71–80 of 332 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s for a foreign market (India) though which proves the original point
Stripe is international, including in India.
I think Swipe is more niche ie: focused on Indian SMBs who may have a very different workflow. Swipe is focusing on WhatsApp powered payments. (See: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/swipe-2).
Though, you'd think they would compete for the same customers over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
I find this comment surprising. I didn't say anything too controversial. Investors regularly refuse (and it's often the morally correct thing to do) investments in competitors. It's also often in their financial incentive too. To assume any investment organization in broad does differently because of their stated principles is absurd. Most investors would comfortably say this. > YC funds competitors all the time and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
I find this comment surprising. I didn't say anything too controversial. Investors regularly refuse (and it's often the morally correct thing to do) investments in competitors. It's also often in their financial incentive too. To assume any investment organization in broad does differently because of their stated principles is absurd. Most investors would comfortably say this. > YC funds competitors all the time and…
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.
By add in Lyft, I assume you mean the fact that Lyft is not actually a YC company? (vs, the tweets refer to Lyft as Stripe's batchmate)
> Stripe and YC effectively co-run the most important media asset in Silicon Valley: Hacker News. A few of my articles [1] have made the front page so I can weigh in on this a (tiny) bit. > The readers know: any time Stripe comes out with a new product, it’s #1 on the site I do believe that "the mods" have the ability to boost articles at their discretion so I would not be surprised if YC companies frequently get a b…
On a related note - I helped review a little over 100+ YC applications since getting in myself in S20 as a way to give back. There were a lot of bad applications or just ideas that seemed over saturated (a social media for some niche as an example). Literally tens of thousands of people apply for YC every batch. I personally recommended around 20 with around 15 getting interviews and around 10 getting in. I only recommend companies that I personally would want to invest in if I had the capital. YC has funded a handful of competitors in my space (PaaS) and I actually had calls with them to exchange notes and see where we could help each other.
> Stripe and YC effectively co-run the most important media asset in Silicon Valley: Hacker News. A few of my articles [1] have made the front page so I can weigh in on this a (tiny) bit. > The readers know: any time Stripe comes out with a new product, it’s #1 on the site I do believe that "the mods" have the ability to boost articles at their discretion so I would not be surprised if YC companies frequently get a b…
Ie, "brand halo" as it relates to ease of getting to #1 on HN is by its nature based on "brand halo in the eyes of HN dwellers", not "general tech brand halo."
I'm not saying that makes HN dwellers think that Stripe can do-no-wrong or whatnot. Just that their prior on how interesting an eng blog post on $topic will be is probably higher for a well-known YC co than it would be for a generically equivalently well-known non-YC co.
One thing to keep in mind - all companies at this size have a corp dev function. Over the past decade, they've likely spoken to several hundred companies and patrick has probably personally spoken to over 100 about an acquisition and looked at some of their data. Anyone who looks seriously at 100 potential acquisitions, while trying to run a company, will drop the ball somewhere on maybe 10 and screw a few up kinda badly. It happens even if you have good intent and try to do the right thing. A number of people on the team will be working on the deal and interacting with the target founders/execs etc and things slip. It happens everywhere, it's a messy process.
Many/most VCs have a policy of not funding competitors. If I had an investor fund a competitor I'd be wary - are they going to share private data? I doubt anyone ever sat on the board of both pepsi and coke simultaneously etc.I get that not all investors are on the board - but they will all get information that isn't in the public domain.
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 c…