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aliljet 11 hours ago [-]
The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.
beambot 9 hours ago [-]
The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).
aliljet 9 hours ago [-]
The path to declaring yourself accredited is uniquely easy. Just say it. The whole space is deeply unregulated and unaudited. What makes it insane is that those middleman are making a small fortune exploiting this loophole protecting large companies from being forced to go public. The number is 2000 private investors. Rest assured, more than 2000 individuals have money in Stripe today. It's a total scam.
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
How exactly?
Sherl 2 hours ago [-]
Robinhood just launched a new ventures vehicle and Stripe could be "supposedly" part of it.
Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI),
It does seem like a lot, but if you look at growth rates, the differences are significant.
Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.
They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.
antiford2049 6 hours ago [-]
Adyen is behind Stripe when it comes to small enterprises but ahead on large enterprises and especially global merchants. They also have scaled back on digital merchants which you can lose easily and focus more on unified commerce, their growth is a lot higher quality. They also report growth differently - ex fees to schemes and banks. Stripe will be on the hook if banks and schemes raise their fees. You also dont know what margin stripe has, just say robust which is enough for the crowd on wallstreet of course but I digress. The fact is Stripe is a good company, but its valuation is set in a room while Adyen's valuation is set on the market 80% of which is pods trading back and forth.
0xy 8 hours ago [-]
PayPal is steadily decreasing in share of web payments, with the one redeeming part of their business being Venmo, which appears to be crushing Cash App.
Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.
Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
Of course, the thing to note about PYPL is the absolute jump it took today on rumors of a Stripe acquisition.
rprend 11 hours ago [-]
1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
Centigonal 9 hours ago [-]
Well, it's not exactly a fair comparison, since they're comparing a volume number with GDP, which is total value produced in a year. Volume numbers are usually much bigger than production numbers, since money moves around a lot.
If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.
rprend 3 hours ago [-]
Stripe doesn’t power money transfers, just commerce. So 100% of stripe volume is economic activity.
est31 12 minutes ago [-]
If I buy something worth 17$ from an SMB's website, and the SMB buys their ingredients from their merchants via stripe for 10$, then those suppliers get a bill for 8$, then that's still only 17$ of GDP, but 35$ of stripe transactions.
jez 10 hours ago [-]
For comparison, Visa's stated FY 2025 (ended Sep 30, 2025) payments volume was $14.2T.
rough math, but:
$14.2T / $1.9T * 1.6% = 12% global GDP
rprend 9 hours ago [-]
I was curious, and the American Clearing House has a TPV of $93 trillion, which means ACH is 78%?? That seems too high.
Oh - not all bank transfers count in GDP. I often move money from one account to another.
Note that Visa has the same issue: withdrawing money from an ATM shouldn’t count towards GDP! Neither does Vemo-ing a friend to settle up a split restaurant bill (my Venmo is attached to my debit card).
reactordev 9 hours ago [-]
At least it’s not 24.9%
Americans and credit have an unhealthy relationship.
oliyoung 4 hours ago [-]
Not all VISA or Mastercard transactions are credit backed, I'd argue that the large majority aren't anymore they're more commonly debit VISA/Mastercard
10 hours ago [-]
antiford2049 6 hours ago [-]
this number is a little misleading, to put it mildly.
hwhehwhehegwggw 9 hours ago [-]
Why will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?
rprend 9 hours ago [-]
I find it inspiring. I relate to the Collison brothers. They're a couple of hackers from Ireland. It blows my mind that a couple young guys like that can build something and in 20 years capture 2% of the entire world's economic activity.
syedkarim 8 hours ago [-]
Visa is valued at $585B and Mastercard is valued at $444B. Is Stripe making more revenue per transaction than Visa and Mastercard?
throwaw12 11 hours ago [-]
Congratulations.
But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
fastball 11 hours ago [-]
It is not 5x bigger, it is 5x more valuable. Obviously Stripes 2x higher revenue is part of that equation, but not all of it.
sej1 11 hours ago [-]
Also Adyen's processing volume grew just 8% (to $1.6T usd) in 2025, while Stripe's grew 34% (to $1.9T usd).
Stripe's bigger _and_ growing faster.
antiford2049 5 hours ago [-]
the valuable part is with a caveat though. Klarna and Figma were very valuable. i find these comparisons a little pointless (private vs public company). they process similar volumes, but one is in hyper growth mode (imagine quality of it) while the other has been scaling down growth and focusing on profitable growth. Has spooked investors but I understand that Adyen are pretty focused and they are scaling nicely their capital offering. But Stripe has good focus on stablecoins, more product focused and aggressive (as all US firms are). Both have like single % of the global payment market, and if you have issues with Adyen look at others in the market - nexi, paypal, etc. I believe both stripe and adyem will grow market share at expense of others over next decade. Plenty of growth for both, and Adyen has a unified platform solution which is smth stripe doesnt. So all have advantages, and the gap in valuation isnt' something id read too much about.
Besides, if AI replaces all white collar jobs, and crashes high spending consumer economy, all payment vols will go down.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
5x more valuable in a private market is meaningless, until they go public it's all magic numbers used to push whatever narrative they need.
throwaw12 10 hours ago [-]
yeah, my bad, wanted to say more valuable
rprend 10 hours ago [-]
Not all revenue is equal. Payments is interesting because the processor’s growth is directly tied to the growth of its customers. Stripe captures the vast majority of high growth SF startups. Stripe has better customers.
malfist 11 hours ago [-]
According to wikipedia, Stripe had a revenue of 5.1B in 2024.
> adyen is cleaner as a business but it's basically a payments rail. stripe's embedded finance products ...
Where in your comment authorship pipeline were these errors introduced?
wasmainiac 8 hours ago [-]
Same question, this is not the first time I’ve seen random 's.
I think it’s a bot, look at the post history with the weird repetitive hyphens.
Rexxar 7 hours ago [-]
The account is strange, two years old account with barely any comment for two years then a lot of comments in the last 3 days. The 3 first comments of the account capitalise the first letter, everything is lowercase in the last 3 days. He never replies to comments under his own comment. Sadly, a comment of someone who was telling it was a bot account has been flagged ...
anpat 6 hours ago [-]
On top of that, almost every single recent comment has “—“, that is enough signal in opinion.
fourseventy 12 hours ago [-]
It's insane that they aren't public yet. Their investors must be pressuring them like crazy to IPO.
jameskilton 11 hours ago [-]
Stripe has been doing annual tender offers. Their stance on not being public yet is that they don't need to be, as an IPO is mainly a way to raise money.
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
tyre 11 hours ago [-]
I hope they never go public (also as an ex-Stripe!)
I can't really see a net-positive benefit to having public shareholders and reporting requirements. Do we think Stripe's leadership needs feedback from random investment advisors or analysts? Do employees need the distraction of daily-updating stock prices? Would quarterly reporting incentivize better decision making?
In my opinion: ehhhhhhhhhhhh
I see the benefit, but if you're joining Stripe you know the trade-off of RSUs in a company that doesn't provide daily liquidity. They provide it on a regular basis, so you're not locked in forever (a la my 2014 Gusto shares).
bryanlarsen 11 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they already have more than the 500 non-accredited or 2000 accredited shareholder total that would trigger most of those reporting requirements anyways. So Stripe already has most of the drawbacks of being a public company without the benefits.
kasey_junk 11 hours ago [-]
The reporting isn’t the drawbacks of being public, it’s the investors.
They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition).
They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them.
Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.
bryanlarsen 10 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is.
IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
overfeed 9 hours ago [-]
The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.
bryanlarsen 8 hours ago [-]
Neither of which would be relevant in the Stripe case, because if Stripe IPO's they'll release a negligible number of shares. It'd be impossible for either group to amass a substantial number of shares.
overfeed 8 hours ago [-]
Why IPO at all, if they will release a "negligible number of shares"?
bryanlarsen 7 hours ago [-]
A low liquidity IPO would likely result in a massive share price increase: the number of interested buyers would vastly outnumber the number of shares available.
toomuchtodo 10 hours ago [-]
Harder for activist investors to get into a private company than a public one imho. Keeps out those who would squeeze the business and bail, and potentially kick out the founders. With sufficient cashflow (which Stripe most certainly has), you can buy out existing investors without going public.
(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)
bryanlarsen 8 hours ago [-]
You'd need to amass 50% of the shares to kick out the founders. That'd be impossible for a hostile party to do if Stripe IPO's because they wouldn't release anywhere close to that number of shares.
The only way to kick out the Collison's would be for the VC's to do it. They currently own 80%. It's easier for the VC's to do that if Stripe stays private than if Stripe IPO's.
ahmetd 3 hours ago [-]
How do you know if they do/don't have a dual-class share structure?
coffeemug 10 hours ago [-]
Also ex-Stripe. This suggests an opportunity to build an exchange that addresses these problems. Could one build an exchange with deliberate "turn-based" liquidity to avoid the problem of daily stock price distraction, for example? (This is hard because there will always be secondary markets, but presumably this is already the case.)
malfist 11 hours ago [-]
Do very many companies provide daily liquidity? Most of my time getting RSUs have had trading windows, once a quarter if you're lucky.
toast0 11 hours ago [-]
When I was an employee of a subsidiary of Infospace, my RSUs were always worthless (honestly, I don't remember if any vested while I was there), at Yahoo, we could generally trade, although one shouldn't trade immediately after earnings, but I don't remember if this was enforced at the affiliated brokerage. At Facebook, I think it was typically a three week window every quarter.
Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.
Rastonbury 9 hours ago [-]
I get the feeling that the founders will not bend and invest for long term and not quarterly, as a non ex-stripe at least judging by their patience to IPO
fnordpiglet 10 hours ago [-]
The latest self funded tenders have been pretty tiny. I wouldn’t term it as “liquidity” as much as a symbolic gesture.
tyre 10 hours ago [-]
AFAIK none of the recent tenders have been self-funded. They’ve matched external investors who want shares with employees.
Also, not sure what you mean by "tiny". It's been billions of dollars.
maratc 11 hours ago [-]
Above certain amount of shareholders, the rules for the public companies start applying, so you get all of the disadvantages of being a public company (like SEC filings, etc.) without the advantages (like ability to raise money.) IIRC this is what forced $MSFT to do IPO in 1986.
coldpie 11 hours ago [-]
Going public is the fastest way to turn a solid, functioning business into a hideous, infinite-growth chasing ghoul that everyone hates. Don't do it.
bryanlarsen 11 hours ago [-]
Instead they are mostly owned by VC's, who will more directly pressure them to do that than the general public owners will.
The important part is that the Collison's control Stripe now. When that changes things may go down hill. It won't matter if it is public or not.
WheatMillington 9 hours ago [-]
As opposed to VC owners, who are famously satisfied with slow growth. Right?
giancarlostoro 10 hours ago [-]
I'm glad. I don't think every company needs to be on the stock market, and companies that are profitable like Stripe is, absolutely do not need to be on the stock market. Why? So people can buy and sell their stock on a whim?
johnny_canuck 10 hours ago [-]
Are there caps on how much you could sell during the tender offer? I had one come through my email ~3 years ago for a company I previously worked for. IIRC it allowed you to sell up to 10% of your stock.
armadyl 11 hours ago [-]
> As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
This is an incredibly odd sentiment, imo. What’s the desire to see them go public unless you personally are profiting from it? Going public would quickly set Stripe on a pathway to potential enshittification and at minimum starting to squeeze the consumers and businesses it provides services to more.
paxys 11 hours ago [-]
If they are ex-Stripe they are likely holding shares, and so yes they would personally profit from going public.
jez 11 hours ago [-]
The tender offer announced in the article is open to former employees as well, so they personally profit regardless of Stripe being public (unless the claim is that by being public the valuation would be materially higher than the stated valuation for this offer).
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
There may be a conflict of interest with ex-Stripe folks wanting to see a move towards x or y.
adventured 11 hours ago [-]
An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors - those that want out - to liquidate out in a big way by dumping to a very large mass of investors. There is no other means to do that without signaling a gigantic loss of confidence.
Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.
hypeatei 11 hours ago [-]
> An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors
Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.
baxtr 11 hours ago [-]
It’s sad.
Public companies allow the rest of us to participate in a success story like this.
Until IPO it’s only a selected group of affluent people who have access to these private companies.
cwbrandsma 11 hours ago [-]
IPOs also kill a lot of companies. Now you have a new list of investors you are obligated to attend to, and what those investors what is not always to make your company more successful, if it can make more money now.
bryanlarsen 11 hours ago [-]
The reverse is much more true. When private equity takes a public company private, there's a 50% chance they'll kill the company.
Also, private companies fail at a much higher rate than public ones do.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think PE buyouts are the right comparison here; we're talking about companies that never go public versus the ones that do.
And, of course private companies fail at a much higher rate. The set of private companies includes every company that doesn't succeed to the point where it has the realistic choice to go public. Again: wrong comparison.
bryanlarsen 10 hours ago [-]
A general IPO is also not the right comparison. The events that kill companies are changes in control whether they happen from going public or going private. If Stripe IPO's, the Collison's will stay firmly in control, and approximately nothing will change at Stripe.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not coming down on either side of the public/private thing, just saying that take-privates and failed small private companies aren't meaningful comparisons to make.
antiford2049 5 hours ago [-]
when companies go public usually the easy money has been made, and for the growth to come back a lot of time might pass.
frankly i dont know why would one go public today unless money is needed badly. Quarterly calls, filings, are one thing, dealing with vest bros asking "so how should we think about" questions on round tables or "whats an incrimental margin" musings as they clack away at their mini keyboards filling out their model no body can make sense of.. and then someone will publish a blog saying their company is gonna be extinct because of AI ... this is not for everybody thats for sure...
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
Private equity is vs not going public in the first place though. Private equity is also the wrong measure because there's good private equity and bad private equity, and we most commonly hear about bad private equity. Eg Toys'R'us. Typically when buying a company, in order to but the company in the first place, PE saddles the company up with debt in order to make the purchase in the first place (which is bananas in the first if you think about it). So then the distressed company now has additional debt payments to make. Making their already distressed situation even worse. Now, the theory is that PE is able to make the company more "efficient" with their PE know-how, and sometimes they do. There's no time machine too go back and undo the PE purchase of Toys'r'us and see what would have actually unfolded, but what we can say is having to make additional debt payments hastened their demise.
So it's true PE taking a company private has a high failure rate as far as the continuation of the company, the question is if the goal of PE is for the company to continue in the first place, or if that gets in the way of them extracting as money as possible as fast as possible. So 50% is certainly a statistic, but not useful for comparison, especially if we're looking at a private company staying private.
kibwen 11 hours ago [-]
Not just the IPO. Being public at all subjects you to the perverse and destructive incentive of needing to maximize shareholder value. Just because some private companies take VC funding (and subject themselves to analogous forces) doesn't mean that's required or expected.
gmd63 11 hours ago [-]
Needing to maximize shareholder value is a myth. There is no law that requires you to do that - people like to use the idea as an excuse to do scummy business.
malfist 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, it's a dubious legal requirement at best. But you try telling people that on an earnings call and watch your valuation plummet because you took a long position and the market wanted a next quarter position. And even if you don't care about selling your stock personally, it does impact your ability to raise funds.
elictronic 10 hours ago [-]
Short term investors don’t matter. They are going to pull out and move to the next thing.
arcticbull 11 hours ago [-]
Depends. In Michigan it is binding precedent, see Dodge v. Ford (1919).
Delaware corporations must act in the interests of shareholders.
rurp 10 hours ago [-]
That's an incredibly vague standard and courts have repeatedly declined to get involved in second guessing management decisions. Aside from outright fraud or negligence executives can claim almost any business related decision is in the interest of shareholders because they have a reasonable expectation that the future benefits outweigh the costs. Judges aren't going to be delving into financial projections and expense reports to override the leaders of a business.
A widget company could sponsor a soccer team or whatever and say the costs are worth it. Or that same company could not do that and say it's not worth it. Two opposite decisions that both would count as acting in the interest of shareholders.
arcticbull 10 hours ago [-]
> That's an incredibly vague standard and courts have repeatedly declined to get involved
Which courts? Corporate law is state-level. Delaware generally has some affordances for long-term strategic decisions.
elictronic 10 hours ago [-]
This case was specifically about dividends and long term shareholder value, not quarterly results.
baxtr 11 hours ago [-]
So keep the profits only for the rich then? I rather see more IPOs for the rest of us.
OGEnthusiast 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
RobRivera 11 hours ago [-]
High risk high reward - I think if I ponied up capital, I'd rather not feel obliged to 'share the success' unless it were part of a needed capital raising.
WarcrimeActual 11 hours ago [-]
I see it differently, and not in a particularly popular manner. Public companies allow those that are already pretty well off to rocket past those who can't afford shares, therefore adding to the disparity. I despise sudden or inherited wealth though so I'm not the best barometer for how things should work when it comes to this. I can't count how many times I've been made almost physically ill hearing about the next meme stock that made some nobody a millionaire overnight.
j45 11 hours ago [-]
Private companies have the right to be private until if or when they decide not to be private.
Navigating the risk and growth allows them to navigate their growth and rewards while maybe in the drivers seat a bit more.
baxtr 11 hours ago [-]
No one said they don’t have the right.
But for the good of all of society, it would be better if they did.
j45 8 hours ago [-]
How would becoming a public company be better for all of society?
Stock markets are not entirely logical from my understanding.
thinkingtoilet 11 hours ago [-]
IPOs really only benefit already wealthy people as well. It's not like poor people can dump tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock.
derektank 11 hours ago [-]
Working class people have 401ks and pension plans
paxys 11 hours ago [-]
We usually hear about the success stories, but public markets have killed wayyyy more companies than they have helped. Unless they really need the money it's always in a company's own best interests to stay private for as long as possible.
rf15 12 hours ago [-]
Why ask for IPO to dillute the effective investor pool if you are already making a ton of money consistently?
fourseventy 11 hours ago [-]
To give liquidity to investors.
onion2k 11 hours ago [-]
The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though. It's fairly safe to assume that as there isn't an IPO yet the investors want to hold rather than cash in returns. They probably believe there's more growth potential, and that the board are the right people to deliver it.
303space 11 hours ago [-]
If you bought Stripe at a 95b valuation in 2021 your returns are barely keeping up with the SP500 after this latest round. Not exactly an elite capital growth machine.
j45 11 hours ago [-]
Perhaps infrastructure has a different kind of long term upside.
skybrian 11 hours ago [-]
Even for good investments, investors will want to sell at some point rather than owning an investment forever, if only to diversify.
onion2k 11 hours ago [-]
Sure, at some point. Maybe that isn't now though.
fourseventy 7 hours ago [-]
The early VCs have been in Stripe for 16 years already. They need Stripe to IPO so they can get liquidity in order to provide returns to their LPs. VCs can't hold onto the stock forever, they need to provide DPI otherwise they won't be able to raise future funds.
KK7NIL 11 hours ago [-]
> The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though.
Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares.
I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.
j45 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe certain types of growth aren't the goal for Stripe at present.
Cyph0n 11 hours ago [-]
Don’t they already get to participate in secondary markets to liquidate?
KK7NIL 11 hours ago [-]
They can, but it's orders of magnitudes less liquid than the public stock market.
Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.
Cyph0n 9 hours ago [-]
I see, thanks for the clarification.
jameson 11 hours ago [-]
Everything's public appearance until S1 is filed
mercwear 12 hours ago [-]
I hope they hold off - going public tends to kill innovation and replace it with bureaucracy
anovikov 11 hours ago [-]
Almost as if there's a lot to innovate in a "dumb pipe" a payment processor naturally is.
jacquesm 11 hours ago [-]
At scale, payment processors are amongst the most difficult things you could do because every two bit crook out there is going to try to scam you somehow.
dewey 11 hours ago [-]
Can probably build it in a weekend.
malfist 11 hours ago [-]
You let me know when VISA lets you colocate into their rack for processing payments with your built in a weekend vibe coded project.
dewey 11 hours ago [-]
I guess I should've added "/s" :P
pestaa 11 hours ago [-]
dewey was joking.
elictronic 10 hours ago [-]
Management reading a thread like this need the /s.
ggregoire 10 hours ago [-]
in 2 hours with claude code
zer00eyz 11 hours ago [-]
The thing is they have "tooling" to help create their own customers:
They also have a tax product, and a few other things that are in the orbit around payment processing.
Their product offerings are a bit more than just the "dumb pipe" portion of the transaction.
cmiles8 10 hours ago [-]
The markets are skeptical at the moment. A bunch of tech IPOs in the last few years have tanked 70+% since the IPO and that can be devastating to a company.
Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
mattas 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder if there will be a class of VC that intends to provide LPs with income in addition to capital appreciation. If it doesn't make sense to go public, then focus on cash flow and kick of steady income to investors.
11 hours ago [-]
pewpewp 10 hours ago [-]
How do you ruin a good company? Simple. Go public
ndr 12 hours ago [-]
Will they ever have to go public? I imagine there's a way they can buy everything back.
paxys 11 hours ago [-]
Investors can pressure you when you are worth single digit or low double digit billions. At $100B+ you are calling the shots, and if investors aren't happy they can sell their shares in the next tender offer.
StopDisinfo910 10 hours ago [-]
The cynic in me thinks they don't want to crash their valuation.
gamblor956 11 hours ago [-]
Companies that keep delaying going public generally do so to keep hidden unfavorable data.
Private companies can say whatever they want about their performance as long as they don't lie to their own investors; public companies can't.
darth_avocado 11 hours ago [-]
You don’t have to go public at all. If you’re profitable and your investors don’t want an exit, then you can stay private in perpetuity. Epic is a great example of that.
doctorpangloss 10 hours ago [-]
why do you figure? in some sectors, IPOs were literally 10x larger in 2023 than 2016, but i am not sure specifically about fintech. ask pitchbook. that increases IRR by a whole +1.4, just by waiting.
stefan_ 11 hours ago [-]
Might be too late already, seeing how we are well past "peak SaaS" (and frankly Stripe have slowed down and lost a lot of the glitter in years past).
hmokiguess 10 hours ago [-]
I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff.
Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
Stromgren 9 hours ago [-]
I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.
hmokiguess 9 hours ago [-]
Fair point, though a lot has changed from 15 years ago. A lot of what you mentioned is sort of the new baseline most payment gateways ship with, and working on code you haven't touched in a while is certainly a lot easier nowadays with agents too. All that said, if you're satisfied with the price and the product I am not here to convince you to swap.
Stromgren 9 hours ago [-]
Yea it wasn’t meant as a counter argument either.
To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.
jamesdelaneyie 8 hours ago [-]
In the EU and had to switch from Stripe to Mollie due to Stripe thinking the client was a cruise company because they rent 'cruiser' boats for river leisure. Mollie was super easy to implement for them, and fees much better
krainboltgreene 10 hours ago [-]
You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.
hmokiguess 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, though not every small project needs to worry about that. Perhaps the payment workflow is a tight loop that has KYC through physical memberships (ID + Photo), say a gym membership for example, and the entire system is private just needs a gateway to do transactions.
krainboltgreene 5 hours ago [-]
Even if that was true literally no payment processor cares about what a small project worries about and they never will.
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Stealing someone's identity and pretending to be them and buying a gym membership with a fake id and a stolen credit card might seem far fetched to you, but Stripe doesn't want to be on the hook for that, especially if the scammer signs up for, say, Equinox and it isn't discovered for year+.
(ex-Stripe; didn't work directly on fraud,
however)
hmokiguess 5 hours ago [-]
Again, scale matters here. I'm talking about small projects, think a local small city gym, run by maybe one person, family business, probably knows all the customers closely, used to run on cash, but wants to get their bookkeeping in order, needs credit card recurring transactions to avoid late payments from some of their members, and doesn't want to increase their pricing because of high fees on a brand new system.
Equinox Fitness is a major conglomerate and likely wants and cares about fraud detection software.
MichaelZuo 10 hours ago [-]
Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.
A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.
woodruffw 10 hours ago [-]
Is this true? I would expect most of Stripe's fraud overhead to be statutory in nature, not something they hire for because they're a concentrated target.
(They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)
the_bear 9 hours ago [-]
When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine.
I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
hibikir 7 hours ago [-]
Look at what happened to, say, Cards Against Humanity: You don't have to be a really bit store for some random card tester to ruin you.
hmokiguess 5 hours ago [-]
what happened with them? I'm not aware of it
woodruffw 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, that makes sense. I was thinking fraud as in AML requirements, not fraud as in scammers and card theft.
hibikir 7 hours ago [-]
Stripe was already a big target for basically anyone and anything 10 years ago. Fake merchants, card testers, the works. People were selling guides to defraud Stripe. And we are not even counting just losees due to nonsense like the Fyre festival.
You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.
krainboltgreene 5 hours ago [-]
> Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.
This is not true. Every payment processor needs this effort because as soon as you broadcast that you're a payment processor you're going to get about 3-5 scammers a day.
As an aside I really think Mercury bank should audit their onboarding process.
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
> Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume
I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair.
I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
atonse 11 hours ago [-]
If a maintainer has chosen to open source and use a permissive license (key word chosen, this isn't a default), they are explicitly saying via their license that they are not charging for the use of the code. What's the issue here?
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Everyone involved is making informed choices.
ericmay 11 hours ago [-]
Well when you're giving away your product for free... maybe open-source maintainers who want payment for their "free" products should consider going to business school?
I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
gmd63 10 hours ago [-]
We have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask for a share of that.
And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
> If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is.
But what I do not want to see as a citizen and taxpayer is "we want to build this for free, ope now we want to get paid and it's totally not fair that Meta took our free thing and did something productive with it and we need taxpayer dollars.". That's not fair to anyone, and solving that by "mandating" or "requiring" things is anti-free market, and against the free spirit of human creativity and entrepreneurship.
> When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations
Let's not call it all charity though. You get invited to conferences, you get job opportunities you otherwise wouldn't get, you get to feel great about the thing you are working on - there's a lot of unpaid benefits, and under-the-table ones too.
gmd63 8 hours ago [-]
I'm saying if the populace wants taxes to fund open source and votes for it, and maintainers just stop working on open source otherwise that's also the free market. Doing stuff for free and then complaining about when it benefits greedy folks in an outsized way is a negotiation tactic with the public that people are allowed to do.
ericmay 7 hours ago [-]
Sure, people can do anything. As a person/citizen/voter I would probably vote against using tax dollars for open-source work. I'd prefer a less convoluted and more honest approach. Doing something for free and then complaining about not getting paid for it later is super cringe and passive aggressive regardless as to whether or not "greedy people" are using it.
Being an open-source maintainer is just some thing people decide they want to do. There's nothing special about it. If you want to get paid, figure out that arrangement for yourself. If you want to do it for free and give it away because you love it, that's great too. That's what free association is all about.
Taxing me to pay for other people to fund their hobby seems ripe for 2 bad things: 1. if the government is funding it, the government gets a say - doesn't bode well for open-source, and 2 it creates market inefficiencies in a bad way - we fund thing we shouldn't fund and we do so to support a lifestyle or hobby instead of what is truly economically valuable for all.
11 hours ago [-]
11 hours ago [-]
skinnymuch 9 hours ago [-]
Not sure what that letter said but open source^ isn’t good and I’m what people would incorrectly stereotype as someone who would love open source as a Marxist [sympathizer].
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
purple_ferret 10 hours ago [-]
Braintree had $1.53 trillion TPV in 2023[0], and it's just a subsidiary of Paypal which has tanked to $40 billion market cap despite revenue and profit that are probably lightyears ahead of Stripe.
Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.
I’m not the most well versed but isn’t that still insane to be 4x valuation of PayPal? Maybe it’s more PayPal valuation being crap vs Stripe being too high. Adyen is close to PayPal with a PE of 30 (vs PayPal’s sub-10) and Adyen like PayPal is close to being back to its IPO level.
PayPal seems crazy when it has acquired businesses like Honey (probably hasn’t helped) and Braintree/Venmo since then. Pretty funny PayPal was spun off as the better growth stock but eBay has tripled since then and their market caps are the same now.
boringg 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know you have paypal and stripe in the same sentence. Paypal is not a great service at all.
rprend 10 hours ago [-]
This multiple is indirectly a bet on AI growth , because Stripe is the payment processor for the vast majority of AI startups.
miohtama 10 hours ago [-]
Weak. They should pivot to AI.
jppope 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds like an IPO in 6-18 months.
MoonWalk 8 hours ago [-]
Another leech piggybacking on the bloated corpus of the greatest leeches in all of consumerdom: credit-card companies.
Disgusting rip-off of consumers, yes, but even worse is the rip-off of merchants.
2OEH8eoCRo0 9 hours ago [-]
Ludicrous valuation
s_dev 9 hours ago [-]
It would help a lot if you elaborated why it's a 'ludicrous' valuation rather than asserting that it simply is. What method are you using to value the enterprise and why does your expected result not match the actual result?
colesantiago 11 hours ago [-]
Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom), as soon as Stripe goes public you're getting dumped on.
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
triceratops 11 hours ago [-]
Something like 20% of American households meet the accredited standard. It isn't some ultra-elite bar.
Stripe being able to find all the capital they need in private markets is the actual indicator of wealth disparity.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
Not to mention: Stripe doesn't want your money, whether or not you're accredited.
colesantiago 11 hours ago [-]
"Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom)"
Stripe might not need your money now, but they certainly needed it at the pre-seed, seed stage where if you were an angel/seed investor you would have been able to participate.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
No they didn't. They were picky at the seed stage. They were picky in their first priced round. They were picky in every subsequent round. There was never a point where they wanted your money. The most promising companies fight off investors when word gets around they're raising.
There is never a point in the lifecycle of any of these companies where they wanted random retail investors with no network on their cap tables. The kinds of companies that do want those investors tend, for clear reasons, not to be the kind you want to invest in.
You don't want accreditation rules relaxed or eliminated. You simply want Stripe to be a public company instead of a private one. Fair enough, but Stripe doesn't want to be a public company.
colesantiago 10 hours ago [-]
Even worse. This means that no wealth will be created for people who actually want to invest.
With Stripe's non IPO example, many will follow and will stay private.
So more gatekeeping.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
Again: you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you). It has nothing at all to do with accreditation though. You're pining for access to companies that wouldn't take your money even if you were a well-known institutional investor. They get to pick which VC/PE firms they work with, and they know it, and it is their job to pick the ones that best serve the interests of their firms.
I mean this respectfully, but: you do not sound, in this thread, like someone whose registration on Stripe's cap tables would be a service to Stripe. To society? Maybe? Who knows. But that's not how Stripe makes decisions.
I also think you drastically overestimate how much broad wealth creation would follow from letting retail investors into private tech companies. You're debating entirely based on a survivor artifact and ignoring the fact that most tech companies --- even most of the highly-capitalized ones --- return $0 to investors.
colesantiago 6 hours ago [-]
I love this projection you're providing to me, how much money did you lose on these companies?
I am in and have invested in YC startups, because I know which ones have growth potential and upside.
> you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you)
I didn't say they had to be a public company, you can invest in Stripe via the secondary market (which I have done before with other companies) but even then this is for accredited investors.
There are lots of unprofitable public companies on the stock market that also return $0 to investors and have no dividends.
But this trend of many private companies choosing to stay private obviously isn't going to help those except the very rich and accredited investors.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
I'm a principal at Fly.io (W20). I'm familiar with the dynamic.
I don't invest in tech companies.
Most funded tech companies don't return funds to investors. Noncontroversial claim.
Investors invest in tech companies as a/in a portfolio strategy. They don't expect any one investment to succeed, and they allocate to the asset class in part to get exposure to decorrelated assets.
That's not at all what retail investors are doing.
You keep talking about accreditation. The companies you want to invest in don't want your money and they don't care that you're accredited.
jonas21 11 hours ago [-]
If you don't meet the financial requirement ($200K annual income or $1M net worth), you can also qualify as an accredited investor by passing the Series 65 exam and filing a form with the SEC.
So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.
colesantiago 11 hours ago [-]
So someone who inherits $100 million (11 year old or not) doesn't have take the exam, but someone who knows about the industry inside out has take an exam to participate?
Seems "fair" to be honest.
I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
We don't care if people with $100MM make a bad bet on a tech company.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe we should, seeing how disastrous unregulated tech has been for society.
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
If you'd like to petition the SEC to make it so that you also have to be, say, 25 to be accredited so as to remove that particular loophole and make it even harder to become a accredited so 11 year olds don't get accredited because of a rather specific scenario, send me the change.org petition. I don't think 11 year olds should be accredited. Might make me elitist, but I've been called worse things.
Still, the theory is that having $100 million, even as an 11
year old, means you have about $90 million more than most people to lose before it even becomes an issue. Hence "accreditation". Accreditation isn't about "can you make smart investments" but about "will you be broke and destitute soon", and having $100 million makes it harder than I'd $400k is your life's savings, and you're about to put it all into NFTs.
Is the theory, anyway.
paxys 11 hours ago [-]
You need an annual income of $200K to become an accredited investor. If you don't have that, you anyways shouldn't be participating in risky private markets.
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
colesantiago 11 hours ago [-]
Why don't we extend this to the risky public manipulated stock market?
paxys 10 hours ago [-]
Because that is what the SEC was created for, and (in theory) it is their job to protect regular invesors from market risks. Now how effectively that works is a different conversation, but at the very least you have reporting requirements, earnings releases, material disclosures, insider trading laws, SIPC insurance, circuit breakers etc. It is very unlikely that you are going to lose all your money in a stable blue chip company or broad index fund, but a regular joe trying to invest in a hot "private investing opportunity" is absolutely going to be taken for a ride.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
Because the odds of you losing all your money on private tech company shares are nearly 100%, and the odds of you losing all your money in SPDR or VFINX are nearly 0%.
skinnymuch 9 hours ago [-]
Still seems silly when meme stocks exist and the establishment (like entire media and news apparatus) can and do collude to mess with things (like “Black Monday” ~2021 when all the media and news lied and said wall street bets and meme stonk people had moved on to silver) and within days all the meme stock gains across over a dozen companies were entirely wiped out.
Not saying meme stocks should be a thing but no one gets investigated or in trouble. Nothing is done. If they cared about the average person something would be done.
tptacek 8 hours ago [-]
When people investigate meme stocks the people complaining that they can't get on Stripe's cap table take the side of the meme stocks!
colesantiago 7 hours ago [-]
Why do you think that is?
tptacek 7 hours ago [-]
Because they watched a small group of people win a roulette straight bet when the ball landed on 32 and now think federal action is needed to allow everybody to bet straight 32 on everything.
colesantiago 7 hours ago [-]
There is no other way for that group of retail investors to build wealth other than go into these highly and extremely risky assets that you and I hate and do not recommend. (even more risky than secondary markets)
Sure, they can invest in public companies but if lots of these high growth companies stay private, the gains will not be shared towards retail especially for their pensions.
tptacek 5 hours ago [-]
This is obviously not true. Most wealthy people do not build their wealth by gambling on meme stocks and tech companies. That's an extraordinarily Twitter-blinkered thing to believe.
Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance.
PayPal: $41.51B right now.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/
Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.
They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.
Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.
Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".
If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.
rough math, but:
$14.2T / $1.9T * 1.6% = 12% global GDP
Oh - not all bank transfers count in GDP. I often move money from one account to another.
Note that Visa has the same issue: withdrawing money from an ATM shouldn’t count towards GDP! Neither does Vemo-ing a friend to settle up a split restaurant bill (my Venmo is attached to my debit card).
Americans and credit have an unhealthy relationship.
But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
Stripe's bigger _and_ growing faster.
Besides, if AI replaces all white collar jobs, and crashes high spending consumer economy, all payment vols will go down.
Adyen reported 500 million EUR in pure profit: https://investors.adyen.com/financials/h2-2025-4r9rc
Where in your comment authorship pipeline were these errors introduced?
I think it’s a bot, look at the post history with the weird repetitive hyphens.
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
I can't really see a net-positive benefit to having public shareholders and reporting requirements. Do we think Stripe's leadership needs feedback from random investment advisors or analysts? Do employees need the distraction of daily-updating stock prices? Would quarterly reporting incentivize better decision making?
In my opinion: ehhhhhhhhhhhh
I see the benefit, but if you're joining Stripe you know the trade-off of RSUs in a company that doesn't provide daily liquidity. They provide it on a regular basis, so you're not locked in forever (a la my 2014 Gusto shares).
They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition).
They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them.
Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.
IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)
The only way to kick out the Collison's would be for the VC's to do it. They currently own 80%. It's easier for the VC's to do that if Stripe stays private than if Stripe IPO's.
Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.
Also, not sure what you mean by "tiny". It's been billions of dollars.
The important part is that the Collison's control Stripe now. When that changes things may go down hill. It won't matter if it is public or not.
This is an incredibly odd sentiment, imo. What’s the desire to see them go public unless you personally are profiting from it? Going public would quickly set Stripe on a pathway to potential enshittification and at minimum starting to squeeze the consumers and businesses it provides services to more.
Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.
Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.
Public companies allow the rest of us to participate in a success story like this.
Until IPO it’s only a selected group of affluent people who have access to these private companies.
Also, private companies fail at a much higher rate than public ones do.
And, of course private companies fail at a much higher rate. The set of private companies includes every company that doesn't succeed to the point where it has the realistic choice to go public. Again: wrong comparison.
frankly i dont know why would one go public today unless money is needed badly. Quarterly calls, filings, are one thing, dealing with vest bros asking "so how should we think about" questions on round tables or "whats an incrimental margin" musings as they clack away at their mini keyboards filling out their model no body can make sense of.. and then someone will publish a blog saying their company is gonna be extinct because of AI ... this is not for everybody thats for sure...
So it's true PE taking a company private has a high failure rate as far as the continuation of the company, the question is if the goal of PE is for the company to continue in the first place, or if that gets in the way of them extracting as money as possible as fast as possible. So 50% is certainly a statistic, but not useful for comparison, especially if we're looking at a private company staying private.
Delaware corporations must act in the interests of shareholders.
A widget company could sponsor a soccer team or whatever and say the costs are worth it. Or that same company could not do that and say it's not worth it. Two opposite decisions that both would count as acting in the interest of shareholders.
Which courts? Corporate law is state-level. Delaware generally has some affordances for long-term strategic decisions.
Navigating the risk and growth allows them to navigate their growth and rewards while maybe in the drivers seat a bit more.
But for the good of all of society, it would be better if they did.
Stock markets are not entirely logical from my understanding.
Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares. I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.
Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.
https://stripe.com/atlas
They also have a tax product, and a few other things that are in the orbit around payment processing.
Their product offerings are a bit more than just the "dumb pipe" portion of the transaction.
Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
Private companies can say whatever they want about their performance as long as they don't lie to their own investors; public companies can't.
Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.
Equinox Fitness is a major conglomerate and likely wants and cares about fraud detection software.
A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.
(They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)
I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.
This is not true. Every payment processor needs this effort because as soon as you broadcast that you're a payment processor you're going to get about 3-5 scammers a day.
As an aside I really think Mercury bank should audit their onboarding process.
I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair.
I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Everyone involved is making informed choices.
I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is.
But what I do not want to see as a citizen and taxpayer is "we want to build this for free, ope now we want to get paid and it's totally not fair that Meta took our free thing and did something productive with it and we need taxpayer dollars.". That's not fair to anyone, and solving that by "mandating" or "requiring" things is anti-free market, and against the free spirit of human creativity and entrepreneurship.
> When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations
Let's not call it all charity though. You get invited to conferences, you get job opportunities you otherwise wouldn't get, you get to feel great about the thing you are working on - there's a lot of unpaid benefits, and under-the-table ones too.
Being an open-source maintainer is just some thing people decide they want to do. There's nothing special about it. If you want to get paid, figure out that arrangement for yourself. If you want to do it for free and give it away because you love it, that's great too. That's what free association is all about.
Taxing me to pay for other people to fund their hobby seems ripe for 2 bad things: 1. if the government is funding it, the government gets a say - doesn't bode well for open-source, and 2 it creates market inefficiencies in a bad way - we fund thing we shouldn't fund and we do so to support a lifestyle or hobby instead of what is truly economically valuable for all.
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.
[0]https://www.paypal.com/us/braintree
Stripe cites 34% growth for the same period and metric.
[1]: https://s205.q4cdn.com/875401827/files/doc_financials/2025/q...
PayPal seems crazy when it has acquired businesses like Honey (probably hasn’t helped) and Braintree/Venmo since then. Pretty funny PayPal was spun off as the better growth stock but eBay has tripled since then and their market caps are the same now.
Disgusting rip-off of consumers, yes, but even worse is the rip-off of merchants.
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
Stripe being able to find all the capital they need in private markets is the actual indicator of wealth disparity.
Stripe might not need your money now, but they certainly needed it at the pre-seed, seed stage where if you were an angel/seed investor you would have been able to participate.
There is never a point in the lifecycle of any of these companies where they wanted random retail investors with no network on their cap tables. The kinds of companies that do want those investors tend, for clear reasons, not to be the kind you want to invest in.
You don't want accreditation rules relaxed or eliminated. You simply want Stripe to be a public company instead of a private one. Fair enough, but Stripe doesn't want to be a public company.
With Stripe's non IPO example, many will follow and will stay private.
So more gatekeeping.
I mean this respectfully, but: you do not sound, in this thread, like someone whose registration on Stripe's cap tables would be a service to Stripe. To society? Maybe? Who knows. But that's not how Stripe makes decisions.
I also think you drastically overestimate how much broad wealth creation would follow from letting retail investors into private tech companies. You're debating entirely based on a survivor artifact and ignoring the fact that most tech companies --- even most of the highly-capitalized ones --- return $0 to investors.
I am in and have invested in YC startups, because I know which ones have growth potential and upside.
> you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you)
I didn't say they had to be a public company, you can invest in Stripe via the secondary market (which I have done before with other companies) but even then this is for accredited investors.
There are lots of unprofitable public companies on the stock market that also return $0 to investors and have no dividends.
But this trend of many private companies choosing to stay private obviously isn't going to help those except the very rich and accredited investors.
I don't invest in tech companies.
Most funded tech companies don't return funds to investors. Noncontroversial claim.
Investors invest in tech companies as a/in a portfolio strategy. They don't expect any one investment to succeed, and they allocate to the asset class in part to get exposure to decorrelated assets.
That's not at all what retail investors are doing.
You keep talking about accreditation. The companies you want to invest in don't want your money and they don't care that you're accredited.
So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.
Seems "fair" to be honest.
I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.
Still, the theory is that having $100 million, even as an 11 year old, means you have about $90 million more than most people to lose before it even becomes an issue. Hence "accreditation". Accreditation isn't about "can you make smart investments" but about "will you be broke and destitute soon", and having $100 million makes it harder than I'd $400k is your life's savings, and you're about to put it all into NFTs.
Is the theory, anyway.
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
Not saying meme stocks should be a thing but no one gets investigated or in trouble. Nothing is done. If they cared about the average person something would be done.
Sure, they can invest in public companies but if lots of these high growth companies stay private, the gains will not be shared towards retail especially for their pensions.