[HN Gopher] The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
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The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
Author : marban
Score : 139 points
Date : 2022-05-26 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| kareemsabri wrote:
| I know the Collisons are brilliant founders and I have long
| admired Stripe (I've used their Golang API client as inspiration
| many times in my own code) but it's kind of unfortunate how
| founder lore really minimizes employees. Stripe has 4,000 people
| working there, this article mentions only two other employees in
| passing (the CPO and CFO). Surely many others were brilliant
| contributors to Stripe's becoming a $95B unicorn, and staying
| one, beyond just the Collison Brothers. A culture in our industry
| that made employees feel more ownership would likely help with
| retention and recruiting.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Being able to hire brilliant people is a difficult skill too. I
| don't suspect Adyen have the same ability to hire great people
| that Stripe do and while they have a lot of complex problems a
| payments API is not the most glamorous of companies to work
| for.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think that this is not just a story-telling problem.
|
| It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about
| stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n)
| rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees.
|
| Why is he getting 100,000 _from_ each employee ? Not because
| those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular
| outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions made in
| UK / US legal circles since before the USA was a USA.
|
| These decisions have been part of 200 years of the most
| phenomenal growth in global human wealth ever, so there is a
| lot of baby in the bathwater. But look at say the German
| mittelstand - a different approach to local business banking.
| And compare european social-democracy to US welfare states.
|
| There is a lot of room and flexibility between "totally dampen
| growth and human innovation" and "more equal sharing of life's
| burdens".
|
| Oh and lest we forget, it is in the main _scientific advances_
| that have bought us the last 200 years, not founders or
| entrepreneurs, and those advances were funded almost fully by
| government out of ... tax revenue. So the last 200 years of
| growth can be seen as a story of government funded and directed
| scientific achievement, given reign to rollout in a benign
| business climate, and the workforce provided via mass education
| and health programs, all of which funded by taxing the
| successful companies.
|
| Is that an over simplification - hell yes. But so is "young
| founder has great idea and works hard".
| l33t2328 wrote:
| To an O(n) rounding error he also has 0 dollar and 100000000
| employees
| jdavis703 wrote:
| If Amazon's board decided to reallocate the CEO's
| compensation package and grant it to employees, it would
| increase the entry level salaries of warehouse workers from
| $18/hour to $18.45/hour.
|
| Not a bad bump, but also historically low by Amazon pay
| bumps. But it's also not going to solve income inequality...
| And very likely there are few people qualified to be CEO of
| Amazon who'd do the job for $18.45/hour.
| daenz wrote:
| Not to mention the financial fallout of not having an
| experienced leader at the helm. Sure, it would coast for
| awhile without a leader, and I'm sure someone will try to
| explain to me how it could be run completely
| democratically, but eventually a competitor with a
| competent leader would eat their lunch.
| zem wrote:
| the issue here is _owner_ compensation, not CEO
| compensation. that is, wealth accrued by virtue of
| "owning" a company that other people are merely "employees"
| adding value to, but not receiving any of that value.
| daenz wrote:
| Anyone can buy Amazon stock. Then you own some of the
| company and will benefit financially if the value goes
| up!
| jeromegv wrote:
| So you're advocating for employees to "buy" stock from
| where they work in order to get compensated?
| daenz wrote:
| >in order to get compensated
|
| That language is based on the assumption that they're not
| already being compensated.
|
| Their compensation is what they agreed to accept as
| payment for their labor. So they're already being
| compensated. If they want to "own" part of the company
| outside of this agreement, they need to buy a piece of
| it. If you want that as part of your employment
| agreement, negotiate it beforehand, either individually,
| or as part of a union effort. If you can't negotiate it
| through those efforts, then accept the fact that the
| employer believes they can get a better deal on the
| labor.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Don't confuse compensation with his wealth.
|
| CEOs often have hardly any salary. But his shares nearly
| doubled in value over the pandemic - increasing by $84
| billion.
|
| Divide those billions per employee instead and they get
| $84,000 each. And Bezos is still as rich as he was before
| the pandemic.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| This is technically true, but of course there are many
| other methods of increasing warehouse worker pay beyond
| reallocating the CEO's compensation package. The pie is not
| zero sum. For example, stock splits often result in market
| cap increases due to more liquidity / access. Amazon could
| issue some (or more?) stock options to its employees in the
| warehouse or elsewhere if they desired to do so, and it's
| not a foregone conclusion it would adversely affect their
| ability to retain a top tier CEO. Who knows, perhaps Amazon
| would see better worker retention resulting in increased
| efficiency if they had a more generous package for
| warehouse workers (not making this claim, but I disagree
| with the zero sum framing here).
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > It is a wealth-sharing problem as well.
|
| The reality is that it's just not possible to start these
| kinds of Unicorn companies anywhere except in the USA. The
| EU's extreme policies contribute to an overwhelming burden of
| taxes and employment regulations, which results in extreme
| risk-averseness. Which results in entrepreneurial Europeans
| going to USA to start their company.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Ok. How?
| paulpauper wrote:
| I am sure a good chunk of those employees are millionaires will
| will become millionaires after the IPO.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> it's kind of unfortunate how founder lore really minimizes
| employees_
|
| It's far easier to tell the story of a handful of people than
| of thousands. The only successful approach to the latter is
| selecting some at random and telling their stories - but that
| still leaves most people out. I think it's an interesting and
| hard problem to tell a comprehensive story about a large group,
| but I'm not really sure if it can be done. Even Howard Zinn
| focused on (usually unsuccessful) opposition leaders more than
| the everyman in his narrative! In any event, I'd love to see
| someone succeed at making such a narrative, not necessarily
| about Stripe, but about anything really.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| For sure. I understand why stories are told the way they are.
| I stand by my point though. And I do think there's a happy
| medium between Ayn Rand'ian style hero entrepreneur and
| telling the story of thousands that can be achieved with
| modest effort, since I've read a few of them.
|
| Admittedly the absurdity of the headline is what triggered
| the initial thought for me, but the article lived up to the
| headline in this case.
| polote wrote:
| > Surely many others were brilliant contributors to Stripe's
| becoming a $95B unicorn, and staying one, beyond just the
| Collison Brothers.
|
| From my experience working at several saas unicorns, in each
| companies there was 2-3 max people who where responsible for
| the success of the company. It is not that all others were
| useless but they all could have been replaced easily without
| having any impact in the success of the company.
|
| I know this is difficult to hear as an employee but this is the
| truth. 99% of us are replaceable.
|
| In my opinion and experience, working with skilled and nice
| people VS working with stupid and coward people for example has
| only an impact on the happiness of the employees but has no
| link with company performance. (company culture has no impact
| on company performance)
| kareemsabri wrote:
| It's not difficult to hear, it's just not true. I don't know
| what sort of companies you've worked at where employees are
| completely fungible, but I've had the opposite experience,
| working with many talented and hard working people who make
| major contributions that help deliver hundreds of millions in
| revenue. Perhaps you joined them when they were already
| unicorns and the playbook / moat was already developed, but
| at startups there's nothing BUT the people. You think the
| Collisons are writing all the code and conceptualizing all
| the new products and figuring out how to take them to market,
| or creating and maintaining a high performing engineering
| culture, or [50,000 other things that need to happen to reach
| $95B]?
|
| If that were true, it would be weird that companies work so
| hard to acquire, retain, and develop talent.
| polote wrote:
| You can be very talented and do a ton of work without
| having a bigger business impact than another person doing
| 50% less than you.
|
| At the end whether you have a design system, if you have
| infinite scalability, if you use node or Ruby, having that
| feature or that other feature it doesn't matter. The only
| thing that matter is the revenue the company make.
|
| If what matters was the people then ngo would be unicorns
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > I've used their Golang API client as inspiration many times
| in my own code
|
| For the last five years, I've requested an Elixir client.
|
| I wish they would either build one or greatly improve the docs
| for people who aren't using one of their first party API client
| libraries. It's not like Stripe lacks the resources.
|
| In fact an argument could be made that ignoring all but the
| most popular handful of languages runs counter to their goal of
| increasing the GDP of the internet. Increased friction for
| adopting new and productive languages means fewer do and devs
| remain in a slightly more ossified ecosystem.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Completely agree, I also had this problem but I guess that is
| one downsides of using a language that isn't particularly
| mainstream. Still with thousands of programmers it would be
| worth the return on the small investment.
| napolux wrote:
| Paddle as a lot of restrictions on what to sell and what not.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| For instance?
| encoderer wrote:
| Paddle buying ProfitWell is big. Paddle would also take over all
| my billing support. I don't want to do a billing migration right
| now but if I did I probably would switch to Paddle.
|
| The first real contender to Stripe in a long time.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| lol, this is like the bat signal for pc
| seydor wrote:
| This kind of business is like airbnb for entrepreneurs.
| Accounting is a big hassle for small devs
| mooktakim wrote:
| I still don't understand what Paddle offers to SaaS.
|
| As a dev I thought maybe easier integration. But it doesn't
| seem all that different from Stripe Invoice.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| They handle paying vat and sales tax for you. Your customers
| purchase from them. You make a single b2b invoice to paddle.
|
| That said their API is very basic and their UX is not on par
| with what you can. A lot of operations are not possible (eg.
| Letting users change their billing details, such as company
| or personal, vat number, etc)
|
| They also won't migrate your credit card data if you're too
| small.
|
| www.getrevin.com looks like a much better alternative: they
| basically create a stripe account and add you to it. You
| integrate with your their stripe account and they pay you,
| same as paddle.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| This seems like a no-brainer acquisition for Stripe. Afaik
| this is the one big differentiator for paddle and this
| seems to solve for it with a lower fee.
| samwillis wrote:
| My understanding is that Paddle becomes a middle man in the
| transaction taking on all international tax responsibility.
| They pay you out _after_ paying all tax /vat local to the
| customer. This _massively_ simplifies international sales,
| particularly for EU business.
|
| I also believe that an awful lot of small online SASS and
| digital good sales by companies are committing
| (unintentional) tax fraud in the countries of their
| customers.
|
| I _hate_ trying to understand vat /sales tax on digital
| goods, to the point that it has until now discouraged me from
| starting that sort of business on my own. With Paddle I
| wouldn't have to even think about it.
| noneeeed wrote:
| I'm so glad I've read this today. I've been thinking about
| building a little SaaS product and one of the aspects
| putting me off was the VAT/Sales Tax problem. I'm a
| stickler for the rules, I don't feel comfortable YOLOing
| something like that the way so many seem to be.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| A simple solution is to do a b2b company only and thanks
| the EU for complicating the situation so much. Another
| thing I used to do was to just sell to everyone except
| European customers (explicitly written on the website).
|
| The funniest thing is that the EU ostensibly did it to make
| "Amazon pay their fair share" while most small merchants
| that used to run e-commerce have moved to sell on Amazon or
| eBay just not to have to keep up with all the regulations
| and bs.
| samwillis wrote:
| I believe that two some extent these sort of regulations
| are lobbied for in the background by large corporations
| in order to make it harder for small business to enter
| the market. If they are going to get regulated anyway
| best make it to their own advantage!
| fredsted wrote:
| EU generally can't make good (tech) legislation. Cookie
| law is the goto example. It's too complicated. Too many
| cooks.
| gibolt wrote:
| They tend to take a defensive approach to restrict
| outsiders, since most tech innovation isn't happening
| locally
| wewxjfq wrote:
| More like: US companies can't handle good tech
| legislation, which the EU makes. I enjoy my rights. And
| "cookie law" is very simple.
| rglullis wrote:
| If your idea of "good legislation" is "bureaucratic
| hellpit that promises the solution to all problems to the
| electorate, but in reality just makes things _slightly_
| more expensive to big companies and destroys any chance
| of smaller players to disrupt the market ", then yes, EU
| legislation is great.
|
| Cookie law is "simple", but what does it achieve? How are
| our lives better after knowing that _every website uses
| cookies_? Is there any website you thought "oh wow, they
| are telling me they are using _cookies_ , this totally
| changes my perception of how they operate!"?
|
| GDPR is the same: did it make any difference in the
| amount of surveillance capitalism we are subject to? No!
| Did it make any of the sites you use to reduce the amount
| of data collected? No! Did it make money for a fuckton of
| lawyers who went after Small/Medium Businesses who had a
| website and _had_ no idea if they were complying or not,
| leading the majority of them to just _close down and move
| to Facebook Pages?_ Of course it did!
| yunohn wrote:
| > A simple solution is to do a b2b company only
|
| "Simply change your entire business model or build a
| different product"
|
| > Another thing I used to do was to just sell to everyone
| except European customers
|
| "Just ignore the entire EU market for whatever you're
| selling"
|
| This isn't a serious post right? Or I guess, it's
| actually a classic HN counter-post.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| How does you stopping selling in ~30 EU countries, help
| you with being tax and law compliant in the other 150+
| countries?
|
| You still have to know and understand your legal/tax
| responsibilities when selling to businesses in Singapore,
| South Korea, Australia etc.
| fredsted wrote:
| Exactly. Paddle saves me so much time and money. I couldn't
| even imagine what my accountant would bill for something
| similar.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Does the 5% + 50c include the whole payment process on
| top of the tax-handling? As in, the alternative is paying
| 2-3% anyway to someone like Stripe for integrating
| payments, so that the cost of off-loading all int'l VAT
| and co headaches is around 2-3% (the 50c is negligible
| for my use case)?
| [deleted]
| samwillis wrote:
| This so much, Stripes innovation was making it so much easter
| to integrate a payment api. Paddles innovation is making
| international tax/vat a complete none issue to new businesses.
| They are doing everything small business want to make online
| digital goods sales painless from an admin point of view.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| As someone currently looking exactly at this kind of
| provider, I'm curious about other Paddle competitors whose
| price model is only revenue based, without a fixed monthly
| fee.
|
| Gumroad is another merchant of records, but developer
| documentation is worse, fees are higher and it seems to
| support only USD pricing.
|
| Other alternatives requires a somewhat hefty monthly fee,
| which is a non starter for my use case.
| ambicapter wrote:
| > Wordlessly offered a credit card reader, Collison says he'd
| rather pay cash.
|
| Wonder why. Competitors' device? Privacy concerns?
| rcoder wrote:
| This is -- as I would expect, given Patrick + John's
| _extremely_ careful public messaging -- consistent with
| Stripe's public mission of "increasing the GDP of the
| Internet." Given the option of cash or card, credit is a net
| loss for a brick-and-mortar establishment: ~3% plus a fixed
| per-transaction fee can easily eat the entire profit margin for
| a restaurant. That doesn't doom them to immediate failure, but
| it does push prices up for everyone; as we've all rediscovered
| in the last ~six months, price inflation doesn't actually end
| up as pure win for sellers.
|
| Seriously, if you're "badging in" with your iWatch to pay for
| your $4 cup of coffee, remember that you just funneled at least
| 10% of that away to various intermediaries. (That even sets
| aside the long-standing tradition of looking the other way
| about "tip jar" income. Putting every dime onto an official
| balance sheet means that employers are going to W-2 all of it,
| even for folks not making anywhere close to nominal minimum
| wage.)
| zht wrote:
| wonder if it's privacy concerns like Zuck taping over his
| webcam
| gnatman wrote:
| Yeah I wonder if, after seeing how the sausage is made on
| payment processing (and making $95B of sausage himself), he
| doesn't want exposure under some other (to him) shitty
| system.
|
| It could also be some petty competitive instinct to stiff his
| competitors even a few cents or dollars in revenue.
| mroll wrote:
| mroll wrote:
| tootie wrote:
| It's a really amazing case of a business going into a crowded
| space and building a solution to what anyone would have called a
| thoroughly-solved problem and still managed to disrupt it. They
| didn't really "invent" anything or make a new market, they just
| did something better than everyone else. And, I think, got
| incredibly lucky with entering the market at the exact right
| time.
| ttcbj wrote:
| While I see your point, I went through several scammy credit
| card processing solutions (one from an intuit subsidiary, one
| from a local bank) back around 2013 before I found stripe.
|
| You wouldn't think that "it's easy to use and not scammy" Would
| have been an innovation, but at that stage, I think it was.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Man, we got burned with a "contracted" credit card solution,
| complete with horrible support, service and billing.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > they just did something better than everyone else
|
| Wow, HN's ability to dismiss and diminish major accomplishments
| continues to astound me.
| DantesKite wrote:
| > got incredibly lucky with entering the market at the exact
| right time
|
| I also found this to be a somewhat shallow analysis,
| considering their sustained success over a decade.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It might be shallow, but it's right. Nothing wrong with
| getting lucky.Those guys worked hard and are smart for
| sure, but luck had a lot to do with it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Better execution is considered the biggest compliment in the
| industry. Novel ideas are sort of considered a passe path to
| success. In that context, it sounds more like idolization
| than insult.
| bcbrown wrote:
| You think saying "a really amazing case of a business [that
| executed] better than everyone else" is dismissive and
| diminishing?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| "Just" implies it wasn't a big deal.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Warren Buffett just focuses on business all day. Tom
| Brady just thinks about football all day.
|
| The word 'just' is used in many cases to show someone did
| one thing and not other things. Doing lots of things is
| often just stupid.
| warent wrote:
| It is curious to wonder how they managed to lead the company
| this successfully. How often do young founders actually hang
| onto leadership this long without either imploding or being
| replaced? Why are the Collison brothers different?
| samwillis wrote:
| I think it's to some extent the good old Irish charm, and I
| say that as someone married to a much better Irish other
| half.
| ralston3 wrote:
| IMO...value. I personally feel like it's always easier for
| founders to stay on when their product provides actual,
| tangible, objective value. It clearly shows that they (the
| founders) sort've know their market, and know what they're
| doing (to some degree). When that's the case, I feel
| investors are happy to get out of the way and watch their
| equity rise. Whereas when a service isn't providing any real
| differential value, it's a lot easier to try to swap out the
| founders for the MBA/finance/corporate type that doesn't
| really know the market/audience.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _How often do young founders actually hang onto leadership
| this long without either imploding or being replaced? Why are
| the Collison brothers different?_
|
| Stripe is great, so I assume these guys are good leaders. But
| Stripe was founded in 2011. Are there not plenty of young
| founders of that era "hanging on" to their leadership? I
| don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here.
| [deleted]
| asd88 wrote:
| More like $50B unicorn nowadays?
| clra wrote:
| It's hard to tell given the private stock and all, but the
| article mentions that there's reason to believe the company
| hasn't taken quite as much of a haircut as comparable ones that
| are already on the public markets:
|
| > _In March, Fidelity, required to publicly update the value of
| its holdings, marked down Stripe by 20%. Most unicorns--
| startups valued at $1 billion or more--are trading on the
| secondary markets at 20% to 40% discounts to their last
| official venture capital rounds. But Stripe's shares remain
| hard for new investors to obtain and in high demand, with
| recent transactions implying a valuation of as much as $165
| billion, per New York-based EquityZen, a marketplace for pre-
| IPO shares._
| __derek__ wrote:
| Does buying private stock on EquityZen include any due
| diligence? I'm skeptical that it's helping with price
| discovery, but I don't really understand the platform.
|
| The topic reminded me of a good episode of Invest Like the
| Best with Carta CEO Henry Ward[1], which included a
| discussion of their CartaX platform for offering insiders a
| chance to sell private stock to institutions.
|
| [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/ma/podcast/henry-ward-
| transformin...
| paulpauper wrote:
| nope. $90 billion more likely. You have to add 30-50% for the
| IPO pop.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Can you take stock of a public competitor in the same industry
| and simply apply its price movements to a private valuation?
| Ferrotin wrote:
| Simply, but not precisely. The same macroeconomic factors
| that affect the public companies' value apply.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| absolutely ZERO chance they could get a $95B valuation in public
| markets today
|
| HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B
| company...Peloton was a $40B company...
|
| if Stripe went public today, I would say they would be lucky to
| crest at a $30B valuation, even that may be lofty...PayPal has 3x
| market share as Stripe and has a $92B valuation
| rvz wrote:
| > HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B
| company...Peloton was a $40B company...
|
| Exactly.
|
| The hype squad have been screaming about the valuations of
| these companies and now look at them as soon as they IPOed.
| Neither of them are profitable companies.
|
| It just means the VCs, insiders and everyone else who got was
| in before the IPO made a windfall in their stock and by now
| cashed out. The news hyping up the IPO to retail investors and
| left them holding the bags again as the market drops.
|
| I would expect Stripe to delay their (eventual) IPO.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| So basically every YC backed company that has IPO'd
| puranjay wrote:
| I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than
| human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high
| school/college at 18-22 and start making money - "being
| profitable", so to speak.
|
| There are starups right now that were founded before 2010,
| went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years
| time
|
| That's 18-20 years without a profit!?!
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| ElFitz wrote:
| I have no idea on how to figure out a startup's valuation.
|
| But I wouldn't compare an infrastructure / platform like Stripe
| to B2C nice-to-haves for rich-ish people like Uber or Lyft or
| cute expensive jokes like Peloton.
| paulpauper wrote:
| yeah, Stipe is a not something that can be dismissed as a fad
| like Palaton. no comparison.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| Uber peaked at ~$150 billion market cap. Peloton peaked ~$55
| billion market cap.
|
| They were absolutely overvalued at those market caps, but it's
| wrong to say that "HN/VCs said those companies were worth X but
| they didn't reach X in public markets"
| clint wrote:
| They reached it, but were quickly proven wrong
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _They were absolutely overvalued at those market caps, but
| it 's wrong to say that "HN/VCs said those companies were
| worth X but they didn't reach X in public markets"_
|
| Why is it wrong? You think private markets are better
| indicators of value than public?
| lowkey_ wrote:
| No, he's saying literally they did reach X market cap in a
| public market. He was correcting facts of the previous
| poster.
| nwienert wrote:
| If Shaq lifts me up so I can dunk, you can say that I
| dunked, but in general it's more accurate to evaluate
| things under more normal circumstances.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Stipe is in a way better position than Lyft and Peloton ever
| were
|
| The $90 billion is without the IPO pop. It would be worth $90
| billion after the IPO pop maybe today. In late 2021, maybe $120
| billion.
| m00dy wrote:
| Let's see what will happen for them in this bear market.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The Nasdaq fell as much as it did during Covid, but without any
| obvious cause or catalyst for the selling. the bear market is
| probably over now. More likely this is the bottom.
| laluser wrote:
| This is exactly why they prefer to stay private. Stock
| volatility would be wild. They will have access to liquidity
| and funding for a while as long as they are growing a good
| rate, which they seem to be.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Doubtful as those sources of funding are also beholden to
| investors who most likely have positions in the market. There
| can be no isolation in modern finance, everything is
| interconnected.
|
| If the rates continue to rise and market gets bearish on
| paying multiples on revenues, its going to run into serious
| liquidity crunch.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| What the hell is a unicorn at this point? Just say "successful
| private company". Because of the craziness in valuations, $1B
| pre-public isn't that rare any more, so "unicorn" is not apt. But
| Crunchbase says they've had 20+ funding rounds, and there should
| be some limit at the D or E round.
|
| Nothing against Stripe, Stripe is great.
| kpennell wrote:
| FWIW - Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership
| position at Stripe -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264
|
| I know Stripe is a darling YC company but if you look for it, you
| can find some usually anonymous detractors.
|
| "+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick
| + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up
| re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team
| members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have
| deployed a team to directly copy one of our products. Amongst
| their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I
| guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of
| that size..."
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > but if you look for it, you can find some usually anonymous
| detractors.
|
| Seems like a vacuous statement. Isn't that true of
| anything/anyone in life?
| kpennell wrote:
| Totally Fair. But just felt like this needed to be shared
| here since HN is always a Stripe cheerleading place.
|
| Another good one:
|
| For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past
| decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the
| founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over
| people in and around their orbit. Almost every fintech
| startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an
| acquisition, mining them for information playing along and
| then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership
| team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely
| smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful
| about trusting.
|
| You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly
| effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of
| reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and
| silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick
| has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that
| every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first
| comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative
| gets buried.
|
| With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent
| vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the
| company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their
| entire people team has turned over and they're having major
| retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like
| this is starting to leak out.
|
| I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the
| backlash.
| pvg wrote:
| _this needed to be shared_
|
| You're welcome to write your own critique of Stripe or
| anything else but recycling other people's HN drama is not
| really in the spirit of the site. Repasting an old
| provocative comment while withholding context (i.e. not
| linking it and its rebuttals) is extra lame.
| [deleted]
| tempnow987 wrote:
| And for everyone of these stories is a story of a startup that
| screwed its employees during a buyout by another big firm while
| founders walked in the gravy.
|
| I've found a lot of the "secrets" really aren't that. The ideas
| are usually pretty public, and the questions come down to
| ability to execute and integrate etc. Stripe has a good
| position from which to expand linked lines.
| lambda_lord wrote:
| Is it unusual for a successful company like Stripe to take so
| long to go public? It seems like their house is in order, and
| they are profitable, but employees aren't liquid.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Is there any reason they can't do a direct listing without
| selling any new shares?
|
| The only downside for the company seems to be that employees
| would be able to sell, and that seems rather greedy for the
| company to not work in its employee's best interest.
| taw89345 wrote:
| There have been liquidity events before, which allowed old
| enough employees to sell shares. You will find that many a
| former employee has managed to leave while being able to
| exercise their options and have a partial cash out with a lot
| of money to spare. So it's not been an exercise of keeping
| employees tied down. A visibility one is Will Larson: You bet
| that he didn't leave without being able to sell shares to cover
| AMT, and getting some immediate payout.
|
| As for why stay private, what John C has said publicly is that
| they still see a lot of growth to go, and that not having to
| provide detailed financian statements to the general public,
| which would include competitors, is a competitive advantage. It
| seems believable to me.
| thecosas wrote:
| https://stripe.com/files/stripe-2021-update.pdf
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I think this is almost a case of a company being _too
| successful_. The general pattern is that you grow, you raise
| money, you grow, you raise money, you grow, your IPO. At each
| stage of growth there 's a different investor. Initially you
| have Angels and YC style places. Then you have various stages
| of VC, then you finally have the public market.
|
| What _normally_ happens is that you become too big and that 's
| when VCs step out of the way, you IPO and everyone takes their
| gains. But in the case of stripe you have $100Bn company that
| the VCs will still happily plough money into. So there's no
| reason to IPO. You can get all the liquidity you need
| privately. On top of that, Stripe doesn't really need capital,
| they aren't some uber buying market share with loss making.
| They are real SAAS, they can scale and see a drop in their
| earnings:cost ratio.
| jadbox wrote:
| What happen if they never go public at this stage?
| brianwawok wrote:
| There are many private companies. Some are very big. See
| space-X as a popular example.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| IPO right now is very difficult as the door is closing, and
| investors are wary about paying a premium like they have
| before. They delayed it too long and have missed the window, it
| is unlikely from a year from now they will be able to get any
| bids for the current market valuations.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I mean why didn't they IPO last year with everyone else?
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