Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you handle situations in which you can't tell if someone is legitimately undergoing hyper-growth or committing fraud? In a prior startup, I had my funds held indefinitely by PayPal and 3 separate merchant banks because our rapid growth made them suspect us of fraud or perhaps that our business was just too risky because our numbers were changing so rapidly. Our ultimate solution was to engage a merchant bank t…
There's no simple thing I can say here. There are situations where withholding funds might be required, but they should be exceedingly rare. In other words, we're hoping to eliminate false positives. In general, we're a tech company and we're looking for technical solutions to problems. We're also just culturally familiar with startups that explode in popularity, so we aren't worried about that kind of behavior.
When word gets out that Stripe makes it "dead simple" to process credit cards without a merchant account, the vampires will come out to play. And I'm truly excited for a service like yours. We need this. But be prepared.