Stripe strikes

There’s been a lot of activity around Stripe this week, who are now valued at $70 billion (slightly down from 2021 but up from 2023).

Stripe’s valuation has edged up to $70 billion as Sequoia Capital offers to buy shares from its investors looking to cash out of the fintech that helps merchants process customer payments.

Source: Marcel van Oost

Why is Stripe so valuable? Well, according to Inc.com, there are five simple lessons:

Make Things Simple

Until Stripe came along, setting up a way to accept credit card payments, especially online, was a major headache. It required working with an existing merchant services company and setting up complex systems and integrations. The Collison brothers saw how complicated it was and figured there must be a way to make it more simple.

Play Nice With Others

Part of that simplicity was the ease with which you could connect Stripe to almost any online platform. Stripe has prebuilt integrations with Squarespace, Memberful, Shopify, and BigCommerce, along with hundreds of others. That means, even if you aren't a developer, and don't know anything about code, you can still easily set up your site to use Stripe.

Delight Your Customers

One of the most important areas to play nice is with your customers. Stripe has long been known for providing incredible customer support and service. That goes a long way considering a lot of those customers are small businesses that aren't experts on things like websites or code or payment processing.

Hire Well

One of the stories about Stripe is that the company uses the "Sunday Test" in deciding whether to hire new employees. The idea is that if the person were working in the office on Sunday, would you want to come in and work with that person? If the answer is no, you shouldn't hire them.

Become the Default

Over time, Stripe has become, for many small businesses, the default option when thinking about how to accept payments online. That's especially true as millions of people had to figure out different ways to do business online over the past year.

There are many aspects of how Stripe has grown that I love. They began with a simple API for merchant checkout, but now provide many more services.

Source: Stripe

Now, Stripe is going one step beyond by partnering with Coinbase, the leading cryptocurrency exchange.

Stripe and Coinbase have formed a partnership that will bring the benefits of crypto to millions of businesses and people around the world. The partnership will launch with three key integrations designed to increase onchain adoption and provide faster, cheaper financial infrastructure:

1. Stripe is adding USDC on Base to their crypto payouts product to enable Stripe platforms to make faster, cheaper money transfers to over 150 countries.
2. Stripe is adding USDC on Base to their fiat-to-crypto onramp to enable customers in the US to convert fiat to crypto faster than ever.
3. Coinbase is adding Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto onramp to Coinbase Wallet to allow people to buy crypto instantly with credit cards and Apple Pay.

Times are changing when we talk about Stripe and Coinbase as the leading payments companies in the world.