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The world's youngest self-made billionaire
- bpicolo 9y agoNot that they aren't both impressive people, but Evan Spiegel has him beat by a hair.
- dharmon 9y agoLiterally the 7th sentence points out that Spiegel is older than him.
- bpicolo 9y agoEdit: Don't lack sleep and math, me
- RmDen 9y agoJune is before August, so Spiegel was born before John no?
- bpicolo 9y agoEdit: Woops
- matthewowen 9y agoso... spiegel's older then. and hence not the world's youngest self-made billionaire.
- drawnwren 9y agoThey didn't become billionaires at the same time?
- aphextron 9y agotl;dr: Start selling picks and shovels.
- rokhayakebe 9y agoOh even better. They decided to lease them to you. Forever.
- selectodude 9y agoI can't help but appreciate that they're aware that they're not billionaires anywhere but on paper.
- wil421 9y agoReminds me of a show I watched a while back about the dot com bubble. A guy was worth 100s of millions on paper and couldn’t pay a dinner bill for the company.
- WalterBright 9y agoI remember that one. He was not allowed by SEC rules to sell any of his stock for a while. By the time the waiting period expired, the stock price had tanked.
- tehlike 9y agoIt's paper so what? They achieved something hard. They could probably still get lots of cash if they wanted to exchange their equity.
- selectodude 9y agoI'm not knocking what they've accomplished, I just think it's cool they know they're not done yet. Makes me think more of Stripe than I would otherwise.
- mrwong 9y agoThat article is incorrect. The youngest self made billionaire is Vitalik Buterin at an age of 23, the founder of Ethereum. Ethereum has a market cap of currently 35B. Its rumoured that he has 5-10% of the coin supply.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoAnd Vitalik is 1000 times more liquid than owners of private equity. People need cryptocurrency to be illiquid for their peace of mind instead of just facing the reality that they made bad choices.
- sidlls 9y agoPeople with $1.1B in "paper equity" have more avenues to acquire cash flow than simply selling their illiquid paper.
- mlevental 9y agoI've always been curious: what are those ways?
- kornish 9y agoTaking out debt using their equity as collateral is probably the most obvious.
- unabridged 9y agoLoans against their stock, the company selling bonds. But after cryptocurrency enters the traditional financial system (eg ETH futures), I'm sure he will be able to get loans against it without a problem.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoYes, they can borrow against it. In the crypto space the lending facilities are just getting started, SALT, the central bank of Mauritus and others will also provide fiat liquidity for cryptocurrency collateral.
- rconti 9y agoI had a laugh at this: "Patrick successfully applied to study maths at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, near Boston in 2007. Two years later John was accepted nearby, at the equally well respected Harvard University."
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoWell, that might be true. They're respected in different ways and among different circles of people, though...
- rconti 9y agoRight. I think virtually everyone reading the BBC would know what Harvard is; MIT less so (especially when written out more formally and not referenced by acronym). In the context of saying that MIT is highly respected for math(s), it was then important to point out that Harvard is also highly respected in the subject (and not, say, a globally-known liberal arts college that might be surprisingly weak in math). Still, it amused me.
- cellis 9y agoWhat does an MIT grad call a Harvard grad? "Boss"
- celticninja 9y agoI think MIT is fairly well known in the UK, on a similar level to Harvard.
- qntty 9y agoFor math they're pretty similar
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tabeth 9y agoI really wonder what the purpose of these kinds of articles are. Millionaires become billionaires? People who attend prestigious universities get rich?
- gutnor 9y agoIt pleases the HN crowd, after all a lot of people here are in the startup business so that's sort of understandable. What worries more is that this article, like the one about Musk, are really too ego driven. Not a word on teams. That is more understandable here I guess, but the Musk article took it to the next level - the lone genius furiously and successfully solving the world biggest issues with nothing else than his own brain and the moral support of his family. The moral of those article: there is no place for sidekicks in this world, you are at the top, or you are a loser. And that's where all those ultra-secretive, "I will give you 1% of the company, all you have to do is implement this idea in software", "that will make you a millionaire if we exit don't complain", founders are born.
- joeblow9999 9y agoAgreed. They clearly hired well.
- cjsawyer 9y agoThe more I read about Musk the more parallels I see with Edison.
- Firebrand 9y ago>Stripe is not widely known because it doesn't sell anything that consumers can buy. Instead its software systems enable companies around the world to more easily accept online payments and run their websites. What does Stripe do that makes it a better choice for companies than PayPal?
- jonny_eh 9y agoBetter API, documentation, and support. It's pretty much that simple.
- rising-sky 9y agoIsn't this why PayPal purchased Braintree?
- jonny_eh 9y agoMaybe? Hard to buy your way out of this kind of problem though.
- coldacid 9y agoWell, they don't steal their clients' money through abuse of their own terms of service, so that's one thing. Mainly, though, it's because they have a fairly simple API, compared to PayPal, which makes their service easier to integrate into others.
- jondubois 9y agoYes the PayPal API and its documentation has always been terrible. It really wasn't hard to beat. That said, I think that Y Combinator was crucial for Stripe's success. So many developers read HN and pracyically all of them needed a better alternative to PayPal.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoThey were one of the first to allow accepting of credit card without leaving the site or requiring heavy PCI compliance work. They did it using client-side tokenization so the server never needed to see the credit card data. Paypal either required you to leave the site or put you in territory where you need to meet fairly expensive PCI compliance rules. So the UX was simply better for the buyer. And the API is drop-dead simple to implement. Now a days PCI caught up and requires some compliance for users of Stripe like platforms but still nowhere near as much as the ones who see the card. Also, being able to be up and accepting payments in less than 15 minutes is pretty great. And as other's pointed out, Paypal has (had?) a nasty habit of taking people's money. To be fair I know some stripe merchants where Stripe held back payments as protection against chargebacks. But that is just a delay, not flat out taking the money like Paypal used to do.
- Sandorie 9y agoOkay congrats ..you are a billionaire on paper, now what? What was the point of this article ?- To showcase an already predictable scenario ? Either way, congratulations nonetheless, I do admire and respect the work they put in for Stripe.
- saagarjha 9y agoBy this logic, isn't Bill Gates a billionaire "on paper" as well? His wealth is all stock and assets.
- scarmig 9y agoIt all depends on how liquid those assets are. "Paper" billionaire or millionaire typically refers to situations where someone is a millionaire but wouldn't be able to come up with a million dollars in funds in the short term (in less than a week, say). Paper ones might be able to take a haircut on their assets for additional liquidity, but that haircut might be enough to make them not a millionaire.
- gech 9y agoI don't follow whats special about what they did? They were able to land big merchant account connections?
- ryantbrown 9y agoIf you’ve never used Stripe or had to implement a payment system it may be hard to understand. Like others have said, Stripe made it simple to accept credit cards online and since have expanded to offer several different products that focus on helping internet companies (sass, ecommerce, marketplace payments). What they did right was their developer first approach. They eliminated all of the bullshit you had to do to start accepting payments. They took something that more and more companies needed to do, was unusually complex, and made it easy. It certainly qualifies as “special” if you’ve ever had to do it.
- johnsimer 9y agoI (almost) met Patrick Collison at a conference a month ago where he gave a talk. He seemed extremely smart and interesting and I had no idea he was rich and famous. So after he gives his talk, I stand in line to get his phone number to see if we could meet up sometime so that I could pick his brain. While I was in line to talk to him, I mentioned to the guy next to me "Man that guy sure is interesting", and he said "Yeah, most billionaires are pretty smart". I was floored that Patrick was a billionaire, and then got super nervous and exited the line.
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- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y agoWhat is that makes people so intimidated about addressing someeone rich or famous? I see it all the time. Why put yourself beneath him, you’re a human being and so is he, he goes to the toilet and takes a dump and so do you. He will die and so will you. We’re all just people.
- justboxing 9y ago> he goes to the toilet and takes a dump and so do you I say the same exact thing to my friends who are mesmerized by rich and famous people. Both money and fame are man-made and didn't exist in pre-historic reptile era of the earth.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoAlpha males has been a part of animal (including human) psychology for millions of years.
- tomkarlo 9y agoThe concept of "alpha" leaders, especially as derived from wolf pack behavior, has been largely debunked. It was based on faulty research.
- dtzuzu 9y agoCongrats. Very happy for him/them since Stripe is awesome!