| > knowledge workers cost 1m/yr on average This is wildly off, even for programmers. (Most knowledge workers are not programmers.) You're also conflating cash expenses with the equity-heavy compensation that makes tech employees expensive. > Stripe charges 2.9% + 30c per transaction. This is the baseline product. The resulting analysis is like analyzing Microsoft solely on the basis of Windows volumes and margins. (A great business, but not nearly as good as the real Microsoft!) I would be surprised if the rest of their product suite (Invoicing, Billing, Radar, Identity, Tax, Capital, etc.) isn't generating a meaningful portion of their revenue (and a larger portion of their profit). > multiple has dropped Without high-level visibility into the relative revenue/profit contributions of their various products and their individual growth rates, it's hard to even guess at which numbers are driving investment multiples. Is this business more like Twilio, still trying to break from from the tyranny of COGS, or is it starting to look more like a pure SaaS a la Salesforce? |