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John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe.

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Rising interest rates crushed technology valuations and had a chilling effect on Silicon Valley. Stripe’s co-founder says it was needed.

“Broadly speaking, the effects of higher rates have been quite good,” John Collison, president of the online payments company, told CNBC in an interview at the company’s annual conference Wednesday. “The period where money was free was not a healthy time in Silicon Valley.”

Collison founded Stripe with his brother Patrick in 2010. The company took off, becoming a startup darling and racing to a valuation of $95 billion in 2021, making it one of the world’s most valuable venture-backed businesses, behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Stripe had to take a major haircut along with the rest of the industry as soaring inflation and rising interest rates, starting in 2022, pushed investors out of the riskiest assets, lifted borrowing costs and forced startups to tighten their belts.

Stripe slashed its valuation to $50 billion in a 2023 financing round. Its recent employee tender offer valued the company at closer to $65 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“Valuations are a product of interest rates,” Collison said. Still, he said, “Stripe’s business is the healthiest it’s ever been.” Regarding the drop in valuation, he added, “We’re not losing sleep over it.”

Stripe processed $1 trillion last year, up 25% from 2023, the company said in its annual letter.

While many tech companies took a hit in 2022 and 2023, Collison said the rising interest rate environment succeeded in flushing out the “wackiest” startup ideas, leaving the best ones to get funded.

He pointed to an “overfunding” of marginally good ideas, and “zombie companies” taking too long to go bust.

“That’s not good for dynamic capital allocation in the broader economy,” Collison said. “You want people to be working on the most valuable ideas, and not on the marginal ideas.

Following an extended stretch of rock-bottom borrowing costs, the Federal Reserve started lifting rates in 2022, and hiked its benchmark rate last year to the highest since 2001. Rates have held steady since, and recent statements by Fed Chair Jerome Powell and other policymakers have cemented the notion that cuts aren’t coming in the next several months. 

Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell speaks during a news conference at the bank’s William McChesney Martin building on March 20, 2024 in Washington, DC.

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Collison said there’s more pain coming.

The “point of high rates is that they should hurt, and they haven’t hurt enough yet,” he said. “We should just assume that the hurt takes a bit longer to arrive.”

One part of the tech market that’s powering through the higher rate environment is artificial intelligence, where there “seems to be a new AI funding round every week,” Collison said.

This week, Perplexity announced a $63 million funding round that pushed its valuation above $1 billion. SoftBank and Jeff Bezos are among its backers.

Stripe is benefiting in its own way from the euphoria. OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face are among the AI startups using the company’s payment processing technology.

“I can’t remember a time in Silicon Valley where it has felt like there was as much interest in tech advances taking place,” Collison said of the AI boom. “It’s just a fun time to be in tech, broadly.”

As for Stripe’s future, an eventual IPO has been a source of speculation for years given the company’s lofty valuation and its roster of high-profile backers thirsting for a return on their investment. Collison said Stripe is in “no rush,” and that executives are focused on providing liquidity to employees through secondary share sales.

“We have no timeline that we’re announcing on being a public company,” he said. “The thing that we were quite focused on is making sure that there is good liquidity for employees.”

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Just Eat Takeaway to delist from London Stock Exchange in blow to UK market

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Just Eat Takeaway to delist from London Stock Exchange in blow to UK market

Just Eat Takeaway said it was delisting its shares from the London Stock Exchange due to the “low liquidity and trading volumes” of its shares on the exchange.

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Just Eat Takeaway will delist from the London Stock Exchange next month, in a blow to the U.K.’s ambitions to attract more high-growth tech firms to its stock market.

After completing a review of optimal listing venues, the Anglo-Dutch food delivery firm said Wednesday that it intends to delist from London’s stock exchange, making Amsterdam Just Eat Takeaway.com’s sole trading venue.

Explaining its decision, Just Eat Takeaway said it was delisting its shares from the LSE in a bid to “reduce the administrative burden, complexity and costs associated with the disclosure and regulatory requirements of maintaining the LSE listing, and in the context of low liquidity and trading volumes.”

Just Eat Takeaway shares slipped 1.5% following the delisting announcement.

It has requested that the LSE and the Financial Conduct Authority, the U.K.’s markets watchdog, cancel its listing, so that it can remain primarily listed on the Amsterdam exchange.

The delisting will become effective from 8 a.m London time on Dec. 27, while Dec. 24 will mark the last date of trading of Just Eat Takeaway’s shares on the LSE.

Earlier this month, Just Eat Takeaway.com said it would sell its GrubHub arm to New York-based online takeout startup Wonder for $650 million — a huge discount compared to the $7.3 billion the firm paid for the U.S. food delivery app.

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Reddit targets international users for ad growth, teases bolstered search feature

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Reddit targets international users for ad growth, teases bolstered search feature

Reddit logo on website.

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Reddit is ramping up efforts to attract more users outside of the U.S., putting countries like India and Brazil in focus as it looks to unlock new advertising opportunities, a top company executive told CNBC.

In a wide-ranging interview, Jen Wong, chief operating officer of Reddit, said other platforms have 80% to 90% of users outside of the U.S. while about half of her company’s current users are based internationally.

“So that points to a lot of our future user growth opportunity definitely outside of the U.S. and local language,” Wong told CNBC. “The opportunity, the way I think about it, is every language is an opportunity for another Reddit.”

Reddit has historically been an English-language platform, but the company is looking to expand its international reach with the help of artificial intelligence translations. This year, Reddit launched a feature that automatically translates its site into different languages.

Wong said that around 20 to 30 languages could be available by the end of the year.

India opportunity

Among the company’s fastest-growing markets in terms of users is the U.K., the Philippines, India and Brazil.

“India’s growing really rapidly,” Wong said. “We see a big opportunity in India.”

The Reddit COO said that India has a large English-speaking internet population, and there are lots of engaged users around topics like cricket and the Bollywood movie industry.

Wong also said Reddit has been meeting with “mods” — or moderators, who oversee content on communities on the site.

Advertising opportunity

Growth in markets like India can propel Reddit to boost ad revenue, its main source of income.

International markets account for just over 17% of Reddit’s revenue currently, according to the company’s third-quarter results, despite around 50% of its users being located outside the U.S.

Wong said that Reddit first attempts cross-border advertising for international markets, such as when a European brand is looking to advertise in the U.S. Then, when Reddit hits about 10% of a country’s internet population in a country, there is an opportunity to build teams focused on local advertising — like an Indian brand advertising to Indian users.

This has not yet happened in many markets, but Reddit is keeping an eye on many of its fastest growing countries, Wong said.

New search tools

Reddit users will know that it’s not always the easiest site to find what you’re looking for — a drawback that the company is now looking to change with new search tools.

During Reddit’s third-quarter earnings call last month, CEO Steve Huffman called search on the platform a “focused investment” in 2025.

Wong expanded that the company is thinking of its search feature as a way of helping users to navigate around the site to find similar topics or posts that they may have otherwise missed.

“You land on a post and but it’s almost like a dead end. But there are a lot of posts, often like that post, or there are other posts like that post in other communities. And so giving you a total view of what that looks like is a really interesting opportunity,” Wong said.

“Guiding you through Reddit as you follow that line of thinking, is how we think of the opportunity.”

Wong declined to say more except, “We’re testing a lot of things.”

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OpenAI gets new $1.5 billion investment from SoftBank, allowing employees to sell shares in a tender offer

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OpenAI gets new .5 billion investment from SoftBank, allowing employees to sell shares in a tender offer

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during an event in Seoul, South Korea, on Friday, June 9, 2023.

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OpenAI is allowing employees to sell roughly $1.5 billion worth of shares in a new tender offer to SoftBank, CNBC has learned.

The new financing will allow the Japanese tech conglomerate to get an even larger slice of the AI startup, and it will allow current and former OpenAI employees to cash out their shares, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC.

Employees will have until Dec. 24 to decide if they want to participate in the new tender offer, which has not previously been reported, one of the people said. The deal was spurred by SoftBank billionaire founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, who was persistent in asking for a larger stake in the startup after putting $500 million into OpenAI’s last funding round, one of the people said.

The tender offer is not related to OpenAI’s potential plans to restructure the firm to a for-profit business, one of the people said.

OpenAI and SoftBank declined to comment.

The news underscores Son’s interest in the AI space and in backing the most valuable private players. SoftBank was an early investor in Arm, and Son said at a recent conference that he’s saving “tens of billions of dollars” to make the “next big move” in artificial intelligence. He had previously invested in Apple, Qualcomm and Alibaba.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 recently invested in AI startups Glean, Perplexity and Poolside. SoftBank has about 470 portfolio companies and $160 billion in assets across its two vision funds.

The OpenAI investment matches SoftBank’s eagerness to deploy cash, with a capital-intensive business model, a person close to Son told CNBC.

Even without SoftBank’s deep pockets, OpenAI has had no trouble raising billions in cash. Its valuation has climbed to $157 billion in the two years since launching ChatGPT. OpenAI has raised roughly $13 billion from Microsoft, and it closed its latest $6.6 billion round in October, led by Thrive Capital and including participation from chipmaker Nvidia, SoftBank and others.

The company also received a $4 billion revolving line of credit, bringing its total liquidity to more than $10 billion. OpenAI expects about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue this year, CNBC confirmed in September with a person familiar with the situation.

OpenAI employees can cash out

The tender offer will be open to current and former employees who had been granted restricted stock units at least two years ago and have held the shares for at least that long, one of the people said. The unit price of $210 will align with the company’s most recent funding round.

Tender offers have become crucial for tech employees amid a dormant IPO market and skyrocketing company valuations. Private companies rely on such deals to keep employees happy and reduce the pressure to list on public markets. Since OpenAI has no initial public offering immediately on the horizon and a price tag that makes the company prohibitively expensive for would-be acquirers, secondary stock sales are the only way in the near future for shareholders to pocket a portion of their paper wealth.

Databricks is another private company raising money to allow employees to cash out and avoid public markets pressure, CNBC reported this week.

OpenAI took a more restrictive approach to tender offers in the past, with rules allowing the company to determine who gets to participate in stock sales, CNBC reported in June. Current and former OpenAI employees previously told CNBC that there was growing concern about access to liquidity after reports that the company had the power to claw back vested equity.

But the company reversed its policies toward secondary share sales this summer, and it now allows current and former employees to participate equally in annual tender offers.

The company expects to allow more of these secondary sales, and it will need to tap private markets again in the future based on demand from investors and the capital-intensive nature of the business, according to a person familiar with this week’s tender offer.

OpenAI has faced increasing competition from startups like Anthropic and tech giants like Google. The generative AI market is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade, and business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, according to recent data from Menlo Ventures.

Last month OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the high-powered AI startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity.

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