Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

This certainly makes Stripe the most valuable private startup in the world.

Where does Stripe rank among the world's most valuable private companies, though? It's easy to find lists of dubious quality like this: https://news.yahoo.com/10-most-valuable-private-companies-21..., but I'm sure there are more lurking. What are they?

View on HN

> This certainly makes Stripe the most valuable private startup in the world.

Stripe has not been a startup for a while, they've been in public operations for about 10 years now and probably power a large portion of online purchases.

Why does any of what you said disqualify them as a startup?

Probably because they are a billion dollar mature company. Every company was a startup at some point but at some point they are a mature company that shouldn’t be called startup anymore. Stripe is certainly one of them.

I don't get it. I follow PG's definition of a startup [1]. I think Stripe still qualifies as one.

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Well its PGs perspective whose opinion is not accepted or valued world wide, Indian government doesn't consider you a startup any more after crossing certain age and revenue. Also a lot of companies will not recognise you as a startup(for offers) after you cross certain threshold. Stripe is far from that threshold.

This is not a startup by any meaning of the word “start”. He should call it “high growth company ” If you go by growth then Apple may be considered a startup after 40 years in business.

true. any word on their market share %?

They started processing a portion of Amazon.com's purchases back in 2017 and I'm guessing that portion has probably grown since then.

Bytedance was valued at $180 billion back in November. I was shocked to learn how many products they have besides Douyin/TikTok.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/05/tiktoks-parent-company-byt...

Koch Industries is worth well in excess of $100 billion.

Coinbase is still private and is valued at $100 B.

Would they have that valuation if they were non-custodial?

I don't necessarily know if this is relevant. Coinbase's custody business is a relatively small (but growing) branch mostly for institutions. Its consumer product is not driven by the fact that it is custodial, but by its function as a gateway between the crypto and fiat world. Where you ultimately put the crypto you acquire through them is entirely up to you, and in fact Coinbase does provide a non-custodial wallet product called Coinbase Wallet.

Probably be worth more. Being custodial is a liability and Coinbase doesn't charge anything for it.

Bosch is privately owned and they made 71 B€ of revenue in 2020, so about 180 times bigger than Stripe.

Yeah, I don't know about these lists. Cargill valued at 40bn when wikipedia says they own 60bn in assets and profiting...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill

Cargill is an agritrader. They are a big company but definitely not as valuable as Stripe (look at some of the other ABCDs).

Trading businesses never get high valuations. But they throw off real cash. Different strokes for different folks.

True.

They don't get high valuations because their earnings fluctuate a lot, and their average profit margin is like 1-3%, as compared to like stripe or apple which probably has like 30%.

> Cargill valued at 40bn when wikipedia says they own 60bn in assets and profiting

This is true, but it's unclear how much debt they are carrying, and a quick Google couldn't find out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com