Stripe’s valuation is only 10B. It’s much more solid that other unicorns at similar valuation. Most of all its founders came across as authentic and grounded. Compare that with Dropbox also at 10B valuation. C’mon! Steve Jobs famously said Dropbox is only a feature not a product. That remains the best description of Dropbox by far.
I wish Stripe can fend off the big bad wolf aka Bezos and IPO so we small potatoes can have a piece of its action. But Stripe really looks like something that belongs in Amazon… I wonder if Bezos is thinking alike?
I believe I will get more bang for the buck if I stay with my current company than working for Stripe. Quite frankly I have no interest in late-stage startups as they tend to be stingy in giving out stock options and are generally overhyped.
Not yet, I just feel that Canada as a whole is big bubble (since they never have proper correction). One more article that point to Silicon Valley → Toronto (AI and other tech) story here: https://movnorth.com/story/
I would add quantum computing and blockchain to the emerging trends. I read the Economist’s technology quarterly on quantum computing from the March issue. It’s a lot closer than I thought:
AI seems mostly a technique to make the current services better. It’s like ketchup. You can apply ketchup to make the food you cook taste better, but it’s difficult to have a ketchup startup. I think about AI in a similar way. Especially for big data, you need to have, err, big data. It’s the existing big corporations like Facebook and Amazon that have those.
No it’s in the so-called growth and expansion stage. I wouldn’t mind taking on risk to work for a company with seed funding only, but that usually translates to getting a significant pay cut.