Hey -- just want to say thanks to the people on HN who've given us feedback and encouraged us along the way. We're building Stripe for the kind of people who read Hacker News, and the suggestions we've received here have generally been the most useful feedback we've gotten anywhere.
So, thanks. We're pretty excited about the next few years.
I am really excited. Thank you for all your hard work. Can't wait for it to break Canadian ground. I waited 1.5 years for Twilio.... please say its sooner then that.
Again. Great job.
I just wanted to add another voice to this (and i'll up vote it dont worry!)
We decided to go with paypal payments pro for our beta because stripe wasnt supported in Canada, as soon as you guys get here we'll make the switch however! Very excited you have people working on it!
I have a project ready to go (with the exception of billing). It is almost impossible for an Australian business to easily accept credit card payments in USD.
I have looked at Saasy.com but the lack of data portability makes it an unattractive option.
PayPal really is the only solution unless you can get the one bank in Australia to let you open a USD account, you'll also need a modem to check your balance with them online.
This is a good thread http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia/brows... about the complexities in setting it up in Australia and unfortunately I suspect Stripe will consider the risks outweigh the benefits of providing this sort of functionality in oz.
In Canada we're using CheddarGetter and paypal to accept USD, however as an Australian (Living in Canada....) i know exactly what you mean and have been through it before.
I seriously suggest you look at Paypal, if you want to make switching easy however, abstract the implementation as much as you can. We're using CheddarGetter to do the abstraction for us, its $79 / month for CheddarGetter...but any half decent programmer who i trust with our billing doesnt cost far from that per hour anyway. Its a cheap means of getting around some smelly situations!
I second this. Recurring credit card payments are virtually impossible in the EU at the moment, and the existing options (e.g. PayPal) suck or are too expensive.
Just to chime in with the others regarding international support: hopefully the funding will help you expand in that way. I'm in the UK and would like to see some more viable alternatives to Paypal.
Don't forget to spend some of the money to lower your costs and then lower the fees. This field needs competition to make the old players uncompetitive and run them out of business.
One thing that YC drills into you is to not settle for B or C class talent. You just have to look at Stripe's team overview to see how talented this company is: https://stripe.com/about
Stripe is a lesson on how to build a company from the ground up. Surrounding yourself with incredibly intelligent people tends to have an outcome like this (both product and valuation). Congrats guys!
Am I the only one who finds the language "C class talent" really distasteful? I feel like it's worse than referring to your employees as "human resources".
I understand the importance of passing on people who are a close-but-in-the-end-imperfect fit for your organization. But using the concept of class and grading people from A to F just makes my skin crawl, and it makes me want to avoid any company or organization who things about people that way, YC included.
I would find it unpleasant to be called "C-class talent," but I'd also find it unpleasant to get a C. In both cases, that would prompt me to either step up my game or reconsider my priorities.
People are unequal, and in a business context, that means some people are worth less than others. You can grade them on a curve, but that just means we'll all learn that a "B" means you're a failure, and that really good companies are only recruiting among As and A+s. Differences in ability can't be fixed through semantics.
I think it's fine as long as you don't think people are born ABC. You have to draw the line, and you have to be able to recognize talent - and the lack of such.
I am used to it. It is a terminology shortcut to qualify people's actions. You'll find that from a lot people coming from universities. They tend to compare themselves a lot and use statistical horizontal comparisons. If not from HR, it is mostly to imply they are part of the A group.
I did have a look, but didn't see anything out of ordinary there.
Surely the team must be great to be doing so well, and best of luck and kudos to them! But what exactly am I supposed to be seeing on that overview page? Which part triggered your "A class" detector?
From my experience running a startup this isnt necessarily true.
I hired what you would call B/C class talent because i loved their work ethic. Simply put, they get shit done and follow the guidelines while some A class people try to write the perfect solution which takes more time (planning overhead etc). Of course you need A class talent for certain positions, but certainly not all, not even in engineering.
Also if you are bootstrapping on a rather low budget, attracting A class talent isnt the easiest thing todo anyway.
Awesome product, brilliant people, answered all my emails in less than 15 minutes...
I so much want to become a customer that I'm seriously considering incorporating ShiningPanda LLC (or C-Corp) somewhere in the United States for this sole purpose. And probably dissolving ShiningPanda SAS (French equivalent, more or less, of a C-Corp) to reduce the costs, as SAS are pretty expensive to keep around, and it would become largely pointless.
Do someone have experience with such an endeavor? The part that I can't seem to figure out is how to pay foreign people, living abroad, from an American company. All the while avoiding double taxation.
If someone have references toward a good lawyer / accountant / tax lawyer to figure out all that... My email is alexis dot tabary at shiningpanda dot com
There's a lot to like about Stripe, but my absolute favorite under-appreciated thing is their name and domain name.
Hard to quantify just how much it helped, but I seriously doubt they would have had quite this trajectory with a name like Chargerly.com or even possibly Stripe.io.
I love stripe. I got everything setup and accepting payments this morning for a side project in less than 20 minutes before I had to leave for work... It's such a joy to use.
This definitely draws a line in the sand for the online payment provider process. Looks like Paypal has been served.
Disclaimer: my business is a huge Paypal user, but we've been actively looking at Stripe and put in our plans for 2012 to begin to transition to them. Exciting times!
Congrats guys! I just want to say that I love Stripe. You are really changing the game. I love that you are focusing on developers.
I wonder what might happen down the road when users make mistakes that put themselves in PCI compliance violation (like posting a form to their server with input names, thus sending the card info). What kinds of effects could this have on the business, their image, and the customers?
Quite likely. I think Sequoia's bet goes hand in hand with the trend as of late of 'democratizing' programming and CS education (Stanford online classes, Udacity, Codeacademy and others). More and better programming means more projects and more demand for payment platforms like Stripe.
Someone pls come to India. There is a serious need for good payment processor out here. Anybody who comes up with even half-decent solution wins 75% of mkt-share by default without any sales/mktg/BDM efforts.
So, thanks. We're pretty excited about the next few years.