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Slava Rubin (00:00)

Welcome everybody. Thank you very much for joining. We have another great conversation today. My name is Slava Rubin. I'm one of the founders here at Vincent. We're looking to democratize access to all kinds of interesting content. And part of that is our pre-IPO series. Many of you have enjoyed many different companies. We talk about everything from SpaceX, Anduril, Stripe and more. And there's been a lot of demand for people to want to talk about Stripe. So here we are talking about again, it's the

super large payments company last valued at approximately $90 billion. But we're going to want to talk about what is it worth? What's it going to be worth? With me today is Marcelo from Sacra. Marcelo, you want to say hi? Hi, everyone. Welcome. And we also have our partner for this episode is Healey Pre-IPO. We actually have Christine here. Christine, you want to say hi? Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. Thanks, Slava.

Absolutely, and Healey Pre-IPO is actually a concierge broker service helping investors across all kinds of pre-IPO investments like Stripe, SpaceX, and more. So we're going to dive in further with Christine at the end of this session. So let's get into it. First, a word from our compliance department as always. So this presentation is intended to be educational only. Nothing in this presentation should be construed as an offer to sell securities or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities.

This presentation does not endorse any particular security or company. This presentation does not imply any affiliation, partnership, or other relationship with any companies or issuers mentioned. All investments involve risk and the possibility of loss, including loss of principle. And neither past performance nor forward-looking information is a guarantee of future results.

Now with the disclaimer all said, everybody wants to talk about Stripe. So Marcelo why don't you baseline us? So give us a few minutes as to what's the overview? What is Stripe? What are we talking about here? Sure thing. I mean, I think the important thing to understand is just what payments was like before Stripe launched in the 2010s. It was just very hard for merchants, especially small businesses, to accept payments online. Traditional acquiring in terms of being able to accept

Payments as a merchant. It's called merchant acquiring what the banks do in order to allow merchants to do that. Was just a big pain. Lots of roadblocks, lots of barriers for small businesses. so Stripe's API made it easy for businesses to do it. You know, the classic thing they said was with seven lines of Stripe, you know, it's important to keep in mind they have a phenomenal founding team. It's a really special founding team with the Collison Brothers. They still lead the company have led it since it was founded in 2010.

You can see them there in the shot from 60 minutes when they were on 60 minutes in 2016. They were called, know, fintechies by the by the reporter Lesley Stahl It was, you know, still early days for Stripe. But you can tell that, you know, they were already making a splash even mid 2010s. So right now, fast forward to today, they're an 8,800 employee org.

They're driving 1.4 trillion ⁓ in total processing volume, and that's equivalent to 1.3 % of global GDP, as they say. Their big mission has always been to grow the GDP of the internet. And I think they've been delivering that, not just in their core payment processing business, but also just across a broad ecosystem of business software, back office products that we'll talk about a little bit, tax billing, card issuing, et cetera.

So they've begun to attach a lot of their customers to other lines of business as well. And the latest thing they've been into is global stablecoin payments. They acquired Bridge in October, 2024 for 1.1 billion and made some other add-on acquisitions as well in that area.

So as I said, for Stripe, it's been all about core payments processing, but also layering on other affordances to help businesses run and collect revenue. So they do offline payments as well with Stripe Terminal for point of sale payments. But the real sort of ⁓ latest catalyst for growth in their business has been this revenue and finance automation suite.

In January of this year, they announced that that business on its own is a 500 million ARR business, which is really impressive. It's a business sort of bundled within Stripe that a lot of people didn't talk about until maybe last year. came up in the last webinar we did on Stripe. So the core of that business is Stripe billing. I think what's interesting there is that Stripe billing has gotten a lot of tailwinds from the latest AI surge. And that's because a lot of ⁓ companies like, say, Anthropic or OpenAI

will use Stripe billing ⁓ to run their billing customers for API calls, AI usage, subscriptions. You have businesses like Intercom that do customer support. Now they have all kinds of different pricing models for their AI powered customer support. They will use ⁓ Stripe billing as well as their billing becomes more complex. And so that's been a big ⁓ tailwind for Stripe as well.

And I think that'll come up again as we talk about ⁓ growth for Stripe. They also do embedded FinTech, meaning allowing their customers to serve other end customers with financial products. And that's also an important part of the business.

So I think the key thing here for Stripe in terms of fundraising and you see valuation there as well is that post 2020, they've really been on a kind of roller coaster. think it's, you see on the left there, ⁓ their valuation chart kind of goes up and down and then starts crawling up again. What that shows you is that when post COVID after they had a big run up,

they had to raise money, they raised 6 billion in 2023 at a $50 billion valuation. And that was almost half of what, of their peak $95 billion valuation when things were hotter and the markets were sort of more frothy. But since then, Stripe has been valued in different tender offer situations. There was a recent one in February, it was valued at 91.5 billion.

in an employee tender offer where Stripe also repurchase shares by the way. And so that's basically Stripe going from 95 billion all the way down to 50 billion and then up again to 91.5 billion in the latest priced round. They've raised almost $9 billion to date.

Amazing. So sorry, let's go. Let's go back to a product for a second. So one point four trillion dollars. That's a lot of money that's been processed. Like you said, over one percent of all GDP. How do these twin, not twin, brothers that are these, as you say, young geeky ⁓ fintech folks start with seven lines of code and now have this massive menu of options?

⁓ How has that been able to be sustainable for so many years? Yeah, I mean, I think as ⁓ the way they would put it is that they've just been really laser focused on assembling a ⁓ team and a talent pool that has been ⁓ really focused on building on this API and just making it drop dead simple for businesses to accept payments online. I think they've been really savvy in terms of attacking

A lot of businesses that before  Stripe came along just found it really hard to accept payments online. know, banks wouldn't always deal with your small business, with your startup. Even, you know, your medium-sized business had to pay, you know, really high fee rates and stuff to get these merchant acquirers to pay attention to them. So they've been really savvy about snapping up this kind of, if you will, long tail of the market.

and developing a product for them. Since then they've expanded into enterprise, et cetera. But I think the real snowball effect for Stripe came with the sort of convergence of that internet e-commerce ⁓ wave and being able to bring small businesses and mid-market businesses globally ⁓ into that. And like I said, it's not just core payment processing anymore. Now you have a whole revenue and finance automation suite with Stripe billing that I talked about.

And so they've also been really smart about layering on products that make a lot of sense in terms of making it easier for businesses to hold money, move money, et cetera. We'll get into the actual revenues in just a second, but from a macro perspective, a pie of a hundred percent, do you have a sense as to payment processing, I imagine is the largest slice of the pie, right? Of the revenue pie. That's right. What are the other two, what are the top three slices of the

full revenue right now. I know there's a huge menu here, but what would you say are the three main products driving revenue at the moment? I think the way to think about it is thinking about your core payment processing, which includes all the payment processing they do for small, medium, lately large businesses. Then you would have the revenue and finance automation suite with

Stripe billing, but also tax and invoicing as being a very significant chunk of the business now. And then after that, you would have what I would call the embedded FinTech products like treasury issuing. Another part of the business is Stripe Capital. They're pretty clear that they lend money to businesses just to help them grow faster, not to make a lot of points on those loans. So.

If you think about it, yeah, it's really those three buckets of business, but I think they also synergistically really work well together, which is another thing I think Stripe has done well. Why, you know, it goes back to 2010 in a world of Visa existing, MasterCard existing, PayPal existing, and some others. Why was Stripe able to carve this out and not only carve it out, now create a massive organization?

Well, I think their wedge, if you think back to the 2010s, it's harder to think about now, is building a product that was crafted ⁓ for developers and having that approach of designing a really simple to use and elegant API. In the 2010s, this whole API economy thing wasn't as widely talked about. It wasn't as

you know, common to devote so much, you know, time, care, and effort to developing a product specifically for developers to do something as uncluttered and glamorous as helping businesses accept payments. So I think that was really, ⁓ that was really their wedge. That was really the way that they were able to find a room in that, you know, payment processing space that was already crowded even, even back then. They've also remained really focused on the internet side of things like a company like Stripe, a company like Block.

⁓ even Adyen, which is a direct comp, have done way more in terms of offline payments. And Stripe has been really ⁓ more focused, I would say, as a company in terms of that internet economy. Let's go back to the revenue side here. If anybody needs an illustration of COVID changing the way the world works, look at these numbers from 2019 to 2021. I mean, talk about pulling forward internet usage and e-commerce.

I mean, these numbers are absolutely crazy. It obviously, I don't wanna use the word flatten because it's not flat at all. It slows down a bit post the massive COVID bump. But can you talk us through what's happening here with revenue growth and what you're seeing for 2025? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think you've brought us up to date. It really was all about this pulling forward of online activity.

⁓ and then the snapback and then trying to grow out of that. I think the remarkable thing is that at Stripe scale, right? I mean, this is really massive scale at a company the size of where Stripe is now. I mean, you're basically exposed to every macro regulatory tax tailwind or headwind that you can think of around the world. And the fact that they've been able to with their different businesses accelerate.

at that scale from even just 28 % to 30%, I think is, sorry, from 25 % to 28 % in 2024 is really quite impressive. Yeah, companies actually usually struggle to actually reaccelerate growth, right? So the fact that you bottom out at 25%, which is not a number to sneeze at at all, and now you see 28 % last year and potentially a three handle with a 30 % this year is,

quite remarkable. Me personally, I thought it was massively, this is just an opinion, no one needs to follow it. It's not financial advice. But in 2021, I remember when it was valued very high, closer to $100 billion, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so expensive. And I was thinking to myself like, oh, the 50 when it came down, like you showed the chart, seems much more reasonable. But I wasn't even sure if it was going to continue to accelerate growth or if it was going to wane off.

being this is really impressive. So in regards to the business model, just so we can simplify it down for folks, how does that work exactly? is, again, I might not know what Stripe is. Is Stripe a replacement for Visa? They're one and the same. Is it using the Visa Rails? Can you just talk to us exactly where does Stripe sit in this world?

Yeah, mean, Stripe rides the rails and Stripe is very clear that their goal as a business is not to quote unquote disrupt visa or replace visa or mastercard. What they wanna do is to plug into every relevant business rail globally. Obviously in the US and many parts of the world, the most relevant one is visa, but they're involved in every other payment rail you can think of as well. And their goal is just to make those payment rails more efficient and work better for customers.

The way the business works is really simple once you take out all the complexity of payment processing. Once Stripe handles those payments, their net revenue figure is what's left over after all the payouts go to the issuing side, to the merchant slash acquiring side. That net revenue figure is the key figure. It's what Stripe, Adyen, companies like them manage to.

So that's the number to keep an eye on. And that's the number that we showed in the revenue chart, because net revenue is really what matters for these companies. What's interesting is that for billing, invoicing, and tax, those are very different from a business model perspective, vis-a-vis payment processing. For billing, invoicing, and tax, it's much more like a traditional internet business in the sense that you're

It's some combination of usage, subscription, revenue. And so in net revenue picture, that goes directly to net revenue, right? Because you're not paying out all these other fees to intermediaries. So what you end up with is on average about 40 basis points of 0.4 % payments margin falling into that net revenue from payment processing. And then the lion's share of the

billing, invoicing and tax. If not all of it, it's basically one-to-one falling into that net revenue line. And worth mentioning that Stripe was profitable in 20, starting in 2023, it was profitable in 2024 and it telegraphed that it expects to be profitable in 2025 and beyond. You have a bullet here about stablecoin We mentioned that once before, I want you already hit a little bit on that here. Yeah, stablecoin is really interesting. We talked about net revenue.

I mean, it is payment processing in the sense that, you know, it involves fees. It's so similar from a business bottle perspective to payment processing. I think the interesting thing with stable coins is that it is more inexpensive for the Stripe customer. Stripe's take will probably end up being around that 0.4%, maybe a little bit less than for

traditional payment processing, but because it's so much cheaper for the end customer, because there's far less intermediaries involved, I think Stripe's hope is that stablecoin payments, and we can get into it a little bit more about why there's this expectation that it could really scale up quite a bit, is that that will drive incremental volume that will be really interesting and significant for the business. Yeah, let's get into that in just a second. So this is just to mention that we do have a Q &A section.

Anybody can look to ask any questions they want. I will do my best to try to track all the questions. All questions are welcome. It doesn't mean your question will be picked, but we will try as hard as possible to incorporate all the different questions. So when I'm trying to think about the price of Stripe, who do I compete against? What are the comps that are out there in the public markets and the private markets?

Yeah, we talked about this a bit last time as well. ⁓ It's really the best comp is Adyen checkout.com to some extent ⁓ as well. There's other companies that we've added here like Shopify and Coinbase because they're in parallel or overlapping lanes. But basically what you want to do is you want to compare it to Adyen as another sort of online internet forward payment processor, roughly the same generation as Stripe.

very similar in terms of business model and then against incumbents like Fiserv, FIS, slash Worldpay that are in similar businesses but are incumbent businesses with a lot of other baggage that come with them. So walk me through this. So let's look at this chart. So on the Y axis, I'm looking at enterprise value over last 12 months revenue, right? So I'm looking at what's the enterprise value divided by

the 2024 revenues, is that right? Yeah, that's right. So the price that you're using here is like 90 billion for Stripe. And what's the last 12 months revenues? So the last 12 months revenue are 5.1 billion. OK, great. it would be like, sorry, go ahead. Net revenue, yeah. OK, great.

And that's approximately a 20X. Yeah, that's right. I actually used more recent secondary market ⁓ valuations. If you look across secondary marketplaces online, they have a slightly higher. Christine will tell us more about what she's seeing in the market. I used more of like 100 billion ⁓ valuation for Stripe because that's what

you know, I was seeing across the secondary market data that I have access to and applying 2024 revenue to that. And that's been basically, you know, the same. what's the x-axis here? Sorry? Sorry, what's the x-axis here? So the x-axis is just, oh, sorry, the x-axis is revenue. It's 12 months revenue.

the x-axis is 12 months revenue. Yeah. So Stripe is at 5.1 billion. So I see. Yeah. So those numbers like 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 is billions. Billions, yeah. Got it. Got it. Got it. So PayPal, the way we read this is PayPal is quite large of a company, but definitely not getting a strong multiple. Yeah, that's right. I mean, like I think I said before, Stripe does a lot of stuff offline.

You know, it's a very big company with a Stripe like company within it, which is Braintree, right. So Braintree is the unit of PayPal that does all this, you know, payment mobile and online payment processing. But PayPal has many other things besides it, you know, working with big box stores on offline payment processing, etc. So it's doing a lot of other things that Stripe isn't and not not growing as quickly. So

the markets obviously put a different multiple in that business. Great. And we already have a question, a good one for this slide as well, which is where was Square fall on here, both from a comparison perspective slash you probably don't have the numbers memorized, but if you have any thoughts. Yeah, no, it's Block. I didn't add it here just because so much of Block is the cash app.

you know, that's pretty different, but it's around, I believe it's around like two to three X as well. Okay, great. So is it fair to say, and it's not the purpose of this discussion, but is it fair to say that Coinbase looks quite affordable here? Cause it's bigger than Stripe in terms of size, but it's actually on a lower multiple? Yeah, I mean, I think Coinbase does look attractive in this chart.

⁓ you know, you have to factor in other considerations when looking at Coinbase from a lot of different perspectives. Yeah, which is a perfect segue, actually. Let's go to the potential pros and cons. Obviously Coinbase is going be more crypto oriented and we're going to be talking about potentially, you know, Stripe moving into more stable coins and other crypto oriented stuff. So can you give us a perspective as to kind of what's

upside potential, what are the risks? And as part of this, feel free to take the conversation wherever you need as it relates to the bridge acquisition and other stablecoin type opportunities or crypto opportunities. And it's quite timely because I think today, there's even like the, and yesterday, there was like the crypto regulations that are in discussions in the Congress. Yeah, that's right. Well, we could start there. I mean, I think there's basically, roughly speaking, three

catalysts that people should pay attention to. One is that regulatory, and let me lump in sort of like the broader macroeconomic picture there too. There's this bill in the Senate. The expectation is if that bill goes through, and the Senate likes it, already went through the House, then that would be very favorable to stable coins. And specifically just getting

the whole US financial services ecosystem sort of lined up around stable coins, Stripe needs to move ahead. It'll want to have the banks on board. It'll want to have clear rails, clear regulations, et cetera. And that would be considered very friendly towards Stripe stable coins ambitions. It's also, we might expect or most people are expecting a rate cut before the end of the year.

I think that that would be positive in the sense of giving Stripe some multiple expansion possibly. But generally speaking, the Trump administration has been friendly towards companies like Stripe, fintech companies. They've talked about getting rid of the CPFB. Not sure if that's a good idea, but the point is they're clearly trying to be fintech friendly.

and roll back some of the Biden constraints put on the fintech ecosystem. Then stable coins specifically, there was a note from Standard Chartered recently that they expect that they think that stable coins could be as much as 10 % of FX money movement and M2 money supply, which is just a broad measure of things like savings accounts, checking accounts, cash, et cetera. That it could be as much as of

as 10 % of those two volume streams by 2029. Sorry, quick interrupt. So FX being foreign exchange, so moving from one currency to another, which is really not the same as stable coins. Sorry, continue. No, yeah, that's right. And I mean, that's basically how stable coins are used today, particularly for businesses moving in and out of emerging markets and global markets, moving money horizontally between non-US markets or back to the US.

That's how stable coins are used today. And so basically the bank is saying, hey, you these are huge money movements. Stable coins could be as much as one 10th of those money movements within five years. Stripe also, you know, basically highlighted that stablecoin volume has doubled between the end of 2023 and 2024. So this is really like the first, I wouldn't say the first, but it's like the first new.

alternative to the Visa and MasterCard Rails that we talked about that's come along and it looks really promising. Stripe's already accepting stablecoins and it rolled out USDC payments in 34 markets. It's doing stablecoin stuff in 100 plus markets. So that catalyst wasn't really clearly in view when we talked about Stripe in November, 2024. So I think that's really exciting. And then Stripe is doing a lot of interesting stuff in AI.

It's got its own AI model internally that's helping it ding fraud and lower fraud rates internally, which is accretive to the whole business, right? Because the more you can lower fraud, the more ⁓ that payments margins move, ⁓ contribution margins move in a positive direction. So those are the three ⁓ big catalysts that I see besides the acceleration and the billing business that I already talked about.

In terms of the risks? yeah. So I think in risks,  it's kind of like a little bit of the flip side of the upside, as is often the case. With enterprise and international specifically, there's more intense competition. those are both markets that Adyen is very aggressive in. We talked about this last time. There's also

the expectation that with agent powered payments, you could see a refragmentation of this payment processing ecosystem. If you have ⁓ companies that use agents and using agentic workflows in the payment processing stack, that could open up space for new entrants and a refragmentation of this scene that we saw earlier where

It's really been consolidating around companies like ⁓ Braintree and the products like Braintree, Stripe and Adyen. You can also talk about the regulatory and macro uncertainty in Europe being a drag on Stripe's business and their annual letter, basically not in a dramatic way, but spent quite a long time talking about the barriers to their business in Europe. These are basically just regulations that affect business formation.

what fintechs are able to do, tax, et cetera. And like I said, at their scale, that's a significant drag. And you could see regulations like that spread outward from Europe possibly and put a drag on Stripe's business. And likewise, the macro picture is pretty uncertain right now. I think everyone would agree on that. And that's also a risk that Stripe needs to keep an eye on because as the economy goes increasingly.

That's where Stripe goes.

So you mentioned AI and agents. think agentic workflows will definitely become more normalized in the near future. ⁓ In its competitive set, would you bet on anybody else to beat Stripe at trying to add agentic workflows? ⁓ Again, this is separate from an upstart. Do you think Stripe is best positioned of all the ones that were in the competitive chart, or would you bet on somebody else? I would bet on Stripe there.

I think they've shown that they can harness new technologies as they have with stable coins more effectively and harness talent to harness new technologies more effectively than rivals. I think the interesting thing for Stripe with agentic payments is if you have agents paying for stuff, you just imagine payments, you set payments to pay for a bunch of stuff sort of 24 seven.

businesses are moving 24, money 24 seven with agents, you can see that as possibly being a volume tailwind for Stripe. So, and if you were to predict, obviously this is just your opinion here. Do you think there's an upstart that you would expect to see in the next two or three years that's going to be the new, the new Stripe from 2010 using agent tech workflows and payments?

I mean, I think the short answer is no, ⁓ just because I do think that there's a data need here. I think that, similar to what they're doing with fraud, Stripe just has so much more data on what people buy, what businesses sell, what barriers and frictions there are, that with their ability to harness talent, they're gonna put up an agentic.

know, agentic products and thread agents into their business and AI in general more effectively than rivals, I think. I think this is one of those cases of bigger companies having an advantage. Yeah. And I would personally predict that probably within the next two years, they'll do a bridge style acquisition in the AI agentic world. Yeah, makes sense. Talking about IPO, do you get the sense from your research

Do you think they're gonna try to leverage this IPO window and IPO in the next 12 months, 18 months, or do you get the sense that this is gonna take a few years? Obviously you don't have any insider access. This is just the research. What do you think? Yeah, no, this is a tough one. I think that as the tender offer that we talked about showed in February, the one that gave it a 91.5 billion valuation, Stripe can basically do tender offers at will, right?

So it's, you know, they have the liquidity they need from that perspective if whenever they need it. I think that obviously the IPO window has reopened. So I think there is going to be some calculation on the side of Stripe in terms of whether it's the right time or not. I think it comes down to basically like cost benefit analysis. Like what do we gain by going public?

They're, think they have a new CFO as of September, 2023. It was very seasoned, been a CFO at two public companies in the past. I'm sure they're ducks in a row. think it's just purely, you know, what's the cost benefit analysis for us? Should we remain private or go public? I would not be surprised if they filed, but at the same time, I would also not be surprised if they didn't file. you know, I know that's not a very, you know,

clear definitive answer, but I think it's the best answer I can give right now. You're supposed to tell us all the future. I guess it's OK. You can hedge. It's perfectly all right. Let's move on to the potential future outcomes in terms of the bull bear, et cetera, case. walk us through this. So this is obviously predicting what this looks like five years from now. So give us a sense as to what we're looking at. Yeah. I I think that as you saw in the revenue slide, going into 2025 for the reasons that

I already enumerated we're feeling more bullish on Stripe than when we last met at the end of 2024. I think that the base case is based on a terminal revenue growth rate of 20 % in 2029. So when you're looking at this graph and you see those lines, those represent a terminal growth rate. What Stripe will be growing at by 2029?

and what the evaluation will be when they're at that level. Sorry, what the revenue will be when they're at that level in 2029. Obviously the variable here that will also matter is multiple. So we put in a couple of multiple, threaded in a few multiple scenarios as well. But basically the base case is that Stripe grows, continues to grow above 20%.

but gradually declines to 20 % year over year in 2029. And on a 50 next multiple, by that time, there would be a 211 billion company. Thinking about it now. This is perspective, 20 % year over year growth is obviously a little bit lower than the floor of what they hit was 25%.

a couple years ago and they're targeting 30 % growth this year, right? So I just want to make sure the comparison is in line. Is that right? Yeah, no, that's right. I think the floor was 22 % if I'm not wrong, right after COVID. But no, yeah, that's right. mean, even the Carlson brothers have said, like eventually, the asymptote is that Stripe grows as quickly as GDP. They say, but that could be in decades. But I do think that

there is a natural gravity towards Stripe declining to grow in that direction. I think this is a conservative prediction, but yeah, that's right. However, as you saw, we do think that there's, our forecast is 30 % for 2025. So they would be declining from 30 % in 2025 to 20 % in 2029 in that scenario. And then what's your bull case?

So the bull case is that they'll maintain these levels above 30%. They'll see some ongoing reacceleration because of the catalysts we talked about. And that they'll taper off in 2029 at 35 % year over year growth. So at a 25x multiple, that would make it a $500 billion company. And that would be at $21 billion in revenue.

Yeah, it's pretty huge. And then on the UltraBull, you have even more stablecoin. You have stablecoin explodes. Is the huge variable here on growth, in your opinion, what happens with stablecoin? I do think that the variable between the bull and the UltraBull is the stablecoin volume. think if stablecoin doesn't really move that much, which I'm not saying it's not, I'm actually very pro stablecoin personally, but let's say it didn't move that much.

Are you still confident in the bull case for Stripe? Yeah, I do think that there's a lot of other reasons. think stable coins is kind of an option built that built into Stripe that could take it from like, you know, a very positive story to an extremely positive story. But I don't think Stripe needs stable coins to achieve a bull case. I do think that it requires those products like Stripe billing

enterprise international expansion to go very well. And I do think there needs to be some there should be some contribution from the whole stablecoin thing. But no, it's the ultra bull is not sorry, the bull case is not dependent on stable coins. And if you Marcelo were setting the market, maybe on Polymarket or Kalshi or whatever, or just here on our zoom webinar, what would you set the over under on enterprise value? This is the Marcelo enterprise value 2029 terminal value enterprise value.

What would be the value that you would try to get equal money on both sides of that number? I think I'm feeling I'm feeling like this is a 280 billion dollar company in 2029. I think it's just under a 300 billion dollar company. That was awesomely precise. I love the clarity of the answer. So just give us a little bit more. Is that based on growth rates and what you expect to have happen? Just give us a little more color on that 280 billion.

Yeah, I mean, think that, you know, I think the multiple on Stripe will remain very high. And that, you know, at a 20x multiple in 2029, even if it, you know, declines that growth rate of 20 % year over year, which would be very high for a business of that size at that time. But I think realistic, that's about where it puts it.

at a 20x multiple growing 20 % year over year in 2029. Amazing. So let's look at the stock price then for today. Like what are you seeing? If you're predicting 280, are you happy buying it at 90? Are you happy buying it at 100? Are you happy buying it at 110, 120? What's your perspective that you, Marcelo, if you were putting in your money?

Yeah, I would be very happy buying it at $40 a share right now. That was the target price we had on it last time we spoke. And I think now looking forward, I think that there's more reasons that could trigger these more bullish scenarios. And I would be comfortable buying it at $40 a share at this point. $40 a share, bit lower. What enterprise value? So at $40 a share,

It is, sorry, it's around $103 billion, yeah. All right. Love the precision. How might an economic slowdown affect this company? What would your take on that be? Yeah, I think it's definitely going to affect the company, right? If there's a big ⁓ economic slowdown and that could tilt it towards a base slash bear case, I think more of a base case.

But you have to think too on the billing side, which is big growth driver in the business, that billing side is tied to these like very fast growth tech companies, these very large growing extremely quickly AI companies are nearly all on Stripe billing. And so it's, I think those companies are gonna continue growing very quickly in the slowdown. So there would be some offset for Stripe in that scenario. One more question from the audience, similar but different.

When you look at a company like SpaceX, it feels like it could have meteoric, I'm using that word on purpose, growth independent of the economy per se, but Stripe might be very much tied to the economy. Is there any sense that Stripe will not be able to massively outperform, let's call it an industry index of fintech, or do you think it will because of its unique assets?

company, customers, and products? I think it's very well positioned to outperform, know, regardless, outperform its peers, regardless of the macroeconomic pictures. Just because I think the parts are big, ⁓ you know, some of the parts is bigger than the whole, right?

And I also think that what they're doing with AI is very intelligent in the sense that they're not trying to come up with this AI product that's going to blow their individual customers' minds. What they're trying to do is use AI to grease the wheels of their whole business and help them make more revenue, marginal more revenue from the same activity and presumably more profit as well.

I think that's smart for a business like Stripe. think they think about things in the right way. And I think that they're well positioned to outperform because of what they're doing with AI, what they're seeing with billing, et cetera. Great. Any other words you want to cover about Stripe before we start chatting with Christine? No, think nothing comes to mind. think, ⁓ yeah, love to hand it over. All right, perfect. Christine, so...

We all want to know you since you are the matchmaker between us, the investors and the folks who potentially have access to these assets in this specific situation. We're talking about Stripe. So let's get right to it. I'll act like as if I'm the customer, which for what it's worth, I am the customer. I don't personally own any Stripe yet. I'm very sad about that, but that's okay. So if I want some Stripe, Christine, how do I get some Stripe right now? What are my requirements? What has to happen? How do you help me get some Stripe?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, you're always welcome to source your own deal if you happen to know a strike seller. For the vast majority of people, that's not a reality. You may be in different industry, a surgeon or a dentist, you just don't know your own strike seller. So it's quite common to engage a broker like myself to source some offers for you, help you understand the structures and help negotiate on your behalf too. So

At a high level, the Stripe market is very institutional. The company is very strict about moving around shares and direct transfers. So as a result of that, typically the best way to access Stripe is by subscribing to a vehicle that already holds the shares. So you're not actually dealing with as much of a transfer process because the shares are already held there. So you should be prepared typically.

to invest in what we call a special purpose vehicle, essentially a fund for that deal where you're pooled together with other investors and you have a manager that's managing that vehicle that holds the shares. So I'm reading here, it's like 50 to 100K minimums. Is it usually available that low or is it higher? mean, because sometimes for these companies, it's harder to get these smaller blocks. Obviously it's all relative.

Yeah, Stripe is a difficult market, but it's not an impossible market. So it does tend to be more institutional. So it's going to be hard to get very, very low minimums at a 5K or a 15K or a 20K. But personally, you know, I have good relationships within the Stripe market, different funds, secondary funds, SPV managers, et cetera. So I think around 100K is probably realistic right now in terms of getting access. But it does skew more institutional in some other names that could be low.

So for the sake of this conversation, let's say I want to put in 100K. Is it the sort of thing where we just say go and you can get it or it's still really a search? could take weeks, months, however long? For the particular case today, I think I could get a quite speedy process. I have contacts in mind that would be immediately relevant so we could kind of pull the trigger right away and get negotiating. Got it.

And I know we have a whole nother session that you and I did where we talked about SPVs, how you get into private assets. It'd be great if we could share that link here, or maybe we'll follow up in a future where we'll share it as another tutorial in itself. think that was an hour conversation where we talked about all the things everybody needs to know, including the entire glossary of this world. But let's talk about specifically Stripe. What is the price action you're seeing today as it relates to Stripe? know that Marcelo said,

you he'll come in at $40 a share, 103 billion dollar market valuation. Are you seeing it right at that number? Are you seeing above it, below it? What are you seeing? Yeah, interestingly, I think he's pretty close in terms of where the market levels have actually balanced out to. the yeah, sure. It's a third party SACRA chart showing some of the actual price per share numbers and how they've fluctuated. So certainly you're seeing a lot of market activity. You're seeing activity and demand.

both institutions and individual investors buying in. So it's definitely an active time in the market. And you're seeing deals getting done at a premium to the latest official company price mark, which was the tender earlier this year in 2025. with that deal getting done at $35.50 per share, and you're seeing prices here closer to 37, 38 and 40, which Marcelo was saying he'd be happy to pay.

⁓ that equates to a premium to the latest official price per share of the tender. Great, so just so people understand, there's employees at Stripe that they're getting long in the tooth with their options. So some of them were looking to potentially get out. So there's this tender opportunity where somebody came with money saying, we'll buy out these people that are having these long options. So they actually bought their options, their shares at the price of $35.50.

⁓ which is like around 90 billion dollars, is that right?

Yes, 91 and a half. Yeah, 91 and a half. Perfect. And then now, because we weren't part of that tender, we're not one those employees holding that option. We're still trying to get a hold of the shares. So there's a little bit of a premium on top of it because it's a hot company. It's not trading below that tender price. It's trading above it. But not too much above Yeah, I was just going say also because the average person, even if this tender is going on, cannot.

that tender. It's still a very small number of participants that get to actually get shares through the tender. So typically, even if there's tender supply, it's a fund manager or someone with that initial access that is then extending that offer to their LPs. So they have to factor in a financial incentive or a markup to offer that out. So that's why you get the dynamic of a premium. Awesome. Any other final thoughts you want to share with the audience, Christine?

It's a fast moving market. It's an active time for Stripe. It can change at any time. So I'm of course more than happy to be introduced through you guys to any investors who want to talk more about specifics or if someone's viewing this recording several weeks from now, we can always do a ⁓ one-on-one session to update on the current state of the market and how to move.

Amazing. Well, thank you to both. think Stripe is a very interesting company. It's funny because this is the first time we're actually re-discussing a company from just under a year ago. And Marcelo kind of put a price target back then and he was spot on with his perspective. I'm not trying to say that his feedback or advice here is financial advice, but it's obviously a good discussion. My personal opinion is Stripe is a very, very strong company. I wasn't sure.

personally as part of the COVID bump, if they were gonna be overpriced and get too far ahead of themselves. And they did get overpriced, but the amazing thing is the founders and the leadership there has been continuing to execute. I think their movement further into innovative spaces like stable coins, AI, and expanding their revenue streams beyond just the transactional flow has been quite awesome. So personally, I'm quite bullish.

I'm sad that I'm not in, obviously I need to talk to Christine and others to try to figure out a solve that problem. But thank you very much Marcelo and Christine for educating us and thank you everybody for joining. Have a good rest of your day. Thanks, Slava.

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