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Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

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Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#51
Public fights can occasionally be net positive for one of the participants, but your arguments will be publicly scrutinized and they better be watertight. If the logic you presented is your best work, then I can easily see why you've experienced some trouble in getting people to support you.

Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion.

Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley.

I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move.

I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#52
post #38
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...

> 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.

That’s for a foreign market (India) though which proves the original point

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#53
Is this the end of Silicon Valley and the tech utopia - when HN also starts acting like a paid media with vested interests like Fox News or CNN . Assuming of course that Ryan’s accusations have any truth to it. Then again HN moderators and leaders are people and have their biases and I would not expect them to be truly altruistic. Maybe they shafted Bolt.

Edit- Whether there is any truth to it is another matter but I applaud Ryan’s guts to bring this to the forefront. It reads like an episode of the show Silicon Valley.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#54
At first https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 seemed pretty damning but if you hover over the dates of the HN posts, the title attribute shows the timestamp, and it would appear Stripe's came in a couple hours before Bolt's. Add in Lyft and the "facts" around this story really seem to fall apart.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#56
post #10

I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting. Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very li…

If that's the main result of the post, then it's a reductio, because YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons—only because they thought it wouldn't be a good investment at that moment. Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles (https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/). Of course it still happens that YC turns down good companies which go on to innovate and succeed—but only by mistake.

Edit: by "principles" I don't mean some sort of moral edict, I mean YC's investment thesis, which is described at https://www.ycombinator.com/principles.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#57
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s for a foreign market (India) though which proves the original point

Stripe is international, including in India.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#58

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?

YC alum here, witness my HN submissions page full of 1- and 2-pointers.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#59
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…

I've only ever heard of tens of thousands of views. Maybe it breaks 100k sometimes. I mean, we don't track who clicks on what links, but we do track HN page views and you can't click on what you don't see.

So, millions of views from an HN post is off by two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately! (or maybe fortunately)

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#60
post #54

At first https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 seemed pretty damning but if you hover over the dates of the HN posts, the title attribute shows the timestamp, and it would appear Stripe's came in a couple hours before Bolt's. Add in Lyft and the "facts" around this story really seem to fall apart.

Stripe also launched the product that day on their blog. If anything it seems like Bolt tried to preempt the Stripe launch.
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