Can Stripe hurry up and go public so I can buy some shares?
e.g. Fidelity has a significant investment in SpaceX through a handful of their mutual funds, which you can then purchase and basically invest in SpaceX indirectly.
The best option is for the company to raise a good deal from the public markets (high valuation on limited equity) and then execute successfully without needing to raise again. If they do need to raise again they have hopefully not done a poor job on their original public IPO so that they can go back to the public markets. That said it isn't that important a factor.
Not sure where you are going with that thought. A business that isn't creating value is going out of business or selling to someone who has an idea of how to use its assets to create value.
In this current moment I would wager that if you are suggesting that you will create value in the market going forward you will get a great return on your investor dollars but you may not actually execute that value creation. (relevant news: lordstown motors)
Perhaps the company doesn't necessarily intend to create value going forward, but they must at least pretend to have that intention. What I meant was that the idea of the people buying public stock in a company is that the company will create value going forward.
In the case of cloudflare (And many tech stocks) they had a black swan event of a large portion of the global economy going online during the pandemic which has juiced their returns.
Not saying it doesn't happen but rather that it isn't how people typically price their IPOs to generate value to the retail investor.
I've been eyeing Scottish Mortgage which despite the name is actually a high-tech fund packaged as a stock publicly traded in the London Stock Exchange. They hold Stripe among many other interesting investments.
https://betakit.com/shopify-reportedly-invests-in-stripe-bri...
I observed other teams struggle to build and have tackled challenges posed by identity, 1.5$/user is terrific price. Handling PII data in itself is a rabbit hole of engineering, product, and regulatory challenges. Let alone creating unique identities, matching, and what not.
What is the usecase?
This strikes me as classic HN bikeshedding.
Instagram also don't charge users and yet they verify identity.
Using that as a means to block spammers would be.... unusual.
When are we as a community going to move past treating frameworks/languages/tools as a silver bullet? Frameworks don't make teams better; good management, technical leadership, and great infrastructure does.