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Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

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Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#301

Post by danielmarkbruce »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #286
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #79

I was at Stripe a few years back and I don't remember Bolt coming up as a competitor, ever. Stripe was more worried about Paypal and Adyen. 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…

> I was at Stripe a few years back and I don't remember Bolt coming up as a competitor, ever. Stripe was more worried about Paypal and Adyen. They even had an office you could _see_ from Stripe's. Right across Brannan.

We were in Townsend when I was there :)

Regardless, seriously, I don't think anybody paid any attention to them ever. I'm not even convinced they are a competitor from looking at what they do. Payments is a big space, lots of players fit into different parts of the value chain and/or target different customers. I'm speculating, but I'd guess their issues raising money came from bad messaging. They aren't clear about what they do. I'd guess VCs were confused about what they did and/or explicitly misunderstood it.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#302

Post by pbreit »

skinkestek wrote: post #215
dang wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we've worked a lot on detecting such manipulation. I looked into whether it was employees doing the flagging, but I didn't include that in the GP because I can't tell for sure who was or wasn't an employee. What I did find is that of the flaggers, most haven't ever voted for a stripe.com submission (before or since). There were two flaggers who have voted for quite a few stripe.com submissions, but not enough to…

I'd almost suggest reducing the power of flagging on posts even more, but I won't for two reasons: - This is your job and from everything I see you already put a whole lot of thought into it and I don't think I can outsmart you here. - IMO things have become better the last decade so it seems to me some adjustments (either technical or in the user base) have already happened. [1] That said, maybe we as a community co…

People who "false flag" should have their voting power diminished immensely.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#303

Post by sombremesa »

pbreit wrote: post #302
skinkestek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd almost suggest reducing the power of flagging on posts even more, but I won't for two reasons: - This is your job and from everything I see you already put a whole lot of thought into it and I don't think I can outsmart you here. - IMO things have become better the last decade so it seems to me some adjustments (either technical or in the user base) have already happened. [1] That said, maybe we as a community co…

People who "false flag" should have their voting power diminished immensely.

There's no such thing as a "false flag", just as there's no such thing as a "false upvote". Fradulent? Abusive? Sure. But true/false implies these things are objective.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#304

Post by takinola »

eagleinparadise wrote: post #298
danielvinson wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not related to your actual point, but I researched corporate boards a few years back and found many instances of people on boards of two direct competitors. In fact, I found a couple of companies with CEOs who also served on the board of a competitor. This was going through maybe a few hundred large corporations, so I’d have to assume it’s incredibly common.

I haven't studied this in depth but I recall that there's a book out there that sort of blasts the management consulting industry. How a lot of corporates will hire the same consulting company such as McKinsey to learn what their competitors are planning/how they are performing. IIRC

This is absolutely incorrect. Consulting companies, at least the major ones, will never let any consultant work for more than one competitor throughout their career. They also strictly forbid sharing any info learnt about a company with anyone else, talk less of with competitors.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#306

Post by halpert »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #288
halpert wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is notoriously playing out in the ETF space. Large institutions own vast quantities in stock in competitors and competition decreases as a result. See Rise of Institutional Investors Raises Questions of Collusion.

Can you give a concrete example? This seems vague. It's certainly not notorious.

Notorious is the wrong word you’re right. It’s an active area of research. It’s called the “common ownership hypothesis”.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#307

Post by abernard1 »

manquer wrote: post #265
abernard1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ? Yes, but it would be nice to dispense with the mythology that what is going on is the best technology is winning. YC might as well be the alumni association at Harvard. The whole culture in SV / YC / HN / FAANG (and I understand the differences between those) is a value capture mechanism. It sim…

I wouldn't call it fiction , it depends on which lens you see it from. For a team without the education /experience background in a developing economies or more traditional smb/micro saas product they are privileged. However no matter how much resources/help stripe got taking on PayPal still means underdog. Taking on trillion dollar companies like Amazon, Apple Google , MS or even Facebook, with enormous platforms an…

> Taking on trillion dollar companies like ...

They're not taking on trillion dollar companies though. They're taking on small software players in their space and racing to see who can grow fastest. This, if anything, is the biggest failure in the Bolt CEO's argument. YC and VCs intentionally fund huge amounts of identical players in the same space all the time. It's like the adage with outrunning the bear: "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you." Throwing money at problems is how Bay Area VCs outrun other companies and American/international companies as a whole.

Later though, disproportionate amounts of their returns are made on sector consolidation, and this applies equally to down-market dominance with the FAANGs.

> Tesla was and still is some extent an underdog in the automotive industry.

Tesla is a perfect example of just how silly the Bay Area VC complex is. Its history is almost in complete opposition to the software-first model promoted for a long time, and it still required massive government subsidies.

And there's only one Tesla. For two decades the Bay Area (generously) has produced only one huge non-software tech company, and it left. There is no Bay Area VC tech future outside of software, and that low hanging fruit is gone.

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#308

Post by skinkestek »

dang wrote: post #255
skinkestek wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, you are probably right again. It is just that I spend quite a lot of time on HN and I missed it until I checked /active. So either I didn't notice it at first or I had a 13 hour break from HN ;-) That said, doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days? Am I mistaken? (And if not - do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this o…

You might be surprised how much stuff you miss on HN. At least I am, and there can't be many people who monitor it more than I do (at least I hope there aren't! as I'm paid to). If you look at the front page links on past days ( https://news.ycombinator.com/front , linked as 'past' in the top bar), you'll see that there are a lot of significant front page stories in a day. You need to click "More" at the bottom at le…

> I have time, but I don't understand the question!

I have realized I was probably wrong again ;-)

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#309

Post by skinkestek »

sombremesa wrote: post #303
pbreit wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who "false flag" should have their voting power diminished immensely.

There's no such thing as a "false flag", just as there's no such thing as a "false upvote". Fradulent? Abusive? Sure. But true/false implies these things are objective.

While you are probably technically correct, remember many here are not native English speakers.

Given the quotes it seems poster was aware that the word wasn't perfect.

I'd try something along the lines of "I guess the word you are looking for here is fraudulent or abusive".

Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

#310

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

neya wrote: post #201
emerongi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could a competitor have its employees flag a submission? Does HN have automatic vote manipulation detection? Does HN have automatic flag manipulation detection?

Yes, it happened even a few years back. I have seen this first hand with a startup (not going to name). At the time, the startup asked its employees to flag comments against them on HN, and vote only what their founder said. Today, they're a big multi-million dollar business, the founder gives many useful pieces of advice and interviews and what not, but to me, ethics is everything and I stopped recommending them to…

Without a name is hard to trust your story
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