Stripe acquires Clerky
clerky.com
clerky.com
I wish all smaller startup that is being acquired by big fish would start their blog by stating what they do first. So that hopefully we get a little bit of context of what is being sold and what it might add in the future.
Every single time I had to click around and look at what they do and what are their competitors to help understand the company.
I've been bitten far too many times by low info density wall of text.
I think this is many people's algorithm.
wall? it is less than 400 words, separated over 5 paragraphs. is that what counts as a "wall" now?
your comment is longer (49 words) than it takes to get to the answer of what clerky does (45 words).
The one question I want answered is "what is Stripe buying?" I know the prose is typical acquisition copy. I can figure out the strategy myself once I know what was bought.
for someone who goes on about how busy and valuable your time is, you are making some interesting decisions
Maybe I'm wasting your time now.
It seems to be, yes. The Twitterization of discourse.
You don't need to rely on Stripe to do anything. There are other payment gateways, and you can file things yourself (or hire someone).
Do they make things very easy and accessible for a smaller fee than doing it yourself, yes.
C corps can offer a lot of advantages in terms of shareholder and employee benefits, particularly around healthcare, and QSBS is a huge benefit for qualified businesses and owners who might one day sell the business.
Unsure how much I trust my searches for this kind of stuff on the web lately
Lol, no.
Firstbase, Doola, Capbase. Not to mention all the old school cos that will help you incorporate in their state.
So I wouldn't Stripe controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure – just the flashy stuff (which I'm sure is great too).
(disclaimer: former Stripe employee)
tbh I still don't understand why anyone bothers paying anyone or anything to do the paperwork, it's not like Federal taxes
The only thing more complicated than Federal taxes is environmental regulation. Everything else is simpler.
But thanks for wording the press release as "company X acquired company Y", and not some weasely lingo line like "Y is joining the X family".
Hoping that now they'll have the best of both worlds!
Thus, a million little acquisitions to make the possible Stripe bundle for small companies stronger, as they become the moat. The opposite of, say, the Adyen play, when you want to lower your own costs, and make money on tiny margins to do processing for really large companies.
Fraud detection is really, really, really, really hard so I would probably stick with someone like Stripe for this, as they have so much data that they can do a really good job.
And fundamentally, the moat for Stripe isn't just the front-end APIs, it's all the work that they do (and there's a lot) in connecting together financial infrastructure. Even if you could wave a magic wand and generate all the code Stripe has (which you can't, currently) then you'd still need to build out all the partnerships, which is a lot of work.
Disclaimer: former Stripe (though only a tourist), still hold some of their shares.
There are also a couple of advantages. They can take money directly from revenue before it leaves Stripes and without any processing costs. They can also invest into startups through credits and financing. And finally, their exposure to bankruptcy risk can drop as well.
If you don't like a government regulating a market then you haven't seen a company do it.
Clerky is an absolutely amazing product and the team there are equally as amazing.
Nothing ever came of my incorporated business (no spend, no revenue) and I received extremely menacing "collections" physical mail over many months about delinquent business incorporation franchise tax payments and escalating fees + fines (which I never paid).
The experience left me a very negative opinion of Clerky (and Delaware).
Imagine how much capital and work hours society would be saving.
What does Clerky do that Atlas doesn’t to justify the acquisition?
Seems like the easiest way to grow Atlas.
I gave up and went with Clerky, paid them $800 lifetime fee, and had things done the same day. A few years later I needed to change the name of my corporation and their support made it an absolute painless breeze.
So, I understand things change over 6 years, but Stripe Atlas was vaporware garbage when I attempted to use it.
That said, I wonder if this reflects how much people are using LLMs for generating legal boilerplate, rather than using lawyer-generated boilerplate (i.e. clerky). As in, this is another version of Stack Overflow losing traffic.