Stripe: The Internet's Most Undervalued Company
The June 23 edition of Beach Reads featured a fantastic interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison. For those less familiar with the payments platform, this write up from a substack provides a thorough introduction to the company and importantly describes the company's moat (through the lens of Hamilton Helmer's book 7 Powers). "Stripe's 7 Powers work together to build moats around a business that is reliant on acquiring young customers, keeping them as they grow, and expanding the capabilities it offers them," the article says. Stripe has reached a private valuation of about $36 billion, according to the author, by leveraging its core payments moat to develop new products: "In a decade, Stripe has gone from accepting payments, which is now a commodity business, to providing an increasingly comprehensive suite of products that make it easy to start and run an online business." Wide moats and new products build "a double compounding advantage – Stripe's revenue grows both as its customers' revenue grows and as they buy more Stripe products." In many ways, the Stripe playbook sounds similar to some other internet-native platform businesses. With no immediate plans to go public, Stripe remains mysterious and its eventual S-1 will be fun to go through whenever it decides to file.