Stripe

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The platform's own early signals for this company — hard-to-fake, and where one preceded a real raise, the measured lead.

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• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And in many ways, like, payments and inference are going to blend together for companies of the future.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And Stripe demonstrated that they've been wanting it and building towards it for many, many, many years.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And there was a bigger picture kind of alignment, too, where both Stripe and Open Router really want lots of new companies in the world.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And then culturally, there were just, I think, in terms of mission and values and building a neutral, trusted platform that businesses can depend on and scale on top of, that's also really developer-friendly with the best possible developer experience to encourage new companies to emerge. That alignment was there.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  It was really clear how aligned they were with us kind of having autonomy over the brand and roadmap and product and keeping Open Router doing what it's already doing just much faster with, like, a much more serious go-to-market plan.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I did really respect the company, do really respect it today. And of possible acquisition options for us, it was, I think, my top choice.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think they feel like there's very high returns to them being able to be a lot more efficient in writing code.

• neutral prediction Jerry Murdock

  you hit the bid if open router gets a $10 billion bid from Stripe you take it

• bullish endorsement Eno Reyes

  And so for them, I think this is very reasonable

• neutral assessment Eno Reyes

  I would say that if they think that data gives them insight into how to run Stripe better as well, that could also potentially make it worth it.

• neutral assessment Eno Reyes

  $8 billion is quite steep though. So stranger things have happened.

• bullish assessment Eno Reyes

  If you're Stripe, you already control the flow of one out of the three of these. With OpenRouter, rather than the routing technology, you actually just gain the information of where these models are going, right? You start to understand what are people doing with intelligence? How are they allocating it? To what models are they using? So now you start to control the second of these three things.

• mixed assessment Eno Reyes

  if somebody comes up and says, look, Stripe bought OpenRouter for $8 billion because of the technology, then I'd say either A, if they have insider knowledge, then that was a bad decision. If B, they're just sort of assigning that to it, I think they're missing what I read when I read the letter to shareholders, which was that they see this as a bet on where the direction of capital allocation is going.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Stripe has partnered up with Meta to develop the payment feature for the Muse agent.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Stripe's core DAV team need a bonus at Christmas time. They are busy this year.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  And they're doing it all private. Again, back to the comment, doing what looked like public company size M&A and pulling it off while private. I know they got the investors to take Stripe stock in the open router deal. I think some portion of it was stock. And the PayPal deal is more complex and probably requires more thought. But again, being able to do what is, I think, a $40, $50 billion deal and a $7 billion deal issuing paper while private is pretty impressive.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if they get the PayPal deal done, that's the kind of deal you have a high, to Jason's point about, if you're good at M&A and good at consolidation, you probably have a high degree of visibility that you keep those revenues, that you remove the entire G&A, you get more of a two-sided network because you have consumer wallets, which Stripe doesn't have, and you've done core consolidation acquisitions. Doing them both together, provided you can pull them off, is super interesting in terms of buildi

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  There's probably a one in three chance that they have a massive AI routing business in five years, but if they do, that's a big second leg.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  What's fun about Stripe right now is they're doing that acquisition, which is very much a, hey, we don't play in this space. Let's put a stake in the new ground. And at the same time, they're talking about a PayPal acquisition, which is very much, we own this space already. Let's buy these guys, fold them into what we already have, and just make a shit ton of money consolidating, right? And actually, I think that's a clever strategy. I mean, I think they're actually playing a very clever hand.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I think it'll be like the scale acquisition. It will be the start of something that gets bigger, whether this brand exists or whether even this product exists five years. I don't even think this product will exist in five years, but I think there's a high chance, more than 51% chance it builds into a 20 or 30% revenue stream for Stripe and that's enough.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think Stripe is, hey, listen, any transaction on planet earth, we can take 2 point something percent of, right? But it's not going to be true for open router. It's a niche, it's a wonderful niche product, but in the world of routing, which everybody does, Databricks does, Replit does it, Lovable does it, Vercel does it. It's a niche product with two really good niches. But this is the risk to Stripe is that they end up owning a niche, a successful niche product. And that's not their, their DNA

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  This benefits Shopify. Of course, Shopify leans into this, right? Of course, Stripe and PayPal lean into this, right? It benefits them, right? There's no question.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  There was a comment by one of the open router investors that suggested the Stripe acquisition of open router wasn't about lowest cost routing to open-wind models. It was about trust relationships and monitoring untrusted use of AI.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And so if you think about like fraud happening in payments, well, you could have fraud or bad actors happening in AI token usage and open router would be able to monitor, hey, unauthorized

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Because Stripe is not a payments company. Stripe is a anti-fraud company.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the way you see it manifest in the numbers in companies like Databricks or Stripe, um, is, massive, massive new bets, um, in new product areas. Um, and, you know, you can see revenue acceleration that happens as a result.

• neutral endorsement Unattributed

  Stripe calls it the renaissance. Oh, the renaissance. I actually quite like the renaissance.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  there's a little bit of a narrative violation in Stripe's SaaS customer data, which actually shows growth accelerating into 2026 across both young and mature businesses.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  some of our most forward-leaning companies like Stripe have discussed with us is, you know, where are they actually putting their incremental AI investment dollars? Are they putting it toward things like building new products for customers that could drive higher revenue, or are they putting it toward optimization or efficiency gains on the cost side? And this is sort of a litmus test for us

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  i'm not sure where stripe is i think it's it's it's uh maybe on the lower end of that

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  what stripe does uh on the internet or or you know some of the underlying uh payment infrastructure do because it's it's such a small piece of the pie and i think that they're providing real value

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  he founded brain tree which was a company that did transactions payments and he sold it to eBay made a bunch of money

• bullish assessment Adam Ludwin

  like stripe makes stuff usable ... they're abstracting it to make it developer friendly consumer friendly bus friendly and that's very valuable

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  So there's this new generation of companies, of which I would submit Intercom, would be a part. Slack would be there. Stripe would be there. Atlassian are there. People who build a product, and the product is the core of the offering, and everything else follows the product.

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  we feel like we haven't we're we're still very early instead of this trajectory they we first established and just because we work with startups and technology companies you know they themselves have lengthy trajectories and so you know this is just going to have to be when you're building infrastructure you know there's just long time Horizons involved

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  we launched a new version of Atlas yesterday

• neutral assessment Patrick Collison

  being a public company certainly does not stop you from taking a really long-term time Horizon but it does make it more difficult

• bearish prediction Patrick Collison

  we're going to hold off for as long as possible from partaking in them (public markets)

• neutral assessment Patrick Collison

  Day Zero is not the time to monetize them

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  we're not trying to make on it the way we make money is strip's whole business model is we make money when our customers generate Revenue

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  Stripes goal is to increase the GDP of the internet right we just want the internet economy overall to be bigger

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  what we found over the kind of year post launch uh is that actually there are in fact thousands of these people and they are in fact just as capable

• bullish fact_claim Patrick Collison

  Atlas was our effort to do that and so kind of coming back to we discussed earlier on the way we work with entrepreneurs in 124 countries is through Atlas we've put together this package of we'll incorporate a company company in Delaware we'll get you a bank account with Silicon Valley Bank which is you know the top Bank used as I'm sure you know beer companies beer software companies um will get sort of you know the basic uh uh tax and legal advice to just kind of get you off the ground get the

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  as far as I could tell nobody had cared or noticed ... it was actually kind of existentially bad news

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  she told us you know no kind of um no uncertain terms that there was no possibility that that they would work with us

• bullish prediction Patrick Collison

  I think that people have underestimated that for a long time

• mixed assessment Patrick Collison

  the first such moment was probably pretty early right uh maybe a month after you started working out something we're like you know God this will take over the world but of course then that was you know succeeded by an event you know the next morning where like this is the worst idea in history

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  a lot of people are like why would people want to payment API

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  we came to appreciate that sort of what we thought was kind of a you know this this little Pond was actually kind of this much larger ocean

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  we came to shift from sort of thinking about it you know merely as this nice little tool for for developers that kind of makes their lives easier ... to kind of realizing that well when you sort of survey the broader landscape it's not just that it sort of sucks for developers to have to sort of integrate payments initially into the their website or service or whatever but that like the whole edifice is broken

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  a large part of I think what enabled strip back to your question uh is that we're building kind of this Universal Global platform for you know building an online business

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  we're about to hit 700

• bullish fact_claim Patrick Collison

  we now work with companies in about 124 countries and so basically we now work with companies in uh just most countries

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  we handle now billions of dollars uh of sort of aggregate Revenue every year for sort of all the the companies building on the platform um and you know we we've many thousands of companies building on top of it

• neutral fact_claim James Altucher

  Sam Altman from Y Combinator fame now he did stripe and his position in that became worth 25 million or 50 million or something

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  Stop at the very second you bump into like a market leader, I would say, stop. So, if the next step in the user's workflow is charge a credit card, don't go and build Stripe. Let Stripe be Stripe. Integrate with Stripe.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Instinct's raising a two and a half right now, two and a half billion. And it's still, like, invite-only pre-monetization.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  Cursor got sold for $60 billion. Andrew Wang's company, the one Scali, I got bought for $10, $11 billion. ... 14, 15. I mean, these are extraordinary. And if this company, what is it called? Instinct is the new. Instinct in town. Instinct in town.

• bullish prediction Elad Gil

  if something just keeps compounding why would you sell out of it and so for example my intention with stripe is to just hold stripe for the next 10 years you know i think it's going to keep growing at a really good rate forever

• bullish assessment Elad Gil

  i think an interesting analog was payments because after paypal got bought by ebay a lot of folks who were sort of director level at at paypal started talking in silicon valley around how hard it was to do payments and i think that stopped real innovation and payments companies for five or six years and then suddenly stripe emerged and square emerged and a firm emerged and all these amazing payments companies got started and now it's something that people know they can build again but there was

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  it was the 10 billion into stripe at 50 billion not really venture capital that's mid cap tech those are ipos or ipos

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  the reason some of these are famous, like SpaceX and Stripe is because they've been private for so long. Both of those have been private for well over 10 years now. Those two companies have been private for a long time, which means they have a large number of shareholders. They've got a large number of shareholders because they have so many employees. Employees vast over four years, typically. If a company like Stripe is 12 years old, you might have an employee who has had three different grants

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  is aws going to be able to compete on payments or for e-commerce platforms uh with stripe shopify and square probably not

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  He's also, by the way, a seed investor in Stripe.

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  Now, some companies will wait it out. So if you're Stripe and you've got a ton of cash and the business is doing great, maybe you wait, maybe you wait until 2025 and you hope your valuations bounce back to those 2021 levels.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  We're waiting on the Stripe IPO.

• bullish assessment Brian Singerman

  So Stripe took a, you know, raised around and, you know, less than what it was previously trading at. So what? At the end of the day, if Stripe is one of the most valuable companies in the world, then amazing. Right.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  instacart great product market cap was obviously at a sync with uh market realities and potential ipo stripe same thing 100 billion 50 billion now it's 75 billion i think in this in the sequoia secondary that they did recently

• bullish assessment David Weisberg

  last week we saw some positive news with some promise of dpi coming back with sequoia's planned purchase of stripe

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  right now, I think a lot of key networks include OpenAI, DeepMind, Palantir, Stripe, Anduril, probably Fair out of Facebook, SpaceX for hardware. You know, there's a small number of places that are spawning all the founders who are doing the really interesting companies.

• bullish assessment Jeremy Allaire

  So actually one of the coolest, uh, things that we saw, um, earlier this year was John Collison at their big annual conference got up and did his kind of one more thing, uh, uh, thing. And he basically said, Hey, look, um, you know, crypto is back, but it's, it's USDC and it's stable coins. And he demoed basically like in, in the Stripe checkout product, um, which they're rolling out. It's like a, it's like the product that you could just add as a merchant to your website or your app or whatever

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  we see stripe go out and maybe spacex goes out i don't have any information or anything or starlink spins out like people are saying you know whatever we see five or six of these things happen in in 2025

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  12 year old copy stripe is still not public what's going on right and stripes a great example of that

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  stripes model which is very very simple 2.9 plus 30 cents per transaction

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  stripe did grow its payment processing volume to about a trillion dollars last year up about 25

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  if they have a number of key customers and your stripe and you want to enable a bunch of this or your bank of america and you decide this is critical for you you're kind of buying the customer base

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  privy getting bought by stripe

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  So their transactions are probably counted as a private VC-backed company, but that's essentially a public company.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Stripe is, you know, that's a public company that's decided to not go public.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  Stripe will never go public. I mean, they said on all in a couple of weeks ago or a couple of months ago that maybe they could be private for 30 years, maybe never go public.

• bullish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  both that stripe will have an incredible ipo and that a lot of these kami crypto projects will go to zero

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  i'm also fading implicitly friedberg's pick of stripe but my biggest business loser for 2022 is visa and mastercard and traditional payment rails and the entire ecosystem around it

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  it sounds like they're going for a direct listing and we could see that become the highest valuation tech ipo ever and then they will become kind of the golden child next year

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  we are hearing rumors that stripe might you know kind of or think that they bankers think that they might be able to break that and so stripes ipo could be the biggest tech ipo ever

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  stripe is a payment technology company based in san francisco uh stripe raised money earlier this year at a 95 billion dollar valuation

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  if you look at the Collison's, Patrick Collison, and how much breadth he has, and some of the topics he's interested in, and the things he writes about, it indicates to me a high degree of intellectual curiosity, and people who are intellectually curious generally are very humble, because they're constantly seeking things they don't know... if you look across the range of successful founder CEOs that scale to $100 billion plus valuations for their businesses, that to me is one of the more common

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  They're the standard, everybody knows that. And we know that Stripe has a great CEO

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  If you're a startup founder, you know, early decisions can be the difference between success and failure. And one decision that thousands of successful founders have made is choosing Stripe as their payments platform. We all know Stripe CEO Patrick Paulson was on episode 723 back in April of 2017. Over the past decade, Stripe has made processing payments simple and borderless. That's what you need to know. Simple because, well, you know, borderless because the world is complex and there are many

• bullish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  Stripe has the inside line, they come speak at YC, they offer them probably special deals. And YC partners encourage them because they own 6% of the companies where the 100 billion, it's a $6 billion position for Y Combinator. It's probably one of their biggest, if not the biggest most meaningful position along with Airbnb. Therefore, everything in that world is going to lean towards it.

• bullish fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  They want to own more shares of Stripe. They got to buy a tiny taste in the series B. Now they want to put more in the C and D with their late stage fund. They don't want to piss off the brothers. Therefore, they don't do that.

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  If you invested in Stripe, you're picking them over other competitors. This is a pretty pragmatic, non controversial strategy, but it does, in fact, act like a blocker.

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  I can set up a stripe and do it on my website.

• neutral fact_claim Eric Newcomer

  Stripe has been forcibly taking a cut of my revenue since I started my newsletter. ... That's how Stripe is taking 75 basis points of his money every month for protection.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  to get to the $231 billion market cap record of Alibaba. Uh, they'd have to be at 24 times their valuation, you know, sales to their valuation, which is pretty rich as we've seen.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  if they're at 7.4 billion in 2020, that was the number in the wall street journal, uh, let's say they either went up 40% year over year, be high growth company, but who knows? Maybe we saw, you know, other companies have grown faster, you know, and they hit 10 billion

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it's a huge company. They have been, it's not a startup at all. It's not even a unicorn. It's just a huge business.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Stripe has been very aggressive in certain ways to control its market positioning. You could say. In a mafia way. I, I was trying to align the entire fiasco. Day three of the mafia. I'm thinking about Phoenix and Sequoia and that particular saga in which they kind of bullied one of the most legendary investors in the history of technology into giving up $21 million. Um, cool. Well done Stripe. But now I want to see the proof.

• bearish assessment Alex Wilhelm

  I think it's much harder this year, a question about this, going back to my favorite topics, I'm boring is gross margins and how high quality this revenue is because 7.4 billion at 40%, uh, is not nearly as good as 7.4 billion at 75%. And no one's given me hard numbers on their revenue quality. So I I'm curious, um, and it's not a cheap business to run. They've hired all the smart people they can get their hands on, which is expensive.

• mixed assessment Alex Wilhelm

  everyone knows that it's hot. Everyone knows that it's huge. Everyone knows that it's doing well. I just want to know if that's actually true. And so this IPO filing is the one that's going to really, I think, deobfuscate the business.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  I don't think it's not going to be a we work situation.

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  the scuttlebutt around the valley is that they just print money.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  their actual intentions to invest in fast remains

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  that stripe maybe may not be able to when it comes to one click specifically

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  when you have a company like stripe that has an assortment of features um and product offerings it's like how dedicated can they be to just the one click checkout solution you know if if if their bread and butter really is payment processing

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it does seem like they accelerated checkout was kind of already in their pipeline it just wasn't super like promoted or merchant facing

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  And the new business line for Stripe looks pretty similar to plaid.

• bullish fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  we have a billion dollars of customer demand for you. The lower carbon team just announced a $300 million fund for equity investments in carbon removal companies that are doing, you know, the exact criteria that that Stripe is purchasing, purchasing from as well.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we've done, you know, tried to do some of this. We threw a demo day last year where we had all the companies that we purchased from present for five minutes on what they're working on. We invited, you know, I think nearly a thousand people came from all different parts of the ecosystem. So we'd love to do, um, and are planning to do more stuff like that, but, uh, don't have, you know, specific plans right now. I think that work is, you know, sneaky, really important for forwarding the field.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we are very fortunate to have leaders of Stripe who genuinely care about the long-term, long-term progress and like want to make the world better in a number of different ways. I think that's really genuine and the support that I've experienced has just been, um, pretty remarkable.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Stripe is very much in the business of economic enablement. And when you think long-term about what are the threats to that, and we do think long-term because we are an infrastructure company, climate change is one of the biggest threats. And if you take the long view, I think that the efforts that we're doing, at least to me make a lot, a lot more sense because this is very mission aligned with Stripe in the long run.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  This is a really innovative mechanism that you could imagine consortiums of companies all over the world or governments really adopting.

• mixed assessment Nan Ransohoff

  In a sense, this is kind of an academic philanthropy effort in some sense, like, the companies are getting back tons, they can use to count towards, say, a net zero commitment. But it's certainly not the cheapest way to quote unquote check that box, right? Everybody is overpaying for tons, in the hope that it's going to be cheaper for everybody else in the future.

• bullish assessment Nan Ransohoff

  Our hope is that with Frontier, we can make it a lot easier for other companies that want to do something here to put that money to really, really good use.

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  We have developed a pretty broad set of technical and commercial experts that we rely on to help us with the evaluation. And so for every single application, we have two, at least two scientific reviewers, one governance reviewer, they fill out kind of their comments in a form that we've created, send them back to us, we synthesize them and ultimately are the ones that are kind of weighing and making making the decisions. Because spending $1 billion is different than spending $15 million, we're

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  We've done this three times with Stripe Climate. We've run three rounds of purchases, we have 14 companies currently in our portfolio, and Stripe was the first customer for 11 of them, just to give you a sense of kind of how early we are, and how early we've been purchasing.

• bullish prediction Nan Ransohoff

  this is going to be $100 billion to $1 trillion market a year in the coming decades, like every single year.

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  our focus has really been on creating a market for early technologies so that they are confident enough that, you know, they're going to be early customers and that they can get a bit further on that cost curve.

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  The dollars, these $925 million are customer dollars. You can think of Frontier like a customer. We're not taking equity stakes in these companies. We're not getting a return. It's money in tons out.

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  And that's from two companies. One of which was Charm Industrial, which was Stripe was its first customer.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  And it sounds like the big unlock that you have had at Stripe is, hey, what if companies, instead of buying offsets, and I want to dig into your feelings about offsets, which I share, instead of buying offsets so that we can say our operations are carbon neutral because we paid for a wind farm over here or some solar or like some tree planting. Let's specifically pay to re-sequester carbon. Is anybody else doing that or wanting to do it? You know, obviously supply being the big constraint here,

• mixed assessment Nan Ransohoff

  And a million dollars and 15 million dollars, which is what Stripe had given to date, is a great start. But like 15 million dollars is not a market make. And candidly, a billion dollars is not a market make. Like, these are still steps in the right direction, but at least it's a big step in the right direction.

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  our focus at Stripe is really on filling the gap that exists today in solutions... we're looking for solutions that will store carbon permanently... don't compete with other sources of arable land... have the potential to be $700 a ton in the coming decades and for solutions that have the potential to be more than half a gigaton a year.

• mixed assessment Nan Ransohoff

  that was like, okay, great. That's another good step in the right direction. But we're still super far behind. So what's the next thing that we can do, which really is what led us to this latest announcement with Frontier.

• neutral fact_claim Nan Ransohoff

  we then launched Stripe Climate, which makes it easy for the 2 million businesses on Stripe to choose to give some of their revenue to carbon removal, which we then pull together with ours and use it to buy even more carbon removal.

• bullish assessment Nan Ransohoff

  the idea behind their initial million dollars was to say, could we essentially buy the Tesla roadsters of these companies to help them get started and get down the cost curve more quickly?

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  They marked Stripe down, but 13%

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Interestingly, Stripe is like a developer finance tool.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the notice are pointing out that even though this is a cut in the internal valuation from 95 to 74 that that is nowhere near as deep a repricing as for example paypal has seen in the public markets where it's down over 60 since january 1st

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the wall street journal reported that stripe told employees in an email friday that its internal share price was about 29 that it cut its internal valuation by 28 and its internal share price was now 29 compared with 40 in the most previous internal valuation known as a 409 a valuation the move and i'm quoting from the journal lowered the implied valuation of those shares to 74 billion dollars according to one of the people

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  stripe posted the message they sent to employees and it's hard to avoid comparisons to adyen which processes a similar volume to stripe but employs about half the people then stripe in lower cost regions

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  clearly we're seeing the higher first get to profitability later strategy backfire in the current economy

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  we were much too optimistic about the internet economy's near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown we grew operating costs too quickly buoyed by the success we're seeing in some of our new product areas we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  in march 2021 stripe had raised 600 million at a 95 billion dollar valuation in july stripe reduced its own valuation to 74 billion down 28 as part of a 409 a valuation

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  stripe did a 14 reduction in force a riff let go of a thousand employees so they had had that 8 000 cut that down to 7 000

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  the lack of discipline that comes from being a private company is corrected when you go public.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  You can't time the markets. That's why when you have a window to go public, you go public.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  It was a mistake, obviously.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Stripe currently has a massive tax bill to pay in order to cover some expiring RSUs. So because Stripe did not go public, which is the enduring question of our day, why did Stripe not go public over the past three years, as a result, they have these expiring options, stock options that they've given to employees. And so they are now having to raise $4 billion before the end of 2024.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  eric's amazing scoop on stripe which is raising 6 billion at a 50 billion dollar evaluation down from 96 billion

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  people like microsoft stripe are in a unique position to to show that leadership because they're highly profitable companies and it matters to their employees and to their investors

• bullish fact_claim Will Kain

  you've seen folks like the frontier uh group that came out of stripe that's a couple billion dollars now

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Klarna announced on November 25th, Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later giant that went public here in the US this year, a major venture-backed victory for a lot of its early investors, announced its own stablecoin on Stripe's Tempo blockchain for stablecoins.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  robotics was one that I think a lot of people said, that doesn't make any sense for me. $39 billion. They don't have a customer. And they said, oh, we have BMW. BMW said, oh, well, we're testing it. Then they became a customer. And you had that really good debate in the Wall Street Journal publicly and the founder coming out and showing the product to support the valuation. But that would be one where I would say, hey, maybe that valuation is supported by, you know, the revenue eventually, but i

• neutral fact_claim Brian

  So in the case of Oboe, instead of having a tutor, you essentially pay 30, 40 bucks a month for the hiring plan and it becomes a labor replacing device. So it does that for you

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  I suspect he's going to crush it with this business.

• mixed assessment David Friedberg

  one, he's a tremendous founder with a huge vision that's incredibly costly. That last part is the issue. We've got a lot of great founders. Not enough, but we've got a lot of great ones. And he's got a big vision. We need to see more big vision. But his vision was so big that funding it, I think, has turned out to be very challenging. And hardware takes longer than you think. There was another hardware company that was incredibly ambitious, that then started to do side projects and side hustles

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  It's incredibly low, but if it's low enough, you induce a market. And now people are like, Hey, I'm going to build a product because this is so cheap and so good, which is the inducing of a market. That's beyond product market fit. That's like gravity, you know, like, I don't want to say a black hole because that's got a negative connotation to it. Maybe it's a white hole where you create. Yeah, exactly. But you just to be able to pull people into something that the product is so good, they come

• bullish assessment Brian

  Right. And luckily, I think we operate in an environment where it's sort of well understood that we may not be the best people to estimate the temp or total addressable market. Again, when Uber first came around, I think many asked, Hey, what is the addressable market for black cars? And when Airbnb came around, what is the market for house swapping? There's no equivalent. I'll give you an even more useful example where Eleven Labs initial product was dubbing. So the natural question, Jason, is

• bullish endorsement Brian

  company based in London, Eleven Labs, we had the opportunity to back the company at series A. And we at this point, quadrupled down in the company. So every single round we purchased Faden and Colette.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  the company announced a couple months ago that it's now over a $4 billion run rate growing at more than 50% year over year. And critically, David said that it has now a greater than $1 billion run rate just for its AI products.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  the fund that did the first round in Databricks is going to be in that plus category

• bullish endorsement Brian Kim

  Oboe, we had a long, we had a long thesis. Like two years ago, we actually thought about AI is coming out as changing a lot of ways that we interact with technology. Learnings and education was one of the key areas that we're excited about. Partially because, you know, relative to other earnings power, the cost of healthcare, education kept going up. Like something, something's got to give. And maybe one way, one way that AI really helps is help everyday people learn things a lot better. Second

• bearish criticism David

  it's not clear why Stripe would care about that. And I don't think it's a great fit

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  But open router is the most obvious bet of all time, in my opinion. And I, and I, you know, completely, you know, disagree with like a lot of, you know, apologies, David, a lot of VCs say there's no moat. There's no moat. Nothing has a moat. You know, if it was built once it can be built again, right? Like nothing really has a moat. It's just how long does it take you to build that thing again and make users switch to that thing? And in the last few weeks, we've seen maybe 10 router releases fro

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Look, open routers is extremely strategic asset. It gives developers API for 400 plus models and it routes everything. That being said, I don't really understand at least maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the basic principles of why there's a moat here, why somebody can't come in and offer what open router is offering and paying 70 plus X multiple is just feels too expensive to me. There's an old management consultant quote from Peter Drucker, CEOs who get bored, they start making acquisi

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  that $10 billion, David, compared to a $140 million run rate is a bit spicy. It's about 74, 78 X run rate, which seems a bit excessive. Um, so why is Stripe trying to make and willing to spend so much to make DD happy?

• mixed assessment David Sacks

  stripe cutting i mean stripe is probably the single highest quality i think it's probably the most valuable private companies now spacex oh well spacex okay but but like software pure software company they had a 14 cut

• mixed assessment David Friedberg

  it's a business that obviously benefited greatly from the pandemic and the adoption of um you know the payment processing infrastructure that they've built across their across various kind of e-commerce platforms it's i've been i'm not an investor so i don't have any numbers but there are public reports that have highlighted that the revenue increased 66 this year they've indicated that they're probably going to experience significant revenue slow down with the recession ahead but it still seems

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  it's become more popular to pursue the stripe strategy of the sort of more smb... i tend to think it's a good strategy too

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  they just announced that they're going to process a large portion of amazon's payment volume

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  the most profitable thing they could have done from an enterprise value perspective would probably have been to go public in 2018 2019 because they could have raised max value at max valuation cleaned out all these options issues and have a huge balance sheet of cash with which to do stuff whether it's acquisitions or other things because the thing that i struggle with is is there going to be long-term profitability in all of these tail products

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  stripe has it went crazy from a little over 2 000 to almost 8 000 so a 4x of employees... adion has found operating leverage... stripe has added an enormous number of employees... stripe which is having a little bit more trouble

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  when stripe got underwritten at 96 billion dollars... 55 billion dollar valuation it's down... people are re-rating the stock right by approximately 50 60 percent

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  according to a leaked pitch deck uh stripe implied they needed 2.3 billion in capital by the end of q1 2023 they're working with goldman sachs to raise a few billion at a 55 billion dollar valuation that's down 42 percent from the peak of 95 billion in 2021

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  so you then have to you then have to withhold tax on behalf of the employees and so that collective number is the four billion that stripe is trying to raise

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  four billion dollar tax bill due to cover expiring employee rsu's those are restricted stock units

• bearish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  I use the example of stripe disrupting stripe by going to market with an equivalent product with one-tenth the number of employees at one-tenth the cost

• bearish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  the problem now for stripe is that the public comps dollar for dollar are off 50 which from the beginning of the year which then says that if you apply that rateably to its valuation they did around at 55 billion then the market clearing trade may be 25 to 30 billion now now 25 to 30 billion for stripe you're incinerating 70 billion dollars of equity value right and about five to ten billion dollars of actually painting capital so what does that do for silicon valley and for vcs i think it's goi

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  actually you can just pipe that stuff directly from stripe into snowflake and you can just transform it and do what you will with it and then report it

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  you need to have an aggressive performance management culture and to stay on top of that... we really try to you know stay on top of that we track it closely

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  we measured this before covet because we were doing a lot of remote hiring and we want to see we wanted to see how much we should lean into it is that it is not good for early career people we can actually measure it in our productivity data

• bullish fact_claim John Collison

  a big reason people come to stripe is basically we are a reputation network across the internet economy and so when someone comes and buys something from a stripe user 93 of the time we have seen that card before and so the merchant can know something and know that they can trust this end user and it's gotten to the stage now where if someone comes along and buys with a credit card if they're you know signing up with an email address or a phone or something that we haven't seen before that is ju

• mixed fact_claim Unattributed

  stripe is not like a full cross-section of the economy you know we're more biased towards online we're more biased towards innovative companies you know whatever that you know it's kind of net that out somehow and you know there can be these stories where i mean during covet like the online economy was doing great uh the offline economy is of a different story so the interpretation can be a bit tricky but then just the second thing is the stripe business is growing so quickly and changing so fas

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  the fraction of money movement on stripe where you know the two counterparties are both part of the stripe network is obviously growing and so i think that'll be another way we can reduce fees over time although again i actually think the biggest part of that is it's going to be because we reduce fraud

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  the thing we really want to solve is all the calculation the id verification the risk like those are the things that are actually expensive

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  if you turn on stable coin acceptance with um you know with all in today that'll use usdc

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  stripe billing which we actually just announced uh last week has passed you know half a billion in uh in arr

• neutral assessment Patrick Collison

  most of the interchange fees that are charged to merchants and you know you mentioned uh what we charge the all in podcast you know the vast majority of that flows right back to the uh to the issuing banks uh in the form of interchange and almost all of that flows right back to the consumers in the form of you know the lending that the the the cards themselves represent but then also in card rewards like card programs are not actually big profit pools uh for most of the major banks and so i thin

• bullish assessment Patrick Collison

  the big use case that's taking off right now is consumers in other countries seeking to hold dollars you know we in the us here today you know we obviously benefit from having able to do that the vast majority of people in the world have kind of a are subject to a worse currency worse in the sense that it's less stable uh it's more inflationary you know storing savings is is much less favorable uh you know if you look at the naira for example there are a lot of people in nigeria and the the curr

• bullish assessment John Collison

  stable coins are finally happening and they're really useful like we followed crypto for a long time the bitcoin white paper dropped in 2008 the year before we started working on stripe and so it's been funny where stripe and crypto have grown up together and you know we tried to make bitcoin happen as a payment method on stripe just wasn't that good as a payment method i mean it's good as a store of value as kind of a gold substitute but transactions are slow transactions are expensive you neve

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  helping with lending we're helping with card issuance we're helping with treasury and money storage we're helping with cross-border money movement stable coins we got to talk about stable

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  the thing we kind of realized a couple years in is that you know what business like the the structural secular thing that's happening is that every kind of money movement is going from being manually orchestrated to being orchestrated by software and there's you know some programs somewhere making the thing happen and so because of that like just because of what we hear from customers and the the pull there we're now you know

• bullish fact_claim John Collison

  that's broadly accurate i would just fact check that it's nowadays not just startups even though they run on strike but also the world's largest enterprises hertz amazon ford all these kind of companies

• mixed assessment David Friedberg

  this is a 10 plus year old startup that basically if you're a startup company and you want to do transactions you use stripe for example the all-in startup uses stripe to pay for the tickets and then we give these guys for some reason a half million dollars every year no discount they don't sponsor the event and uh they're making a fortune they got 10 000 employees and uh the company changed the world

• neutral fact_claim John Collison

  it's more than a trillion dollars a year a trillion dollars a year is processed through your network and which works out to you know global gdp is around a hundred trillion a year so it works out to around one percent of global gdp incredible and you could say well you know gdp is is final goods and and you know stripes processes more than only final goods so it's not exactly

• bullish fact_claim John Collison

  when we started out with stripe we thought it would only be for startups like we thought those were the people who needed a problem solved and we thought payments was broken for them and as time went on we just found out it was kind of broken for everyone

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  it is such a first of all amazing it's an well no it's an amazing place for silicon valley where you can like see these people just keep pushing the boundaries up and up and up

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I mean, you know, this is where brand comes in. If you have a trusted brand amongst developers, and there's three choices, are they going to take tether, which people go, maybe it's a little sordid, it's offshore, I got some challenges there. Am I going to use USDC? Okay, I haven't heard of it. But okay, yeah, they sound interesting. Oh, we're gonna use Stripe. I'm gonna go right to Stripe. It's kind of like the IBM, you know, or Microsoft of payments, right? Nobody gets fired for picking Stripe

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  They bought that other company. So I got to think they'll launch their own, but bridges the facilitation later. It's the rails. Yeah.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  And I think the best way for Stripe to actually do this is just to build it and to actually facilitate payments between existing Stripe customers. Because again, it's sort of what I said last week, these are all ultimately ledger entries. And I think that the more that you can commoditize these things to be a simple ledger entry inside of two systems of record at two companies, that's a much better product feature. I think Stripe has the scale to do that now. And to your point, they could have a

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I do think Stripe's main business could be, if we're sitting here in five years, Chamath, could be sitting on $300 billion and getting whatever it is, three, four or 5% on some coupon, right? They could be making $10, $20 billion in pure profit. If they have a stable coin out there, that gets widely adopted.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I just thought the Stripe data was really interesting because it validates what we're seeing, which is the growth in this industry. It's not like anything I've ever seen before.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if they figure out network effects inside of the Stripe ecosystem, that's interesting. So that's first, which is the hub and spoke of payments being at the center, but all of these other incremental services, I think that that's really interesting and underappreciated for Stripe. That probably speaks to why there's such a difference in valuation because Adyen has less of that ecosystem, or at least it's not nearly as well described maybe as Stripe's.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the value of Stripe's ecosystem is, is probably underappreciated. I think Patrick mentioned it, but he just kind of said it as a passing fact and none of us picked up on it, but in the report, they talk about all the additional products that they're able to build around core payments. And one of them was the billing product. It's half a billion dollars a year of ARR. That's just incredible.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  So, uh, here's a quick summary. So, uh, in terms of processing volume, Adyen, 1.34 trillion, Stripe at 1.4 trillion. I mean, that's incredible that they're both in almost the same exact space. One's growing 33%, Stripe's growing 38%. Valuation, Adyen 56, they're public, Stripe, private, 91.5 billion. I guess that's the private market premium. Employee account, very interesting here, since we've been talking about, uh, Jamie Diamond's, uh, rant last week, Adyen 4.3,000, Stripe over 8,000 and, uh,

• bullish prediction Gavin Baker

  I think it will become a standard and it makes it really easy for an LLM like Stripe can just integrate with MCP.

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  I'm bearish, margins are brutal.

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  stripe just raised eight hundred million dollars in a Series C at an eight point three billion dollar valuation. Very bullish, generational company.

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  I'm bearish, the margins are brutal.

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  I'm very bullish, this is a generational company.

1. 2028-03-20 I think that people have underestimated that for a long time · Prediction · confirmed
2. 2028-03-20 we're going to hold off for as long as possible from partaking in them (public markets) · Prediction · pending
3. 2028-02-17 if something just keeps compounding why would you sell out of it and so for example my intention with stripe is to just hold stripe for the next 10 years you know i think it's going to keep growing at a really good rate forever · Prediction · confirmed
4. 2028-02-15 stripe is a payment technology company based in san francisco uh stripe raised money earlier this year at a 95 billion dollar valuation · Prediction · confirmed
5. 2028-02-15 we are hearing rumors that stripe might you know kind of or think that they bankers think that they might be able to break that and so stripes ipo could be the biggest tech ipo ever · Prediction · confirmed
6. 2028-02-15 it sounds like they're going for a direct listing and we could see that become the highest valuation tech ipo ever and then they will become kind of the golden child next year · Prediction · confirmed
7. 2028-02-15 both that stripe will have an incredible ipo and that a lot of these kami crypto projects will go to zero · Prediction · confirmed
8. 2028-02-11 this is going to be $100 billion to $1 trillion market a year in the coming decades, like every single year. · Prediction · confirmed
9. 2028-02-05 It's incredibly low, but if it's low enough, you induce a market. And now people are like, Hey, I'm going to build a product because this is so cheap and so good, which is the inducing of a market. That's beyond product market fit. That's like gravity, you know, like, I don't want to say a black hole because that's got a negative connotation to it. Maybe it's a white hole where you create. Yeah, exactly. But you just to be able to pull people into something that the product is so good, they come · Prediction · confirmed
10. 2028-02-05 I suspect he's going to crush it with this business. · Prediction · confirmed
11. 2028-01-23 I use the example of stripe disrupting stripe by going to market with an equivalent product with one-tenth the number of employees at one-tenth the cost · Prediction · confirmed
12. 2028-01-20 I think it will become a standard and it makes it really easy for an LLM like Stripe can just integrate with MCP. · Prediction · pending
13. 2028-01-17 my sense is the culture is totally broken so maybe stripe can do something really fun here with this asset · Prediction · pending
14. 2028-01-17 so what you're saying is that stripe's going to become the world's best vc firm in time that's what i just heard · Prediction · pending

VentureSignalScore 60.3/100 for stripe, composed from 3 of 4 components (ai_infra formula), discounted ×0.88 for 60% signal coverage