Stripe Atlas

Yep!

Few Nice Words about Stripe before the "But"

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The Stripe team straddle technology, trust and finance at scale. I have seen almost every interview PC has done and the insights the guy brings up are super interesting and he is a lot more measured than most people, and it seems to be true that he is also a lot more correct. Super smart team, super smart vision, seem to have great integrity and provide opportunity to many people. This focus on "building roads while everyone else is building cars" has been really mutually beneficial to the ecosystem.

The "But"

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To reflect breifly on how Stripe frames itself, their data points, and just the general caliber of the people there lead me to believe this is the best way to solve global commerce. I suspect they have given it quite a bit of thought, and the move seems to be unite all of the things in one place. In the narrative analogy, what about electric vehicles?

On one hand, alternative currency and technology companies have the luxury of, they themselves, being an infrastructure to allow for distributed global commerce, a new framework for growth, and the natural rise of the global internet company unbound by arbitrary lines drawn when imperialist did the carve out of the world. On the other hand, I would have loved to see a structure to derisk, a company and allow them to trade internationally with some semblance of compliance and also speed a structure where a company registers a business as the domain.

Stripe assuredly knows that Ethereum, BTC and Blockchain are super important, and in many ways, solve the problem Stripe sent out to fix. Possibly with a better framework. I think the Atlas program is great, a net good, and a phenomenal way to solve what(as a US citizen I luckily haven't been subjected to) is a huge painpoint of just selling into America, trying to work in America, and the regulatory complexity of that shitshow.

I am a bit bummed because Stripe is often correct, and while I suspect to some extent it is tough to de-risk this, they just see the timeline being much longer than I do. They're probably right, I am looking at it at the "S" bend of technology adoption, and they are looking at it from a corporate standpoint.

Just sucks that centralizing all of these new companies into the USA ends up being the best way. I have to hand it to the Stripe guys/gals, this was such a feat of complex coordination that it is absolutely staggering they were able to manage several verticals of beurocratic inertia in parallel like this. I work in fintech where one of the guys in the accelerator I was talking to today was explaining how we might need a quick restructure of a few assumptions, he explained his implementation like this:

The API ends up literally being a call. You call a human for credit appraisal, the backend has the data and his system has a rest API for fetching and pushing data, and still a human reads the huge red text: "please copy and paste from [othersystem name] & hit enter", then his system generates all the regulatory compliance stuff and all the actually useful stuff needed, but a human is in the loop because it is too complicated for the internal dev team to allow (or to post) the fucking data.

* Sales team loves this process innovation.

* Friend responded (as I am assuming everyone is thinking) that it is NOT regulatory hurdle, purely tech.

* You have heard of this bank.

So kudos to Stripe, awesome job, complexity is immense and I am sure this could be life changing for many. I would still love to see them embrace something like Ethereum near-term, but congrats.

Ethereum to be honest. I stated this elsewhere but PC isn't dumb and has a lot more data points than I do, although I consider myself someone who knows(maybe incorrectly) a bit about how these things seem to be moving.

Obviously, it would be insanely difficult to de-risk that, but I also assume that some of their assumptions are:

* [x]coin is a solved problem, as it transacts globally by default and has an API already.

OR

* [x]coins aren't there yet, super risky, and for the foreseeable future remain difficult and cumbersome to use programmatically so we will internally build some of that tooling and wait for less risk and hire adoption.

AND

* People, like previous versions of us(from p/j/collisons perspective) need this now and it is a huge pain point for many to do business internationally.

* Even in country this is totally full on wacky.

So, I don't think it is congnitive dissonance to believe both these things, and in fact we are over predicting here. That is why I am put out. Not because of anything Stripe did, but because I think they could be correct about how long this transition will take.

Dear Stripe UX/Design team, please consider whether light grey text on a light grey background is a good idea. See: http://contrastrebellion.com/

does stripe support personal bank accounts? I have a U.S personal bank account but I don't live in the U.S. nor do I'm a U.S. citizen, in my country there isn't anything as awesome as Stripe, the bank infrastructure here is pretty bad and non existent for online payment processing of credit cards. All my clients will reside outside the U.S. but I want to use U.S/Stripe as a proxy for getting paid.