Ha, wouldn't we all :) My point is only that it's damn hard to get to that number, and if you're a startup who's raised many rounds of capital, after a few year

Ha, wouldn't we all :) My point is only that it's damn hard to get to that number, and if you're a startup who's raised many rounds of capital, after a few years of grinding an acquisition by a company like paypal (read: ebay) starts to look like a nice option. To put that Visa number into perspective, according to various reports Square did $15bn in transaction volume last year. So, if you use the same ratio of transaction volume to revenue (0.16%) that would put Square's revenue at $23.2mln. For what it's worth, that's probably a generous ratio, as companies like Square and Braintree are all use Chase payments tech as their processor, which itself has to pay out to Visa and other processors. So these firms' margins are likely much lower than Visa's. As either a customer or a partner of one of these companies, I'd prefer doing business with a company that's building a base that doesn't essentially require acquisition if they can't grow to Visa's size.