Stripe founders are the youngest Irish billionaires on paper | Hacker News Reader

Stripe founders are the youngest Irish billionaires on paper

bloomberg.com

117 pointsaburan2876 comments

Rather than fret about the valuation, it's useful to look at the big picture and ask what stripe has created: an incredibly valuable product in a massive market with lots of potential. It's also rapidly capturing the value it has created: its running ahead of projected revenue and has become the preferred provider for giant companies: http://fortune.com/2015/07/28/stripe-visa/

You can have a long discussion about the real or implied valuation, but the truth is this company has a great product and terrific momentum. Who's going to stop it from becoming the next paypal?

> Who's going to stop it from becoming the next paypal?

As in market share, or support/development annoyances?

For instance, becoming the market leader worth $30B.

But the easy-to-use API is 90% of the great product, isn't it? Because I noticed most other payment processors offer similar APIs now. PAY.ON develops a white-label platform for third-parties, so now my online bank offers me RESTful payment processing for Visa and Mastercard and I think they even support PayPal.

I haven't seen a single payments API made as clean or simple as Stripe's. The magic is in what you _can't_ do with it imo.

The solutions from old style banks adopting nicer looking APIs still force you to mess around with setting up your own acquiring bank account, etc.

Yes, you have to open a free business bank account (but most companies need one anyway) and then you apply for the payment processing. I should have added a link to the platform in my initial post. [1]

It might not be as easy to use as the Stripe API, but it offers you many more payment options. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this will put Stripe out of business, I'm just saying there seems to be a change in the payment processor landscape and in a few years, people might take these simple online payment platforms for granted.

[1] https://docs.aciworldwide.com/

Ease of use really matters. If you think of your product workflow being a series of micro solutions, then user delight implies you picked the right micro problems to build a solution for. For instagram, a key micro problem was it took too long to upload photos from a phone. They solved it by pre-uploading it. A great talk in this regard is 'Stanford to startup' by the instagram founder.

Before stripe came into the scene, I tried to do a paypal integration into an app once. It was an absolute nightmare. The one time I did stripe integration, my grandmother could have done it :)

Also, it doesn't matter that every bank builds an API once Stripe becomes (or is perceived as) a market leader. People view it as genuine and provide disproportionate value to the leader. People will go out of their way to use the market leading product even if they have to pay more. When you're in a store, think of how many times you buy the more expensive product because you see that as the default brand in that space.

But wasn't PayPal the market leader? Then how could Stripe have taken over? Well, PayPal sucked (for developers). Stripe was 10X better and took over while PayPal slept.

To replace the incumbent you need to be 5-10x better, otherwise nobody bothers to move over. The key to that is to pick the right set of micro problems to solve.

> For instagram, a key micro problem was it took too long to upload photos from a phone. They solved it by pre-uploading it.

Say what‽ Does Instagram just upload everything? Or do they start uploading a picture as one is editing the comments and such?

My understanding is once you have selected a photo, they upload it in the background while you're doing other things (like typing the caption). If you decide to cancel it, I believe (hope) they delete it from the server.

But it's the specific photo, not your whole album (that would be pointless ( and expensive) to do).

Startup valuations drive me crazy. Preferred stock is not common stock!

This article says they sold a 1.6% stake, derived by taking the amount raised divided by the valuation. Once again, preferred stock is not common stock.

Amen. You'd have to be even more concerned when staff etc use this valuation when considering value of equity grants etc.

You're technically correct, but there's no distinction between preferred and common at IPO and it's a fairly safe bet they won't go public below this valuation.

I agree there are legit problems in the way valuations and fundraising gets reported. But what would you "prefer" they say?

I don't see leaking/reporting details of term sheets becoming a trend any time soon.

$150mm is ~1.6% of $9B. If they sold the whole company the day after this last round at the same price the last round paid the day before - without us guessing what random clauses might be in the term sheets or how much the bankers and lawyers might siphon off in fees (7% is not unheard of) - then the last round should just get their $150mm back or 1.6% of the total.

At least its not fake news. Mainly this is useless and inaccurate news. But it's info of interest to bloomberg audiences, many of whom know what valuation on paper means.

I agree it's misleading numbers for many newsreaders. What else could/should they report?

Yet another case of European founders that moved to San Francisco and became succesful.

They tried to start in Ireland, but without much success (e.g Enterprise Ireland hasn't allocate them funding to previous vencture).

Not like it was the US government that funded them either.

>I’m sometimes asked whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland. It’s impossible to really know the counterfactual, but I suspect not.

-p. collison (blog)

I think he was on a US bound circuit as soon as he was done with Leaving Cert. I don't think they "tried" Ireland despite selling a company siopa when they were 16 or what not.

pg was aware of the two lads from an early age and recognized their talent quickly. I have no doubt they would have done well though I doubt very much as well as they have and theres something for ourselves in the Irish scene to reflect on that.

Hm, I wonder what visa they used to move to SF.

Right now, there's no startup visa of any kind. The closest thing is the EB-5 investor visa, but that requires investing $500k-$1mil of your own money (not investor money). And, the H-1B work visa prohibits starting your own company and self-sponsoring.

If they figured out a way to move here and start a company under the current U.S. immigration system, it would benefit a lot of people to know how they did it.

> Right now, there's no startup visa of any kind.

They've been over there a while I believe. The Collison bros have for a long time been known as valedictorians - could well be they found some other means to get a visa.

I don't know their story, but I imagine that they took similar route as others: - start on ESTA or B1/B2 - switch to E2 - once successful-ish go for O-1

Actually these days there are lawyers specialized on obtaining O-1 in a pretty short period of time (3-5 weeks) for founders that get into incubators or raise >$300k.

Working on ESTA or B1/B2 would actually be considered "working without authorization" as neither permits gainful employment or self-employment (incl. remote/contract work).

The O-1 seems more plausible. You do have to be very impressive to get an O-1, but raising $300k in funding probably qualifies you.

Patrick mentioned in a tweet that they met with a bank in Ireland, and they essentially laughed him out of the room (can't find the link, it was a few years back).

He elaborates further on his blog:

>I’m sometimes asked whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland. It’s impossible to really know the counterfactual, but I suspect not.

>Stripe wasn’t easy to get off the ground. It required convincing banks to work with us, and to take a bet on an unproven startup. I actually spoke to some banks in Ireland when we were starting out, and it was pretty clear that getting them to work with us would have been a very tough battle. I doubt we’d have been able to pull it off.

> But I’m not sure that asking whether Stripe could have been started in Ireland is the right question. Most technology start-ups don’t have to convince banks to work with them. The interesting question is probably “how hard is to start a successful start-up in Ireland compared to doing so in Silicon Valley?” (I’m not claiming that Stripe itself is yet successful—it's still very early days.)

https://patrickcollison.com/post/stripe-ireland

As an Irish person who has followed the Stripe story, it's infuriating.

There are some counterexamples, but every single one of those I can think of is self-funded and doesn't rely on VC or bank funding beyond what would be strictly necessary for any business.

You can do it, but it's a hard slog, and many of the success stories (Intercom, for instance) end up relocating out of the country once they look for VC funding because Irish (and European) VCs are so damned risk averse.

Since Patrick and John have as much distaste for bullshit as the rest of us, I don't think they'll mind if we excise the silly euphemism "billionaires with funding" from the title.

Also, this is kind of a weak article that doesn't add much if any information. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037654 was a big thread on the actual recent story.

And thanks for adding "Paper" in its place, too.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are immigrants. Another to the list!

What is the reason for your distinction?

The United States is a nation of immigrants. To quote John F. Kennedy:

“Every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants”

There's a big difference between immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

I am not sure what you are getting at but it's still very much a nation of immigrants:

Here's some data:

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Annu...

He was wrong about the exception though.

Indeed, it was most certainly the only group that arrived by foot and a ice bridge :)

Two groups.

First, America the nation did not exist when people came to North America.

The second group were brought against their will.

Neither are what we usually mean by immigration.

Simple - descendants of immigrants have momentum, and when they found their startups at home it doesn't mean much beyond there not being some horribly compelling reason to leave. Immigrants founding startups is proof that there is a potential gradient strong enough to uproot them and fly them across the ocean.

>"descendants of immigrants have momentum, and when they found their startups at home it doesn't mean much beyond there not being some horribly compelling reason to leave."

Can you elaborate?

Because that sentence kind of reads like you are saying that entrepreneurship and all of the crazy risk taking involved in it are less meaningful if those entrepreneurs didn't fly across an ocean in order to get to Northern California.

It is not just flying. People need to familiarise themselves with all sorts of new things from shoe size to local law, using zed instead of s in sentences. :) This takes time and energy that could be used for something constructive.

Zed is 'z' by the way :)

>Can you elaborate?

There are startup scenes in countries with lots of problems because people don't like to and can't always leave home. Because migration is a choice between countries, immigration statistics are a "market-y" way to look countries as places to work.

For example, if we had a country with huge numbers of educated people but 40% unemployment, we would expect to see lots of web startups from people trying to find something to do - but this would not mean much for the health of their economy in the immediate term. We could pick up this signal by noticing that lots of people were leaving, indicating that being a founder doesn't have to have a positive expected value in order to be worth trying.

Likewise, a country with a great college to corporate campus pipeline might have an artifically depressed startup scene.

Not to put too fine a point on things here but sadly the current animus against immigrants is directed at people that look a certain way, not enterprising Irish lads or nice looking Slovenians.

That's great. Always proud when entrepreneurs create a great product that has seamless integreation with other platforms and improves efficiencies.

Whats not to love about this?

Not to diminish the accomplishments, but "Youngest Irish Billionaires with Funding" is an overly narrow superlative. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyNarrowSuper...)

It sounds like the bad translation of a restaurant special.

I don't think the "with Funding" is really meant to narrow the selection. I think it means something more like "based on the valuation from new Funding, are Youngest Irish Billionaires"

I think the intended grouping of that sentence is (((Stripe founders) are (youngest Irish billionaires)) (with funding)), i.e. they're simply the youngest Irish billionaires, not the youngest Irish billionaires with funding. Still a fairly narrow superlative, but less ridiculous than the original interpretation. "Youngest Irish billionaires" is the lede, "with funding" is the actual news story - they're announcing Stripe's funding round.

Normally I would agree with this interpretation, except that Bloomberg did a proper story on Stripe's new funding a few days prior: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-25/payments-...

Shitty title. Should be: "With [new] funding, Stripe founders are youngest Irish billionaires."

They still can't process my card.

So. If I value a company, of which I own 100%, at 1B, does that make me a billionaire?

If you can convince a 3rd party to give you $1 mil for 0.1% ownership of said company, yeah, you are.

No. Then I'd be a millionaire.

If you define as "millionaire/billionaire" as strictly the amount you hold in cash, yes. However, the commonly accepted definition includes entire net worth which would include the valuation of shares in companies owned.

There are two differences though. One being that the equity is highly illiquid. The other (and more important) being that there is no market validation of the valuation.

The most useful purpose of being labeled a billionaire is being identified as one who has the ability to spend a billion dollars. Obtaining $1 mil doesn't qualify, and it's highly unlikely the other 99.9% of the company would be bought for $999M, so from my perspective the only other purpose of being labeled a billionaire would be for clickbait/marketing.

Why so unlikely? Companies are frequently bought out at or above current valuation.

The ones I've heard about are usually publicly traded companies with sort of transparent finances so they're liquid. It's possible they're worth $1B, but I'd bet that more companies would like to claim they're worth $1B than actually are.

What if I convince someone to give me one dollar for 0.0000001% of my company? Am I a billionaire then?

How much do I need to actually have to be a billionaire?

How about this definition: If you have enough assets (liquid or otherwise) to convince a bank to lend you a billion, you are a billionaire.

By that measure, I can guarantee you that they don't meet the standard. Banks are rather conservative.

But probably less conservative than you think. Bank just don't like handing out loans against collateral they can't collect against.

That's exactly the point though. A bank wouldn't be able to collect.

Yeah, that counts too.

The problem is that there is no connection between someone giving me that dollar and the value of my company; just because they say that they are giving it to me because they value my company at one billion dollars doesn't make it so. Maybe they are doing it to be funny, or to prop up the value of my company. They are only sacrificing a dollar, so there is no real cost to them. It also has no bearing on or indication that anyone else would also value my company at that much.

it's interesting to think about why not. it probably comes down to noise and friction in transactions, so that 1e-9 of your company is not a meaningful/tangible quantity. you could imagine an economy in which you could indeed issue a billion shares at a dollar each and have them be worth buying individually.

The reason why it is not is that the assumptions you have to make about valuations in order for the one dollar investment to translate to the company actually being worth one billion do not hold. You have to assume that the investor is a rational actor, is capable of correctly evaluating a company's value, and is making the investment because they believe the company is worth one billion dollars.

There is no reason to believe any of these things. Lots of people who satisfy none of these requirements have a dollar to waste. They could be investing as a joke, they could be trying to pump up the value of the company for some other reason, or they could be incompetent at evaluating a companies worth. Just because a person is willing and able to throw a dollar away doesn't mean you can find people to throw a billion dollars away.

I'm all for the healthy skepticism of inflated valuations and the valley's tendency to forget that most venture funded startup wealth is illiquid, but c'mon -- what does this comment add to the discussion? Snark is not needed here; I'd rather engage in an earnest conversation about Stripe's valuation (if you have any thoughts there :))

Perhaps that was a bit snarky, but then let's also agree that the article is severely oversimplifying things. I guess I just react with annoyance when I see the press do that.

I didn't mean to belittle the accomplishment of the founders btw - keeping such a high stake in a company at such a late stage IS impressive.

Agreed, generally if its on bloomberg/TC, etc, it's gonna be simplified for the catchy headline

It does contribute, by pointing out that this 'valuation' in no way makes them billionaires.

I'd say they're closer to being billionaires than being broke...

If others are willing to trade ownership in your company such that 100% equaled 1 billion then the answer would be yes. Valuations are made based on exchanges relative to the whole's worth. That's a simplified way of how public stock markets work too.

A public stock market with common stock is very different than early funding with preferred stock. They are getting more than just at fraction of ownership; they are getting liquidation preferences and other perks that make the stake worth more than just the ownership percentage.

So if I buy a 0.0000000001% stake in his company for $1, then suddenly it really is worth $1B?

I'm suddenly reminded of his onion article[1]:

> U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

1. http://www.theonion.com/article/us-economy-grinds-to-halt-as...

No, because you wouldn't be willing to buy the entire company, or a large enough percentage to show interest in the entire company

Basecamp is valued at 100 B$: https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation-...

No, but if a billion other people joined you in a similar fashion then yes.

It's kind of like the Architect scene in the Matrix. To paraphrase, "ignorance is the most predictable of all human responses, but rest assured. This is the sixth time we have valued a unicorn, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it."

Look into the efficient-market hypothesis. Basically, the potential for profit motivates the members of financial markets to always seek the most accurate valuation of a stock as possible. This means that if there was a discrepancy in the perceived value (in this case $9 billion) and the "actual" value (in your imagination something close to $0), then the price of the stock would be more-or-less automatically corrected because an enterprising individual such as your self would be able to capitalize on this gross negligence on the part of all other financiers.

If we generalize this notion, we can conclude that the price of a public stock already includes all available information because if it didn't the potential to profit would see a shift in its price by people either shorting or longing it.

So you are kind of right. Kind of.

The value of the bet you make is only $1, so we shouldn't lend much credence to it.

The more money is at stake, the more credible the valuation. It's always speculation, of course.

A paper billionaire, yes.

Up until a few minutes ago, the title did not include the 'paper' part.

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