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Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

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Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#51

Post by scalenemuscles »

Osiris wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the founding team of braintree still in control of the company?

No. According to the article, the investors kicked out the founder in 2011 and brought in a new CEO with a history of getting companies acquired.

I think it's relevant to point out the former CTO explicitly stated earlier today in the thread that the founder wasn't kicked out:

"I'm the former CTO of Braintree and one of the founding employees. I was there when Bryan Johnson hired Bill Ready as CEO and decided to move to Chairman. The authors of the TechCrunch article were either misinformed or speculating when they said that Bryan "lost his position" and that Bill joining was a "decision made by Accel." Bryan made the decision to hire Bill and move into the Chairman role without pressure from anyone."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6338053

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#52

Post by vidarh »

scalenemuscles wrote: post #51
Osiris wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. According to the article, the investors kicked out the founder in 2011 and brought in a new CEO with a history of getting companies acquired.

I think it's relevant to point out the former CTO explicitly stated earlier today in the thread that the founder wasn't kicked out: "I'm the former CTO of Braintree and one of the founding employees. I was there when Bryan Johnson hired Bill Ready as CEO and decided to move to Chairman. The authors of the TechCrunch article were either misinformed or speculating when they said that Bryan "lost his position" and that…

That may very well be true - if he wants the company sold, why not, especially if he wants to avoid getting tied into working for an acquiring company for years.

That said, I've also been involved in a company (as co-founder) where finding C-level execs to parade around to state that the CEO (one of my co-founders) left voluntarily would be easy enough.

Most of them wouldn't know differently either, not having been privy to the conference calls where the investors made it clear they'd find an excuse to fire him for cause and tie him up in court over his shares for the next few years if he didn't "volunteer" to take 6 months pay, put on a brave face and leave. What most of them saw was the show my co-founder put on to get the best deal possible and leave gracefully.

I'll hasten to add that I don't know this guy, so for what I know he was in the room for every conversation Bryan Johnson had with the investors at Braintree or otherwise actually did have the inside track. Just pointing out that it's also easy to think you have the inside track on these types of things without having a clue about what actually went on.

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#53

Post by xfour »

dan_manges wrote: post #25
pixelmonkey wrote: post #9

The CEO who got ousted, in 2011: “Without outside capital, we have to make do with less ... Constraints are a beautiful thing because they force creativity and precision. We don’t have the resources to throw after hit-or-miss hires or strategies. Bootstrapping a business requires a different mentality. It’s taught us to be frugal, hire slowly, and exercise caution as we grew the business. While companies that take fu…

I'm the former CTO of Braintree and one of the founding employees. I was there when Bryan Johnson hired Bill Ready as CEO and decided to move to Chairman. The authors of the TechCrunch article were either misinformed or speculating when they said that Bryan "lost his position" and that Bill joining was a "decision made by Accel." Bryan made the decision to hire Bill and move into the Chairman role without pressure fr…

That appears like a pretty first hand account, seems more legit than the usual speculation.

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#54

Post by jacquesm »

vidarh wrote: post #52
scalenemuscles wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's relevant to point out the former CTO explicitly stated earlier today in the thread that the founder wasn't kicked out: "I'm the former CTO of Braintree and one of the founding employees. I was there when Bryan Johnson hired Bill Ready as CEO and decided to move to Chairman. The authors of the TechCrunch article were either misinformed or speculating when they said that Bryan "lost his position" and that…

That may very well be true - if he wants the company sold, why not, especially if he wants to avoid getting tied into working for an acquiring company for years. That said, I've also been involved in a company (as co-founder) where finding C-level execs to parade around to state that the CEO (one of my co-founders) left voluntarily would be easy enough. Most of them wouldn't know differently either, not having been p…

Second this. There can be many layers of understanding to things like this and it is all too easy to think you were an eyewitness to a real life event when in fact you were just watching a well-choreographed ballet.

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#56

Post by sterwill »

dcc1 wrote: post #55

Having dealt with both Braintree and Stripe as a merchant Braintree's business is not worth anything, they are neither innovative nor streamlined nor work as well as Stripe

Braintree has a major advantage over Stripe: their terms of service. Did you actually read through all the prohibited businesses[1] in Stripe's ToS? Most of them are common-sense bad, but some of the descriptions are very general, and there are 56 of them.

Are you sure your business isn't providing "personal computer technical support"? Offering any "extended warranties" with goods your business is selling? Maintaining "quasi-cash or stored value"? Or maybe one your web site's users posted "sexually-oriented or pornographic products or services"? Stripe prohibits accepting payments "in connection" with those things.

[1] https://stripe.com/us/terms#prohibited-businesses

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#57

Post by rmrfrmrf »

programminggeek wrote: post #44

Looking at the numbers and making some estimates... $10 billion in transactions probably turns into about 1% in fees, so we'll say revenue is about $100 million. Being generous, let's say they are running on a 30% margin. That would put profits around $30 million a year. That's pretty good, but when you look at that number it would be a 10 year payback period at $300 million. At $1 billion, that is a 30 year payback…

It's pretty selfish of me, but I hope that Square and Stripe stay separate because I think they both keep their competitors, er... competitive, and honest. Both companies are a pleasure to work with, so I have a[n irrational?] fear that they'll become less customer focused by merging and becoming a large force in the payment arena.

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#59

Post by jareau »

scalenemuscles wrote: post #41
ajsharp wrote: post #18

Anyone building a card processing business is going to have trouble finding long-term cash flow because the margins are razor thin. For example, Visa processed $6.7 trillion in transactions and made $10.4bn in revenue . I'd rather do business with someone like Balanced, who has a larger product vision than "well paypal sucks".

Balanced, Stripe, Braintree, and a host of other companies are trying to build a great payments platform. What makes Balanced any different from the others in this case? Isn't Balanced also based on the premise that "well paypal sucks"?

(I'm a co-founder of Balanced)

Balanced's mission is to increase the global economy by enabling new commerce. Our current mechanism to do that is with payments [1].

So we don't actually want to build a processing company, per se, but we're finding that's the best way to accomplish our mission right now.

At some point, it's likely that we'll have to make changes to our mechanism, but until then we feel building the world's first open source payments infrastructure company [2] is a great way to accomplish our goal.

[1] https://www.balancedpayments.com/about [2] http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008944/open-company/why-i-made-my...

Re: Braintree Is On The Block, Had Acquisition Talks With Square And PayPal

#60

Post by dcc1 »

sterwill wrote: post #56
dcc1 wrote: post #55

Having dealt with both Braintree and Stripe as a merchant Braintree's business is not worth anything, they are neither innovative nor streamlined nor work as well as Stripe

Braintree has a major advantage over Stripe: their terms of service. Did you actually read through all the prohibited businesses[1] in Stripe's ToS? Most of them are common-sense bad, but some of the descriptions are very general, and there are 56 of them. Are you sure your business isn't providing "personal computer technical support"? Offering any "extended warranties" with goods your business is selling? Maintaini…

Yes I did, I wasted time with braintree who didnt accept my hosting business (7 year company is high risk apparently) while stripe has no problems

actually looking at that list all card processors prohibit whats on that list, for example 2co one is very similar, and i doubt braintree would allow anything on it either

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