Stripe raises $18 million from Sequoia
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So, thanks. We're pretty excited about the next few years.
I have a project ready to go (with the exception of billing). It is almost impossible for an Australian business to easily accept credit card payments in USD.
I have looked at Saasy.com but the lack of data portability makes it an unattractive option.
PayPal works just fine for that, although it's not so pleasant to integrate and manage.
This is a good thread http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/brows... about the complexities in setting it up in Australia and unfortunately I suspect Stripe will consider the risks outweigh the benefits of providing this sort of functionality in oz.
I seriously suggest you look at Paypal, if you want to make switching easy however, abstract the implementation as much as you can. We're using CheddarGetter to do the abstraction for us, its $79 / month for CheddarGetter...but any half decent programmer who i trust with our billing doesnt cost far from that per hour anyway. Its a cheap means of getting around some smelly situations!
We decided to go with paypal payments pro for our beta because stripe wasnt supported in Canada, as soon as you guys get here we'll make the switch however! Very excited you have people working on it!
Get yourselves into Canada!
Stripe is a lesson on how to build a company from the ground up. Surrounding yourself with incredibly intelligent people tends to have an outcome like this (both product and valuation). Congrats guys!
I understand the importance of passing on people who are a close-but-in-the-end-imperfect fit for your organization. But using the concept of class and grading people from A to F just makes my skin crawl, and it makes me want to avoid any company or organization who things about people that way, YC included.
Am I the only one?
People are unequal, and in a business context, that means some people are worth less than others. You can grade them on a curve, but that just means we'll all learn that a "B" means you're a failure, and that really good companies are only recruiting among As and A+s. Differences in ability can't be fixed through semantics.
A fun game is to ask the person using this kind of language whether they consider themselves an A, B, or C player.
Surely the team must be great to be doing so well, and best of luck and kudos to them! But what exactly am I supposed to be seeing on that overview page? Which part triggered your "A class" detector?
I hired what you would call B/C class talent because i loved their work ethic. Simply put, they get shit done and follow the guidelines while some A class people try to write the perfect solution which takes more time (planning overhead etc). Of course you need A class talent for certain positions, but certainly not all, not even in engineering.
Also if you are bootstrapping on a rather low budget, attracting A class talent isnt the easiest thing todo anyway.
I so much want to become a customer that I'm seriously considering incorporating ShiningPanda LLC (or C-Corp) somewhere in the United States for this sole purpose. And probably dissolving ShiningPanda SAS (French equivalent, more or less, of a C-Corp) to reduce the costs, as SAS are pretty expensive to keep around, and it would become largely pointless.
Do someone have experience with such an endeavor? The part that I can't seem to figure out is how to pay foreign people, living abroad, from an American company. All the while avoiding double taxation.
If someone have references toward a good lawyer / accountant / tax lawyer to figure out all that... My email is alexis dot tabary at shiningpanda dot com
There's a lot to like about Stripe, but my absolute favorite under-appreciated thing is their name and domain name.
Hard to quantify just how much it helped, but I seriously doubt they would have had quite this trajectory with a name like Chargerly.com or even possibly Stripe.io.
My point is mostly just about the name though. Square is an amazing name. Imagine if they had been called Skware or Swipify?
I think you're better off being called Square and having Squareup.com for a while than settling for Swipify.com.
That is what Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Square, and many others have done.
Bad: Poor name + poor domain.
Good: Great name + poor domain.
Best: Great name + great domain (Stripe).
We started out as bfffr (name and domain) and quickly changed to Buffer (domain bufferapp.com).
It's tempting with things like Forrst and Dribbble around though :) (I still love both these startups)
:)
Congrats gang. I'm sure it's only partially a manpower issue with international expansion - dealing with institutions only moves so quickly.
This definitely draws a line in the sand for the online payment provider process. Looks like Paypal has been served.
Disclaimer: my business is a huge Paypal user, but we've been actively looking at Stripe and put in our plans for 2012 to begin to transition to them. Exciting times!
Proud to see more Irish founders succeeding in the US, and as I know they'll be reading here: good job guys, keep it up.
I wonder what might happen down the road when users make mistakes that put themselves in PCI compliance violation (like posting a form to their server with input names, thus sending the card info). What kinds of effects could this have on the business, their image, and the customers?
congrats to the stripe folks!
(And I think that's a good thing.)