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So, to put this all in context, a small ISO will do at least a billion in payment processing a month, and there are more than a few hundred small ISOs. If Stripe really isn't hitting anywhere near $1 billion a month, I'm not sure how they will maintain their ISO relationship with the platform they use (First Data, Elavon, Chase Paymentech, Tsys, etc) or their relationship with their underwriting bank.

You need a large volume to break even in this industry, and even more to turn a profit, hence why I'm shocked they haven't gone under due to lack of volume if they are really only doing $8 billion annually.


0_o Why so many employees? In the context of the volume you do I don't see how you'd turn a profit with that many employees unless you get the tax credits other francophone software groups like Logivision get and more.


For context, shopify has pretty high monthly fees as well as taking a cut of sales. Last I saw they had over 200,000 shops, minimum $30/month (up to $300) means at LEAST $6 mil/month from monthly fees, plus some percentage of the 3.8 billion/quarter gross sales they process... whatever they get to keep after paying strip and the credit card companies. Even a half a percent means $19 million per quarter.

So if you are a startup, growing fast, and bringing in well over $12mil/month... a lot of employees makes sense.


> Total revenue in the third quarter was $99.6 million

https://press.shopify.com/releases/shopify-announces-third-q...


Wow. Internet startups FTW.


Why all the hate on Shopify, from this and your other comment? They seem to be doing a pretty good job. Also, what does the "other francophone software groups" comment mean? Is Shopify francophone and what would that mean?


Not sure if you're joking, but if something happens that takes shopify out just 15 minutes you could pay for that entire room's annual salary.


Are you kidding? 10 minutes @ $260 K / minute would pay for everyone's salary in that room.


No clue, hopefully xal will comment on this seeing as he works for them.


He's Tobi Lutke, founder/CEO/Coder.


That is really low, for context a teeny tiny ISO does $1 billion in processing volume a month, so your comparable to one of the hundreds of 2 to 4 employee ISOs out there.


Moyta: Where did you get that $1B per month figure? That seems very very high.

Cheers to the CEO of Shopify answering a question on Hacker News and on Black Friday - that is awesome!


There are 2-4 employee companies processing $1B+ per month? Source please.


No written source to provide, but I know of a 2 person shop that provides merchant services (ISO) processing ~$400MM/month. Not $1B, but is certainly possible I suppose.


forgive my ignorance but in this context what does ISO stand for?


Independent Sales Organization [1], Shopify for example is partnered with Stripe who is an ISO. Neither push big volume so their platform costs are much higher than their competitors.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account


Really? Stripe doesn't have big volume? That seems... surprising


Actually, I gotta retract from my other comment.

It seems that both Adyen and Brainsomething processed over 50B last year whereas Stripe didn't.

Stripe didn't publish numbers (I'd dare saying because they are very small and that would scare big companies away), but the valuation at 5 Billion dollars indicates that they are less than 1/10th of the aforementioned providers.

Conclusion: Stripe = The hype underdog with strong marketing :D


Not at all. It only depends on your definition of big volume.

Source: By some metrics my company is > 1% of Adyen... or Stripe... or whatever competitor we decide to use at the moment.

If a single company can be as much as 1% of an entire payment provider, they gotta be quite small, right? Well, that's what I think every day when I see news about them :D


You'd think it'd perform better, on my i5 with 16GB of ram its laggy as can be.

Edit: Keep the downvotes up, but having this site eat a full core is a bit ridiculous. Similar sites are much more performant.


Any examples of similar sites? It smashes a core of my laptop (i7 / 16GB) as well, but every site I've been to that looks like this (3D realtime) does the same thing, so I'm used to it.


Works smoothly enough on a MacBook Air 1.6GHz with 4GB RAM and Windows 10.


Works smoothly for me - i5 and 16 gigs of RAM.


Doesn't for me. i5 and 24 gigs of RAM.


Yeah, given a sizable power budget and the right benchmarks, Nvidia can outperform Radeon cards, but Apple has an exisistung relationship with AMD and there is not a compelling performance case to switch to Nvidia.

Plus with Supercomputing Clusters eating up most of Nvidia's production, Apple is not guaranteed to get the quantity & bin of GPUs they need on their schedule. This is the same reason why Apple didn't release any fusion based Macbooks, the bin of chip they wanted was not available in the quantity Apple needed by launch.


I think so, iirc Caviar is losing money as they compete with the dozen other food delivery services. The payment processing industry itself is currently very overcrowded too, with a million ISOs like Stripe, Square, Braintree, etc.


Windows Phone is a burning platform at this point, Microsoft canned most of the people working on it and left a few dozen interns working on it, hence why the Windows 10 images for the Lumia as of late have been very unstable.

Sadly, its time to migrate off Windows Phone.


I'm very sad about it, too. The Metro Design line was a good mobile platform that's being gradually degraded and left to rot.

I have trouble believing that a 90%-10% duopoly in mobile platforms is an healthy steady state for this market.

Probably something else - not as good - will come in and occupy the vacuum.


I mean, if I could just get a nice Maemo Phone I'd be happy, like throw that on a Lumia 920 and I'd be content. There is definitely room for innovation in the mobile space, and both MS and Nokia have the hardware side of it down, they just need to choose a platform that people can get behind and make it easy to move to it (eg. have a preinstalled app compatibility layer).


It is. Commenter doesn't understand that Microsoft is just trying to regain lost ground & mindshare at this point, hence why you can get Office on your Android device for free, and it works better than it does on Windows.


I was going with the irony of commenter asserting that building the game is an inefficient allocation of MS resources when in fact productive time lost due to the ubiquity of these games has probably been one of the single most contributors to inefficient use of time in the last century (you know, due to people playing the games).


Oh I totally understand, and my point was that Office on Android (or iOS) is much more of a value-add than Solitaire on Android (or iOS).


Los Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass, etc) it is not an option politically.

Another angle on this is why are we scrutinizing only where 10% of California's water usage is, while ignoring 90% (farms)? Why do California's farmers have the right to the majority of the water while paying next to nothing for that water as compared to the rates the other users of water pay?


There was a photo a while back of somebody urinating in a reservoir, and there was subsequent outrage and calls to put an enormously expensive cover over the reservoir (i.e. lake), etc.

Never mind that all the wildlife that urinates/defecates in it, the dead animals in it, etc., which nobody minds.


Minor devil's-advocacy: It's reasonable to score the risk from human material/pathogens higher than animal ones.


Not really, it's pure hysteria.

Urine is generally sterile, it's actually an accepted first aid practice to urinate on a bandage or create a urine paste to treat a wound in the field in emergency conditions.


What this really ignores is all the inland cities that use the same water source, one down-stream from the next, from the great lakes to the gulf of Mexico. I toured one of those sewage treatment plants in 1993 (1). It remains one of the most beautiful visions of my life: clear water flowing over algea-covered wooden beams, glowing in the natural sunlight, no odor whatsoever.

You can't make this stuff up. Civil engineers are amazing.

Edit: also, as per my other comment, urine, in the voided stream, is not sterile, and even if it were, certainly contains all the building blocks for bacterial growth.

(1) https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Johnson+County+Waste...


Is it civil engineering? I thought that hydraulics was a mechanical engineering field.


it might be reasonable to start with that assumption, but actually do tests to determine what's more dangerous. then put processes in place to clean the water from the dangerous stuff (from both humans and animals)


Urine is sterile.


As a pathology resident, I assure you, the voided stream is not sterile, and definitely has all the building blocks necessary for bacterial growth.

That said, inland cities all recycle water. And they generally return water into the rivers that is cleaner than what they took out.


Only before it starts leaving the body.


I grew up in a town along the Mississippi River. It's "ass to glass" all the way from Minnesota to Louisiana. Basically every city, town, and village on both banks treats its drinking water and its wastewater, then releases its treated wastewater downstream.

Are the farmers paying so much less for treated, potable tap water delivered through municipal water mains? I think you'll find the cost of the water itself is pretty small. You may find that treating it, transporting it, and distributing it pretreated to all those people are the real economic costs even during most stages of a drought.


The farmers are consuming the majority of the water and there is no way to even get them to pay for their usage. Many have grandfathered old school water rights. Meanwhile, they pass idiotic laws like the ban on unsolicited table water in restaurants to pretend like they are doing something.


Funny thing is, most waste water treatment plants I've seen - the water coming out of the waste treatment plant is cleaner than the water removed from the river for drinking (which is then treated).

Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been breathed by someone else...


Or that it's got particles from other peoples' farts!


Sorry, Sir, but we got to dialyse your blood- there is t-rex urine in it


> Los Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass, etc) it is not an option politically.

Unsanitary isn't really the problem. Laden with organically active toxins is the problem.

We don't have a good way of dealing with most toxins other than simply diluting them and letting nature break them down.

This is why treatment plants take water from rivers and pump treated water back into the river rather than immediately recycling outflow back to inflow.


I wouldn't say that water recycling is not an option, just that it's happening slowly. See [1] for example.

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/07/16/california-drought-san...

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