
Ask HN: Do you think Stripe will go public? - nodesocket
I&#x27;d be super curious to see their financials, but I&#x27;m guessing they are printing money.
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adventured
It's not a question of if, it's a matter of when they go public or get bought
by one of the giants. Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AMEX, PayPal are all
candidates for trying to buy them.

PayPal itself got caught in one of these types of decisions. The dotcom bubble
peaked around Nov 1999; PayPal was founded (merged) around Dec 1998; they
IPO'd in Feb 2002 with the Nasdaq having lost about 50-60% of its value at
that point. July 2002 eBay bought PayPal, with the Nasdaq on the floor that
Summer, having lost ~75% of its value. This was a massive mistake of timing,
the Nasdaq doubled within about 16 months after that Summer of extreme lows.
PayPal undervalued itself dramatically by selling when it did, timing the sale
exactly wrong.

Venture capitalists have poured $190 million into Stripe. They're going to
require an exit, it's a question of whether Stripe catches this stock market
boom period, are forced to wait until the next one (potentially 5-10 years or
more), or they miss this window and sell themselves to a big acquirer in a few
years instead.

The business they're in doesn't quite print money, but it does have solid
margins at scale. Visa prints money - $12.7b sales, $5.4b profit (incredible
margins). Instead of Visa's 42% hyper net income margin, Stripe might reach
15-20% at scale (more like PayPal's).

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davismwfl
They have 1 of 2 options. Go public or be acquired. Either way they are
obligated to provide their investors with the best return possible. Personally
as a user of Stripe I would really like to see them stay independent and go
public themselves so they can mostly control the culture and customer
experience. Being acquired may mean their culture is changed or their focus
gets jacked around.

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yarrowy
well there's actually some competitors coming up that's offering lower
transaction fees. Forte.net is offering 2.15% + 25c per transaction.
Mastercard has a competitor as well 2.85% + 30c

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dangrossman
Stripe has never competed on price, they compete on product.

The interchange rate, basically what Visa/MC charge to processors, is as low
as 0.05% for debit cards and less than half what Stripe charges on many credit
cards. There are hundreds of merchant account providers a business can go with
that charge less than 2.9%, or charge a fixed markup over interchange. Heck,
PayPal goes to 2.2% if you process just $10K/month, and 1.9% or less for
bigger accounts -- that's been the case for over a decade.

Most people aren't choosing Stripe to get the best fees, they're choosing
Stripe because you can get started immediately, their UX is awesome, and their
reputation among the developers who have to implement the payment processing
integration is stellar.

