Which means that you have to be able to repeat after me “I am an accredited investor”, that’s the actual full list of requirements.
To your bog standard human being, trading Stripe stock has significant barriers vs trading a public stock.
This is the footnote regarding Stripe: "New deal incoming: RVI has entered a binding agreement to invest in Stripe, Inc. This investment is expected to close after RVI’s IPO, subject to meeting customary closing conditions. Note: This deal isn’t guaranteed to close."
What evidence do I need to provide as a US investor: https://help.angellist.com/hc/en-us/articles/15569926884109-...
As a non-US investor: https://help.angellist.com/hc/en-us/articles/15570114297869-...
Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance.
PayPal: $41.51B right now.
Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.
They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/paypal-stock-stripe-acquisit...
Have been waiting for a wallet product from Stripe for a while, but maybe less juicy margins than on top of credit card fees?
Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.
Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".
I pay mostly with credit card (debit really but entering the number etc). When paying with PayPal, I need to click through several screens to even be able to enter my details. They almost always show a login screen, then I have to find the small text at the bottom that says I dont want one. Then by default they want my SEPA details, which Im not going to give them, before allowing me to select Credit Card. Even then I still have to double check that the "Create PayPal Account" checkbox is unchecked before paying.
Stripe immediately shows you a form and doesn't ask any questions.
But it’s not so simple, because Stripe faces liability for merchant fraud. If you are high volume you negotiate IC+, where the plus is .1%-.4%.
The valuations price in expected growth as well as unit economics. Mastercard doesn’t have as much room to grow because cards already saturate consumer payments.
If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.
rough math, but:
$14.2T / $1.9T * 1.6% = 12% global GDP
Oh - not all bank transfers count in GDP. I often move money from one account to another.
Note that Visa has the same issue: withdrawing money from an ATM shouldn’t count towards GDP! Neither does Vemo-ing a friend to settle up a split restaurant bill (my Venmo is attached to my debit card).
Americans and credit have an unhealthy relationship.
I also don't understand the fear around SaaS recently... People believe some weird narrative about AI replacing SaaS apps... Oh boy, people actually think that building the thing is the hard part. The entire software industry is pure crony-play; the people who run the big corporations own shares of their SaaS providers so they have no incentive to cut those contracts. Same with payment processors. I can't believe people still think we have a free market.
You can point to any company that's successful and there will be conflicts of interest all over the place. It doesn't even matter what the company does TBH. It's irrelevant.
People are just competing on who can make the money move around in circles within their group the fastest. Money certainly seems a lot more abundant when it passes through many hands and people are just buying stuff from each other.
You have to either 1. Solve the problem for a new customer who hasn’t solved this problem. 2. Solve a totally different problem than your competition. or 3. Invent a completely different paradigm for approaching solving that problem.
A good case study is search. Nobody could compete with Google, until ChatGPT. Note that ChatGPT is not just “Google but better”, but instead does (3): it’s a different paradigm for answering your questions. Even though it’s much better at solving this problem, people still don’t switch from Google. Most of ChatGPT growth comes from (1): new customers, because ChatGPT usage is highest among young people who haven’t already solved their problem and aren’t sticky with Google.
You underestimate how sticky customers are out of habit. Cable news is now an inferior product for information retrieval, but it’s sticky because it’s already there, solving the problem, for that generation.
If you want to become a bank regulatory approval is hard. If you don't then its necessary but not the biggest barrier by far. Building trust with card networks, merchants & banks, interfacing with card networks, optimizing acceptance rates to a high level against the black box of card networks etc.
And then you still wouldn't make any money because the margins are extremely low on processing payments themselves - so either you have to have massive scale or have a bunch of value added services that you charge more for. For which you also need a serious commercial engine to be able to sell to either loads of enterprises or some very large ones (who will rarely sign exclusive deals - they will just give you a share of wallet so they can transfer traffic over at will).
Card networks are another story...
i list for you the main problems with entering this space:
criminal liability for mistakes (AML rules), you have to manage fraud, the banks which are your custody providers will constantly try and shut you down, clients expect your service on day one to be equal to mastercard, your margins are almost nothing, it is one of the most competitive industries in the world, you need to go through central bank regulations/SEC equivalent every time you enter a new market, governments in countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh or China are actively hostile to your business model, and it is HYPER competitive. anything you do well, stripe/airwallex/etc will clone immediately
Airwallex is one of the most powerful stripe competitors and the CEO is a psychopath that seems like a tv parody of a silicon valley CEO. he has to be though because so many governments, banks, competitors etc are trying to crush him constantly.
note that stripe differentiates itself heavily on checkout technology, basically making the experience of paying for things easier for the consumer.
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
Stripe being able to find all the capital they need in private markets is the actual indicator of wealth disparity.
Stripe might not need your money now, but they certainly needed it at the pre-seed, seed stage where if you were an angel/seed investor you would have been able to participate.
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.
Seems "fair" to be honest.
I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.
Still, the theory is that having $100 million, even as an 11 year old, means you have about $90 million more than most people to lose before it even becomes an issue. Hence "accreditation". Accreditation isn't about "can you make smart investments" but about "will you be broke and destitute soon", and having $100 million makes it harder than I'd $400k is your life's savings, and you're about to put it all into NFTs.
Is the theory, anyway.
But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
Stripe's bigger _and_ growing faster.
Besides, if AI replaces all white collar jobs, and crashes high spending consumer economy, all payment vols will go down.
Adyen reported 500 million EUR in pure profit: https://investors.adyen.com/financials/h2-2025-4r9rc
I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair.
I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Everyone involved is making informed choices.
I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
That's exactly what I want. If you want to give your product away for free, that's great! You're a better person for doing so. If you want to sell it, that's great too! You should be rewarded and compensated for building great stuff just like anyone else is.
But what I do not want to see as a citizen and taxpayer is "we want to build this for free, ope now we want to get paid and it's totally not fair that Meta took our free thing and did something productive with it and we need taxpayer dollars.". That's not fair to anyone, and solving that by "mandating" or "requiring" things is anti-free market, and against the free spirit of human creativity and entrepreneurship.
> When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations
Let's not call it all charity though. You get invited to conferences, you get job opportunities you otherwise wouldn't get, you get to feel great about the thing you are working on - there's a lot of unpaid benefits, and under-the-table ones too.
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
I can't really see a net-positive benefit to having public shareholders and reporting requirements. Do we think Stripe's leadership needs feedback from random investment advisors or analysts? Do employees need the distraction of daily-updating stock prices? Would quarterly reporting incentivize better decision making?
In my opinion: ehhhhhhhhhhhh
I see the benefit, but if you're joining Stripe you know the trade-off of RSUs in a company that doesn't provide daily liquidity. They provide it on a regular basis, so you're not locked in forever (a la my 2014 Gusto shares).
One advantage is that whales can't play around with the stock price, say VCs dumping stocks at an unfortunate moment and putting pressure on the price. But it's also just wall street folks doing price manipulation for options schemes that can be an issue (it's illegal but has low enforcement if you are rich and well connected). Also lower chance of activist investors, and less of a quarterly pressure to show nice numbers, etc.
The advantage is also a disadvantage: minority shareholders of non-public companies have much less rights than those of public ones, and that includes employees. That's part of why you are dependent on the founder's goodwill on whether a startup exit can screw over rank and file employees or not. I'm not sure how much that danger is still out there if the company is doing tender offers, but it might still exist actually. Similarly, you can structure tender offers in a way that say former employees are disadvantaged, and many other arbitrary criteria.
Note that this depends greatly on the jurisdiction, e.g. in Germany there is legislation that's unfriendly to minority shareholders even for public companies, e.g. visible in the Varta takeover, imo part of why the idea of adding stocks to pensions will be ripe for money grabbing schemes of whales against the smaller owners.
Also employee of private company with tender offers, but not Stripe. Opinions my own.
The important part is that the Collison's control Stripe now. When that changes things may go down hill. It won't matter if it is public or not.
Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.
Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.
This is an incredibly odd sentiment, imo. What’s the desire to see them go public unless you personally are profiting from it? Going public would quickly set Stripe on a pathway to potential enshittification and at minimum starting to squeeze the consumers and businesses it provides services to more.
Public companies allow the rest of us to participate in a success story like this.
Until IPO it’s only a selected group of affluent people who have access to these private companies.
Also, private companies fail at a much higher rate than public ones do.
Navigating the risk and growth allows them to navigate their growth and rewards while maybe in the drivers seat a bit more.
But for the good of all of society, it would be better if they did.
They also have a tax product, and a few other things that are in the orbit around payment processing.
Their product offerings are a bit more than just the "dumb pipe" portion of the transaction.
Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
Private companies can say whatever they want about their performance as long as they don't lie to their own investors; public companies can't.
Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.
Helcim takes ages to respond to tickets. They still haven't fully set up my account after weeks. You can't just do sandboxes or dev mode by default; you have to speak to a human via email who sets it up for you and provide the test card numbers. It takes ages.
The rates are much better and once it's fully set up and integrated, I guess it'll be fine? I'm not looking forward to needing support and adding further integrations.
I guess the moral here is that Stripe has gotten worse for small projects, but it's still really good.
A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.
(They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)
You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.
This is not true. Every payment processor needs this effort because as soon as you broadcast that you're a payment processor you're going to get about 3-5 scammers a day.
As an aside I really think Mercury bank should audit their onboarding process.
Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.
Stripe cites 34% growth for the same period and metric.
[1]: https://s205.q4cdn.com/875401827/files/doc_financials/2025/q...
I'd argue that 99% of the "internet gdp" happened after Stripe was founded
PayPal seems crazy when it has acquired businesses like Honey (probably hasn’t helped) and Braintree/Venmo since then. Pretty funny PayPal was spun off as the better growth stock but eBay has tripled since then and their market caps are the same now.
however as a comparison -- how much JP Morgan payments would be valued if a separate entity ?
Disgusting rip-off of consumers, yes, but even worse is the rip-off of merchants.
