
Stripe CEO Discusses Online Payment Service  - pg
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/87619974/
======
staunch
He did a great job with the interview. I think Stripe will be the next big YC
company, on the list with Heroku, Dropbox, and Airbnb.

I always find it a bit odd though, the claim that before Stripe you had to
have a merchant account. I've signed up (on behalf of various projects) for
PayPal's "Web Site Payments Pro" a half dozen times. It doesn't require a
merchant account, the setup is quite quick, and it has a very simple API
("NVP"). It's pretty much everything Stripe is except less polished, with a
slightly slower setup, and a $30/mo fee (insignificant for all my projects).

I'll definitely choose Stripe next time though just because they're at least
20% more polished on all fronts and I like them a lot more than PayPal. I
can't help wondering whether they just didn't know about PayPal's product or
they're ignoring it for marketing purposes.

~~~
pc
Patrick from Stripe here. This is a really good point, and one that's worth
clarifying. I'm just back from a run, and can't reply in depth right now, but
wanted to add this comment as a placeholder before the thread falls off your
radar. Will update here within a few hours.

(And, PS, thanks for the kind words.)

[Update follows]

I don't think we've ever claimed that before Stripe you had to have a merchant
account. We're of course aware that there were a a bunch of services that
didn't require a merchant account before Stripe (not just PayPal, but also
Google Checkout and Amazon Payments).

The point we always do try to make is that the vast majority of sites (and,
especially, the _best_ sites) end up using their own merchant account.
Whatever about the feature sets of PayPal and similar systems, people still
ended up preferring merchant accounts, and the traditional merchant account
infrastructure powers most of the e-commerce on the web.

It turns out that there are actually pretty good reasons for this: the
merchant-account based solutions gave you the most control over the end-user
experience, the most control over the relationship with your customers, and so
on. Merchant accounts were the best solution and still are the most widely
deployed option.

To the extent that Stripe is competing with anything, we're competing with
_that_.

And so, to get back to your point: it is, overall, a pretty subtle situation,
and how best to make the landscape clear in a few sentences to someone
watching TV -- or someone who doesn't know much about the industry -- isn't
easy. We want to be as accurate as possible without compromising clarity or
brevity. If you've any suggestions as to how we could do it better, they'd be
much appreciated: I'm patrick@stripe.com.

~~~
donald_draper
Now can you bring it to Europe, too ? :-)

We will build you a golden shrine and worship you every morning for doing so.

~~~
pc
Working on it, I promise :-).

~~~
GvS
I wonder why it takes so long and how work on something like that looks like.
Is is something you can share with us?

~~~
donald_draper
I guess it's like an army of lawyers trying to understand the part national,
part european legislation of a couple of dozen countries ;-)

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pazimzadeh
Great interview - if only the interviewer wasn't trying to crack a joke at
every opportunity.

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tzaman
The sooner they get into EU market, the better. I wish they already were here.

~~~
marquis
Is it a crazy idea to set up an account in the U.S. on behalf of non-U.S.
sites and take payments via Stripe, with the caveat that the exchange rate
might not be exact when you transfer funds a few days later? I can't imagine
the many ways this could be found illegal and shut down, but with a small
margin it could be profitable.

~~~
tzaman
Yeah, profitable, but somewhat scammy and, as you pointed out, probably
illegal too. Not worth the fuss if you ask me.

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palish
What tactics are used to defeat fraud?

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BryanB55
I may start using stripe in the future. For right now we just left
authorize.net (they suck) and moved to Samurai by FeeFighters:
<https://samurai.feefighters.com/> \- I haven't heard much about them on HN
but so far they seem great. Their implementation may not be as easy as stripe
but they are slightly cheaper and, in our case, there was already a plugin for
our shopping cart. Either way, I'm glad to see some changes in the payment
industry.

