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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why a payment processing company is putting out books? Too much funding?

Their about page (particularly their mission statement) provides some color: https://stripe.com/about

Stripe hasn't been "just a payment processing company" for quite some time.

An optimistic view of this move is that it fits in well with their mission: these books could, in theory, inspire, educate, and motivate people to build or grow their businesses.

A more cynical(1) view is that this is simply more elaborate content marketing – getting Stripe's name out there to people who are interested in this content, who are overwhelmingly in Stripe's target market.

(1): Cynical in that it's less feel-good, but I don't at all mean that this is a bad thing.

It seems to somewhat line up with the Stripe Atlas thing, only even earlier in the process - They're targeting entrepreneurs before they even start their businesses, so that they'll use Stripe when they need to start making money.

I don't think Stripe identifies as a "payment processing company". That's the category their main product exists in but as I understand it, their mission as a business is to "increase the GDP of the internet", which is why they are invested in projects like Stripe Atlas to make it easy for people to form new businesses.

Under that banner, releasing content aimed to help businesses be more successful is totally aligned with their goals.

Well a higher volume of transactions benefits a payment processing company, so “increasing the GDP...” is very much what you’d expect of a payment processing company, however they choose to market themselves. Plus “making the world better/richer” is a popular SV marketing spiel, and clearly they know marketing.

In the same way, I've seen Mercedes-Benz sometimes claim to be a "Lifestyle Company".

They're not. They make and sell cars, and Stripe is a payments processor.

I think it's a little bit different, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple, are all just as much lifestyle companies as they are product companies in their given verticals. The big reason they are able to charge the prices that they do, and retain the clientele that they have is due to that lifestyle image.

The cars Mercedes makes and sells are absolutely abysmal (overpriced, unreliable, expensive to operate) when viewed as transportation appliances. Yet there's a reason the company still exists and its customers didn't buy Priuses instead.

Me neither. As a Stripe user, I'd like to see them focus on their core business of processing payment.

If they could lower fees to 1.9% it would make my business grow much faster. With Stripe Connect, the end fee I have to charge those on our platform isn’t competitive with anyone else. Pretty much have to apologize about the high fees to our potential customers and hope that our other features offset the negative of the high fees. We do about 20k per month in charges so we aren’t big enough to get a “deal” but 3.4% on Connect charges means we are more expensive than literally every other competitor. It has resulted in us seriously considering using something like First Data which sounds horrible from a developer standpoint, but potential customers pointing out lower fees in other places makes it harder to compete. I understand there is are fraud concerns, but we have been with Stripe for over 5 years now, so one would think our risk profile would be well established. As it is now, our high fees subsidize losses from less established or reputable companies.

In 5 years we have had exactly one chargeback.

I am excited about nice books, but I am more excited about Stripe using some of their growing market clout to attain lower fees.

More businesses = more Stripe users.

A great marketing strategy (brand recognition) that actually pays for itself. Brilliant.

That's a very good question. They call the series "Ideas for Progress," and yet all the authors are men based in the U.S., and everyone blurbing these books also appears to be a man based in the U.S.

Fine, okay, maybe sometimes the diversity argument gets annoying and stale, but seriously‽

There's a reason publishers exist. If they're good, they have enough experience to not be so myopic and tone-deaf.

“There's a reason publishers exist. If they're good, they have enough experience to not be so myopic and tone-deaf.”

That’s a stretch. Publishing has been dominated predominantly by white men for a long time.

True, but I think any decent publishing house in 2018 would look at its lineup of authors and, upon finding it all-male, would go back to the drawing board. Stripe did not do that. They ran with it.

Isn’t your argument itself sexist? Judging the publishing company based on the sex of the publisher? Is there any actual content that offends you or is it just the people publishing it? Serious question.

Why should one judge any book by the gender or geography of the author, editor, or blurb writer?

I wasn't commenting on any one book, but observing a pattern about the entire series.

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