initial target base, and there
are simply things that enterprise customers expect more than developer
friendliness when it comes to choosing a gateway or processor. That’s all.

For some context for _why_ Stripe is not necessarily suited for enterprise see
what Finix Payments is doing
[https://www.finixpayments.com/](https://www.finixpayments.com/) \- the value
prop resonates much more with enterprise...would say they are basically a
developer friendly Anti-Stripe.

~~~
mehhh
Amazon has direct integrations for payments in the US and most major
countries, but farms out payment processing in certain low volume regions to
Stripe.

Optimize a region's payment processing as volume increases is what Amazon is
doing internally...

