Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
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Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
1–10 of 332 posts
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#2Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#3This is an argument that needs more receipts.
I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#4Let's hope they're better at payments than they are at being the mafia because this guy raised a billion dollars 5 blocks away from them.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#5This is an argument that needs more receipts. I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
Be careful with this sort of reasoning for the sake of false negatives. Under this lens only 0.001% of all actual incidences of what he's describing would be deemed as enough proof (your bar effectively requires testimony under oath and document subpoena).
Obviously, I'm not saying the case is made in the other direction. Given this is all the information that we'll get we have to take into consideration our intuition, his incentives, his reputation, etc. I'm personally not so comfy dismissing it with a "need more proof" stamp.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#6This is an argument that needs more receipts. I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
I’m curious: you ask for receipts but are sure stuff gets shady. What does that look like “without the receipts”?
The extremes are likely too wild to be true, and I think it’s highly unlikely this activity transpires on the YC Slack or BookFace, but I could absolutely believe calls and messaging takes place between what are now startup power brokers, whether that’s founders, VCs, or PR folks, to shape the narrative and drive towards specific objectives.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#7This is an argument that needs more receipts. I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
Be careful with this sort of reasoning for the sake of false negatives. Under this lens only 0.001% of all actual incidences of what he's describing would be deemed as enough proof (your bar effectively requires testimony under oath and document subpoena). Obviously, I'm not saying the case is made in the other direction. Given this is all the information that we'll get we have to take into consideration our intuitio…
I'm not trying to dismiss it, merely trying to open the door for more evidence. Such as emails with redacted identifying info where VCs are saying what's going on and why they won't fund him.
I agree there's a risk of raising the bar too high, but it's also a scenario where he has a financial incentive to paint Stripe in a bad light and he's also trying to make character accusations about actual people. The bar *should* be quite high imo.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#8This is an argument that needs more receipts. I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
I’m curious: you ask for receipts but are sure stuff gets shady. What does that look like “without the receipts”? The extremes are likely too wild to be true, and I think it’s highly unlikely this activity transpires on the YC Slack or BookFace, but I could absolutely believe calls and messaging takes place between what are now startup power brokers, whether that’s founders, VCs, or PR folks, to shape the narrative a…
I'm just saying that human nature is, unfortunately, somewhat inclined to do shady things when a lot of money and power is on the line. Silicon Valley is definitely not immune to this reality. That's all I mean.
Given the amount of publicized cases where high-profile companies had unethical behavior at the founding level (Facebook, Apple, Twitter), I think it's naive to assume any company makes it to that level while maintaining 100% ethical decision making.
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#9I 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?
Re: Bolt founder on Stripe/YC
#10I 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 likely become predatory to the potential innovators that SV is supposed to support.
At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade in the same way as everything else does because it won't be able to entertain a wave of innovators, and they will, as he did, seek and build the next SV.