7 ms·
Stripe Raises $20M From General Catalyst, Sequoia, Thiel
- pixie_ 14y agoI just implemented Stripe and Paypal into my site. God PayPal's entire API and documentation are beyond terrible. It's hard to put into words how bad the experience was with PayPal. It's like they hate developers or something.
- timaelliott 14y agoPaypal hates everyone, not just developers.
- netcan 14y agoI can absolutely confirm that paypal hates me. I'm just a regular customer that buys stuff online sometimes. I've also had a lot of clients that used paypal to sell stuff. Paypal hated them too.
- ajankovic 14y agoYou just made me stop and think where this hate is coming from. I am imagining a probable scenario were Paypal employees are hating their job. So their hate is transferred to everything they do for Paypal. End product would be the hate we feel by using their services.
- jrockway 14y agoProbably not. The reason Paypal appears to hate its customers is because a not-insignificant number of them are trying to steal Paypal's money. A poor developer API, on the other hand, is probably due to bad programmers. I've worked with a lot of bad programmers at other jobs, and one thing I've noticed is that they're not very good at coming up with APIs. (Why does Paypal have bad programmers? I don't know: why don't you work for Paypal?) Also, much of the complaining about Paypal seems to be in the form "I violated Paypal's ToS, and then they closed my account." Well, maybe you should read all those legal documents before entering into a business agreement?
- talkingquickly 14y agoVery true re the not insignificant number trying to steal from them. PayPals business is as much fraud detection and avoidance as it is payment processing and they're very very good at the fraud detection bit. The payment processing part seems to be great until it goes wrong but when it does they have the minimal resource possible devoted to dealing with it.
- jhuckestein 14y agoIt's growing like square? Wouldn't it be better to grow like exponentially?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ryanglasgow 14y agoSquare, the company. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/square http://www.crunchbase.com/company/square
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Me1000 14y ago'Growing exponentially' is an overused phrase, and people actually forget what it means. Exponential growth makes a lot more sense when you're describing the number your user base, where generally speaking each user is worth the same to you. How sustainable is actual exponential monetary growth? I mean, I can't speak for Stripe, but I seriously don't think they're getting exponential growth in transaction.
- jhuckestein 14y agoHeh, my comment was just an attempt at humor. That said, most naturally occurring growth is exponential. In the case of a webservice, whenever a new user increases the chance of another new user signing up by at least some constant factor, no matter how small, you have exponential growth. Things working against that are churn and later, like in the case of Facebook, the saturation in your market. If you discount for those factors (I don't think they hugely affect Stripe right now anyway), EVERY application that has even the tiniest viral co-efficient, even just traditional word of mouth, will grow exponentially. The specific case of Stripe transactions is particularly interesting. They grow in both the number of companies using Stripe as well as the size of each of those companies. I have no knowledge of Stripe metrics, but I am fairly certain they've seen exponential growth over the past months. Much like Square btw ;)
- bugmenot 14y ago"The company’s Canadian beta just started today" Stripe is available in Canada? Is this a private beta or public beta?
- moses1400 14y agoLove Stripe at our business! Best move we've made to date.
- lanstein 14y agoExec’s "Justin Khan"?? Spelled wrong in two places?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rdl 14y agoHis name is Justin Kan. They appear to have corrected it, though.
- Juuumanji 14y agohope this results in expansion beyond US residents.
- dangrossman 14y ago> He’s focused on expanding Stripe outside the US; The company’s Canadian beta just started today and Western Europe is next.
- chubs 14y agoI'd love to get a rough idea where australia fits on their timeline.
- rurounijones 14y agoWoohoo, Stripe coming to other countries! Stripe is one of the few companies I know of where people are literally begging them to expand to their country which is a good indicator of their potential.
- ZanderEarth32 14y agoI really like what Stripe is doing and am trying to get my girlfriend to use it instead of PayPal on her ebook.
- blantonl 14y agoCongrats to the Stripe team - this will hopefully allow them to expand their platform outside of the US. I am one of those "anti-funding" guys, but I also understand cases where capital is needed to take it to the next level. This would be a classic example. I am spinning off a portion of my business into a new startup this year and Stripe is at the top of our list as our subscription/payment provider. We've been playing in their sandbox and cannot wait to get going to production.
- BadassFractal 14y agoGuess what, second VC round we're seeing today that's going to companies that actual provide customers and the high-tech community with a lot of tangible value. This hopefully gives some gunpowder to those claiming that we're not in a bubble.
- vgm 14y agoCould you please explain your reasoning? It seems to me that a bubble implies that there is a surplus of available capital, so that good and bad companies alike are funded. I'm not sure how a company would only be able to raise capital in a not-bubble.
- Heinleinian 14y agoThere's an argument to be made that there's not a macro-economic bubble right now like there was in 1999, but that there IS a "Silicon Valley bubble". That is, there are so many early-stage startups proliferating and getting angel funding that there's a bubble for companies that provide services to other startups. If this is true, there's a doomsday scenario: if the SV bubble collapses (say, due to some macro-economic change that dries up the glut of angel funding), then a lot of those companies that primarily provide services to other startups will collapse with it. There's more. As the companies go out of business for lack of (other startup) customers, a lot of the remaining startups that depend on those outside API's could go down for lack of infrastructure to stand on. Things could spiral down to a bad place pretty quickly.
- BadassFractal 14y agoVery interesting perspective, I wasn't quite thinking of them as "startup services", but it completely makes sense. They're certainly not wasting the opportunity, but as you said, they're on shaky grounds.
- capkutay 14y agoMany of the companies raising good funding today are innovative and create value in the valley and in the world. I don't understand why people compare that to the dotcom bubble where 6-month old web companies with no significant value would raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Look at stripe for example, they're an excellent company that has proven their product is in demand. It's much more reasonable for a company like this to be allowed to scale versus the likes of pets.com.
- robryan 14y agoIt may have made sense to try and raise more. There appears to be a land grab going on in that local versions of stripe are popping up in other countries. The quicker they get to other countries, the bigger their business might be as with payment providers there are switching costs.
- jhuckestein 14y agoThe best practice for dealing with clones seems to be buying up the most promising clones in each of the larger countries. If there really are successful Stripe clones in other markets, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stripe raised a series C next year and bought some. It's much easier than setting up operations from scratch everywhere.
- robryan 14y agoTrue, the hard problem is the regulations. Clones that are out there would have to jump that hurdle before they got anywhere.
- misiti3780 14y agogreat service, great support, i am glad my company uses them
- calgaryeng 14y agoMaybe now they will support Canadian payments.... :)
- yedingding 14y agoKeep rocking. I really hope Stripe can speed up the expansion outside the US. Checkouted many different choices and really how it works.
- aaaa 14y agomering
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pxlpshr 14y agoI've been one of the biggest fans of this service since it came out. Hugely disruptive to PayPal, we integrated their service in minutes over PayPal's laborious API, documentation, and error-prone sandbox. Congrats to the team, much deserved and looking forward to what this product becomes. Request: quarterly subscriptions. I know they can be handled with hooks but it shouldn't be that way. :)
- jhull 14y agoTook one month to integrate CyberSource payment infrastructure....Integrated Stripe into our stack in a few hours. Congrats!
- pbreit 14y agoOdd that they would raise only $20m just a year after raising the same amount.