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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

(www.axios.com)
721 points hhs | 3 comments | 16 Apr 20 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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JaakkoP ◴[16 Apr 20 14:56 UTC] No.22889999[source]▶
I love the quote from John Collison:

"This is digital migration in a very compressed period of time, for both businesses and customers," Collison adds. "My mom recently asked me if I'd heard of 'this Instacart thing.' Yeah mom, I have."

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tlrobinson ◴[16 Apr 20 15:19 UTC] No.22890270[source]▶
Sadly, it’s also likely one of the largest and fastest transfers of wealth from small businesses to large corporations. As Amazon hires 100,000+ workers how many small businesses are shuttering for good?

Stripe is one of the “good” tech companies in this respect by helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses, but it’s not going to be enough.

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1. pc ◴[16 Apr 20 15:26 UTC] No.22890362[source]▶
The impact of Covid-19 on many businesses around the world is very sad.

That said, it's less clear to me that the medium-term impact will be pro-incumbent or pro-large company. Big incumbents tend to be less adaptable and to benefit from large fixed cost barriers to entry (e.g. real estate). We're seeing a lot of nimble small businesses migrate to online business models far faster than the behemoths they used to struggle to compete against.

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2. hooande ◴[16 Apr 20 17:20 UTC] No.22891526[source]▶
This is true, but the big incumbents will benefit from being able to buy up swaths of local business at a discount. Their advantages of scale will only increase
3. bagacrap ◴[16 Apr 20 17:34 UTC] No.22891665[source]▶
I think he's thinking about local specialty retailers, which pretty much by definition cannot pivot into some online model. If you aren't deemed essential, you're likely going out of business as your market is eaten up by Amazon and Target/Walmart (which get to keep selling various non essentials since they're allowed to remain open, so they can sell groceries and drugs). Small local businesses will fail or take out crushing loans from the govt, and your mom+pop kitchen store is not more able to cope than Target with its well staffed IT dept, unbroken revenue stream, and deep pockets.