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Comment by jorgecurio | Hacker News Reader

Is this coincidence or what? Yelp CFO also resigned. Two executives from two different sinking ships.

Paypal is getting murdered by Stripe. Yelp thought it could raise stock prices by buying traffic. Something had to give, someone has to take the blame.

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Looking at Paypal's Q4 2015 statement, they made $500 million in profit on $2.5 billion in revenue, up from $400 million in profit on $2.1 billion in revenue from Q4 2014. If that's what a sinking ship looks like, I'd love to be on board!

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-4BS3R8/148031109...

PayPal a sinking ship? Getting murdered by stripe? I call bullshit - do you have numbers to back you up?

Here's a documentary about that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA

In the first down market Stripe will no longer exist. They are losing money at an incredible rate and no where near profitable. They are losing money at a rate of about $100MM per year, and having to raise the same.

Perhaps they can make it to IPO, but even at a 3.5B valuation, they have to find profitability very quickly, a 3.5B market cap can turn into a $250M market cap very quickly, just ask GroupOn.

When you are losing more per year than you can book in revenue, this is not a good business, and certainly isn't going to take over the market.

This is doubly true if Paypal is firing their CTO, who is in the end responsible for their situation, poor usability, and very poor APIs. If Paypal wakes up and starts fixing their issues, they are closing the one and only thing that is giving companies like Stripe an opening.

> They are losing money at an incredible rate and no where near profitable. They are losing money at a rate of about $100MM per year, and having to raise the same.

Do you have a citation for that? I couldn't find anything when I tried searching.

Indeed. A lot of people reading HN surely have some sort of business interest that uses Stripe, so if they are really in such a fragile position then that would be a significant risk for many here. And yet this is the first suggestion I've seen of it at all, never mind the huge burn rate claimed.

Groupon ($GRPN) is valued at 1.3 Billion, roughly its all time low. So I'm not sure that's the metaphor you wanted?

Right, and at its high it was hyped up to more than $15B.

So if Stripe is worth 5B, and has a similar % drop, it will be worth about 300M, or about half as much money as it has raised.

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