10 ms·
Stripe acquires Clerky
https://twitter.com/darbyw/status/2092718828405096955 https://twitter.com/darbyw/status/2092718828405096955
- Computer0 1mo agoI really can't bring myself to put myself behind stripe. Maybe it's because of how the Paypal people turned out. Maybe it is just a dirty business to be in.
- davidsojevic 1mo agoCongratulations to Darby, Chris, and the team! Clerky is an absolutely amazing product and the team there are equally as amazing.
- swampthing 1mo agoThank you, and thank you for being a part of our journey!
- HPMOR 1mo agoClerky is great, Stripe is really buying all of the great product companies. I feel like with Clerky and Stripe Atlas they, Stripe now controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure now. This feels deeply problematic.
- georgel 1mo ago> controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure You don't need to rely on Stripe to do anything. There are other payment gateways, and you can file things yourself (or hire someone). Do they make things very easy and accessible for a smaller fee than doing it yourself, yes.
- brianwawok 1mo agoIn fact Atlas and their push to be a C-Corp is a bad play for us small timers
- gnfargbl 1mo ago...unless you're based in a jurisdiction like the UK, where an LLC may not get the same tax treatment as a C-corp (Ltd companies being the norm here).
- ElProlactin 1mo agoA C corporation can still make a lot of sense for a small business depending on the nature of the business and the interests and needs of the owners. C corps can offer a lot of advantages in terms of shareholder and employee benefits, particularly around healthcare, and QSBS is a huge benefit for qualified businesses and owners who might one day sell the business.
- techsystems 1mo agoWhat are some good alternatives to Stripe for people to pay for your stuff? Unsure how much I trust my searches for this kind of stuff on the web lately
- reddalo 1mo agoAdyen is similar to Stripe, and it's an European company. But they select their customers, so you need to contact them, you can't sign-up "diy".
- schnebbau 1mo ago> Stripe now controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure now. This feels deeply problematic. Lol, no. Firstbase, Doola, Capbase. Not to mention all the old school cos that will help you incorporate in their state.
- rattray 1mo agoI've used https://delawareinc.com/ https://delawareinc.com/ to incorporate several companies over the years, and always had a good experience. Their website looks pretty old-school but it works well and their service is very prompt. So I wouldn't Stripe controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure – just the flashy stuff (which I'm sure is great too). (disclaimer: former Stripe employee)
- ElProlactin 1mo agoYeah, it's not even close. Stripe Atlas is a very small part of the market. It doesn't mean the product isn't good but every year, over a million new businesses that are formed and of those that are incorporated, I'd guess that a very small fragment are incorporated through Stripe Atlas.
- forshaper 1mo agoMost businesses in the state I live in, as well as the states around me (what someone in SF or NY would call flyover) are handled by a registered agent (trivial, not even in a fee to become an agent in most states, just a valid local address) or the owner. tbh I still don't understand why anyone bothers paying anyone or anything to do the paperwork, it's not like Federal taxes
- antaviana 1mo agoWhy would you pay someone to do Federal Taxes? Are they difficult to do in the US?
- forshaper 1mo agoYeah, few things are as complex for a business in any industry that has ever gotten caught in the nation's political sights. For example, if you provide some sort of VoIP service, there's levels of nested rules that fill books, in part due to the breakup of the Bell System later coming into full contact with the internet. Plenty of carve outs, loops, and all manner of grandfathered elements for everyone. The only thing more complicated than Federal taxes is environmental regulation. Everything else is simpler.
- nezaj 1mo ago+1 to Clerky being a great product. Was super useful for us when incorporating and after as well
- swampthing 1mo agoThank you!
- written-beyond 1mo agoChose Clerky over Atlas, never regretted a thing. I recommended it to everyone, pushing through atleast 3 more founders.
- alberth 1mo agoI thought Atlas was pretty comparable to Clerky. What does Clerky do that Atlas doesn’t to justify the acquisition?
- written-beyond 1mo agoHave customers and marketing
- kaonwarb 1mo agoR.e. customers: Atlas accounts for a quarter of Delaware incorporations (https://x.com/jeff_weinstein/status/2023891497792532950?s=20 https://x.com/jeff_weinstein/status/2023891497792532950?s=20). But yes, Clerky does have additional capabilities, as others point in.
- written-beyond 1mo agoMy comment was poorly worded, what I meant was they have both lifetime and recurring customers. Their team is insanely good, specially their email support. Seems like the easiest way to grow Atlas.
- clerky2026 1mo agoI tried establishing my startup with Stripe Atlas in 2020 and it was a total trainwreck. Nothing worked right, nobody had a fucking clue what was going on, dead ends everywhere. I gave up and went with Clerky, paid them $800 lifetime fee, and had things done the same day. A few years later I needed to change the name of my corporation and their support made it an absolute painless breeze. So, I understand things change over 6 years, but Stripe Atlas was vaporware garbage when I attempted to use it.
- akrolsmir 1mo agoOh awesome! I love Stripe Atlas overall for the fast/excellent UX, but Clerky supports PBCs and a higher degree of customization (eg useful for incorporating for https://manifest.is https://manifest.is since we had previously agreed on an informal equity split with a bunch of people). Hoping that now they'll have the best of both worlds!
- gkoberger 1mo agoHuge congrats to Clerky. They've been doing thins for a very long time, and have awesome support + a solid product (that just... does what it's supposed to do). Congrats Darby and team!
- swampthing 1mo agoThank you Gregory! I've always been a fan of ReadMe too :)
- codemog 1mo agoWhat’s with all these acquisitions? Stripe realizing it’s going to slowly become PayPal 2.0 because infinite growth doesn’t exist?
- hibikir 1mo agoDoing just payments is a really low margin industry, and the larger the contract you are after, the lower the margins. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to try to sign up startups, as their growth is your growth. And to win in the startup market, you don't win by lowest costs, but by how much generic work you can save them. Cut their headaches, and they'll be happy giving you a wider cut. Thus, a million little acquisitions to make the possible Stripe bundle for small companies stronger, as they become the moat. The opposite of, say, the Adyen play, when you want to lower your own costs, and make money on tiny margins to do processing for really large companies.
- benatkin 1mo agoAI is making it a low-moat industry too. It's a lot quicker to build some API docs, a behavior tracking JavaScript library, and some fraud detection, with LLMs.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo ago> some fraud detection Fraud detection is really, really, really, really hard so I would probably stick with someone like Stripe for this, as they have so much data that they can do a really good job. And fundamentally, the moat for Stripe isn't just the front-end APIs, it's all the work that they do (and there's a lot) in connecting together financial infrastructure. Even if you could wave a magic wand and generate all the code Stripe has (which you can't, currently) then you'd still need to build out all the partnerships, which is a lot of work. Disclaimer: former Stripe (though only a tourist), still hold some of their shares.
- whazor 1mo agoMy analysis is that Stripe wants to own the costs of running a startup. They would get a complete picture of both sides of the business: what money comes in and where it goes. There are also a couple of advantages. They can take money directly from revenue before it leaves Stripes and without any processing costs. They can also invest into startups through credits and financing. And finally, their exposure to bankruptcy risk can drop as well.
- chupchap 1mo agoI think Stripe is looking at companies using their services and identifying companies to acquire. This reminds me of Facebook looking at data from pixel data to identify apps with heavy usage they could acquire.
- tagalog 1mo agoUsed Clerky ten years ago to make my company. Great experience!
- phtrivier 1mo agoNo idea about the products, or if it is "good news for founders, and bad for consumers" as is unfortunately sometimes the case. But thanks for wording the press release as "company X acquired company Y", and not some weasely lingo line like "Y is joining the X family".
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- tash_2s 1mo agothis
- hiteshisoni 1mo ago[dead]
- kshahkshah 1mo agoA competent administration would bring about an antitrust suit here I feel.
- ksec 1mo agoClerky: We help startups and attorneys get legal paperwork done. I wish all smaller startup that is being acquired by big fish would start their blog by stating what they do first. So that hopefully we get a little bit of context of what is being sold and what it might add in the future. Every single time I had to click around and look at what they do and what are their competitors to help understand the company.
- theowaway213456 1mo agoIt's the second sentence of the blog post.
- echelon 1mo agoWhen faced with a wall of text, I make a decision to either find the homepage (which I did this time) or click back to the HN discussion. I've been bitten far too many times by low info density wall of text. I think this is many people's algorithm.
- john_strinlai 1mo ago>When faced with a wall of text wall? it is less than 400 words, separated over 5 paragraphs. is that what counts as a "wall" now? your comment is longer (49 words) than it takes to get to the answer of what clerky does (45 words).
- echelon 1mo agoThe paragraphs descend below the page fold. The paragraphs in view have 10 lines of height and a hero image takes up the first half. It's a bad shape. The one question I want answered is "what is Stripe buying?" I know the prose is typical acquisition copy. I can figure out the strategy myself once I know what was bought.
- anthonypasq 1mo ago
- evtothedev 1mo agoI've used clerky to incorporate a company, and I *loved* it, and I've recommended them to many people. That said, I wonder if this reflects how much people are using LLMs for generating legal boilerplate, rather than using lawyer-generated boilerplate (i.e. clerky). As in, this is another version of Stack Overflow losing traffic.
- sickcodebruh 1mo agoClerky is great. I used it a few years ago and not only was the web product as advertised, they were quick to answer questions and give advice where they could for years after. I hope they keep doing well within Stripe.
- andunie 1mo agoStripe and Clerky are two companies that wouldn't exist of it wasn't for the existence of draconian government regulations. Imagine how much capital and work hours society would be saving.
- lbriner 1mo agoThat's not true. We will always have laws and to someone without the training, the legal side is best left to professionals.
- apercu 1mo agoI feel like I am repeating myself a lot lately, but I think that the "middle class" of software/tech companies is being eroded as fast as the middle classes of North American societies. The oligarchs just buy everything since they can no longer innovate.
- baggachipz 1mo agoStripe, the Bending Spoons of commerce-related sites.
- mslate 1mo agoClerky when I last used it nearly a decade ago was lead generation for Delaware's business franchise tax. Nothing ever came of my incorporated business (no spend, no revenue) and I received extremely menacing "collections" physical mail over many months about delinquent business incorporation franchise tax payments and escalating fees + fines (which I never paid). The experience left me a very negative opinion of Clerky (and Delaware).
- swampthing 1mo agoSorry to hear you had a poor experience. Just for clarity, we don't get anything out of the Delaware franchise tax. We'd certainly rather it not exist. But the franchise tax and the late penalties, and the fact that there is a minimum tax even if your corporation didn't do anything, are just part of Delaware law.
- jnyst1985 1mo agoStripe buying founder relationships at incorporation… smart move I guess?