This is on the less expensive side of alternatives and doesn't require a minimum annual spend quota. They nailed this for startups, which I imagine is a combination response to / anticipation of regulatory requirements in Web3 apps.

I'd put Twilio and Cloudflare in the same category for vision (expanding product offering) and execution.

Yep, these are all examples of top engineering organizations.

I thought that too - until I tried to use Twillo for the first time in a couple of years. Holy crap they overcomplicated the interface! There's 3 or 4 levels of menu all shown at the same time in different directions. The docs are also way worse. The product is still great, but the interface is a complete mess!

Just what I was thinking.

Can Stripe hurry up and go public so I can buy some shares?

I have been thinking the same thing for some time now. Unfortunately, I wouldn't hold my breath. If they are able to stay private, they probably will. It's easier to build a business when you don't have to deal with the hassle and interference of public markets.

What would that do to all the Stripes holding illiquid shares in a private company?

I'm not familiar with Stripe's situation, but there are non-public markets available for this kind of stock sale. You just can't buy from them unless you're already rich. I'd guess that long-term employees do have an amount of flexibility in that regard.

Unfortunately many companies have clauses in their options grants that prohibit employees from selling shares to any investor not approved by the company board (e.g. EquityZen).

Can you form a mutual fund/ETF that invests into those kind of companies via the non-public markets and then sell shares publicly for the fund?

Scottish Mortgage (SMT) in the UK does this and has a stake in Stripe (https://citywire.co.uk/investment-trust-insider/news/boost-f...)

This is already a thing, large investors like Fidelity do exactly this.

e.g. Fidelity has a significant investment in SpaceX through a handful of their mutual funds, which you can then purchase and basically invest in SpaceX indirectly.

Publicly traded organizations can have any kind of private investment. I wonder, though, if there is regulation around how much of the public org’s capital can be put in private stock purchases…

I think some VCs are already also offering shares via mutual funds.

I’ve seen companies doing buy backs to give people liquidity. In India, anyway. Check out Zerodha.

"In March, Stripe, which describes itself as “payments infrastructure for the internet,” became the most valuable private company in Silicon Valley, raising $600 million at a valuation of $95 billion. The Journal reported Stripe is considering going public later this year or early next year."

While that sounds like a great ... in all likelihood by the time it hits the public market most if not all the value will be extracted by the investors. With a branded company like this and equity markets as frothy as they are. I doubt there will be much value left for retail. Hopefully Im wrong though.

I always hear this line of thinking, but there aren’t ever supporting examples presented. Stripe reminds me of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is over 5x what it was at IPO (as of 6/14/21). Maybe what you describe is the case “on average” for most IPOs, but it seems to not be the case for extraordinary companies like Cloudflare (and maybe Stripe). Obviously just an n of 1 but I’m sure others could chime in with similar examples.

There are numerous examples on both sides for sure. I would add that performance also does well for companies operating in a bull market.

In the case of cloudflare (And many tech stocks) they had a black swan event of a large portion of the global economy going online during the pandemic which has juiced their returns.

Not saying it doesn't happen but rather that it isn't how people typically price their IPOs to generate value to the retail investor.

Yep, makes sense. A little nitpick: I wouldn’t call it a Black Swan because multiple people called out the potential for such a global event to happen (Gates, Taleb, etc.), but to your point it certainly further accelerated the move to online commerce, mainstream remote work, etc. Cloudflare and Stripe are/were both well positioned for that type of world.

Wouldn’t the idea be that the company would continue to create value after going public?

The idea of going public is to raise another round of financing for the company while being able to get liquidity for private shareholders. It is not necessarily to create value going forward.

The best option is for the company to raise a good deal from the public markets (high valuation on limited equity) and then execute successfully without needing to raise again. If they do need to raise again they have hopefully not done a poor job on their original public IPO so that they can go back to the public markets. That said it isn't that important a factor.

> The idea of going public is to raise another round of financing for the company while being able to get liquidity for private shareholders. It is not necessarily to create value going forward.

Perhaps the company doesn't necessarily intend to create value going forward, but they must at least pretend to have that intention. What I meant was that the idea of the people buying public stock in a company is that the company will create value going forward.

> It is not necessarily to create value going forward

Not sure where you are going with that thought. A business that isn't creating value is going out of business or selling to someone who has an idea of how to use its assets to create value.

Actually not all companies create value. Monopolies create profits through pricing distortions but not necessarily value. My point is that creating value is not a key component of a company going public.

In this current moment I would wager that if you are suggesting that you will create value in the market going forward you will get a great return on your investor dollars but you may not actually execute that value creation. (relevant news: lordstown motors)

Perhaps my original wording should have been "delivering value" rather than "creating value." Of course it's true that some things that companies do are at best shifting value around and at worst extracting or even stealing value from elsewhere. But my point was that people who buy public stock from a company almost certainly expect that company to somehow be more valuable in the future.

If only Stripe would start a pre-ipo stock market. I guess only incumbent regulation prevents this, it’s not a technology problem.

I believe Carta already does this: https://cartax.com/

CarTax.com? Good jerb marketing team!

I'm sure OP was implying "for retail investors" in his wish. Carta is just another way for rich people to access things that are only available to rich people.

I think Stripe pre-ipo-ing on their own platform would show great cojones, but I think they are more careful than I’d be about such things.

You can buy it by proxy through funds or similar.

I've been eyeing Scottish Mortgage which despite the name is actually a high-tech fund packaged as a stock publicly traded in the London Stock Exchange. They hold Stripe among many other interesting investments.

Stripe is 0.9% of their holdings so they are of limited value of you sell exposure to Stripe specifically.

If you want exposure to them - go get Shopify stock - they just disclosed being in on the round of Stripe.

https://betakit.com/shopify-reportedly-invests-in-stripe-bri...

> $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price.

I observed other teams struggle to build and have tackled challenges posed by identity, 1.5$/user is terrific price. Handling PII data in itself is a rabbit hole of engineering, product, and regulatory challenges. Let alone creating unique identities, matching, and what not.

I know that KYC checks for Onfido we had no volume but we’re being charged around $10. Is the $1.50 for KYC or some lesser verification?

That it's flat, and not a percentage, is a welcome surprise.

Any news on IPO plans?

Sadly out of reach for small projects. For example if you had a site with 100k users, you'd barely cover server costs with Ad Sense. $150k to check all of them? Would never happen :/ Maybe if they could pay for verification themselves?

In many cases you don’t need to verify the identity of every user. You can use some signal to determine when you need ID, or require it for accessing certain products/features.

If you're not offering a service for $, why do you need to verify identity?

What is the usecase?

This strikes me as classic HN bikeshedding.

Spam and other malicious behaviour. It's time consuming for mods to block spammers.

Instagram also don't charge users and yet they verify identity.

Instagram may be verifying identity now (I didn't know... letting FB scan my id would be one of the last things I would want), but I'm pretty sure they reached a massive scale without such a measure.

Stripe's website shows users scanning their government ID documents and taking selfies.

Using that as a means to block spammers would be.... unusual.

You don’t need to verify a user’s real identity to serve them AdSense.

They can post AdSense violating image and report the URL to get the page demonetised. Users of similar project done that many times.

The tech stack has something to do with it. Stripe has such high velocity because of Ruby on Rails.

lol!

When are we as a community going to move past treating frameworks/languages/tools as a silver bullet? Frameworks don't make teams better; good management, technical leadership, and great infrastructure does.

You are right but frameworks help with long term maintainability of code and also being able to build out features quickly which is what the comment was referring to originally. If they use Go lang of some other tech stack without framework it can help them achieve their goal but not at the same speed.

Stripe does not use Ruby on Rails

I can't even find any evidence that they use Rails, and I'm pretty sure their outstanding velocity is minimally explained by their choice of tech stack.