I get they may have some differentiating products but for the majority of their revenue, they all do the same thing, payment processing. I noticed Stripe has a crapload of talent though, mostly ex-Google and Facebook. Even the CFO of General Motors and an ex-head of Goldman Sachs left their jobs to go to Stripe as leaders. Why does Stripe have a Harvard like pedigree compared to similar competitors? I'm not saying Square and PayPal have no talent, but it is like comparing Brown or Columbia to Harvard and Princeton (Stripe being the latter).
l10n
Pre IPO.. Upside is much more..
I’ve wondered the same. I get constant rejects from stripe within a day. I guess they look for accomplished talent which according to them is folks from FANG with multiple years of experience and not really other fin-tech. My other friends at fin-tech have had similar experience with Stripe too. Also, Stripe is an API first company compared to the traditional payment facilitators and they used to pay far above PayPal IMO. I’ve always questioned about the differentiator when it came to Payment companies - which is very much on surface - for eg, I know stripe offers omni channel solution mostly and charge transaction plus subscription fee. Not sure how other facilitators vary.
Payments is already hard enough, Stripe did it right. Everything they build is HQ, white label solution. App, docs, support, etc. Also expensive af
Is it truly better than SQ
Having built (unsuccessful) startups on top of both PayPal and Stripe, here's the difference: PayPal locked me and my money in a permanent financial purgatory labeling me as "payment aggregator." Can't process payments = death. Stripe gave me 3 lines of code to copy paste. Biz still died a year later for unrelated reasons lmao. So all the talent at Stripe figure out how to enable customers, which is likely the mentality the select for.
I actually view talent from square and Stripe as equivalent. Both top tier
I’ve been wondering this question for a while too.