
Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club - sama
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579337043662898228
======
pc
Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN
community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've
received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 --
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883).

~~~
Negitivefrags
Seeing this comment makes me realise how much of a crazy technical risk I made
choosing to use Stripe when I did.

My company started charging for things in April 2012, but I made the decision
to use Stripe months before that, something like January 2012. Only 4 months
after you launched!

We only did 1500 transactions on our launch day, yet at the time it was enough
to break your service for a little while due to load. Your customer service at
the time was really great and you refunded all the transaction fees for our
launch day and gave us a list of all the customers who had tried and failed to
make transactions so we could contact them.

I don't think I realised at the time how small you guys were. We are lucky
that you guys didn't fail, and I doubt that the me of today would have relied
on such a young company. Certainly we could have moved to a different payment
processor, but losing all the saved card data would have sucked a lot.

So great work on that!

~~~
pc
Thanks for taking the risk :-).

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cschmidt
Congratulations to the Stripe team. Strips is one of those excellent companies
that make the tech world a better place.

I actually spent the day working on adding Stripe integration to a Django
application for my startup. Since there seem to be a number of Stripe people
on this thread, I thought I might give some feedback.

It was fairly straightforward to add a custom credit card form, but not as
easy as I had expected. You've made a really nice form with Checkout, but that
isn't flexible enough for many users. You leave a fair bit of work to your
customers if they use the raw Stripe.js library. You mention your open source
jquery library for doing client side validation [1], but don't provide any
good examples. In particular, the neat trick in Checkout where you show the
logo of the type of credit card being used isn't documented anywhere. This
blog post [2] is a crucial piece of information. Your Django examples seems a
little out of date, as you've been using Flask for your python examples.

In short, I spent a day pulling things together, and got a form that has many
of the nice features of Checkout. That's cool. However, you should really make
it dead simple for your customers, with good examples that give ultra-slick
validation and results.

Thanks for listening, and continue being great.

[1]
[https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment](https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment)

[2] [http://yoast.com/checkout-field-validation/](http://yoast.com/checkout-
field-validation/)

~~~
23andwalnut
I'm working on something to solve this problem right now - a drag and drop
stripe form builder.

------
chavesn
Avoid paywall (am I the only one this always happens to?):

[http://google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...](http://google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304632204579337043662898228)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Happens to me. You wouldn't happen to be browsing with Ghosterly, would you?

~~~
namenotrequired
I have it without such extensions. I pasted the text from the article in a
comment below if anyone still has difficulty accessing it (it took me a while
to get through).

------
kulkarnic
This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious.

The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that
are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large
number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is
unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one
of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company be a powerful entity that could
invest to subvert the public interest?

~~~
kamaal
I'm not sure what you mean by 'public scrutiny'. Surely any common person on
the street has absolutely no influence over Google or Microsoft wishes to do.
And going public hardly has any influence at all.

Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments, they don't collect
taxes and they are not voted into power. So they are not answerable to anyone.
These are individual(s) who are investing their own time, money, and on their
own risks to create wealth.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments

All juridical entities other than individual persons -- and this definitely
includes all corporations -- are creations of government through which special
privileges are given to particular individuals on the theory that by doing so
some common good will be served.

------
staunch
Count down until the $3.5 billion acquisition by eBay/PayPal/Google/etc. Kind
of amazing to see these happen on HN over the years.

~~~
argumentum
Or rejected acquisition _offer_ and subsequent raise at $10b+ valuation.

------
mehdim
Congratulations. Stripe really changed the payment implementation for
Developers. Please know you have this valuation, support more Developers
communities in meetups, developers conferences, API conferences. Twilio opened
the way in the Telco world, please do it in the Payment one.

------
tomasien
Stripe is amazing - I can't believe it took until 2011 for something like them
to exist. It really blows my mind - one of those "seems obvious, but only
after you've seen it" things.

Here's to y'all figuring out more than just CC payments in the future, and
making them just as awesome.

------
slowdown
When is Stripe coming to India? An estimate would be really nice! The only way
Indian startups can get to use Stripe right now is by setting up an LLC/LLP in
US/UK and accepting payments through the LLC.

The problems with this approach are:

1) High initial cost of setting up the LLC.

2) Lawyer consulting fees and/or CPA fees.

3) Separate taxes for the LLC.

4) The same income is taxed in the country of the LLC AND India.

India is one country that needs Stripe very badly right now. The payment
gateways here have the shittiest/unreliable APIs you could imagine of. One of
them (CCAvenue) even got hacked and it was found that passwords were being
stored in plaintext. (!)

However, the transaction volume is pretty much as high as any other country.
Would love to get an idea of when Stripe would become available here..

~~~
sumedh
Check out Payzippy.

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j2labs
Keith Rabois is apparently teaming up with Stripe too. What a day for them!

[https://twitter.com/rabois/status/426157931239714816](https://twitter.com/rabois/status/426157931239714816)

~~~
stevenj
Is he joining the Board of Directors (via Khosla Ventures' investment this
round)? Or in some other capacity?

~~~
pc
No, he isn't joining the board.

~~~
kavrick
Huh. Can you comment on what he's doing then?

------
benwerd
Stripe is probably my favorite infrastructure startup of the past few years,
and I'm delighted to see them do so well. Looking forward to seeing what
happens in the _next_ two and a half years!

------
sushi
I'd love to know what are stripe's plans to launch in countries where payment
gateways are regulated and one company has constitutional monopoly (looking at
you, Chile).

~~~
superpatosainz
As a fellow Chilean citizen I can just say: what?!

Is it Transbank? Redcompra?

~~~
sushi
Transbank indeed. As it stands today. it takes 2-3 months to get Webpay Plus
(Transbank's payment gateway) implemented on the website.

~~~
superpatosainz
Thanks for the answer!

Also, I just looked your profile and I can just say good luck with what you're
doing!

------
jpdlla
Wow! This is hug! Congrats to the Stripe team. Thanks for making our
lives/projects/startups easier! BTW any other source on this?

Edit: Covered in TechCrunch [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-
internationa...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/with-an-eye-to-
international-growth-payments-company-stripe-raises-80m-from-peter-thiel-
khosla-and-sequoia-at-a-1-25b-valuation/)

------
codex
I've always thought of Stripe as a "faster horse" in the world of payments. I
expect Google, Apple, or Square will find some way to disrupt credit cards
completely and move consumers over to a new method of payment for most
transactions. PayPal would also like to do that, but I'm not sure they have it
in them. And Bitcoin may well upend them all.

------
stevenj
Congrats to the Collison brothers and the entire Stripe team!

Patrick and John are two of the most remarkable people I've _ever_ met.

------
ezl
I'm curious about what one of these decks looks like.

When you raise money, you presumably have some notion of how you are going to
spend that money. $X for new engineers, $Y to build out the London office,
etc.

What does a plan for SPENDING the $80m they raised in this round even look
like?

~~~
majani
check out IPO roadshow presentations for an idea of what goes on at that level

------
john2244
Stripe is one problem which is solved really really well. Behind the pretty
API there is serious amount of work with bureaucracy and traditional systems.
Kudos to a job well done.

~~~
raganwald
"Where there's muck, there's brass"\--Paul Graham, quoting some timeless
business wisdom.

------
scotthtaylor
Wait, I thought they were already in the billion dollar club. Regardless, the
cash should help against PayPal.

~~~
pc
We were in the billions-of-dollars-of-annual-processing-volume club, if that
counts?

~~~
scotthtaylor
Haha yep, keep up the great work!

------
Chris_Newton
Congratulations to all at Stripe on the milestone. It’s nice to see a good
idea being well executed and leading to the success it deserves. There can’t
be many new businesses that have had such a positive effect on so many other
new businesses in such a short time.

------
jmtame
Was just watching the old prototype day recordings from the s09 batch.
Impressively focused on the same problem since day 1: "We're like
Authorize.net, but we're easier and faster." Lots of progress - congrats!

~~~
billclerico
where are these? i'd love to check them out

~~~
jmtame
i have them backed up on an external hard drive. i'll upload on dropbox and
send them to you

------
lucidrains
I am a developer interested in integrating a payment system into one of my
sites where my target customers are mainly in the US. Could someone outline
the major differences between Stripe and Balanced?

~~~
stephen_mcd
All depends on the country your bank account is in.

As an Australian company selling to the US, we've kinda been left in the lurch
with their AU beta.

When it was launched we were told they were working on being able to
accept/convert USD into AU accounts, so at the time we (incredibly naively)
started building our subscription code around their API, assuming it'd be
ready by the time we were.

Almost 6 months later and all we can get out of them is "we don't have an eta
but we're working on it", and we've been sitting here the whole time losing
money hoping that it's just around the corner, when really we should have just
thrown out the work we'd done and gone with a provider that can already handle
it.

~~~
nmjenkins
You should check out [https://pin.net.au/](https://pin.net.au/) – it's an
Australian competitor to Stripe. You can accept payments in USD and Pin will
settle in USD to an Australian account (this is exactly what we do at
FastMail). We've been using them exclusively for the last few months and are
pretty happy, other than the lack of Amex support, which they're still working
on.

~~~
stephen_mcd
Thanks - we originally looked at them but they didn't have recurring payment
support at the time.

Since then they "acquired" an entirely separate recurring payments company (I
don't recall the name), and it was all just a bit too much of an integration
mess at the time, when compared to Stripe who also announced their beta then.

~~~
thejosh
You should try storing it as a customer profile token, then charging using
that with your billing software.

------
pairing
Congratulations to Stripe. It's great to see a company with an excellent
product succeed against the huge incumbents. I use Stripe for all my projects
and I can't recommend it enough.

------
silverbax88
So fanstastic. I love Stripe. A lot. I use it. A lot. I will continue to use
it.

A lot.

Congrats on their success. They deserve it for creating a product that beats
the competition, hands down.

------
chunky1994
Congratulations guys! You guys are pretty much living proof that it's still a
good idea to start startups :)

------
marcamillion
Would love if someone could paste the contents of the article.

------
eieio
Is there a way to read this article without logging in?

~~~
glaugh
They let clickthroughs (clicksthrough?) from Google read the whole thing.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Payments+Startup+Stripe+Join...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Payments+Startup+Stripe+Joins+the+Billion+Dollar+Club)

~~~
eieio
I tried googling the name of the article earlier and it didn't work, but
apparently I screwed something up. Thanks for the link.

And I like clicksthrough :)

------
vidar
Any date for launching in iceland?

------
denibertovic
a link to an article that requires you to login to read it. Wonderful, just
wonderful.

------
namenotrequired
For those who can't access it:

[http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-
club/](http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/)

In the crowded field of online payments, venture capitalists are betting
Stripe Inc. is a standout worth more than a billion dollars.

The payments startup has raised about $80 million in new funding this week
from venture-capital investors including Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and
Founders Fund, said brothers John and Patrick Collison, the company's co-
founders, in an interview. Stripe, at just over four years old, is now valued
at $1.75 billion.

The lofty valuation for such a young company suggests Stripe is growing
rapidly in the area of mobile payments—a market that Forrester Research
estimates will add up to $90 billion in total U.S. spending in 2017—and posing
a threat to eBay Inc. EBAY +3.84% 's PayPal, the digital-payments leader for
more than a decade.

Introducing WSJD, the Journal's new home for tech news, analysis and product
reviews.

The San Francisco startup is among several companies trying to simplify how
businesses accept payments online and through a mobile device. Stripe provides
easy-to-use computer code that any merchant can plug into their website or
mobile app to begin accepting credit-card payments. The company takes 2.9% of
most transactions in addition to a flat commission of 30 cents per charge—the
exact same rate set by PayPal.

"Payments are still startlingly disconnected and fragmented," said Stripe
President John Collison. "Less than 5% of consumer spending happens online
today. It's pretty clearly going to be much larger than that."

The new funds will help fuel Stripe's international expansion. Stripe, now
accepted in just 12 countries, has plenty of work ahead to catch up to PayPal,
which is in more than 190 countries. Entering each new country requires
meeting local laws governing payment providers, and sometimes requires Stripe
to team up with existing businesses, Mr. Collison said.

While the company doesn't disclose its revenue or number of merchants, its
software is now used in thousands of popular mobile apps, including ride-
sharing service Lyft and grocery delivery app Instacart. Its total payment
volume has doubled since last September, he said.

Stripe's transaction total is likely dwarfed by PayPal, which processed $125
billion in purchases last year. But according to Khosla Ventures' Keith
Rabois, an early PayPal executive, Stripe has a competitive advantage because
it created a simple new service that is popular with developers.

"PayPal has a lot of legacy technologies cobbled together, whereas Stripe has
reinvented everything they are doing from scratch," Mr. Rabois said. "Stripe
has created a brand where all new developers start with the premise that
Stripe is the right answer. If you were a developer today and you thought
about using a different option, your engineers would think you're insane."

Stripe saved costs for Lyft, which began using the service a year ago to let
drivers quickly process mobile payments. "Stripe removed the need for us to
hire additional internal staff to process payouts to Lyft drivers," said Lyft
co-founder Logan Green in an email.

For its part, PayPal stepped up competition in mobile payments last year, when
it paid $800 million for Braintree, widely seen as Stripe's closest rival. On
Wednesday, eBay said that activist investor Carl Icahn wants to split up the
company, dividing its PayPal payments unit from its e-commerce site.

A spokesman for PayPal declined to comment.

Stripe has now raised more than $120 million from investors, who include
PayPal alums Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as well as Andreessen Horowitz,
Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. Stripe was last valued at
close to $500 million when it raised funding in July 2012.

An engineer-heavy workforce, Stripe now has about 90 employees.

The company is in talks to power payments for a shopping feature on Twitter
Inc. TWTR -0.14% 's social network, according to a person familiar with the
discussions.

Write to Douglas MacMillan at douglas.macmillan@wsj.com

------
WilliamChanner
Great news.

------
showkhill
mo cheol thu a phc!

