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.
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.
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.
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.
YC has funded and continues to fund a lot of payment startups. More generally: YC funds close to a thousand startups a year at present—obviously it's impossible to avoid funding competitors in such a model, nor would that be in keeping with YC"s founding principles, one of which is to try to fund as many good startups as possible (https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/). But you can have good practices around it, such as not playing favorites, not giving inside information about one to another, reminding founders that startups mostly don't die because of competition, big markets are big enough to support multiple players, and so on.
In this scenario (not getting into if its true or not) logically the "mafia" would want to get 7 % in successful companies, and the key to that success is to influence everyone else not invest in anything they reject, which means less competition/resources to their portfolio. This makes life harder if you never applied so you are kind of forced to apply and be forced to pay "protection" even if you may not like it.
More powerful a mafia is, more likely their rejection dooms your venture, making it more likely you would be okay with deal even if terms are not too favorable.
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 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.
> the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear
Yes, I think the incentive argument is certainly the more interesting piece than the notion that there is any sort of coordinated conspiracy, which seems far-fetched.
> At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade
I'm not sure that this follows. This argument doesn't really apply to new approaches, it only applies to direct competitors of market-dominant darlings, not fresh approaches within a vertical.
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 companies which go on to innovate and succeed—but only by mistake.
Edit: by "principles" I don't mean some sort of moral edict, I mean YC's investment thesis, which is described at https://www.ycombinator.com/principles.
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 would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons
While I know your intentions weren't bad, it feels disingenuous to speak so confidently about the behavior of hundreds(?) of investors/employees, regardless of the take. Also getting a seed check from YC doesn't really disprove any of this. The forces of the business immune system he's describing probably wouldn't kick in until later anyway.
To be clear I don't think any of this is abnormal behavior (or reprehensible). Regardless I stand by my bet: the successor to Airbnb & Stripe probably wont be YC backed.
VCs generally don't fund direct competitors to those in their portfolio, which I agree with you is a good thing -- conditional on there being a lot of VCs out there (which there are).
(Btw, in case any reader is not aware, dang is employed by YC to manage HN - and YC acts differently from VCs in many respects).
With all due respect there have been 2-3 HN posts in the last few months about YC and HN being biased towards Stripe. Surely it cannot be so much smoke without a fire.
That's bad logic in two ways. First, this is the internet. Smoke goes a lot further than that.
Second, to the extent that the claims involve HN, (I'm being careful only to comment on facts I personally know about), they're definitely false [1]. So yes, for sure there can be that much fireless smoke.
[1] I haven't had a chance to respond properly about those claims yet. Normally I'd have done it by now, but I'm on my phone with intermittent access at the moment, so am a lot slower and don't have my usual tools. Edit: I finally got it out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
Sorry, but if someone makes statements about HN or YC that I know to be false, I believe it's my job to correct them—especially since we can't treat this kind of post in the way we normally moderate HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). What do you think I should do instead?
I can see someone who isn't convinced you're a fair operator taking the volume and detail of response as defensiveness, and that can look suspicious in a context like this.
They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective.
> They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective.
How? I'm curious. If someone makes accusations that you know to be false, wouldn't your best defense be a comprehensive refutation?
What alternative do you see that would be more compelling?
I, for one, really appreciate this level of detail, because the most common alternative is to attack back mercilessly without evidence. This tactic being commonly employed by politicians the world over.
I get it too. But when things get to that stage, literally anything you do will be taken as proof of the same nefariousness, whether you sink or you float.
I think it makes more sense to focus on the much larger audience that's sincerely making up their mind, and give them good information with which to do it. Could I do that less defensively though? Absolutely. Not there yet.
When you have a fixed mindset, have chosen a side in a debate, and actively participate in a story where you have a vested self-interest, you cease to become what this community loves about you -- the impartial gardener of HN. At this point, you've become a YC defender and have abandoned your post as someone who could serve as a balanced arbiter. Surely, there are other people at YC who could comment on such matters for stories like this. That would be far, far better for you and HN (and probably YC too).
I appreciate your comment! but I really don't think that's the right conclusion. I've been doing this for years—people know what to expect from me. I'd rather be up front about the fact that I care about HN and YC, and don't like to let false accusations go unanswered. To some extent it's a temperament thing. Past experiences (long before HN) have conditioned me to be a bit passionate in this department, and with a community like this one, which is extremely sensitive to the truth, I think it would be a bigger mistake to pretend otherwise. Probably a hugely bigger mistake, because what works best for me on HN is relating to people, and I can only do that by being myself.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment and the links. Very helpful! Three thoughts in response:
- The appearance of unfairness is arguably at least as important as actual fairness from a community perspective. If you're being fair, but no one thinks believes it, the community suffers as though it were true. During this story, people were openly questioning your motives (even though the original story was apparently not factual) because they perceived unfairness.
- Choosing not to engage on certain topics and leaving that to other people in no way prevents you from connecting and engaging with the community naturally. Not engaging throws cold water doubt (unfounded though they may be) before it has an opportunity to smolder.
- There are lots of new community members, who could easily get the wrong idea. They don't know you like many (like myself) who have seen how you interact with the community, and in whom you've built up a large reservoir of trust.
The role you play in this community is very special and incredibly important to me and many others. Thank you so much!
I think people have already made their mind but if you want to share more information, I would suggest being 100% transparent and releasing any internal communication (emails/text/slack) about Bolt.
I don't understand what sort of communication you're talking about. If you mean internal communication at the time (back in 2018), there wasn't any. If you mean internal communication yesterday - there was a bit (e.g. someone pointed me to the thread), but what value would there be in releasing it?
Thank you . That was a fantastic and very detailed response. Obviously seeing a few of those posts made me think there was something to those insinuations so its good to get those clarified. Ball is now on Bolt founder's court to back up his claims otherwise its libel.
My comment wasn't about hundreds of investors -- it was strictly about Y Combinator, which is just one company. I've worked for YC for years and therefore know things about it. Since I don't work on the investment side of the business, there are a lot of details I miss out on, but on the macro level, such as the core patterns by which YC operates, I know quite a bit. Also, part of my job is to be a liaison between HN and YC, and an important part of that is to correct inaccuracies and misperceptions where possible.
But this poster is also a HN "moderator" and has a very biased perspective in this conversation. Moderators are in place to ensure fairness, to act as a referee and prevent spam. It's PR that does the sort of "correct inaccuracies and misperceptions where possible" stuff of effectively using outsized leverage to control the narrative. It's PR that tries to deny that beliefs that are deemed "incorrect."
I'm sure that line between PR and "forum mod" can get blurred over the years, but that's exactly the OP's point. The YC community, as it has scaled, is no unbiased marketplace, and it has not handling scaling responsibly. Look at the founders who were ousted from bookface, or even some of the non-public discussions there. The OP's Stripe commentary might be over the top, but YC has yet to produce a mature response to any of these friction points.
> The OP's Stripe commentary might be over the top, but YC has yet to produce a mature response to any of these friction points.
How could they produce the mature response you’re looking for when the accusations are full of holes. Lyft isn’t a YC company and didn’t use Stripe initially as he claims.
The only “Proof” (his words) posted is incorrect: Stripe posted their blog post before he posted his.
He has produced no real evidence for his claims. The evidence he has tried to produce is trivial to check and works against his claims.
Curious about the funding competitors part. What enables YC to do this, why aren't other VCs able to fund competitors? Has this ever resulted in conflicts or lawsuits between companies? Lots of questions appreciate any insights.
>Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles
Well, "bad for business" is arguable, but it's not like "against its principles" has been any big detterent in Google, Apple, Microsoft, and generally coporate behavior...
YC is orders of magnitude smaller. So far, from what I've seen, those principles still carry some weight.
Edit: I think I might have confused things by using the word 'principles'. I'm talking about YC's investment thesis, as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070101.
Turning down good deals is bad for a startup investment business, yes. In fact it's the worst mistake such a business can make. This observation is so commonplace that it's long been a cliché.
Every member of a cartel is motivated to defect, yes. The hiring cartel Facebook broke wasn't for business reasons, it was because Steve Jobs was mad about recruiters calling his people.
I think the word 'principles' is leading to a bit of confusion here. I used that word because I was referencing https://www.ycombinator.com/principles, but I don't mean moral precepts, I mean YC's investment theses. These, for example:
"Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them."
"YC’s value is the number of startups we help times how much we help them."
The point is that funding new startups in the same markets as previous startups it funded is a consequence of YC's model. Not to do it would be self-contradictory.
The Twitter thread and OP didn't say anything about YC investing in companies who do similar things. The "accusation" is that YC discourages other VCs from investing into competitors that YC isn't part of (for whatever reason).
Then why did Lyft and Uber, Dropbox and Box, come from SV, from the same time period? I just pulled these from my brain with little recall, which tells me your argument probably has a lot of contradictory examples.
The answer to this is probably FOMO (and it does work against GP's argument) — the VCs who missed out on the hot new startup will want to get on the second best rocket.
Wait, I forgot which payment processor silicon valley liked? CyberCash, PayPal, Venmo (whoops), BrainTree or something, does Toast (but they're east coast, maybe not SV darlings) count? I like the name, clearly and they do process payments... Etc.
There's a ton of companies in this space, and a lot of them got funding from somewhere.
I know of at least one instance in which direct competitors were accepted to YC in the same batch. So your implication that SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. is untrue.
If the premise of the tweets are true, then anything negative about Stripe will be hidden from Hacker News and so following this thread to see if that is the case.
There was also a hacker news thread sometime ago about predatory tactics used by Stripe if I'm not mistaken and so there does seem to be an increase in negative sentiment.
The top HN search result for Stripe is, by a considerable margin, the post from two months ago, about Stripe ghosting candidates and retracting offer letters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264
On the first page of top-ranked results for the word “Stripe” I noted two other articles as well that appeared, on the surface, to be critical of Stripe.
I encourage performing your own search and assessment rather than trusting my brief skim, but it’s certainly enough for me to recommend further research along those lines if you’d like to contrast the historical data with moderation concerns.
Ok so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 is Ryan (and probably the other copycat temp accounts). I’m having a hard time believing him when he gets basic facts like Lyft not being in YC wrong…
I guess it’s like Grove said, “only the paranoid survive.”
You have to understand Twitter is itself not meant to be that serious. (FWIW US media reporting in general is primarily advertising nowadays, I never see any reporting that is without a clear goal for certain ideas, reporting facts are simply not the primary goal) This Twitter thread is of course a combination of business promotion (bolt is for start-up, bolt standard up against stripe, bolt founder stands up against bullies). I am not questioning his intention. I am saying promotion is simply a unconscious drive in US business man. When they talk they always put the business interest at the center, intentionally or unconsciously.
Let's be careful here. I don't know of any reason to believe that those are the same person, and somebody getting a marginal fact wrong is a bad reason to dismiss everything they're saying. Humans are far too error prone for that to be much of a signal.
Of course I'm not 'siding' with that poster, or this one. I just say these things out of habit.
> The reality… if you stand in their way, they will do more than compete with you head on. Flushed face They will use every power move imaginable. Blocking you from capital, media, talent. And funding competitors just to get back at you.
Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company by the power of rainbows and unicorns?
The idea that you need to reach top of HN to be relevant in SV is also a bit silly. Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."
> Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it.
Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction. Breslow himself admits there are competitors. We're also conveniently forgetting that Bolt just raised $355M at an $11B valuation, who am I supposed to feel sorry for again?
Excellent execution in the payments space and expanding beyond that to support business infrastructure and development through things like Treasury and Atlas etc.
Not sure that qualifies as a monopoly, but in general Stripe is an example of one (so far).
I think for a lot of posts, people just comment and upvote based on the title, and never click through to register an actual view. For products this is still valuable because of brand recognition. That being said, I really doubt YC has the bandwidth to target all the competitors of their top companies.
Same here. My blog posts that hit #1 and stayed up for a while never generated over 10k views. Now, a product like Bolt or Stripe might attrack more views, but I doubt that HN even has a million views on an average day.
I've only ever heard of tens of thousands of views. Maybe it breaks 100k sometimes. I mean, we don't track who clicks on what links, but we do track HN page views and you can't click on what you don't see.
So, millions of views from an HN post is off by two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately! (or maybe fortunately)
Wow, I would have assumed it's significantly higher than tens of thousands of views, given how often websites get hugged to death. I guess people really skimp out on hosting plans.
Or have an unfortunate habit of hosting their sites on mind-numbingly inefficient architectures. E.g. vanilla Wordpress seems to run 500-1000ms TTFB on a standard shared hosting plan.
What is an example of a direct Stripe competitor that has been recently funded?
I think the gist of the argument is correct though - there are a few main horses like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart that get funded by a swarm of SV insiders including YC and marquee VCs and then those same insiders have a strong incentive to block investment in direct competitors to those companies.
Competitors that do end up popping up are usually being funded by outsiders or smaller firms as mentioned.
just because a startup is doing something payment related does not mean “direct competitor to Stripe”
and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.
> Swipe: A billing and payments solution for Indian small and medium-sized businesses. [...] As my colleague Alex Wilhelm put it, Swipe is Stripe, with a W.
Stripe's messaging seems focused on infra for the "internet".
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.
Also: Steal is Steel with an A, Rob is Rub with an O, and ShopLyft is Shoplift with a Y.
Why PayPal for it when you can just Swipe it?
In the same vein, BooKing.com is BooQueen.com with a penis. That kind of majestic insubordination can get you a €400 fine and a few weeks of jail time in the Netherlands where their headquarters are located, but I wonder what problems they had with the harsher Lèse-majesté laws in Thailand because of their name.
>With penalties ranging from three to fifteen years imprisonment for each count, it has been described as the "world's harshest lèse majesté law" and "possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere"; its enforcement "has been in the interest of the palace". [...] Even attempting to commit lèse-majesté, making sarcastic comments about the King's pet, and failure to rebuke an offense have been prosecuted as lèse-majesté. [...] The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. [...] The longest recorded sentence was in 2021: 87 years imprisonment, reduced to 43 years because the defendant pleaded guilty.
Not sure which rounds you are talking about but both Airbnb and Coinbase had hard time getting funding after YC. Airbnb because it was a crazy idea and with Coinbase lot of VCs didn’t understand or avoided crypto back in in 2012.
Only later, after they got their first investors and became more successful, lot of other firms flocked to them.
Very few of those companies seem to be truly competing with Stripe. Most of them are specific to a non-US country, or target a very specific demographic.
Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?
They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this.
You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcoming about it!
While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.
I didn't say HN operates on an "unmoderated scoring function"; it most certainly doesn't, as Dan has (again) repeatedly said. I said that YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC votes don't count differently.
You are arguing the specifics of my comment and not the spirit of it. It’s not clear all the ways posts are modified and it isn’t clear who all knows all the ways posts are identified.
It's clear enough, if you pay attention. Follow Dan's comments over time; they're an informal moderation log of the site. You'll see what stuff does and doesn't happen to posts.
Sure, I also, still, feel some of the kinetics need to be explained to avoid confusion.
Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.
The specific answer (about this post) is that moderators haven't touched it in any way. Twitter.com links have a mild downweight, along with many other domains that produce a lot of sensational/offtopic content (relative to HN). That includes nearly all major media, forums like reddit, etc. Other than that, all you're seeing is the regular HN algorithm at work. It's more complex than just points + time—we've tweaked it over the years to (try to) do a better job of selecting for intellectual curiosity, dampening flamewars, and so on.
My comment was more about what are all the different ways post can be ranked higher/lower. I trust Dan that the two things I mentioned they don’t do, but is there anything else like keywords/hosts that if yc members knew would give them an edge.
There is no reason to believe anything like that is happening. We do well enough on HN that Dan called us out downthread, and certainly there are no secret tricks we're using --- short of "not having our friends vote us up when stuff of ours gets submitted". I think this is pretty much just conspiracy theories.
The discussion here is pretty unproductive. You're free to simply disbelieve Dan; that's a coherent perspective to have, even if I think it's deeply wrongheaded. But I assume we both know enough about the dynamics of message board "debate" to know that there's an unbounded set of un-falsifiable arguments you can throw up to support the idea that Stripe is unfairly gaming HN. Maybe they've found a wrinkle in the way the second-chance pool is handled!
You are quite defensive and I’ve never said I didn’t trust Dan but you keep saying it.
Because you knew enough about HN that this conversation is “unproductive” doesn’t mean it is unproductive to others. My comment got a lot of upvotes. Maybe that means the knowledge you have isn’t as wide spread as you think it is.
Also I recommend you compare Dan’s responses in this thread to your own. A very different tone—one that is “more productive” than how you’ve chosen to respond.
My entire point was more information could a. Prevent these posts in the future and b. Help to others understand the dynamics when a post like this is made. What is wrong with this? Jeez... was my initial comment that offensive to you?
p.s. I'm in the middle of traveling somewhere but I'll try to come back to this thread soon and respond to the more specific claims in the OP. The claims in there that I personally have direct knowledge about (at least the ones I've had time to read so far) are false, and I agree with you that forthcomingness would be helpful. Edit: more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
pc is probably one of the most recognizable and respected folks in tech, the vast majority of people view him in a positive light and generally like the tone in which he comments on HN (forthcoming and open), so it's entirely possible he just gets upvoted up by a lot of readers for any of those reasons (i.e. there's a simpler explanation besides a a full-blown HN / YC conspiracy on his post rankings...)
Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ?
Everyone wants the exclusive network that YC founders get access to. The doors that YC stamp can open. The obvious corollary to that is for not YC company it is harder to open those doors and build those connections.
This is central to the model for any exclusive network, tech companies (FAANG) education institutions (Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc) or even schools like Eton all do the same to someone's(or company)'s profile.
It is lot more likely that you will get funding (not just YC) if you studied in best schools, worked at top company or a hot startup all else being same.
It is true of the ex-founder badge as well, second time founders get better chance at fund raise than a first time founder for the same idea.
VCs would say there is strong correlation between such attributes and success, but it really hard to prove (or disprove ) causation for this.
It is quite hard to know how much is such experiences or education a factor of merit or is it only because of the network effect and brand recognition more opportunities open up rather than any real merit to those brands alone.
> 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 simply could not exist without extreme VC funding and pushing market entrants out via capitalization and size. Additionally, 20 years of this has proved that only certain types of low-hanging fruit can succeed with that model: (1) low cost-of-capital software industries, with (2) relatively known risks and favorable governance (see SF politics), and (3) an endless supply of knowledge workers who don't need domain experience.
Make the technology physical, requiring real science or engineering experience, have to pay the taxes that every other company in America pays, and not be able to push out market entrants from capitalization, and this whole world would collapse. Personally, I think it's obvious it's collapsing right now.
I have no dog in the Stripe vs Bolt fight, but the idea that this forum and the VC network culture of the Bay Area are talented underdogs as opposed to the extremely privileged is a deliberately concocted fiction.
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 and userbases even with couple of billions in the bank still feels like underdog.
Tesla was and still is some extent an underdog in the automotive industry. The amount of money and support they could leverage from "paypal mafia" and other VCs while enormous doesn't make it an equal fight when taking on Volkswagen, toyata or GM.
They are more likely to see from who is bigger than them rather than who is less privileged.
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.
Possible this is just a marketing piece to generate discussion?
Bolt the david vs Stripe/YC the goliath of SV, reconciling traditional startup pains to a monopoly but they made it anyway...
Some interesting points though, particularly the one where stripe took investment from many vcs in order to block other companies... that could've been to get access to existing networks and sell to those companies too. But I could see how that could be a blocker too.
Seems like the person had been mulling on this for a while and for whatever reason decided today was the time to share his thoughts publicly. If it was a deliberate strategy I suspect it would have been better argued (there’s a few factual errors that undermine most of the argument which any competent PR person would have thought to verify).
Public fights can occasionally be net positive for one of the participants, but your arguments will be publicly scrutinized and they better be watertight. If the logic you presented is your best work, then I can easily see why you've experienced some trouble in getting people to support you.
Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion.
Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley.
I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move.
I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.
"a person who opposes or rejects popular opinion." [1]
That meaning is exactly that I was looking for. Many people, myself included, believe he's wrong. But what the hell do we know? It feels odd to be giving business advice to a self-made billionaire.
Seemed like you were focusing less on "contradicting popular opinion" and more on "offending powerful people" which is a related but different concept.
I agree that was a strong opening, and if turns out that this whole ordeal was a net positive event for Bolt, then it will have been entirely due to that one sentence. I imagine quite a few people on HN had never heard of Bolt before, and that's now changed for about 100k people at least (likely many more if you take other platforms into account).
Even so, I still think the closing could have been better. His last words are an accusation, and he portrays a landscape where it's hard for Stripe competitors to win. There actually was an opportunity to say something like: "And yet, if there's anything I've learned, it's that in the end a great product can overcome all adversity. That's what enabled us to become the first unicorn startup in the world to have introduced a 4-day work week for all of our 600 employees."
You started with the weakest argument, that was based all hearsay and had no smoking gun. It was first only because the Twitter thread told the story in chronological order. And then.. you stopped there?
For me the strongest argument is that hours after they reached #1 on HN, Stripe posted, got #1 themselves, then Bolt's own post somehow disappeared, suggesting foul play. Twice, in two separate occasions, this is alleged to have happened. This is both pretty damning for HN itself (and in this case, @dang has some explaining to do), and pretty easy to confirm or refute with Wayback machine and such.
edit: but it appears.. Stripe post was earlier than Bolt's own post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068406 Were Bolt posts even removed? And if they were removed, for which reason, each of them?
All of what he said about those HN posts is false. I'm going to post something soon with all the details. It just takes a long time to put together with all the correct links.
Is this the end of Silicon Valley and the tech utopia - when HN also starts acting like a paid media with vested interests like Fox News or CNN . Assuming of course that Ryan’s accusations have any truth to it.
Then again HN moderators and leaders are people and have their biases and I would not expect them to be truly altruistic. Maybe they shafted Bolt.
Edit- Whether there is any truth to it is another matter but I applaud Ryan’s guts to bring this to the forefront. It reads like an episode of the show Silicon Valley.
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.
Yes, Lyft not being YC is is mostly it but also from an early Stripe employee [1]: "Lyft was also not originally on Stripe. They were on Braintree and switched over to Stripe after both Stripe and Balanced (another YC-funded payments company) competed for their business." Balanced was definitely a payments company also backed by YC. I cannot verify the switching from Braintree as I'm mostly an observer in all this but the other details are easily verifiable.
> 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 boost. This is a separate admin feature from the open role posts that YC companies post (which cannot be commented on and which drop from page #1 over a fixed timeframe I think). I will have to dig for the source on that but I believe dang has publicly commented on it here. That does indeed feel somewhat shady IMO if correct (and let me be very clear that I could be incorrect here).
Edit: let me elaborate on this because I'm sure dang will see it and possibly take it the wrong way. dang, isn't there a feature where you can boost "interesting" articles? I believe it was described as "articles that are probably interesting to the HN community but have not gotten enough attention" (bad timing, etc.) Are you the only one with the permissions to do that? That feature is never used to boost YC company posts? I.e. it's only used for intellectually stimulating content where no YC-related conflict of interests is possible?
But on the other hand, if you have a huge name like Stripe (or Chrome DevTools) it really isn't as hard to make it to page #1 as the Bolt person is making it out to be. The hardest part IMO is crafting a title that succinctly summarizes how new feature X is a big deal.
> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.
Millions of views sounds like a stretch. 250K to 1M sounds more accurate to me.
[1] I wrote the Chrome DevTools docs for 3 years. DevTools docs made the front page probably 10-15 times. I also was content lead for https://web.dev for a couple years. Those docs made the front page another 10-15 times. I've also had 2 or 3 personal articles make page #1.
Dan has said repeatedly that YC companies do not get artificial boosts. He's said that on this thread, as well. Ranking is definitely not a strict function of votes; HN does a bunch of stuff to groom the front page. But, according to Dan, none of that involves giving preference to YC companies.
I have no knowledge except what I read here, but this is obviously false. Or perhaps not obviously but at least suspiciously. As apparent by the "_YC_STARTUP_ is hiring" posts, that don't even take comments, as well as the "work at a startup" (YC's hiring portal) posts, that are commonly on the front page. Without publication of the ranking algorithm, I would be _very_ hard pressed to believe these are organic. I mean even if all YC alums mass voted for those topics, vs the total number of users voting that has to be a small fraction.
So there are at least a couple classes of topics that seem to be artificially promoted, in preference of YC companies.
The specific types of posts that are treated specially are well documented, including in this thread. It's 'suspicious' mostly because you (seemingly) haven't had a chance to look into it.
I didn't mean 'suspicious' with a negative connotation, just to be clear. Indeed, I didn't care enough to look it up, ie I could care less how posts are ranked. That's YC and HN's business. I have nothing at stake.
Given this well documented information, and my basic belief that the principals here aren't sociopaths, I see no reason to believe Stripe posts would be artificially promoted, well normal SEO (done right) aside.
But, even though I don't really "care", I do think it's great that HN has so many defenders of their impartiality. I can't really tell how many are insiders but it feels like most (all but 1 or 2) are just regular users. It speaks highly of HN and is worth defending. HN ain't perfect, that's for sure, but I know I couldn't make it better. [well i would get rid of the newish prev and next links -- they make the byline a bit long on mobile. i prefer folding, so when i free scroll i can see better where i was. that's not the kind of better i am referring to. just a throwaway complaint]
Yes, the YC startup is hiring posts work differently than other posts on the front page, they're also explained in the FAQ ("Can I post a job ad?" and "What's the relationship between YC and HN?").
The grandparent comment of your comment also called this out, so I'm assuming the post you replied to assumed that those weren't worth calling out in their statement.
One thing that I suspect is true, but sort of hard to avoid and not really anyone's fault (although, potentially part of the "deliberate" value of HN) is that HN dwellers tend to be pre-disposed look up to YC companies, implicitly favor them, etc.
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.
YC invited Ryan to apply again and he declined? If the establishment was so anti-Bolt that they were colluding against him, why would they want him to apply again? Regardless, why wouldn't he? It seems like he's had a chip on his shoulder ever since the initial rejection, and he deliberately made it more difficult for himself and his team by passing up another opportunity to get into YC. If YC is as powerful and as big of an advantage as he says, why wouldn't he apply again?
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] threadI'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More powerful a mafia is, more likely their rejection dooms your venture, making it more likely you would be okay with deal even if terms are not too favorable.
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.
Yes, I think the incentive argument is certainly the more interesting piece than the notion that there is any sort of coordinated conspiracy, which seems far-fetched.
> At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade
I'm not sure that this follows. This argument doesn't really apply to new approaches, it only applies to direct competitors of market-dominant darlings, not fresh approaches within a vertical.
Edit: by "principles" I don't mean some sort of moral edict, I mean YC's investment thesis, which is described at https://www.ycombinator.com/principles.
> YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons
While I know your intentions weren't bad, it feels disingenuous to speak so confidently about the behavior of hundreds(?) of investors/employees, regardless of the take. Also getting a seed check from YC doesn't really disprove any of this. The forces of the business immune system he's describing probably wouldn't kick in until later anyway.
To be clear I don't think any of this is abnormal behavior (or reprehensible). Regardless I stand by my bet: the successor to Airbnb & Stripe probably wont be YC backed.
VCs generally don't fund direct competitors to those in their portfolio, which I agree with you is a good thing -- conditional on there being a lot of VCs out there (which there are).
(Btw, in case any reader is not aware, dang is employed by YC to manage HN - and YC acts differently from VCs in many respects).
Second, to the extent that the claims involve HN, (I'm being careful only to comment on facts I personally know about), they're definitely false [1]. So yes, for sure there can be that much fireless smoke.
[1] I haven't had a chance to respond properly about those claims yet. Normally I'd have done it by now, but I'm on my phone with intermittent access at the moment, so am a lot slower and don't have my usual tools. Edit: I finally got it out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective.
How? I'm curious. If someone makes accusations that you know to be false, wouldn't your best defense be a comprehensive refutation?
What alternative do you see that would be more compelling?
I, for one, really appreciate this level of detail, because the most common alternative is to attack back mercilessly without evidence. This tactic being commonly employed by politicians the world over.
I think it makes more sense to focus on the much larger audience that's sincerely making up their mind, and give them good information with which to do it. Could I do that less defensively though? Absolutely. Not there yet.
I've never claimed to be impartial and never would (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). What I do claim is that (a) we try hard to be fair and to follow HN's principles, especially the one about intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) ; (b) we always answer questions truthfully, partly because it feels better that way and partly because it would be dumb not to (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) ; and (c) we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved in a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That, by the way, is the only reason why this imaginary riler-upper spent 11 hours on HN's front page today. We'd never allow that normally—it goes against everything the site is supposed to be for. But I dutifully gritted my teeth and bore it, because that's the principle, and because I'm not about to trade a global optimum for a local one (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), even though it sucks to periodically get slimed like this.
- The appearance of unfairness is arguably at least as important as actual fairness from a community perspective. If you're being fair, but no one thinks believes it, the community suffers as though it were true. During this story, people were openly questioning your motives (even though the original story was apparently not factual) because they perceived unfairness.
- Choosing not to engage on certain topics and leaving that to other people in no way prevents you from connecting and engaging with the community naturally. Not engaging throws cold water doubt (unfounded though they may be) before it has an opportunity to smolder.
- There are lots of new community members, who could easily get the wrong idea. They don't know you like many (like myself) who have seen how you interact with the community, and in whom you've built up a large reservoir of trust.
The role you play in this community is very special and incredibly important to me and many others. Thank you so much!
I'm sure that line between PR and "forum mod" can get blurred over the years, but that's exactly the OP's point. The YC community, as it has scaled, is no unbiased marketplace, and it has not handling scaling responsibly. Look at the founders who were ousted from bookface, or even some of the non-public discussions there. The OP's Stripe commentary might be over the top, but YC has yet to produce a mature response to any of these friction points.
How could they produce the mature response you’re looking for when the accusations are full of holes. Lyft isn’t a YC company and didn’t use Stripe initially as he claims. The only “Proof” (his words) posted is incorrect: Stripe posted their blog post before he posted his.
He has produced no real evidence for his claims. The evidence he has tried to produce is trivial to check and works against his claims.
How should YC respond to this?
Well, "bad for business" is arguable, but it's not like "against its principles" has been any big detterent in Google, Apple, Microsoft, and generally coporate behavior...
Edit: I think I might have confused things by using the word 'principles'. I'm talking about YC's investment thesis, as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070101.
Come on. It's like saying crime won't happen because it's illegal.
"Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them."
"YC’s value is the number of startups we help times how much we help them."
The point is that funding new startups in the same markets as previous startups it funded is a consequence of YC's model. Not to do it would be self-contradictory.
Not agreeing or disagreeing with this, just trying to point out this argument :-)
There's a ton of companies in this space, and a lot of them got funding from somewhere.
There was also a hacker news thread sometime ago about predatory tactics used by Stripe if I'm not mistaken and so there does seem to be an increase in negative sentiment.
On the first page of top-ranked results for the word “Stripe” I noted two other articles as well that appeared, on the surface, to be critical of Stripe.
I encourage performing your own search and assessment rather than trusting my brief skim, but it’s certainly enough for me to recommend further research along those lines if you’d like to contrast the historical data with moderation concerns.
I guess it’s like Grove said, “only the paranoid survive.”
Of course I'm not 'siding' with that poster, or this one. I just say these things out of habit.
Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company by the power of rainbows and unicorns?
The idea that you need to reach top of HN to be relevant in SV is also a bit silly. Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."
FYI - It's illegal to do what Bolt founder tweeted. Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it.
Not sure how this ever gets proven..
Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction. Breslow himself admits there are competitors. We're also conveniently forgetting that Bolt just raised $355M at an $11B valuation, who am I supposed to feel sorry for again?
I didn’t say they are.
Not sure that qualifies as a monopoly, but in general Stripe is an example of one (so far).
Yeah, my posts have been on the front page a couple of times and it's nowhere near millions of views.
http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html
So, millions of views from an HN post is off by two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately! (or maybe fortunately)
1. There are dozens of Stripe competitors funded by YC and new ones get accepted every batch from what I've seen.
2. VCs will ghost you last minute no matter who you are.
Edit: You can see public YC companies here https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Payments
I think the gist of the argument is correct though - there are a few main horses like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart that get funded by a swarm of SV insiders including YC and marquee VCs and then those same insiders have a strong incentive to block investment in direct competitors to those companies.
Competitors that do end up popping up are usually being funded by outsiders or smaller firms as mentioned.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies...
and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.
You: Go here, do this.
Person: That doesn't provide anything meaningful in this context.
You: I don't pretend to know...
Then why present said "data point" at all?
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.
Why PayPal for it when you can just Swipe it?
In the same vein, BooKing.com is BooQueen.com with a penis. That kind of majestic insubordination can get you a €400 fine and a few weeks of jail time in the Netherlands where their headquarters are located, but I wonder what problems they had with the harsher Lèse-majesté laws in Thailand because of their name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9#Netherl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...
>With penalties ranging from three to fifteen years imprisonment for each count, it has been described as the "world's harshest lèse majesté law" and "possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere"; its enforcement "has been in the interest of the palace". [...] Even attempting to commit lèse-majesté, making sarcastic comments about the King's pet, and failure to rebuke an offense have been prosecuted as lèse-majesté. [...] The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. [...] The longest recorded sentence was in 2021: 87 years imprisonment, reduced to 43 years because the defendant pleaded guilty.
Only later, after they got their first investors and became more successful, lot of other firms flocked to them.
You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcoming about it!
While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.
Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.
The specific answer (about this post) is that moderators haven't touched it in any way. Twitter.com links have a mild downweight, along with many other domains that produce a lot of sensational/offtopic content (relative to HN). That includes nearly all major media, forums like reddit, etc. Other than that, all you're seeing is the regular HN algorithm at work. It's more complex than just points + time—we've tweaked it over the years to (try to) do a better job of selecting for intellectual curiosity, dampening flamewars, and so on.
The discussion here is pretty unproductive. You're free to simply disbelieve Dan; that's a coherent perspective to have, even if I think it's deeply wrongheaded. But I assume we both know enough about the dynamics of message board "debate" to know that there's an unbounded set of un-falsifiable arguments you can throw up to support the idea that Stripe is unfairly gaming HN. Maybe they've found a wrinkle in the way the second-chance pool is handled!
Because you knew enough about HN that this conversation is “unproductive” doesn’t mean it is unproductive to others. My comment got a lot of upvotes. Maybe that means the knowledge you have isn’t as wide spread as you think it is.
Also I recommend you compare Dan’s responses in this thread to your own. A very different tone—one that is “more productive” than how you’ve chosen to respond.
My entire point was more information could a. Prevent these posts in the future and b. Help to others understand the dynamics when a post like this is made. What is wrong with this? Jeez... was my initial comment that offensive to you?
Most importantly, the first principle of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when a YC startup (or YC itself) is involved in a story. That does not mean we don't moderate at all—but we moderate significantly less. I've written about this a ton over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here is a more entertaining subset: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
p.s. I'm in the middle of traveling somewhere but I'll try to come back to this thread soon and respond to the more specific claims in the OP. The claims in there that I personally have direct knowledge about (at least the ones I've had time to read so far) are false, and I agree with you that forthcomingness would be helpful. Edit: more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
Everyone wants the exclusive network that YC founders get access to. The doors that YC stamp can open. The obvious corollary to that is for not YC company it is harder to open those doors and build those connections.
This is central to the model for any exclusive network, tech companies (FAANG) education institutions (Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc) or even schools like Eton all do the same to someone's(or company)'s profile.
It is lot more likely that you will get funding (not just YC) if you studied in best schools, worked at top company or a hot startup all else being same.
It is true of the ex-founder badge as well, second time founders get better chance at fund raise than a first time founder for the same idea.
VCs would say there is strong correlation between such attributes and success, but it really hard to prove (or disprove ) causation for this.
It is quite hard to know how much is such experiences or education a factor of merit or is it only because of the network effect and brand recognition more opportunities open up rather than any real merit to those brands alone.
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 simply could not exist without extreme VC funding and pushing market entrants out via capitalization and size. Additionally, 20 years of this has proved that only certain types of low-hanging fruit can succeed with that model: (1) low cost-of-capital software industries, with (2) relatively known risks and favorable governance (see SF politics), and (3) an endless supply of knowledge workers who don't need domain experience.
Make the technology physical, requiring real science or engineering experience, have to pay the taxes that every other company in America pays, and not be able to push out market entrants from capitalization, and this whole world would collapse. Personally, I think it's obvious it's collapsing right now.
I have no dog in the Stripe vs Bolt fight, but the idea that this forum and the VC network culture of the Bay Area are talented underdogs as opposed to the extremely privileged is a deliberately concocted fiction.
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 and userbases even with couple of billions in the bank still feels like underdog.
Tesla was and still is some extent an underdog in the automotive industry. The amount of money and support they could leverage from "paypal mafia" and other VCs while enormous doesn't make it an equal fight when taking on Volkswagen, toyata or GM.
They are more likely to see from who is bigger than them rather than who is less privileged.
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.
Bolt the david vs Stripe/YC the goliath of SV, reconciling traditional startup pains to a monopoly but they made it anyway...
Some interesting points though, particularly the one where stripe took investment from many vcs in order to block other companies... that could've been to get access to existing networks and sell to those companies too. But I could see how that could be a blocker too.
Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion.
Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley.
I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move.
I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.
That meaning is exactly that I was looking for. Many people, myself included, believe he's wrong. But what the hell do we know? It feels odd to be giving business advice to a self-made billionaire.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=contrarian+meaning
> Today we’re a successful company with 600 employees, billions in GMV, and growing rapidly
Even so, I still think the closing could have been better. His last words are an accusation, and he portrays a landscape where it's hard for Stripe competitors to win. There actually was an opportunity to say something like: "And yet, if there's anything I've learned, it's that in the end a great product can overcome all adversity. That's what enabled us to become the first unicorn startup in the world to have introduced a 4-day work week for all of our 600 employees."
For me the strongest argument is that hours after they reached #1 on HN, Stripe posted, got #1 themselves, then Bolt's own post somehow disappeared, suggesting foul play. Twice, in two separate occasions, this is alleged to have happened. This is both pretty damning for HN itself (and in this case, @dang has some explaining to do), and pretty easy to confirm or refute with Wayback machine and such.
edit: but it appears.. Stripe post was earlier than Bolt's own post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068406 Were Bolt posts even removed? And if they were removed, for which reason, each of them?
Edit: finally - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287
Edit- Whether there is any truth to it is another matter but I applaud Ryan’s guts to bring this to the forefront. It reads like an episode of the show Silicon Valley.
https://twitter.com/cjc/status/1485803509110894596
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 boost. This is a separate admin feature from the open role posts that YC companies post (which cannot be commented on and which drop from page #1 over a fixed timeframe I think). I will have to dig for the source on that but I believe dang has publicly commented on it here. That does indeed feel somewhat shady IMO if correct (and let me be very clear that I could be incorrect here).
Edit: let me elaborate on this because I'm sure dang will see it and possibly take it the wrong way. dang, isn't there a feature where you can boost "interesting" articles? I believe it was described as "articles that are probably interesting to the HN community but have not gotten enough attention" (bad timing, etc.) Are you the only one with the permissions to do that? That feature is never used to boost YC company posts? I.e. it's only used for intellectually stimulating content where no YC-related conflict of interests is possible?
But on the other hand, if you have a huge name like Stripe (or Chrome DevTools) it really isn't as hard to make it to page #1 as the Bolt person is making it out to be. The hardest part IMO is crafting a title that succinctly summarizes how new feature X is a big deal.
> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.
Millions of views sounds like a stretch. 250K to 1M sounds more accurate to me.
[1] I wrote the Chrome DevTools docs for 3 years. DevTools docs made the front page probably 10-15 times. I also was content lead for https://web.dev for a couple years. Those docs made the front page another 10-15 times. I've also had 2 or 3 personal articles make page #1.
Permalinks:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067683
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067919
So there are at least a couple classes of topics that seem to be artificially promoted, in preference of YC companies.
Given this well documented information, and my basic belief that the principals here aren't sociopaths, I see no reason to believe Stripe posts would be artificially promoted, well normal SEO (done right) aside.
But, even though I don't really "care", I do think it's great that HN has so many defenders of their impartiality. I can't really tell how many are insiders but it feels like most (all but 1 or 2) are just regular users. It speaks highly of HN and is worth defending. HN ain't perfect, that's for sure, but I know I couldn't make it better. [well i would get rid of the newish prev and next links -- they make the byline a bit long on mobile. i prefer folding, so when i free scroll i can see better where i was. that's not the kind of better i am referring to. just a throwaway complaint]
The grandparent comment of your comment also called this out, so I'm assuming the post you replied to assumed that those weren't worth calling out in their statement.
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.
Your suspicion is supported elsethread by this estimate of 100K or less: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067872