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Hard Times in Silicon Valley? Not for the Payments Startup Stripe
- olliej 7y agoIsn't it more "hard times for Silicon Valley companies that don't make money and/or makes losses that grow with increased users"?
- webwielder2 7y agoIndeed, it would seem that some companies are successful while others are not!
- olliej 7y agoCrazy!
- ummonk 7y agoThe most egregious such company (WeWork) actually being an NYC company.
- olliej 7y agoUber and Lyft both make losses that are directly proportional to their usage. Eg more users or more trips will only ever increase their losses. WeWork makes a lot of money for the CEO - I recall he used a large amount of money he cashed out during earlier rounds to buy the building that We leases.
- RandomBacon 7y agoThat's equally genious and stupid. WeWork has to be successful to be able to pay the lease. If WeWork is successful then he can continue to make money from WeWork via being a CEO. He should have 'diversified'.
- olliej 7y agoIt's even better - people clearly need office space, so even if WeWork fails he can lease to other people. If WeWork fails to pay for their lease he can take them to court - and I would not be surprised if there are some fun creditor priorities in the bankruptcy terms of the lease agreements. Seriously, I appreciate screwing the VC funders, but it does kind of demonstrate the kind of guy he is.
- jdsully 7y agoIf WeWork fails it will likely be because people don’t need office space (i.e. a recession).
- olliej 7y agoMuch like Uber and Lyft, we work runs at a loss that scales with usage. In the event that continually losing ever increasing amounts of money somehow results in bankruptcy all of the people currently leasing office space will probably try to lease the building space directly.
- xvedejas 7y agoIf you want to be geographically technical about it, Stripe is not a Silicon Valley company, but rather a company in a nearby city called San Francisco. Both Stripe and WeWork do seem to follow the "silicon valley model", however.
- dehrmann 7y agoWeWork is somewhat different. Its deflated valuation is because of a creative governance and self-dealings, rapid growth, and a tech-like valuation. If they paused expansion, they're basically Regus with better decor and more risk in a recession. Fundamentally, their business is viable, even without growth.
- Smithalicious 7y agoOkay, fair enough. Hard times for most of Silicon Valley then ;)
- thrower123 7y agoStripe has an actual product that businesses actually use. They aren't playing the underpants gnome game of: 1.) Light money on fire to grow 2.) ??? 3.) Profit!
- jonas21 7y agoTo be fair, WeWork has an actual product that businesses actually use too.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoSelling dollars for 95c is a game anyone can play.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y agoIncluding the Federal Reserve.
- AznHisoka 7y ago... anyone that can seduce VCs, speak charismatically and preferably has a prior track record.
- dehrmann 7y agoSo do Uber and Lyft--this isn't the dot-com bubble. Their issues is they all have quirks that were blissfully ignored pre-IPO. All these companies are running proven business models that can work.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoI'm so glad to see this article and the other front page one on Stripe. I see so many stories about "WTF" unicorns like WeWork and Uber, so it's great to see a company that provides real value, creating products that lots of other companies are willing to pay for, and that seems like it has such genuine founders and a great culture.
- codesushi42 7y agoGoogle was founded right before the dotcom bubble burst. Yeah, we are still headed for a downturn/correction/crash or what have you. But valuable companies will continue to be.
- RandomBacon 7y agoStripe "sells shovels". People want to exchange money, that will always be a basic tenet of commerce, and Stripe facilitates that. Bravo Stripe.
- taneq 7y agoStripe goes a step further, and makes it easy for the shovel-sellers and the shovel-buyers to get what they want. Good on 'em!
- outside1234 7y agoI am always going to regard seeing the simplicity of the first Stripe payment widget, realizing it was amazing, and not immediately breaking down the door to work there as a major career mistake. That mistake will only be one upped by seeing the signs in the windows in Palo Alto of the original Google logo and then typing it in at home, being amazed, and not breaking down the door to work there. :)
- ci5er 7y agoHa! Jerry Yang used to camp out at my place or my friend's house in Tokyo when he went to a VLSI seminar as a, I guess, poor VLSI PHD candidate/student. We used to chat late at night, and I would say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to advertise on your and Dave's bookmark list! Oops.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- reilly3000 7y agoGather round kids. There was once a day where processing payments online was something that you signed up for with a fax machine, or a merchant processing salesperson. You might even walk into a bank to get a merchant account, then they would sell you an online gateway for $20-99/month plus transaction fees. If you were lucky, it was Authorize.net, not some 5th party proprietary garbage with a ColdFusion SDK. Not to say Authorize.net was any fun at all to work with, but at least there was a Ruby Gem for it that mostly worked. Payment processing was hard. PCI audits sucked. Millions of full credit cards were stored in MySQL, unencrypted because it was left to the developer to engineer security. REST API? Hah. Hope you know SOAP and XML, and you're using the correct schema version. Stripe made untold pain and suffering disappear. Congrats to them for getting rewarded for doing so- they have unlocked billions worth of economic value by making that process easier. PS. Here's a fun little quote from the Authorize.net docs today, 2019-09-19: The Authorize.Net API, which is not based on REST, offers JSON support through a translation of JSON elements to XML elements. While JSON does not typically require a set order to the elements in an object, XML requires strict ordering. Developers using the Authorize.Net API should force the ordering of elements to match this API Reference. Do you know how to force a JSON object's elements to be specifically ordered? I don't.
- baddox 7y agoThat’s pretty funny. FYI, object order in JavaScript is a bit complicated, but in practice these days it will maintain the order of key declaration and insertion.
- ci5er 7y agoDsig technologies, such as JSON Web Signature, require "canonicalization" (C14N), in order for the hashes to be consistently generated and then signed and verifiable. Here is one approach: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-rundgren-json-canonicalization-scheme-00.html https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-rundgren-json-canonicalizati...
- bedros 7y agoIt's pretty much because that API is written by someone who hates his/her job
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- weiming 7y agoHow does everyone deal with sales tax/VAT collection with Stripe? If selling software licenses for example. It seems like you have to use a third-party solution [1] and wondering why Stripe doesn't provide such a service themselves. [1] https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration
- edwinwee 7y agoWe introduced the Tax Rates API earlier this year to help with this: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax-rates https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax-rates. It doesn't do everything just yet, but we're getting there!
- weiming 7y agoHey that's great! Thanks, will give this a go.
- tempsy 7y agoThere is a reason why a little known company called Adyen is a $25b company on its own. Despite being less developer friendly they have contracts with way more big money enterprise firms...your Facebooks and Googles and Ubers of the world. Stripe might be great for small companies or regional ones but there are many reasons why they haven’t won over high volume global enterprise cos yet.
- Operyl 7y agoAmazon isn’t a big company? How about Target? Digital Ocean, Slack? Lyft? https://stripe.com/customers#b2b-platforms https://stripe.com/customers#b2b-platforms This list isn’t exhaustive, it’s just a few of the companies that have OK’d being put on the list.
- tempsy 7y agoDepends on the company, but absolutely no way that Stripe processes all of Amazon or Target’s payments. It is a minority of payments, at best. And the WSJ article explains that Lyft is trying to in-house payments away from Stripe to save money. I’m not trying to rag on Stripe by the way, but I have worked in payments at one of these large tech cos that did not work with Stripe. They didn’t start trying to target enterprise customers as their initial target base, and there are simply things that enterprise customers expect more than developer friendliness when it comes to choosing a gateway or processor. That’s all. For some context for why Stripe is not necessarily suited for enterprise see what Finix Payments is doing https://www.finixpayments.com/ https://www.finixpayments.com/ - the value prop resonates much more with enterprise...would say they are basically a developer friendly Anti-Stripe.
- mehhh 7y agoAmazon has direct integrations for payments in the US and most major countries, but farms out payment processing in certain low volume regions to Stripe. Optimize a region's payment processing as volume increases is what Amazon is doing internally...
- Smithalicious 7y ago