17 ms·

Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

709 points by tempsy 7y ago

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
Before stripe, I used paypal and it was sooo painful! There are so many terrible APIs out there that waste so much time needlessly. Then I found stripe. What a treat. Everything was documented and the documentation itself was both readable and didn't go in endless circles like the paypal ones. The error messages were helpful. And every api endpoint had an example, which is hugely helpful: HUGELY! All the other API developers out there can learn from this: you can't underestimate the value of having a working example. Not only that but the testing is much easier in stripe, and there's no need for a bunch of seperate accounts and sandboxes that don't make sense. Oh and did I mention that the variables describe themselves: the first 3 or 4 letter of an ID says what it is (subscription or etc). Genius! It's little things like this which make Stripe stand out orders of magnitude above the rest of all the APIs in the world. I hope you guys rule the marketplace for payment processing and wish you all the success you deserve. Stripe's success in payment processing sends a clear signal to the Paypals and API developers of world: If you're producing an API that sucks, it creates an opportunity for someone else to come eat your lunch. :)
- adventured 7y ago
  > Before stripe, I used paypal and it was sooo painful! Almost no matter what Stripe does from here, that they disrupted the PayPal monster (and the rest), will always reserve them a place in my developer heart. It really was an atrocious experience; there's pre-Stripe and post-Stripe.
  - forgot-my-pw 7y ago
    I wonder if that's the reason they launched Braintree with a more sane API. Nevermind, Braintree was acquired by Paypal in 2013.
- enahs-sf 7y ago
  I definitely consider stripe to be the canonical example when it comes to both API and documentation design. Really an excellent benchmark and point of reference for anyone who's making a published API.
- theturtletalks 7y ago
  Paypal also came out and said they will no longer refund seller fees when a customer is refunded. Before, they used to just keep the $0.30, but now they will keep the 2.9% as well. More the reason to switch to a new processor like Stripe.
  - theunixbeard 7y ago
    Stripe keeps your 2.9% also [1]. > Stripe supports the ability to refund charges made to your account, either in whole or in part. If the original charge underwent currency conversion, the refunded amount is converted back using the same process. There are no fees to refund a charge, but the fees from the original charge are not returned. [1]: https://stripe.com/docs/refunds https://stripe.com/docs/refunds
  - nickjj 7y ago
    > More the reason to switch to a new processor like Stripe. For a lot of merchants it's not a matter of switching to Stripe. It's using Stripe but also including PayPal as an option because a huge percentage of buyers want to use it to pay for things -- especially 1 time purchases of digital goods. About 40% of my course sales are through PayPal. By the way if anyone reading is curious, that new PayPal refund policy goes into effect October 11th 2019 (you probably got the User Agreement email to notify you of this too if you're a merchant).
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  I know Stripe is in beta in India, but I don't see any other alternative better than PayPal. Or is there something?
  - anandchowdhary 7y ago
    > Or is there something? Razorpay. It’s also a YC company. I think of it as essentially an India-focused Stripe clone, with UPI, netbanking, etc.
    - aloknnikhil 7y ago
      That's awesome! Thanks.
lasryaric 7y ago
At Producteev, my old start-up, I implemented the payment system using Paypal, omg, it was so hard, and so painful for the following reason: - poor documentation - I never knew how to get an up to date documentation - very slow api and website - very hard to understand the meaning of the undocumented data etc. Once, my co-founder @Ilan Abehassera sent me a link to an article about Stripe on Techcrunch: I signed up to Stripe, within minutes I was able to charge my own credit card through a CURL bash call, everything was clear, recurring payment perfectly handled, discount, etc etc. And this was at the very beginning of Stripe. Then I had to come up with why we should quickly switch from Paypal to Stripe. Anyway, very good memoery, you definitely set the standard for how an API should be designed and I can't thank you enough for that!
czbond 7y ago
I've always wondered: What was Stripe's actual MVP when they started? How did they MVP in a few weeks, and start charging cards?
malthusian 7y ago
Adyen is _way_ ahead in terms of revenue, yet only at a $25b valuation. I don’t see how $35b can be justified when their direct competitor is twice as big and growing twice as fast. This seems like a recipe for another WeWork.
sam1r 7y ago
[Random techie] This makes total sense. Stripe is driving the example for OSS for all countries to follow. Thank you Stripe Co-founders. I appreciate your work and effort to bring GH where it is today.
puranjay 7y ago
Anybody who doubts whether Stripe is worth $35B just needs to read this comments section I don't think I've seen a unicorn get this much love from developers
- hobofan 7y ago
  Developer love isn't everything. There are some projects on here that just as much dev love, but are not even able to fund a single person. There are also quite a few products I've used that have an amazing API but an otherwise awful product. Yes, dev love is a big part of what allowed Stripe to become stripe, but it's probably not a good indicator whether Strip is worth $1B or $10B or $35B.
GeneralTspoon 7y ago
I quite like Stripe - but them forcing the recent switch to Checkout V2 has me a bit miffed. Previously it was super simple to add dynamic card payments to a site - just drop the JS in, make a call to your server and then call Stripe from your server. Done. And it's all done in a popup on the same page (so no context switching UX for the user). Now it seems they've killed the simplicity of that in favour of a more PayPal-like experience - where the user gets pushed out to the Stripe website to checkout. And it becomes more complex to implement too - due to everything being async and webhook based. At this point I think Paypal might actually be easier to implement for a certain class of simple one-off payments (although their sandbox servers are cripplingly slow). I'm a little bit skeptical of this change because I think it's partially a strategic play by Stripe (with the smokescreen of SCA-compliance + Apple Pay support) to become more of a user-facing online "wallet", rather than just a behind-the-scenes payment processor.
- edwinwee 7y ago
  A wallet isn't the intent. It's almost the opposite! If you remember the previous version, your customers used their saved card within Checkout. The new version of Checkout lets your customers use whatever payment method is easiest for them, and wherever it is. That's why we're big fans of things like Apple Pay (some have seen a conversion increase of 250%!), local bank payments in Europe, or even saved cards in Chrome (rolling out now). From its inception, Checkout was designed to be the fastest way to accept payments, and I think it's now faster (and even faster for customers). You can just drop in a single line of code—and that code doesn't have to be server-side. :)
  - ENGNR 7y ago
    But the whole question of "which payment method do you want to use?" is unnecessary complexity if they're sitting there with a card in their hand. Wouldn't it be better to let the front end service handle that question, and then use the appropriate Stripe APIs in the front end? The whole revelation of stripe was that if a customer was sitting there with a credit card, they just put it there into the same screen and it was done. It was the other crappy products that forced you out into a merchant gateway then back again I'm never going to send retail customers out a payment gateway with someone else's brand/colors/html, mostly because it's just too confusing to introduce more concepts at that critical stage when they're about to actually make the payment
leesec 7y ago
Amazing and congrats! I'm curious if anyone knows how much revenue/profit Stripe is making? Or is it all still under wraps?
guanzo 7y ago
Please allow international, independent charges/transfers. This is a huge pain point in our Stripe experience.
- edwinwee 7y ago
  We announced a beta for this last week! You can send money to 45 countries. (We're turning this on for businesses in the US first, and we're working on more countries soon.) https://stripe.com/connect/payouts#request-invite https://stripe.com/connect/payouts#request-invite
ent101 7y ago
Well-deserved. One of the best dev platforms in existence right now with a clear value prop that is perfectly executed on at 100%. I'm excited to see what the future holds for them.
kchoudhu 7y ago
Stripe is cool -- I use it every day -- but is it really worth, oh, half a Goldman Sachs? I dunno man.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Privately traded companies and publicly traded companies use different terminology for the same things. In the private markets "valuation" is a term that just means "someone bought a couple shares at this arbitrary price, here are the value of the other millions of shares at that same arbitrary price". Although the effects on all shareholder's balance sheets are real and useful, it is just broadcasted for marketing and hype. In the public markets "marketcap" is the same term. And finally, older public companies have low price to equity ratios because the hype has fizzled and they are predictable. It doesn't mean anything. Its not enough inputs alone for you to decide what the rest of the market will do.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Square is $25b and was trading at above $40b at some point within the last year.
- mathattack 7y ago
  A couple thoughts on why this isn’t a fair comparison: - Goldman is profitable but the employees extract most of it via compensation. - Goldman has to rewin their business every year. Very little recurring revenue and they are one recession from imploding. - You can’t really compute valuation on a very small investment. It’s not like the entire float is trading, and the small investment (relative to valuation) can have all kinds of liquidity preferences and special rights.
  - tryitnow 7y ago
    I think your third point supports the OP original point. Stripe probably isn't "really" worth that much now. EDIT: wanted to mention that my impression is that they're a great company, just not worth $35B.
    - 7y ago
harryh 7y ago
Why is Stripe still private?
- dheelus 7y ago
  Why should they be public?
  - ETHisso2017 7y ago
    So wallstreetbets can yolo on it, of course
- neom 7y ago
  It would probably be safest to stay private and ride out the weather, the public markets are not exactly fun right now.
- 29_29 7y ago
  So VCs can capture every bit of value before its put on the public market.
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  Cause it's easier to be private. Look at what wall street is doing to Tesla and ask if they wished they we still private or not.
- babl-yc 7y ago
  There's two main incentives to go public: raising money and liquidity. They don't need to tap public markets to raise money. And investors are likely OK holding off on liquidity if the valuation continues to rise. Going public typically requires a significant amount of effort across the company, which can reduce focus on other initiatives key to growing the business.
  - tempsy 7y ago
    I'm not sure what Stripe's policy is on selling shares on secondary markets, but another reason is that at some point employees need liquidity too.
neom 7y ago
A lot to live up to, but those Collison brothers are hella ambitious and execute like champs, the whole team at stripe is seriously world class. No surprise here and incredibly well deserved. Keep up the good work folks.
thinkingkong 7y ago
Before we start piling on about whether or not its really worth 35B just keep in mind how private companies are valued. Someone paid a lot of money for a chunk of stripe so thats what its “worth”. Personally I think stripe is close to worth - as another commenter put it - half of goldman sachs. The recent launch of loans, credit card issuing, etc are all bets or exercises that put stripe in an incredible position to build platforms for financial capabilities.
- pmart123 7y ago
  What about Stripe versus Adyen or Square?
  - ashelmire 7y ago
    Does the existence of other financial firms make Goldman Sachs worth any less? I don't think it does. We're used to winner-take-all when it comes to these unicorns, but I'm not convinced it will stay that way. With many of these service niches, there's a ton of money to be made and enough needs / feature differentiation for competition.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      Not the parent poster but I don't think that's what they were going after. I think they were asking whether the valuation is fair relative to other companies that are operating in a very similar space with similar ambitions. GS is an investment bank. A fairer comparison would be SQ, PayPal, Adyen or First Data. Square's market cap is $25B today on the public markets with a 2019 estimated net revenue of $4.5B and almost $100B in transaction volume. I don't have any insight into Stripe's numbers, though I'd guess it's probably not 40% more than that? Willing to be surprised of course, it's a great company. The real question being asked here is: "Is Stripe's valuation likely to hold up when they go public one day?"
      - pmart123 7y ago
        Exactly. I've really liked Patrick Collison in interviews and I've long admired their API documentation. Square Capital was first to offer loans to SMBs that amortize over the transactions so Stripe isn't the first mover there. Some bigger companies like eBay and Burberry have chosen Adyen as a payment solution and I think Booking uses Braintree? Are there reasons outside of costs to choose Adyen or Braintree over Stripe? Can Lyft develop their own payment tech because they only transact in the US and Canada, and global transactions are where things get complicated? I like most things about Stripe, but Shopify is also growing like crazy, has an awesome founder, and provides the only alternative to Amazon right now and is valued at $35B.
warent 7y ago
Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Overall I'm really not surprised at the valuation. Stripe is one of the best products/services out there.
- Despegar 7y ago
  Why is it better than Adyen?
  - warent 7y ago
    For starters I've never heard of Adyen until just now. So, perhaps better marketing?
    - joshmn 7y ago
      It's pretty popular in the Europe and is a Dutch company.
      - scient 7y ago
        Its only "popular" because for a long time it was the only choice in Europe pretty much. In several countries it still is. It also was total garbage developer friendliness wise ~5 years ago.
        mtgx 7y ago
        Well, Stripe still isn't available in like one quarter of the European countries.
  - odiroot 7y ago
    I had the unfortunate opportunity to integrate with Adyen around 2016-2017 and it was super painful. The API didn't make much sense to me and the documentation was hard to navigate and understand. It all looked very rough and rushed to the market. Granted it was "a long time ago" but I can still remember the pain.
mathattack 7y ago
Great company but it’s too hard to infer value from such a small investment.
- amelius 7y ago
  Also I see little true (high-tech) innovation with the "SV Elite". It seems that people are more interested in cornering markets than in creating exciting new things. The valuation doesn't surprise me because that's how you corner markets, by first building a huge pile of money.
- danesparza 7y ago
  Not really. Some people infer value without any investment -- only based on P&L and year-over-year growth. (Stripe is consistently making money, after all)
  - mathattack 7y ago
    That’s not what the listed valuation is based on.
rblion 7y ago
Only ~10% of the world's GDP runs through the Internet right now, Stripe is working to raise that number and I fully support them. Their brand, their message, their product is stuff I study as I work on my own projects. I feel this valuation is well-deserved. I rarely feel that way nowadays. This company will be around and still relevant a decade from now. I'd love to see them challenge the dinosaurs in the financial sector.
spencerwgreene 7y ago
> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?
- hkarthik 7y ago
  Stripe is trying to capitalize for a capital intensive endeavor: Stripe Capital. An IPO would have been one way to fund it, but likely would have involved a lot of financial scrutiny along the way, which would probably distract them from the main point of raising the funds. A bold move which will hopefully work out for them and not overvalue the company before they attempt to go public later on.
- seansmccullough 7y ago
  Generally consensus is a recession is going to happen in the next year or two, and the next good time to IPO won’t be for several years after it that.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Yep. That's why we've seen a glut of public offerings in the past 18 months, as CFOs push to get them out before the drought.
  - joering2 7y ago
    ... which has absolutely nothing to do with going IPO, since they would cash out/in and get access to stockholders money at the exact day of their IPO, not "next year or two". If you do not need to raise money there are limited reasons to go public, however you have much stricter reporting requirements, and general things you cannot do anymore since you are publicly traded, not to mention hostile takeovers, etc. Dell's story is a great example why you want to go public / go back private. https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-wont-have-michael-dell-to-kick-around-anymore/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-...
    - 7y ago
tempsy 7y ago
I wonder how Square missed the boat so hard with a developer payment API. I know they have one, but of course never hear about anyone using it.
- icelancer 7y ago
  I have no idea. I kept hammering them on this for years until Stripe came and ate all their lunch. And only THEN did Square release an API.
ganitarashid 7y ago
No way that’s worth as much as Airbnb
- BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
  What do you mean? They look like they're on a fast path to disrupt like all of banking! The banking industry has to be bigger than the bed and breakfast advertising industry.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Not to mention they are more regulatory compliant, and so likely deal with fewer lawsuits and have to spend less on lobbying.
    - dymk 7y ago
      > Not to mention they are more regulatory compliant Source?
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        Here's a few: https://www.jotform.com/blog/is-stripe-psd2-compliant/ https://www.jotform.com/blog/is-stripe-psd2-compliant/ Linda Scott of Silicon Dales in the U.K. uses Stripe and isn’t surprised that the payment processor is in compliance. “We have found Stripe to be proactive and open around legislative changes.” https://www.paymentssource.com/news/stripes-next-step-is-built-on-strong-authentication-compliance https://www.paymentssource.com/news/stripes-next-step-is-bui... Stripe hasn't exactly been in the news for lawsuits or controversy, unlike AirBnB.
        dymk 7y ago
        Not being in the news has nothing to do with being regulatory complaint. You’ve provided articles that Stripe is compliant, which is fine, but nothing there indicates that Airbnb isn’t compliant. What regulations specifically is Airbnb breaking that Stripe isn’t?
pc 7y ago
[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want to build".) I always appreciate hearing from HN users (even if I don't always have time to respond): patrick@stripe.com. For anyone thinking about what they should work on: I started building developer tools when I was 15 and "tools for creation" is still, IMO, one of the most interesting areas to work in.
- czbond 7y ago
  What was your MVP that you were charging cards in a few weeks of start?
- pitchups 7y ago
  Kudos to Stripe on an amazing journey! Interesting to revisit the original HN submission of Stripe's launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883
  - hiharryhere 7y ago
    Incredibly the API links from 2011 still work. Just followed one mentioned in that old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3054726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3054726
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > Incredibly the API links from 2011 still work. Developers rightly praise Stripe's API documentation, but their approach to versioning and backwards compatibility is a gold standard that is not sung enough. What other fast-moving startup that constantly tweaks and changes their APIs also provide backwards compatibility with their earliest versions? Stripe understands that handling payments is critical, scary, and hard to get right. When a company builds a payment solution that works, there is strong resistance to mess with it. The fact that Stripe is so backwards compatible means that they do not have to.
adamqureshi 7y ago
I use STRIPE as my payment Processor for my 1 man shop. They are great. Stupid simple. They even offered me a cash advance. All i need now is for stripe to be my bank to keep all my money in there and pay my business bills from it. One stop shop to run my business, would be great! What would even be more useful to me then lending me money, is if they help me build my v2 and take a slice from my business. Finding engineers is hard and very expensive for a small online business like mine.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- buildawesome 7y ago
  What do you feel like you need if Stripe gives you capital for your future receivables for you to go hire more engineers?
  - adamqureshi 7y ago
    They offered me capital. I'd prefer Stripe engineering in exchange for equity.
Xixi 7y ago
I remember when we launched our Japanese tea service [1]: we wanted to switch to Stripe so badly that I was emailing them at the very least once a month, until we made it in their beta program. I'm not sure the youngest remember what the payment landscape was before Stripe, but it wasn't great. Stripe lifted the whole industry up from mediocrity. Around 10 years ago I had the pleasure of setting up payments with a French bank: instead of a web API we had to use an opaque binary installed on our server. In terms of setup it took many weeks and several in person meetings to get approved. There was a (big) setup fee and a (not so small) monthly subscription. And then of course transaction fees. In Japan for startups targeting foreignland it was even worse: only PayPal supported payments in anything other than JPY! [2] Interestingly it seems that with Stripe Japan everything coming from outside of Japan goes through USD. I have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY. So I would expect an EUR/JPY transaction to occur in the middle, yet oftentimes the USD/EUR exchange rates ends up leaking on our customer receipts... I wonder how it works behind the scene... [1] https://tomotcha.com https://tomotcha.com for those interested. [2] Maybe banks were offering this service directly, but for what was only an experiment at the time, I was expecting the setup cost to be prohibitive (at least in time, if not in money).
- edwinwee 7y ago
  The rates themselves show on your receipts? Are you using some sort of plug-in? Could you forward me a receipt at edwin@stripe.com? For the conversion itself, we automatically convert from whatever currency you've accepted the payment in, then send it to your JPY bank account. The conversion rate is the average of whatever people are buying and selling the currency at that hour, but some financial institutions add a small markup on top of that along the way.
  - Xixi 7y ago
    The rates were not showing on our receipts. They were showing on the bank statements of our customers. They were charged an extra 2 EUR by their banks as a FOREX fee on the Tomotcha payment, on a line showing the USD/EUR forex rate, despite us charging in EUR. Very weird. That issue was only ever reported by two customers in France. This is on top of my head, but I will forward you the relevant and exact information.
Allvitende 7y ago
Congratulations to the Stripe team. Truly great product and company. The fact that WeWork truly thought that they were $12B more valuable than Stripe is insane to me.
deleted 7y ago
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jiveturkey 7y ago
> [Chief Product Officer] Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. How's that possible? At this valuation they aren't looking at acquisition, right? VC aren't investing to the tune of $250mm (in this round alone) without an exit strategy, right? What exit strategy if not IPO?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  They're not ruling out an IPO in the future. They just don't have plans to do it right now. I have no plans to buy ice cream, but that doesn't mean I'll never buy ice cream. In fact, it's highly likely I will buy ice cream at some point.
apexalpha 7y ago
Your competitor Adyen sits a few streets away from me in Amsterdam. Seems like a very thriving and interesting market you both operate in. Congrats and best of luck!
emdowling 7y ago
You know you have a killer product when your customers will literally fly half way around the world just to use it. When I started my company (since acquired) in 2012, Stripe was so game changing I flew from Australia to the US to open a bank account so we could use it. While we could incorporate in the US online, we had to turn up in person at a bank to open an account. The only alternatives in Australia at the time were PayPal, which had outrageous fees and a terrible experience for recurring SaaS billing, or a merchant account with a bank which was going to require a $30k deposit. It cost me $750 to incorporate a US entity, $1250 for airfares and hotel (oh to remember SF was that affordable!!). I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb, which conveniently has a Chase branch right next door, and 1 day later we had a US bank account and could turn on our Stripe integration. We didn’t look back. I love Stripe Atlas, because I intimately relate to the problem, and wish we had it in 2012.
- edwinwee 7y ago
  Ha! Glad you were able to find a way. We still think it could be easier, even with Atlas and Australia support now. Would you be up to chat more? edwin@stripe.com
- jwr 7y ago
  Chase! It must have been a while ago, because today Chase blocks your account at the mere whiff of anything non-standard going on. And I do mean "anything", being out of the country definitely qualifies. They also shoot first and ask questions later, so your wire transfers will get cancelled or your entire account blocked with incoming transfers bouncing (what is amazing is that the amount that bounces is less $50 that they take for the bouncing service, fun!). My last wire transfer was "cancelled" by their anti-fraud people, and after calling them and identifying myself extensively, I was told that I am to show up at my local branch with two forms of ID. Yes, the same two forms of ID that they've already seen. Kind of difficult if you are out of the country. American banks are something else entirely.
jeffnappi 7y ago
Stripe has made building payments related products fun for me when previously I had suffered through working directly with banks and various poorly designed gateways. Stripe is still the gold standard to me when it comes to developer APIs, documentation, and smart iteration. Kudos to everyone at Stripe!
jedberg 7y ago
I'm curious as to why they chose to raise $250M via VC instead of raising in the public markets? Of course there are trade offs and advantages to each, I'm just curious as to their calculus.
- somebodythere 7y ago
  Can get a higher multiple from VCs probably.
Teichopsia 7y ago
Stripe is one of many services I would like to use but can't because they simply don't work in my country. I understand it can get somewhat complicated due to legalities I probably don't understand (or maybe the market is too small to even bother). But if your Navy can go through the country I live in, could you folks (in general and not directed at anyone) please try a little harder?
- edwinwee 7y ago
  Where do you live? Our roadmap—literally—is quickly expanding to many more countries (we just launched in 8 new countries last week). And this new funding round will be put to use for that. :)
  - Teichopsia 7y ago
    I wasn't expecting a reply, but it was nice to get one. I was just venting my frustration. Panama, Central America. I signed up for the email notification - years ago :)
  - n1c 7y ago
    Not OP but I know a bunch of South African makers who'd love to be using Stripe instead of our alternatives.
  - nickpp 7y ago
    Romania is waiting for Stripe too! Guys, please. What is the hold-up?! It's all EU anyway...
didip 7y ago
Well deserved. They are actually trying to do good + interesting scaling challenges by enabling small business all over the world.
zapstar 7y ago
Here's their original Hacker News post, which is always a fascinating read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883
mandeepj 7y ago
> Still, a raft of younger startups, such as Checkout.com, are raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to challenge Stripe. There is a paywall link for more details. I'm curious to know what they are looking to challenge (especially given the rave reviews that Stripe gets here at HN)
toptal 7y ago
Adyen seems to have higher revenue, a faster growth rate, and stronger overall financials. By nearly double. They're at $25b. How is $35b justified?
- oli5679 7y ago
  The culture and product are exceptional. In the long run I think they will outcompete rivals.
shadowtree 7y ago
So their business is still not sustainable without outside funding? Why do they need training wheels?
PixelPaul 7y ago
I still wish I could accept multiple currencies with strip without conversion and spend them via a CC. Only reason I am still with PayPal
Quekid5 7y ago
I'm calling it now. New bubble.
artur_makly 7y ago
also their support for startups via their communities, atlas, and weekly free feeback is what truly makes them shine. keep up the great work!
nicky19890202 7y ago
This is a very reasonable value.
the-trev-dev 7y ago
We implemented stripe as an add-on a little more than 6 years ago and left it mostly untouched. After some recent TLC we now facilitate $100 million a year through Stripe. Our next hurdle is trying to integrate Stripe terminal for thousands of customers but $300 a pop is a tough sell.
- edwinwee 7y ago
  For huge Terminal device orders like that, we can help with a volume discount. Just email in to support@stripe.com with how many you need (feel free to CC me at edwin@stripe.com). (BTW, if you didn't see, we have a $59 device too. We're also working on supporting more.)
mrweasel 7y ago
It's not that I don't like Stripe, but was it really so difficult to process payments before? When I start working with online payments in 2007/2008 we had multiple easy to use solutions for processing at least credit and debit cards. You could have a test account in less than an hour, and be ready to process real transactions in less than a week. Stripe has plenty of competition, most of which have been around longer. You could argue that Stripe have a better API and that certainly has value.

709 points by tempsy 7y ago

Before stripe, I used paypal and it was sooo painful! There are so many terrible APIs out there that waste so much time needlessly. Then I found stripe. What a treat. Everything was documented and the documentation itself was both readable and didn't go in endless circles like the paypal ones. The error messages were helpful. And every api endpoint had an example, which is hugely helpful: HUGELY! All the other API developers out there can learn from this: you can't underestimate the value of having a working example. Not only that but the testing is much easier in stripe, and there's no need for a bunch of seperate accounts and sandboxes that don't make sense. Oh and did I mention that the variables describe themselves: the first 3 or 4 letter of an ID says what it is (subscription or etc). Genius! It's little things like this which make Stripe stand out orders of magnitude above the rest of all the APIs in the world. I hope you guys rule the marketplace for payment processing and wish you all the success you deserve. Stripe's success in payment processing sends a clear signal to the Paypals and API developers of world: If you're producing an API that sucks, it creates an opportunity for someone else to come eat your lunch. :)

adventured 7y ago
> Before stripe, I used paypal and it was sooo painful! Almost no matter what Stripe does from here, that they disrupted the PayPal monster (and the rest), will always reserve them a place in my developer heart. It really was an atrocious experience; there's pre-Stripe and post-Stripe.
- forgot-my-pw 7y ago
  I wonder if that's the reason they launched Braintree with a more sane API. Nevermind, Braintree was acquired by Paypal in 2013.
enahs-sf 7y ago
I definitely consider stripe to be the canonical example when it comes to both API and documentation design. Really an excellent benchmark and point of reference for anyone who's making a published API.
theturtletalks 7y ago
Paypal also came out and said they will no longer refund seller fees when a customer is refunded. Before, they used to just keep the $0.30, but now they will keep the 2.9% as well. More the reason to switch to a new processor like Stripe.
- theunixbeard 7y ago
  Stripe keeps your 2.9% also [1]. > Stripe supports the ability to refund charges made to your account, either in whole or in part. If the original charge underwent currency conversion, the refunded amount is converted back using the same process. There are no fees to refund a charge, but the fees from the original charge are not returned. [1]: https://stripe.com/docs/refunds https://stripe.com/docs/refunds
- nickjj 7y ago
  > More the reason to switch to a new processor like Stripe. For a lot of merchants it's not a matter of switching to Stripe. It's using Stripe but also including PayPal as an option because a huge percentage of buyers want to use it to pay for things -- especially 1 time purchases of digital goods. About 40% of my course sales are through PayPal. By the way if anyone reading is curious, that new PayPal refund policy goes into effect October 11th 2019 (you probably got the User Agreement email to notify you of this too if you're a merchant).
aloknnikhil 7y ago
I know Stripe is in beta in India, but I don't see any other alternative better than PayPal. Or is there something?
- anandchowdhary 7y ago
  > Or is there something? Razorpay. It’s also a YC company. I think of it as essentially an India-focused Stripe clone, with UPI, netbanking, etc.
  - aloknnikhil 7y ago
    That's awesome! Thanks.

lasryaric 7y ago

At Producteev, my old start-up, I implemented the payment system using Paypal, omg, it was so hard, and so painful for the following reason: - poor documentation - I never knew how to get an up to date documentation - very slow api and website - very hard to understand the meaning of the undocumented data etc. Once, my co-founder @Ilan Abehassera sent me a link to an article about Stripe on Techcrunch: I signed up to Stripe, within minutes I was able to charge my own credit card through a CURL bash call, everything was clear, recurring payment perfectly handled, discount, etc etc. And this was at the very beginning of Stripe. Then I had to come up with why we should quickly switch from Paypal to Stripe. Anyway, very good memoery, you definitely set the standard for how an API should be designed and I can't thank you enough for that!

czbond 7y ago

I've always wondered: What was Stripe's actual MVP when they started? How did they MVP in a few weeks, and start charging cards?

malthusian 7y ago

Adyen is _way_ ahead in terms of revenue, yet only at a $25b valuation. I don’t see how $35b can be justified when their direct competitor is twice as big and growing twice as fast. This seems like a recipe for another WeWork.

sam1r 7y ago

[Random techie] This makes total sense. Stripe is driving the example for OSS for all countries to follow. Thank you Stripe Co-founders. I appreciate your work and effort to bring GH where it is today.

puranjay 7y ago

Anybody who doubts whether Stripe is worth $35B just needs to read this comments section I don't think I've seen a unicorn get this much love from developers

hobofan 7y ago
Developer love isn't everything. There are some projects on here that just as much dev love, but are not even able to fund a single person. There are also quite a few products I've used that have an amazing API but an otherwise awful product. Yes, dev love is a big part of what allowed Stripe to become stripe, but it's probably not a good indicator whether Strip is worth $1B or $10B or $35B.

GeneralTspoon 7y ago

I quite like Stripe - but them forcing the recent switch to Checkout V2 has me a bit miffed. Previously it was super simple to add dynamic card payments to a site - just drop the JS in, make a call to your server and then call Stripe from your server. Done. And it's all done in a popup on the same page (so no context switching UX for the user). Now it seems they've killed the simplicity of that in favour of a more PayPal-like experience - where the user gets pushed out to the Stripe website to checkout. And it becomes more complex to implement too - due to everything being async and webhook based. At this point I think Paypal might actually be easier to implement for a certain class of simple one-off payments (although their sandbox servers are cripplingly slow). I'm a little bit skeptical of this change because I think it's partially a strategic play by Stripe (with the smokescreen of SCA-compliance + Apple Pay support) to become more of a user-facing online "wallet", rather than just a behind-the-scenes payment processor.

edwinwee 7y ago
A wallet isn't the intent. It's almost the opposite! If you remember the previous version, your customers used their saved card within Checkout. The new version of Checkout lets your customers use whatever payment method is easiest for them, and wherever it is. That's why we're big fans of things like Apple Pay (some have seen a conversion increase of 250%!), local bank payments in Europe, or even saved cards in Chrome (rolling out now). From its inception, Checkout was designed to be the fastest way to accept payments, and I think it's now faster (and even faster for customers). You can just drop in a single line of code—and that code doesn't have to be server-side. :)
- ENGNR 7y ago
  But the whole question of "which payment method do you want to use?" is unnecessary complexity if they're sitting there with a card in their hand. Wouldn't it be better to let the front end service handle that question, and then use the appropriate Stripe APIs in the front end? The whole revelation of stripe was that if a customer was sitting there with a credit card, they just put it there into the same screen and it was done. It was the other crappy products that forced you out into a merchant gateway then back again I'm never going to send retail customers out a payment gateway with someone else's brand/colors/html, mostly because it's just too confusing to introduce more concepts at that critical stage when they're about to actually make the payment

leesec 7y ago

Amazing and congrats! I'm curious if anyone knows how much revenue/profit Stripe is making? Or is it all still under wraps?

guanzo 7y ago

Please allow international, independent charges/transfers. This is a huge pain point in our Stripe experience.

edwinwee 7y ago
We announced a beta for this last week! You can send money to 45 countries. (We're turning this on for businesses in the US first, and we're working on more countries soon.) https://stripe.com/connect/payouts#request-invite https://stripe.com/connect/payouts#request-invite

ent101 7y ago

Well-deserved. One of the best dev platforms in existence right now with a clear value prop that is perfectly executed on at 100%. I'm excited to see what the future holds for them.

kchoudhu 7y ago

Stripe is cool -- I use it every day -- but is it really worth, oh, half a Goldman Sachs? I dunno man.

rolltiide 7y ago
Privately traded companies and publicly traded companies use different terminology for the same things. In the private markets "valuation" is a term that just means "someone bought a couple shares at this arbitrary price, here are the value of the other millions of shares at that same arbitrary price". Although the effects on all shareholder's balance sheets are real and useful, it is just broadcasted for marketing and hype. In the public markets "marketcap" is the same term. And finally, older public companies have low price to equity ratios because the hype has fizzled and they are predictable. It doesn't mean anything. Its not enough inputs alone for you to decide what the rest of the market will do.
tempsy 7y ago
Square is $25b and was trading at above $40b at some point within the last year.
mathattack 7y ago
A couple thoughts on why this isn’t a fair comparison: - Goldman is profitable but the employees extract most of it via compensation. - Goldman has to rewin their business every year. Very little recurring revenue and they are one recession from imploding. - You can’t really compute valuation on a very small investment. It’s not like the entire float is trading, and the small investment (relative to valuation) can have all kinds of liquidity preferences and special rights.
- tryitnow 7y ago
  I think your third point supports the OP original point. Stripe probably isn't "really" worth that much now. EDIT: wanted to mention that my impression is that they're a great company, just not worth $35B.
  - 7y ago

harryh 7y ago

Why is Stripe still private?

dheelus 7y ago
Why should they be public?
- ETHisso2017 7y ago
  So wallstreetbets can yolo on it, of course
neom 7y ago
It would probably be safest to stay private and ride out the weather, the public markets are not exactly fun right now.
29_29 7y ago
So VCs can capture every bit of value before its put on the public market.
DeonPenny 7y ago
Cause it's easier to be private. Look at what wall street is doing to Tesla and ask if they wished they we still private or not.
babl-yc 7y ago
There's two main incentives to go public: raising money and liquidity. They don't need to tap public markets to raise money. And investors are likely OK holding off on liquidity if the valuation continues to rise. Going public typically requires a significant amount of effort across the company, which can reduce focus on other initiatives key to growing the business.
- tempsy 7y ago
  I'm not sure what Stripe's policy is on selling shares on secondary markets, but another reason is that at some point employees need liquidity too.

neom 7y ago

A lot to live up to, but those Collison brothers are hella ambitious and execute like champs, the whole team at stripe is seriously world class. No surprise here and incredibly well deserved. Keep up the good work folks.

thinkingkong 7y ago

Before we start piling on about whether or not its really worth 35B just keep in mind how private companies are valued. Someone paid a lot of money for a chunk of stripe so thats what its “worth”. Personally I think stripe is close to worth - as another commenter put it - half of goldman sachs. The recent launch of loans, credit card issuing, etc are all bets or exercises that put stripe in an incredible position to build platforms for financial capabilities.

pmart123 7y ago
What about Stripe versus Adyen or Square?
- ashelmire 7y ago
  Does the existence of other financial firms make Goldman Sachs worth any less? I don't think it does. We're used to winner-take-all when it comes to these unicorns, but I'm not convinced it will stay that way. With many of these service niches, there's a ton of money to be made and enough needs / feature differentiation for competition.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    Not the parent poster but I don't think that's what they were going after. I think they were asking whether the valuation is fair relative to other companies that are operating in a very similar space with similar ambitions. GS is an investment bank. A fairer comparison would be SQ, PayPal, Adyen or First Data. Square's market cap is $25B today on the public markets with a 2019 estimated net revenue of $4.5B and almost $100B in transaction volume. I don't have any insight into Stripe's numbers, though I'd guess it's probably not 40% more than that? Willing to be surprised of course, it's a great company. The real question being asked here is: "Is Stripe's valuation likely to hold up when they go public one day?"
    - pmart123 7y ago
      Exactly. I've really liked Patrick Collison in interviews and I've long admired their API documentation. Square Capital was first to offer loans to SMBs that amortize over the transactions so Stripe isn't the first mover there. Some bigger companies like eBay and Burberry have chosen Adyen as a payment solution and I think Booking uses Braintree? Are there reasons outside of costs to choose Adyen or Braintree over Stripe? Can Lyft develop their own payment tech because they only transact in the US and Canada, and global transactions are where things get complicated? I like most things about Stripe, but Shopify is also growing like crazy, has an awesome founder, and provides the only alternative to Amazon right now and is valued at $35B.

warent 7y ago

Stripe has made transactions for my SaaS business so painless. I recently learned that I have customers with different currencies and it's not even something I had to consider or account for. Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases, but their superb documentation, clean dashboard UX, and relatively low fees really make the value offering huge. Overall I'm really not surprised at the valuation. Stripe is one of the best products/services out there.

Despegar 7y ago
Why is it better than Adyen?
- warent 7y ago
  For starters I've never heard of Adyen until just now. So, perhaps better marketing?
  - joshmn 7y ago
    It's pretty popular in the Europe and is a Dutch company.
    - scient 7y ago
      Its only "popular" because for a long time it was the only choice in Europe pretty much. In several countries it still is. It also was total garbage developer friendliness wise ~5 years ago.
      - mtgx 7y ago
        Well, Stripe still isn't available in like one quarter of the European countries.
- odiroot 7y ago
  I had the unfortunate opportunity to integrate with Adyen around 2016-2017 and it was super painful. The API didn't make much sense to me and the documentation was hard to navigate and understand. It all looked very rough and rushed to the market. Granted it was "a long time ago" but I can still remember the pain.

mathattack 7y ago

Great company but it’s too hard to infer value from such a small investment.

amelius 7y ago
Also I see little true (high-tech) innovation with the "SV Elite". It seems that people are more interested in cornering markets than in creating exciting new things. The valuation doesn't surprise me because that's how you corner markets, by first building a huge pile of money.
danesparza 7y ago
Not really. Some people infer value without any investment -- only based on P&L and year-over-year growth. (Stripe is consistently making money, after all)
- mathattack 7y ago
  That’s not what the listed valuation is based on.

rblion 7y ago

Only ~10% of the world's GDP runs through the Internet right now, Stripe is working to raise that number and I fully support them. Their brand, their message, their product is stuff I study as I work on my own projects. I feel this valuation is well-deserved. I rarely feel that way nowadays. This company will be around and still relevant a decade from now. I'd love to see them challenge the dinosaurs in the financial sector.

spencerwgreene 7y ago

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

hkarthik 7y ago
Stripe is trying to capitalize for a capital intensive endeavor: Stripe Capital. An IPO would have been one way to fund it, but likely would have involved a lot of financial scrutiny along the way, which would probably distract them from the main point of raising the funds. A bold move which will hopefully work out for them and not overvalue the company before they attempt to go public later on.
seansmccullough 7y ago
Generally consensus is a recession is going to happen in the next year or two, and the next good time to IPO won’t be for several years after it that.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Yep. That's why we've seen a glut of public offerings in the past 18 months, as CFOs push to get them out before the drought.
- joering2 7y ago
  ... which has absolutely nothing to do with going IPO, since they would cash out/in and get access to stockholders money at the exact day of their IPO, not "next year or two". If you do not need to raise money there are limited reasons to go public, however you have much stricter reporting requirements, and general things you cannot do anymore since you are publicly traded, not to mention hostile takeovers, etc. Dell's story is a great example why you want to go public / go back private. https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-wont-have-michael-dell-to-kick-around-anymore/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-...
  - 7y ago

tempsy 7y ago

I wonder how Square missed the boat so hard with a developer payment API. I know they have one, but of course never hear about anyone using it.

icelancer 7y ago
I have no idea. I kept hammering them on this for years until Stripe came and ate all their lunch. And only THEN did Square release an API.

ganitarashid 7y ago

No way that’s worth as much as Airbnb

BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
What do you mean? They look like they're on a fast path to disrupt like all of banking! The banking industry has to be bigger than the bed and breakfast advertising industry.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Not to mention they are more regulatory compliant, and so likely deal with fewer lawsuits and have to spend less on lobbying.
  - dymk 7y ago
    > Not to mention they are more regulatory compliant Source?
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      Here's a few: https://www.jotform.com/blog/is-stripe-psd2-compliant/ https://www.jotform.com/blog/is-stripe-psd2-compliant/ Linda Scott of Silicon Dales in the U.K. uses Stripe and isn’t surprised that the payment processor is in compliance. “We have found Stripe to be proactive and open around legislative changes.” https://www.paymentssource.com/news/stripes-next-step-is-built-on-strong-authentication-compliance https://www.paymentssource.com/news/stripes-next-step-is-bui... Stripe hasn't exactly been in the news for lawsuits or controversy, unlike AirBnB.
      - dymk 7y ago
        Not being in the news has nothing to do with being regulatory complaint. You’ve provided articles that Stripe is compliant, which is fine, but nothing there indicates that Airbnb isn’t compliant. What regulations specifically is Airbnb breaking that Stripe isn’t?

pc 7y ago

[Stripe cofounder] Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want to build".) I always appreciate hearing from HN users (even if I don't always have time to respond): patrick@stripe.com. For anyone thinking about what they should work on: I started building developer tools when I was 15 and "tools for creation" is still, IMO, one of the most interesting areas to work in.

czbond 7y ago
What was your MVP that you were charging cards in a few weeks of start?
pitchups 7y ago
Kudos to Stripe on an amazing journey! Interesting to revisit the original HN submission of Stripe's launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883
- hiharryhere 7y ago
  Incredibly the API links from 2011 still work. Just followed one mentioned in that old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3054726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3054726
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > Incredibly the API links from 2011 still work. Developers rightly praise Stripe's API documentation, but their approach to versioning and backwards compatibility is a gold standard that is not sung enough. What other fast-moving startup that constantly tweaks and changes their APIs also provide backwards compatibility with their earliest versions? Stripe understands that handling payments is critical, scary, and hard to get right. When a company builds a payment solution that works, there is strong resistance to mess with it. The fact that Stripe is so backwards compatible means that they do not have to.

adamqureshi 7y ago

I use STRIPE as my payment Processor for my 1 man shop. They are great. Stupid simple. They even offered me a cash advance. All i need now is for stripe to be my bank to keep all my money in there and pay my business bills from it. One stop shop to run my business, would be great! What would even be more useful to me then lending me money, is if they help me build my v2 and take a slice from my business. Finding engineers is hard and very expensive for a small online business like mine.

deleted 7y ago
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buildawesome 7y ago
What do you feel like you need if Stripe gives you capital for your future receivables for you to go hire more engineers?
- adamqureshi 7y ago
  They offered me capital. I'd prefer Stripe engineering in exchange for equity.

Xixi 7y ago

I remember when we launched our Japanese tea service [1]: we wanted to switch to Stripe so badly that I was emailing them at the very least once a month, until we made it in their beta program. I'm not sure the youngest remember what the payment landscape was before Stripe, but it wasn't great. Stripe lifted the whole industry up from mediocrity. Around 10 years ago I had the pleasure of setting up payments with a French bank: instead of a web API we had to use an opaque binary installed on our server. In terms of setup it took many weeks and several in person meetings to get approved. There was a (big) setup fee and a (not so small) monthly subscription. And then of course transaction fees. In Japan for startups targeting foreignland it was even worse: only PayPal supported payments in anything other than JPY! [2] Interestingly it seems that with Stripe Japan everything coming from outside of Japan goes through USD. I have many customers being charged in EUR, and on our end we of course get JPY. So I would expect an EUR/JPY transaction to occur in the middle, yet oftentimes the USD/EUR exchange rates ends up leaking on our customer receipts... I wonder how it works behind the scene... [1] https://tomotcha.com https://tomotcha.com for those interested. [2] Maybe banks were offering this service directly, but for what was only an experiment at the time, I was expecting the setup cost to be prohibitive (at least in time, if not in money).

edwinwee 7y ago
The rates themselves show on your receipts? Are you using some sort of plug-in? Could you forward me a receipt at edwin@stripe.com? For the conversion itself, we automatically convert from whatever currency you've accepted the payment in, then send it to your JPY bank account. The conversion rate is the average of whatever people are buying and selling the currency at that hour, but some financial institutions add a small markup on top of that along the way.
- Xixi 7y ago
  The rates were not showing on our receipts. They were showing on the bank statements of our customers. They were charged an extra 2 EUR by their banks as a FOREX fee on the Tomotcha payment, on a line showing the USD/EUR forex rate, despite us charging in EUR. Very weird. That issue was only ever reported by two customers in France. This is on top of my head, but I will forward you the relevant and exact information.

Allvitende 7y ago

Congratulations to the Stripe team. Truly great product and company. The fact that WeWork truly thought that they were $12B more valuable than Stripe is insane to me.

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jiveturkey 7y ago

> [Chief Product Officer] Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public. How's that possible? At this valuation they aren't looking at acquisition, right? VC aren't investing to the tune of $250mm (in this round alone) without an exit strategy, right? What exit strategy if not IPO?

ceejayoz 7y ago
They're not ruling out an IPO in the future. They just don't have plans to do it right now. I have no plans to buy ice cream, but that doesn't mean I'll never buy ice cream. In fact, it's highly likely I will buy ice cream at some point.

apexalpha 7y ago

Your competitor Adyen sits a few streets away from me in Amsterdam. Seems like a very thriving and interesting market you both operate in. Congrats and best of luck!

emdowling 7y ago

You know you have a killer product when your customers will literally fly half way around the world just to use it. When I started my company (since acquired) in 2012, Stripe was so game changing I flew from Australia to the US to open a bank account so we could use it. While we could incorporate in the US online, we had to turn up in person at a bank to open an account. The only alternatives in Australia at the time were PayPal, which had outrageous fees and a terrible experience for recurring SaaS billing, or a merchant account with a bank which was going to require a $30k deposit. It cost me $750 to incorporate a US entity, $1250 for airfares and hotel (oh to remember SF was that affordable!!). I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb, which conveniently has a Chase branch right next door, and 1 day later we had a US bank account and could turn on our Stripe integration. We didn’t look back. I love Stripe Atlas, because I intimately relate to the problem, and wish we had it in 2012.

edwinwee 7y ago
Ha! Glad you were able to find a way. We still think it could be easier, even with Atlas and Australia support now. Would you be up to chat more? edwin@stripe.com
jwr 7y ago
Chase! It must have been a while ago, because today Chase blocks your account at the mere whiff of anything non-standard going on. And I do mean "anything", being out of the country definitely qualifies. They also shoot first and ask questions later, so your wire transfers will get cancelled or your entire account blocked with incoming transfers bouncing (what is amazing is that the amount that bounces is less $50 that they take for the bouncing service, fun!). My last wire transfer was "cancelled" by their anti-fraud people, and after calling them and identifying myself extensively, I was told that I am to show up at my local branch with two forms of ID. Yes, the same two forms of ID that they've already seen. Kind of difficult if you are out of the country. American banks are something else entirely.

jeffnappi 7y ago

Stripe has made building payments related products fun for me when previously I had suffered through working directly with banks and various poorly designed gateways. Stripe is still the gold standard to me when it comes to developer APIs, documentation, and smart iteration. Kudos to everyone at Stripe!

jedberg 7y ago

I'm curious as to why they chose to raise $250M via VC instead of raising in the public markets? Of course there are trade offs and advantages to each, I'm just curious as to their calculus.

somebodythere 7y ago
Can get a higher multiple from VCs probably.

Teichopsia 7y ago

Stripe is one of many services I would like to use but can't because they simply don't work in my country. I understand it can get somewhat complicated due to legalities I probably don't understand (or maybe the market is too small to even bother). But if your Navy can go through the country I live in, could you folks (in general and not directed at anyone) please try a little harder?

edwinwee 7y ago
Where do you live? Our roadmap—literally—is quickly expanding to many more countries (we just launched in 8 new countries last week). And this new funding round will be put to use for that. :)
- Teichopsia 7y ago
  I wasn't expecting a reply, but it was nice to get one. I was just venting my frustration. Panama, Central America. I signed up for the email notification - years ago :)
- n1c 7y ago
  Not OP but I know a bunch of South African makers who'd love to be using Stripe instead of our alternatives.
- nickpp 7y ago
  Romania is waiting for Stripe too! Guys, please. What is the hold-up?! It's all EU anyway...

didip 7y ago

Well deserved. They are actually trying to do good + interesting scaling challenges by enabling small business all over the world.

zapstar 7y ago

Here's their original Hacker News post, which is always a fascinating read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883

mandeepj 7y ago

> Still, a raft of younger startups, such as Checkout.com, are raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to challenge Stripe. There is a paywall link for more details. I'm curious to know what they are looking to challenge (especially given the rave reviews that Stripe gets here at HN)

toptal 7y ago

Adyen seems to have higher revenue, a faster growth rate, and stronger overall financials. By nearly double. They're at $25b. How is $35b justified?

oli5679 7y ago
The culture and product are exceptional. In the long run I think they will outcompete rivals.

shadowtree 7y ago

So their business is still not sustainable without outside funding? Why do they need training wheels?

PixelPaul 7y ago

I still wish I could accept multiple currencies with strip without conversion and spend them via a CC. Only reason I am still with PayPal

Quekid5 7y ago

I'm calling it now. New bubble.

artur_makly 7y ago

also their support for startups via their communities, atlas, and weekly free feeback is what truly makes them shine. keep up the great work!

nicky19890202 7y ago

This is a very reasonable value.

the-trev-dev 7y ago

We implemented stripe as an add-on a little more than 6 years ago and left it mostly untouched. After some recent TLC we now facilitate $100 million a year through Stripe. Our next hurdle is trying to integrate Stripe terminal for thousands of customers but $300 a pop is a tough sell.

edwinwee 7y ago
For huge Terminal device orders like that, we can help with a volume discount. Just email in to support@stripe.com with how many you need (feel free to CC me at edwin@stripe.com). (BTW, if you didn't see, we have a $59 device too. We're also working on supporting more.)

mrweasel 7y ago

It's not that I don't like Stripe, but was it really so difficult to process payments before? When I start working with online payments in 2007/2008 we had multiple easy to use solutions for processing at least credit and debit cards. You could have a test account in less than an hour, and be ready to process real transactions in less than a week. Stripe has plenty of competition, most of which have been around longer. You could argue that Stripe have a better API and that certainly has value.