Comment by codemog

4 hours ago

What’s with all these acquisitions? Stripe realizing it’s going to slowly become PayPal 2.0 because infinite growth doesn’t exist?

5 comments

codemog

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hibikir  4 hours ago

Doing just payments is a really low margin industry, and the larger the contract you are after, the lower the margins. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to try to sign up startups, as their growth is your growth. And to win in the startup market, you don't win by lowest costs, but by how much generic work you can save them. Cut their headaches, and they'll be happy giving you a wider cut.

Thus, a million little acquisitions to make the possible Stripe bundle for small companies stronger, as they become the moat. The opposite of, say, the Adyen play, when you want to lower your own costs, and make money on tiny margins to do processing for really large companies.

  • benatkin  3 hours ago

    AI is making it a low-moat industry too. It's a lot quicker to build some API docs, a behavior tracking JavaScript library, and some fraud detection, with LLMs.

testbjjl  3 hours ago

I think about their IPO and what seems and likely still is a promising offering seems a little less so with AI offerings. I also wonder if these businesses, suffering from the same AI uncertainties are a good value?