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Stripe tried to raise more funding at a $55B-$60B valuation
- jiveturkey 4y agosomewhat clickbaity title. past tense also implying “and failed”. > It is not clear if any discussions are ongoing. so perhaps not technically wrong but still
- bradly 4y agoI believe EquityZen bought shares in November at a $80B valuation.
- askafriend 4y agoStripe is worth $32B.
- maneesh 4y agoWhere is that number from?
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago[dead]
- devoutsalsa 4y ago[flagged]
- venperspy 4y agoi guess, by putting his finger in the air
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jxramos 4y ago> According to The Wall Street Journal, Stripe would not use the money toward operating expenses but rather to cover a large annual tax bill associated with employee stock units. How does this work exactly, I'm not to keen on these sort of financial matters. Why would the company have to foot the tax bill for the employee's stocks. What's going on here?
- pavlov 4y agoAssuming Stripe’s stock compensation is RSUs (restricted stock units)… The employee received a stock grant that vests according to a schedule: for example, every 3 months after an initial 12-month waiting period. On each vesting date, the employee receives N shares. But this is taxed as ordinary income, which means the company should be withholding taxes accordingly. This is not a problem if the stock is publicly traded. The stock is liquid and it has an unambiguous valuation. If the employee’s tax withholding rate is 40%, the company can immediately sell 40% of the shares on the public market, use that to pay the taxes, and the employee actually receives 0.6*N shares. If the stock is not public, paying the tax is a problem because the stock can’t be sold immediately. Yet it has a market value as evidenced by how much investors were willing to pay for it in funding rounds. If you receive 100 shares of Stripe, and each share was worth $100 in the last private sale, the tax man sees that as $10,000 of income. How do you pay the income tax if you can’t sell 40 shares? I believe this is why Stripe is arranging a private sale. The money goes into paying employee’s tax bills, and the shares come from their vests.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoTax on RSUs is on the employees' side because all the liability is theirs. So usually either the scheme allows them (not the company) to sell a number of shares to cover their tax liability, or they need to shell out the cash, which the scheme may allow to be taken from their salary. Neither should impact the company. But as you write, it's tricky to sell shares if the company is not publicly traded. So perhaps the company has agreed to buy back shares in order to enable employees to easily sell them to cover their own tax liability, which may be what you are suggesting by 'private sale'.
- firecall 4y ago> In 2021, Stripe reportedly notched gross revenues of $12 billion and was EBITDA profitable, according to Forbes. So that basically means they aren't profitable, right?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- halotrope 4y agoCharlie Munger calls EBITDA earnings “bullshit earnings”
- frankfrankfrank 4y agoBecause they are, as is clear to anyone not on the tech sauce. It’s the “I’m a loyal and faithful partner; minus the cheating, lying, deceiving, and gaslighting” of financials.
- shawabawa3 4y agoI always took EBIDTA to be "theoretical best case" earnings, i.e. our business model could theoretically be profitable if we could just magically pay off all our debt and upgrade all of our equipment for free Sure that doesn't mean much, but it's better than losing more money on every additional dollar of revenue which seems to be some company's model
- nowherebeen 4y agoThey should have IPO'd when they had the chance.
- fastball 4y agoHow could a company like Stripe not be profitable with $12B revenue?
- papito 4y agoThen why mention EBIDTA? It exists to basically say "we are bullshit artists and we are using creative accounting to LOOK profitable".
- yumraj 4y agoPersonally I believe that if a company is trying to raise private funding beyond a certain very high valuation, say over $1B-2B, rather than going public, there is something iffy and it's being done to avoid all the scrutiny and compliance that going public requires. I still remember when Groupon went public, and soon after it was revealed that they had engaged in all kinds of funky accounting leading to stock crash. Not sure if there is something similar going on here, but raising private funding at such a high valuation doesn't seem normal.
- ergocoder 4y agoI don't think it is anything shady. Just your regular not-that-profitable thingy to justify high valuation.
- SamReidHughes 4y agoThey'd get endless specious shareholder lawsuits or SEC lawsuits like the way Exxon does.
- raverbashing 4y agoEspecially if you have a "money printing business" (which I really think Stripe qualifies, or is really close to)
- enahs-sf 4y agoThey take a rake on pretty much all e-commerce so I’d say that qualifies.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoHow does Stripe not have a well-developed set of competitors after all these years? What is its network effect? Every time I ask people about this, they say it has an amazing developer-friendly set of APIs. But it’s hard for me to believe nobody has been able to replicate this experience a decade later, when Stripe’s APIs are sitting right there to crib off of.
- bengyl 4y ago[flagged]
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoIs this a copy pasta?
- pharmakom 4y agoReads like targeted disinformation. Always interesting to see how people attempt to steer public discourse.
- monero-xmr 4y agoWhenever Stripe needed money they had a line of VCs begging to give it to them. It was like this for a decade. Now they can’t and this environment is not what they are structured for (or most unprofitable tech companies). If interest rates don’t come down expect more waves of layoffs every quarter, not just Stripe but widespread.
- newaccount2021 4y ago[dead]
- likeabbas 4y agoThe margins on payment processing are extremely slim. While the amount they process makes their revenue look extremely high, Stripe actually makes money by selling other products based in their ecosystem. If you process all of your payments through Stripe than they can offer you very nice products such as radar and tax reporting. The issue is that the large companies who use stripe for payment processing are moving towards using multiple payment processors, which removes the leverage Stripe has to upsell you on their other products. This trend is growing and will ultimately send Stripe the way of PayPal IMO
- jeffybefffy519 4y agoI tried integrating Stripe into a product I am building at the moment and decided to move to Paddle. In the end, Stripe was very complicated for a service that is not end to end complete for delivering digital products and services. The price for Paddle is higher but its a complete service and so much easier to implement. Some really basic and frustrating things I ran into with Stripe: - invoices only generated for subscriptions, not one off products - email receipts not generated in sandbox mode (undocumented but confirmed with their support) All in all, i left stripe thinking it’s probably not a product designed for solo devs but is instead for services at scale like Shopify.
- twelve40 4y ago> send Stripe the way of PayPal is that bad though? I know paypal managed to piss off a lot of people, and the stock is down, but they are making money and don't seem to be going away anytime spoon. They try to keep themselves relevant with acquisitions and so far haven't made any stupid public moves like layoffs. Doesn't seem like a bad endgame?