Ask HN: Do you think Stripe will go public?
I'd be super curious to see their financials, but I'm guessing they are printing money.
PayPal itself got caught in one of these types of decisions. The dotcom bubble peaked around Nov 1999; PayPal was founded (merged) around Dec 1998; they IPO'd in Feb 2002 with the Nasdaq having lost about 50-60% of its value at that point. July 2002 eBay bought PayPal, with the Nasdaq on the floor that Summer, having lost ~75% of its value. This was a massive mistake of timing, the Nasdaq doubled within about 16 months after that Summer of extreme lows. PayPal undervalued itself dramatically by selling when it did, timing the sale exactly wrong.
Venture capitalists have poured $190 million into Stripe. They're going to require an exit, it's a question of whether Stripe catches this stock market boom period, are forced to wait until the next one (potentially 5-10 years or more), or they miss this window and sell themselves to a big acquirer in a few years instead.
The business they're in doesn't quite print money, but it does have solid margins at scale. Visa prints money - $12.7b sales, $5.4b profit (incredible margins). Instead of Visa's 42% hyper net income margin, Stripe might reach 15-20% at scale (more like PayPal's).
The interchange rate, basically what Visa/MC charge to processors, is as low as 0.05% for debit cards and less than half what Stripe charges on many credit cards. There are hundreds of merchant account providers a business can go with that charge less than 2.9%, or charge a fixed markup over interchange. Heck, PayPal goes to 2.2% if you process just $10K/month, and 1.9% or less for bigger accounts -- that's been the case for over a decade.
Most people aren't choosing Stripe to get the best fees, they're choosing Stripe because you can get started immediately, their UX is awesome, and their reputation among the developers who have to implement the payment processing integration is stellar.