It's insane that they aren't public yet. Their investors must be pressuring them like crazy to IPO.
rf15•Feb 24, 2026
Why ask for IPO to dillute the effective investor pool if you are already making a ton of money consistently?
fourseventy•Feb 24, 2026
To give liquidity to investors.
Cyph0n•Feb 24, 2026
Don’t they already get to participate in secondary markets to liquidate?
KK7NIL•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
I see, thanks for the clarification.
onion2k•Feb 24, 2026
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.
KK7NIL•Feb 24, 2026
> 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.
303space•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Perhaps infrastructure has a different kind of long term upside.
skybrian•Feb 24, 2026
Even for good investments, investors will want to sell at some point rather than owning an investment forever, if only to diversify.
onion2k•Feb 24, 2026
Sure, at some point. Maybe that isn't now though.
j45•Feb 24, 2026
Maybe certain types of growth aren't the goal for Stripe at present.
fourseventy•Feb 24, 2026
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.
ndr•Feb 24, 2026
Will they ever have to go public? I imagine there's a way they can buy everything back.
mercwear•Feb 24, 2026
I hope they hold off - going public tends to kill innovation and replace it with bureaucracy
anovikov•Feb 24, 2026
Almost as if there's a lot to innovate in a "dumb pipe" a payment processor naturally is.
dewey•Feb 24, 2026
Can probably build it in a weekend.
malfist•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
I guess I should've added "/s" :P
pestaa•Feb 24, 2026
dewey was joking.
elictronic•Feb 24, 2026
Management reading a thread like this need the /s.
ggregoire•Feb 24, 2026
in 2 hours with claude code
jacquesm•Feb 24, 2026
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.
zer00eyz•Feb 24, 2026
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.
jameson•Feb 24, 2026
Everything's public appearance until S1 is filed
baxtr•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
kibwen•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Short term investors don’t matter. They are going to pull out and move to the next thing.
arcticbull•Feb 24, 2026
Depends. In Michigan it is binding precedent, see Dodge v. Ford (1919).
Delaware corporations must act in the interests of shareholders.
elictronic•Feb 24, 2026
This case was specifically about dividends and long term shareholder value, not quarterly results.
rurp•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
> 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.
bryanlarsen•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
baxtr•Feb 24, 2026
So keep the profits only for the rich then? I rather see more IPOs for the rest of us.
WarcrimeActual•Feb 24, 2026
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.
RobRivera•Feb 24, 2026
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.
thinkingtoilet•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Working class people have 401ks and pension plans
paxys•Feb 24, 2026
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.
j45•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
How would becoming a public company be better for all of society?
Stock markets are not entirely logical from my understanding.
gamblor956•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
jameskilton•Feb 24, 2026
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.
adventured•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
> 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.
armadyl•Feb 24, 2026
> 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•Feb 24, 2026
If they are ex-Stripe they are likely holding shares, and so yes they would personally profit from going public.
jez•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
There may be a conflict of interest with ex-Stripe folks wanting to see a move towards x or y.
maratc•Feb 24, 2026
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.
tyre•Feb 24, 2026
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).
malfist•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
bryanlarsen•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
toomuchtodo•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
overfeed•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Why IPO at all, if they will release a "negligible number of shares"?
bryanlarsen•Feb 24, 2026
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.
fnordpiglet•Feb 24, 2026
The latest self funded tenders have been pretty tiny. I wouldn’t term it as “liquidity” as much as a symbolic gesture.
tyre•Feb 24, 2026
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.
coffeemug•Feb 24, 2026
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.)
Rastonbury•Feb 24, 2026
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
coldpie•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
As opposed to VC owners, who are famously satisfied with slow growth. Right?
johnny_canuck•Feb 24, 2026
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.
giancarlostoro•Feb 24, 2026
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?
mattas•Feb 24, 2026
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.
stefan_•Feb 24, 2026
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).
paxys•Feb 24, 2026
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.
cmiles8•Feb 24, 2026
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.
pewpewp•Feb 24, 2026
How do you ruin a good company? Simple. Go public
StopDisinfo910•Feb 24, 2026
The cynic in me thinks they don't want to crash their valuation.
doctorpangloss•Feb 24, 2026
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.
colesantiago•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Not to mention: Stripe doesn't want your money, whether or not you're accredited.
colesantiago•Feb 24, 2026
"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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
paxys•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Why don't we extend this to the risky public manipulated stock market?
paxys•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
Why do you think that is?
tptacek•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
jonas21•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
We don't care if people with $100MM make a bad bet on a tech company.
shimman•Feb 24, 2026
Maybe we should, seeing how disastrous unregulated tech has been for society.
fragmede•Feb 24, 2026
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.
aliljet•Feb 24, 2026
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.
dyauspitr•Feb 24, 2026
How exactly?
aliljet•Feb 24, 2026
The easiest way? Angelist.
beambot•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
throwaw12•Feb 24, 2026
Congratulations.
But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
fastball•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
throwaw12•Feb 24, 2026
yeah, my bad, wanted to say more valuable
shimman•Feb 24, 2026
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.
antiford2049•Feb 24, 2026
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.
malfist•Feb 24, 2026
According to wikipedia, Stripe had a revenue of 5.1B in 2024.
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.
snowhale•Feb 24, 2026
stripe has a bigger software revenue mix -- Atlas, Treasury, Radar, Connect -- that commands higher multiples than pure payment processing. adyen is cleaner as a business but it's basically a payments rail. stripe's embedded finance products are what analysts are really pricing in. whether that thesis holds post-IPO is another question.
quesera•Feb 24, 2026
> 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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
On top of that, almost every single recent comment has “—“, that is enough signal in opinion.
shevy-java•Feb 24, 2026
> 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.
ericmay•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
> 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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
atonse•Feb 24, 2026
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.
skinnymuch•Feb 24, 2026
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.
rprend•Feb 24, 2026
1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
jez•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
At least it’s not 24.9%
Americans and credit have an unhealthy relationship.
hwhehwhehegwggw•Feb 24, 2026
Why will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?
rprend•Feb 24, 2026
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.
Centigonal•Feb 24, 2026
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.
antiford2049•Feb 24, 2026
this number is a little misleading, to put it mildly.
miohtama•Feb 24, 2026
Weak. They should pivot to AI.
hmokiguess•Feb 24, 2026
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)
krainboltgreene•Feb 24, 2026
You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.
MichaelZuo•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
Oh, that makes sense. I was thinking fraud as in AML requirements, not fraud as in scammers and card theft.
hibikir•Feb 24, 2026
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.
hibikir•Feb 24, 2026
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.
hmokiguess•Feb 24, 2026
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.
fragmede•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
krainboltgreene•Feb 24, 2026
Even if that was true literally no payment processor cares about what a small project worries about and they never will.
Stromgren•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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
purple_ferret•Feb 24, 2026
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.
rprend•Feb 24, 2026
This multiple is indirectly a bet on AI growth , because Stripe is the payment processor for the vast majority of AI startups.
jppope•Feb 24, 2026
Sounds like an IPO in 6-18 months.
2OEH8eoCRo0•Feb 24, 2026
Ludicrous valuation
s_dev•Feb 24, 2026
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?
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".
hibikir•Feb 24, 2026
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•Feb 24, 2026
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.
MoonWalk•Feb 24, 2026
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.
syedkarim•Feb 24, 2026
Visa is valued at $585B and Mastercard is valued at $444B. Is Stripe making more revenue per transaction than Visa and Mastercard?
14 Comments
Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Equinox Fitness is a major conglomerate and likely wants and cares about fraud detection software.
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.
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.
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/
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".
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.
Disgusting rip-off of consumers, yes, but even worse is the rip-off of merchants.