A look at Stripe's obstacles before its IPO, including increasingly tough competition while moving upmarket, slowing revenue growth, and a lack of profitability
Jareau Wadé / Every : Tweets: @sarthakgh Tweets: Sar Haribhakti / @sarthakgh : .@jkwade has committed the crime of writing a sobering piece on Stripe for @every https://every.to/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This sobering audit lands one year after the Collisons' profile showing Stripe's gross revenue rose 60% to nearly $12B in 2021 — the high-water mark of the capital-efficiency story that made it Silicon Valley's most valuable private company. Wadé's argument is that the machine that won SMB online payments doesn't translate cleanly upmarket.
The market agreed within a month: Stripe raised $6B at a $50B valuation, a steep markdown used largely to help employees exercise underwater RSUs. What followed vindicates the piece's patience thesis — John Collison declared 'no rush' to list in 2024, and by 2026 an employee share sale marked Stripe at $159B, all without an IPO.
First-order effects
- Early employees holding RSUs at the old mark take the immediate hit — the $50B raise exists precisely because their options are underwater, converting paper wealth into a liquidity problem Stripe must fund.
- Upmarket rivals now compete against a company whose growth has slowed enough that profitability, not expansion, becomes the metric its own investors will grade it on.
Second-order effects
- Late-stage investors like Thrive, General Catalyst, a16z, and Founders Fund gain a template for buying proven companies at reset prices via structured raises tied to employee liquidity rather than new capital needs.
- Enterprise payment buyers get negotiating leverage: a vendor that must show a path to profit before an IPO has reason to trade margin for marquee logos, intensifying price competition upmarket.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — reset valuation, 'no rush' stance, repeated employee secondaries instead of a listing — the IPO stops being the default exit for top private companies, with secondary markets absorbing the liquidity function indefinitely.
The trend: Top-tier private companies are substituting discounted raises and employee share sales for IPOs, decoupling liquidity from public listing even when profitability questions persist.