There goes that Seattle againâŠ
So much money in the hands of few, but where is the money?
Banks donât loan money, so, who has all those $ billions or trillions?
Think about it, just think about itâŠthe numbers are just numbersâŠon that digital display.
Are you serious? WowâŠ
In 2010, Patrick and John Collison, brothers from rural Ireland, began to debug this process. Their company, Stripe Inc., built software that businesses could plug into websites and apps to instantly connect with credit card and banking systems and receive payments. The product was a hit with Silicon Valley startups. Businesses such as Lyft, Facebook, DoorDash, and thousands that aspired to be like them turned Stripe into the financial backbone of their operations.
The company now handles tens of billions of dollars in internet transactions annually, making money by charging a small fee on each one. Half of Americans who bought something online in the past year did so, probably unknowingly, via Stripe. This has given it a $9.2 billion valuation, several times larger than those of its nearest competitors, and made Patrick, 28, and John, 26, two of the worldâs youngest billionaires.
This is paid analysts work & hype ! It is hard to understand the complex funding circles.
Everything about this is said in âMargin of safetyâ by Seth Klarman.
I want to know how credit card payment terminal companies completely missed the boat. They have all that software for their own terminals. It should have been so easy to make an app.
I just read that article. Amazing company. Now that Uber is in ruins I think Stripe may be the company of this decade. I wonder if Bezos will buy them whole? Put down 20B and I am sure they will sell.
This is amazing:
In 2016, Stripe moved into offices next door to AT&T Park in San Franciscoâs startup-heavy SoMa district. The previous tenant, file-sharing company Dropbox Inc., had tricked out the space with a bar, a music recording studio, a Lego room, and sofa swings. The Collisons got rid of all that. The kitchen, where Dropbox employees dined on individually plated meals, is now a standard cafeteria chow line. âItâs slow and indulgent to wait for food,â Patrick says.
One brother dropped out of MIT and the other Harvard. Definitely the company to watch. I like it even more than AirBnB.
I saw an article that talked about how this is the problem with startups now. Individual investors have zero chance of getting in early. Amazon went public when it was worth peanuts. Now these companies are worth billions and still donât want to go public. Who can blame them with the crazy private valuations they are getting?
Nowadays, founders didnât want to share their wealth and joy with parasitic predators like us.
Yes⊠we investors are absolute parasites⊠leeches of society⊠
Putting in the Toronto for AI: https://techvibes.com/2017/08/02/vanguards-integrate-ai-ceo-steve-irvine
Time for me to survey Toronto 
Have you did a preliminary assessment yet?
Yes, but they need someone to buy the stock or they are only rich on paper. They can quickly watch their fortune vanish the way GPRO and FIT are going.
Some recruiters tried to poach me to work at Stripe recently using equity as a selling point but Iâd imagine the valuation is so high already that it is no longer attractive.
Do you have a better option?