🏦 Stripe is now worth $95B

Patrick and John Collison have got the luck of the Irish.

Stripe — the Irish brothers’ digital payments brainchild — has reportedly raised $600m at a $95B valuation, making it the most valuable private company ever to come out of Silicon Valley.

Here’s why: It’s the platform other platforms use to process money

Some 90% of US adults have bought from companies that use Stripe.

The company counts Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Shopify, Uber, and Zoom among its customers — and at least 50 of these customers process $1B+ on Stripe annually.

In 2020, the company signed up 200k+ new European customers and handled 5k requests per second.

All this success is a boon for Ireland

Stripe plans to invest heavily in Europe and create 1k jobs at its Dublin HQ, a plus for a budding Irish startup community that saw total VC funding jump 13% in 2020.

CEO Patrick Collison, still just 32, was especially proud of a $50m investment in Stripe from Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency.

But Stripe didn’t even need the funding…

… “It will just sit on the balance sheet” as a “rainy day fund,” according to Mike Moritz, partner at Sequoia and a Stripe board member.

Stripe, whose mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, sees a wide-open road ahead, with just 14% of commerce happening online today, up from 10% a year ago.

Stripe’s already done well at achieving that mission: The company has greater payment volume today than the entire ecommerce market when it was founded a decade ago.

Patrick and John, the next round of Guinness is on you.

• Join the club: The social audio app Clubhouse is rolling out an accelerator program. It’ll start by offering brand deals and a minimum of $5k/month for 20 creators. The startup also hired a Netflix exec to head global marketing.
• China’s regulators are asking telling Alibaba to toss assets from its extensive media portfolio in a bid that likely aims to limit the conglomerate’s influence on public opinion.
• India wages war on Bitcoin: India is planning to fine anyone found trading, mining, or holding digital assets like Bitcoin, but the country hopes to eventually build out an official digital currency for widespread use.
• Xiaomi gets a win: The Chinese technology giant got a pass after a federal judge blocked the enforcement of the US investment ban on the company, citing lack of evidence.
• Zoom Escaper…is a tool (and maybe the greatest invention ever) that helps you leave Zoom meeting by feeding the sound of dogs, construction and babies crying into your mic.
• Makes too much sense: Tinder will soon users do background checks on potential dates per The Verge.
• And… more: Andbox, a NY-based esports organization, just added NBA star Kevin Durant as an investor.

Cloud companies are en fuego right now.

In its latest State of the Cloud report, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) relayed stats on how well cloud-based software firms have fared during the pandemic:

• $2T: The combined market value of 60+ publicly traded cloud companies tracked by the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index.
• $186B: The amount of funding poured into private cloud companies in 2020.
• +70%: The increase in YoY value of the top 5 cloud companies (PayPal, Adobe, Salesforce, Shopify, Zoom), which are now worth $1T+ on their own.

Looking to 2021…

… here are BVP’s top cloud industry predictions:

• The unbundling of the office: Startups tackling office tasks continue to pop up: email (Superhuman), project management (Productboard), virtual office (Parsec), calendars (Calendly)
• Small business tech: More back-office solutions for small and medium-size businesses: customer success (Intercom), HR (Gusto), sales and marketing (Yotpo)
• DEI: Rollout of diversity, equity, and inclusion software: talent management (Diversio), training (Unpacking), recruiting (Jopwell)

Another key prediction is the rise of “vertical SAAS,” which is an A to Z solution for a single industry (e.g., how Squire provides all the tools a barbershop needs).

Cloud is the new growth engine

Prior to 2020, the major growth engine for the stock market had been FAANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), heralded as the vanguard of the “new economy.”

BVP finds that a similar portfolio of cloud-focused stocks — hilariously dubbed MT SAAS (Micorosft, Twilio, Salesforce, Amazon, Adobe, Shopify) — outperformed FAANG by more than 3x in the last 4 years.

In case that wasn’t impressive enough, BVP created a chart which literally has a mountain in the background as a nod to their new acronym (MT SAAS):

How a mission to Mars will help your business thrive on Earth

*No rocket ships required*

Adam Seltzner, Chief Engineer of the Mars 2020 mission, faced “workplace challenges” of interstellar magnitude even before the pandemic.

Hailed as writing “the best leadership book of the year” called The Right Kind of Crazy, about the Curiosity rover landing, Adam developed out-of-this-world methods to spark curiosity and passion in his team.

Need some of that proverbial rocket fuel for your remote teams?

Attend his keynote at Tomorrow’s Remote Worker, an event designed to tackle the biggest issues in today’s fully-remote landscape.

Help Devices for Kids by reserving your spot for the April 21st event here. 

The gamification of all apps. Jon Lai, a partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, dropped an interesting Twitter thread showing how leading consumer, enterprise, and fintech firms have embraced “gamification,” including:

• Gamelike visual designs
• Game features like badges, leaderboards
• Motivation, mastery and feedback loops that keep players coming back

The table above breaks down well-known apps that are actively “gamifying” their products.