Posted by jez 14 hours ago
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.
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".
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.
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
Where in your comment authorship pipeline were these errors introduced?
I think it’s a bot, look at the post history with the weird repetitive hyphens.
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.
They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition).
They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them.
Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.
IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)
The only way to kick out the Collison's would be for the VC's to do it. They currently own 80%. It's easier for the VC's to do that if Stripe stays private than if Stripe IPO's.
Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.
Also, not sure what you mean by "tiny". It's been billions of dollars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And, of course private companies fail at a much higher rate. The set of private companies includes every company that doesn't succeed to the point where it has the realistic choice to go public. Again: wrong comparison.
frankly i dont know why would one go public today unless money is needed badly. Quarterly calls, filings, are one thing, dealing with vest bros asking "so how should we think about" questions on round tables or "whats an incrimental margin" musings as they clack away at their mini keyboards filling out their model no body can make sense of.. and then someone will publish a blog saying their company is gonna be extinct because of AI ... this is not for everybody thats for sure...
So it's true PE taking a company private has a high failure rate as far as the continuation of the company, the question is if the goal of PE is for the company to continue in the first place, or if that gets in the way of them extracting as money as possible as fast as possible. So 50% is certainly a statistic, but not useful for comparison, especially if we're looking at a private company staying private.
Delaware corporations must act in the interests of shareholders.
A widget company could sponsor a soccer team or whatever and say the costs are worth it. Or that same company could not do that and say it's not worth it. Two opposite decisions that both would count as acting in the interest of shareholders.
Which courts? Corporate law is state-level. Delaware generally has some affordances for long-term strategic decisions.
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.
Stock markets are not entirely logical from my understanding.
Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares. I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.
Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.
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.
Equinox Fitness is a major conglomerate and likely wants and cares about fraud detection software.
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.)
I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
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.
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.
Being an open-source maintainer is just some thing people decide they want to do. There's nothing special about it. If you want to get paid, figure out that arrangement for yourself. If you want to do it for free and give it away because you love it, that's great too. That's what free association is all about.
Taxing me to pay for other people to fund their hobby seems ripe for 2 bad things: 1. if the government is funding it, the government gets a say - doesn't bode well for open-source, and 2 it creates market inefficiencies in a bad way - we fund thing we shouldn't fund and we do so to support a lifestyle or hobby instead of what is truly economically valuable for all.
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
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...
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.