1) There are almost certainly a lot of inaccuracies in here. I saw a few on a quick skim of the article.
2) Exponential growth is a hard thing for most people to wrap their minds around. The best tech investors--many of which invested in this round--understand it. Most bloggers do not. The former camp has a better track record on valuing companies like these, although of course a lot of investments don't work out. But I would much prefer to give money to the investors in this round to invest for me than the writers of this article.
3) It's easier to spew hate than it is to build value. While bloggers write stuff like this, companies can just ignore it and laugh about it over drinks in a few years.
Basically your comment boils down to "I skimmed the article and it seemed hateful and inaccurate". And then something strange about spotting exponential growth being left to the big boys.
On the contrary, I read the entire article and found it useful. The author admits that getting accurate numbers on Stripe isn't possible at this point. I wish Stripe all the best, but it still has a tough road ahead.
Sam knows Stripe's numbers. So the fact that he was able to see inaccuracies immediately is more meaningful than the fact that you read the entire article and found it useful.
Sama, you may have missed it in your "quick skim" but Stripe isn't actually growing that fast (~50% / yr). Braintree is growing much faster and even stodgy old paypal isn't too far behind in terms of growth rate. For its size and valuation, the growth story is fairly underwhelming.
As for the trackrecord and judgement of the investors, no argument that they are among the best. But only Khosla is new money, meaning they are the only one that took significant new risk (although they got plenty of downside protection via liquidation preferences, as we explained). Sequoia and Founders Fund were already heavily invested in Stripe, thus making it a much easier decision to "re-up" in this new round and pad the company's war chest for the highly-competitive slugfest ahead.
I/we don't hate Stripe. In fact, I think they're a great company. I just think the narrative around this funding round when it was announced on Wednesday glossed over the legitimate challenges that the company faces.
Per my earlier comment, the liquidation preference thing is just completely inaccurate. And the ~50% growth rate comment is just so insanely inaccurate I'm not even sure how to respond. (do have a look at this, though: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/403183731449413632)
I/we don't hate Pando. I just think the narrative around this article when it was posted this morning glossed over the legitimate facts the company faces.
As I wrote to Patrick above, they've been fundraising and having M&A talks over the last 6+ mo, meaning their numbers are "out there." The figures we reported may be outdated, something that we acknowledged, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that they're wildly inaccurate for the timeframe.
1) There are almost certainly a lot of inaccuracies in here. I saw a few on a quick skim of the article.
2) Exponential growth is a hard thing for most people to wrap their minds around. The best tech investors--many of which invested in this round--understand it. Most bloggers do not. The former camp has a better track record on valuing companies like these, although of course a lot of investments don't work out. But I would much prefer to give money to the investors in this round to invest for me than the writers of this article.
3) It's easier to spew hate than it is to build value. While bloggers write stuff like this, companies can just ignore it and laugh about it over drinks in a few years.