Stripe to Let Employees Cash Out Shares for Third Time

Stripe expects to let employees cash out some of their shares, as it has done twice before.

John Collison, a co-founder of Stripe, said the company did that last year, did it again this year and will probably do it again “in the future,” Bloomberg reported Monday (June 17).

Speaking with David Rubenstein for an upcoming episode of Bloomberg Television’s “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations,” Collison also said that Stripe is in no hurry to launch an initial public offering (IPO), according to the report.

While analysts have closely watched Stripe and other FinTech veterans, waiting to see when and how they may go public, Collison said many companies go public too early and that Stripe remains focused on products and opportunities to grow the business, per the report.

Stripe was valued at $65 billion in February after a share sale deal with employees.

That deal saw the company and some of its investors purchase more than $1 billion in stock from current and former employees,

When announcing the deal, Stripe said that using its own capital to purchase the shares would offset dilution from the company’s employee equity compensation programs.

“We’re pleased to once again offer employees an opportunity for liquidity,” Stripe Chief Financial Officer Steffan Tomlinson said at the time. “Our business continues to see strong momentum with the most advanced companies in the world.”

In March, Stripe reported that it surpassed $1 trillion in total payment volume in 2023, a figure that was up 25% from the previous year and meant that businesses running on Stripe accounted for about 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP).

“Stripe was robustly cash flow positive in 2023 and expects to be again in 2024,” Collison and Co-founder Patrick Collison wrote in the company’s 2023 annual letter released March 13. “This threshold is important, because it allows us to invest for the long term, building what we believe our users need 10 years from now, without regard for the natural volatility of capital markets.”

During the company’s annual user conference held in April, John Collison said that Stripe was founded in 2009 to enable the acceptance of online payments but soon got requests for additional features, which he dubbed “software-defined financial services.”

“That is what Stripe is building,” Collision said.