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Comment by bentruyman | Hacker News Reader

PayPal's current market cap is ~$80B. Is Stripe actually worth only $6B less than PayPal?

That’s a good question. People in tech all know Stripe, but outside this circle, PayPal and even Square have far superior brand recognition. If you ask my family members what Stripe is, they would shrug.

I suppose you're technically correct (the best kind of correct ;) but I am not so sure that the brand-recognition metric is the best one to apply to Stripe.

PayPal and Square both have a strong B2C presence. PayPal has B2C offerings focused around sending/receiving money. Square, while they don't have a strong B2C product, does spend a lot of time sticking their logo in your face every time you go to a merchant that uses Square.

By contrast, Stripe is an infrastructure company. The best parallel I can think of might be a company like Maersk (one of the world's largest container-shipping companies). Sure, you may not recognize the name if you're not in the space, but odds are that they do affect your day-to-day life as a consumer.

I would define Stripe as B2B2C. It’s not simply a B2B because they help business charge customers. Their value is convincing business to use their platform. Most businesses will choose payment gateways that their customers use. And by far the number 1 request from customers is usually PayPal. They might be invisible to the customer, but business will alway prefer to integrate with payment gateways that will get customers to say yes faster. It’s nuanced, but that has just been my experience. Logically you are correct though, on the surface, brand recognition should not matter.

> I would define Stripe as B2B2C.

I agree; this is more accurate.

> And by far the number 1 request from customers is usually PayPal.

Do you have any data on this? I'm genuinely curious. Not only do I have a long list of negative experiences with PayPal that skew my own take, but I also have no idea where to look for this kind of industry-wide data on B2B2C customer-demand.

I don’t. But I used to run a Yoga platform and used Stripe. None of my customers (Yoga instructors) knew about Stripe. They always requested PayPal or Square to the point, I realized using Stripe only made my life easier, but my customers didn’t care. It was a huge hassle to convince them a) to use my platform and b) to use Stripe. So it became 2x more difficult to onboard them. Same thing for their customers. Since I was a new platform, they ask their instructors why it wasn’t PayPal or Square. They trusted those brands to hand over their card.

> Square, while they don't have a strong B2C product

Huh? Block (formerly Square) has an incredibly strong B2C product (the #1 finance app on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in the US) called Cash App (formerly Square Cash).

You are right. My mistake; I don't use that app, and I'd totally forgotten about it.

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