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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

I'd guess you could also hire local people. They'd cost money too, but $200M?

Similar things happened with eBay in Germany, the clone was named Alando (then sold for $43m in 1999 after running for a few months).

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Stripe is a multi-billion dollar company and will likely have one of the biggest IPOs ever within 1-2 years. $200M is a bargain price to acquire the market leader in an emerging market like Nigeria.

It is a very good deal for Stripe, but I do wonder if would it have been a better deal to buy 2-3 early stage Nigerian startups five years ago.

Maybe the winners aren't willing to sell early/cheap.

Should Stripe be investing in seed/Round A start-ups? Having Stripe as a resource could be big -- funding, advice, and potentially infrastructure.

You're right about that -- Stripe led Paystack's series A and has also led other series A rounds like Fast's.

If you look at Stripe’s strategy, they tend to ride certain horses rather throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks, so it wouldn’t have made sense for them to buy 2-3 when they only need to buy 1 that’s really good.

And that’s what they did when the led Paystack’s $8m series A funding 2 years ago when they were almost 3 years old.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/28/paystack-with-ambitions-to...

They spent 200M for the one they now know is successful. It does seem likely they could've had > 10% chance of success for under 20M, but that might just be me being way too optimistic / not understanding the expenses of trying to deal with a banking system.

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