thr0waway43234

Regarding their pricing to low-touch customers, like anyone just signing up on the website, yes, it's a very good margin for a payment processor. But the trick is that nobody processing a million a day + is going to pay that. They'll negotiate, hard, or change providers. I suspect most of them are in more traditional cost plus contracts: 5c-50c take per transaction, even though the entire bank processing fee is counted in revenue. In those cases, the local tax would put SF companies at a major disadvantage vs Adyen, which doesn't pay a tax on revenues.

Given that Stripe is already not a major player for those very large companies, 1% of revenues on merchants that have high average transaction sizes means they might as well not show up to the negotiating table, as their break even point will be more expensive than other's best offer.

Look at the valuation increases: Almost 2x year to year for quite a while. I don't expect most people seeing that kind of valuation increases looking to liquidate any part of their position unless they really can't help it.

If their fundamentals growth slowed to rates resembling the regular market, then sure, but as is, all a company with that growth rate might need is let tenured employees add, say 5% of their equity to the round so they can get a bit of liquidity to keep them quiet.

There's also people whose natural tendencies are thoroughly self destructive. For instance, I know a person who doesn't feel like themselves at home. Their favorite moment in the world is when, after speaking at a tech conference and getting praise from random attendees, they get blasted in the after party with something legal or illegal, and have unprotected sex with multiple partners, at least some of which they just met that day, and probably won't remember in the morning. Their quest to feel more like themselves leads them to dozens of trips a year, while their children ask why they have such a demanding job. In practice, they hold their job because they have relations with said CEO, as coworkers know that complaining about their coworker's lack of productivity will lead to termination.

And this is just one example. I have quite a few more of different flavors, all of which involve someone deciding that "being themselves" is all about destructive behavior. They don't lack EQ: In fact, I'd say almost all of them have very high EQs, but they are also either very damaged, or not very good people.