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Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

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Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#31

Post by preetamjinka »

dvt wrote: post #16

> The reality… if you stand in their way, they will do more than compete with you head on. Flushed face They will use every power move imaginable. Blocking you from capital, media, talent. And funding competitors just to get back at you. Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company…

> Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."

Yeah, my posts have been on the front page a couple of times and it's nowhere near millions of views.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#33

Post by hsn915 »

dvt wrote: post #16

> The reality… if you stand in their way, they will do more than compete with you head on. Flushed face They will use every power move imaginable. Blocking you from capital, media, talent. And funding competitors just to get back at you. Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company…

PG is on the record talking about being "good" and "nice".

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#34

Post by tempsy »

tptacek wrote: post #30
tempsy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an example of a direct Stripe competitor that has been recently funded? I think the gist of the argument is correct though - there are a few main horses like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart that get funded by a swarm of SV insiders including YC and marquee VCs and then those same insiders have a strong incentive to block investment in direct competitors to those companies. Competitors that do end up poppi…

Here's a list of the Summer 2021 batch companies. You can just cmd-f "pay". https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies...

just because a startup is doing something payment related does not mean “direct competitor to Stripe”

and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#36

Post by dang »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #14

Ok so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 is Ryan (and probably the other copycat temp accounts). I’m having a hard time believing him when he gets basic facts like Lyft not being in YC wrong… I guess it’s like Grove said, “only the paranoid survive.”

Let's be careful here. I don't know of any reason to believe that those are the same person, and somebody getting a marginal fact wrong is a bad reason to dismiss everything they're saying. Humans are far too error prone for that to be much of a signal.

Of course I'm not 'siding' with that poster, or this one. I just say these things out of habit.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#37

Post by dannyw »

tptacek wrote: post #29
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #25

Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?

They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this. You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcomi…

It's been known that HN has applied keyword-based, domain-based, and manual penalties in the past: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#38

Post by pphysch »

tptacek wrote: post #30
tempsy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an example of a direct Stripe competitor that has been recently funded? I think the gist of the argument is correct though - there are a few main horses like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart that get funded by a swarm of SV insiders including YC and marquee VCs and then those same insiders have a strong incentive to block investment in direct competitors to those companies. Competitors that do end up poppi…

Here's a list of the Summer 2021 batch companies. You can just cmd-f "pay". https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies...

> Swipe: A billing and payments solution for Indian small and medium-sized businesses. [...] As my colleague Alex Wilhelm put it, Swipe is Stripe, with a W.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#39

Post by tptacek »

tempsy wrote: post #34
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a list of the Summer 2021 batch companies. You can just cmd-f "pay". https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies...

just because a startup is doing something payment related does not mean “direct competitor to Stripe” and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.

I'm just giving a data point. I don't pretend to know how many "Stripe competitors" YC funds.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#40

Post by [deleted] »

wmf wrote: post #28
canniballectern wrote: post #9

I don't get it - if "the mafia" wants "7% on your cap table", why would they reject your YC application and backchannel to get VCs to back off?

The theory is that YC would rather support Stripe's "monopoly" than take 7% of a bunch of different payment startups.

[deleted]
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