20 ms·

I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas

850 points by rmoriz 10y ago

jokerwashere14 10y ago
i shall join stripe to help
mendelk 10y ago
Is there any official communication re Starfighter? All I can find is this: > Starfighter is not only not hiring, but also closing its doors. We are 'pivoting.' https://twitter.com/boboTjones/status/774303916464930816 https://twitter.com/boboTjones/status/774303916464930816
- rst 10y ago
  The only other thing I'm aware of is a brief note on Twitter that they're shutting down: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 (FWIW, the "more to come" has so far been about the Ptaceks' next project, which is apparently something focused on security needs of startups, in collaboration with Jeremy Rauch, with details still apparently in flux; contact details for those interested are at http://latacora.com http://latacora.com)
- dfabulich 10y ago
  There's also this from Sep 1: > We’re winding down Starfighter. I’ll have more to say tomorrow. Long story short: still doing challenges. Just not as Starfighter. https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017
duked 10y ago
I'm happy for Patrick. I have to say, to me the downfall of starfighter was predictable. I LOVED microcorruption it was something I could get in fairly quickly and enjoy. But starfighter was requiring too much commitment to get the basics of operation and if I'm looking for a job I'd rather invest that time into brushing up my algorithms (since that's the hiring criteria these days...) rather than reading some background to play a "game" to eventually beat challenges and maybe get a job interview :/
davidw 10y ago
Sorry to hear about starfighter, but it looks like you've more than landed on your feet. Good luck! I think with a big company at your back, you may be able to leverage that to do some great things. People in the US have no idea how easy they have it with creating a company, something I helped to fix a little tiny bit in Italy: https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-little-bit-at-a-time/ https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt... One of the key points: > All told, the price of creating a company in Italy was several months worth of salary for the average Italian worker, whereas even at minimum wage, someone in Oregon could open that LLC after a few days worth of work.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  One thing I like about the US is that there are so many different jurisdictions all in the business of having competitive incorporation services. So although LLC formation might cost $800 in California, it can be like $50 in a nearby state. Both a feature and a bug, is that there is no federal incorporation statute for private persons in the United States.
  - runako 10y ago
    > although LLC formation might cost $800 in California That sounded really high, so I looked it up here: http://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/forms#llc http://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/fo... It looks like CA is $70, unless I'm missing something. I've never started an LLC in CA though. (EDIT: keep reading down the thread for more clarification.) (But: there's another thread here that says IL is $500, which does appear to be correct.)
    - cag_ii 10y ago
      The $800 usually mentioned is actually the yearly minimum tax for an LLC in CA. From the LLC-1 form: "Filing Form LLC-1 will obligate most LLCs to pay an annual minimum $800 tax to the California Franchise Tax Board. For more information about taxes, go to https://www.ftb.ca.gov." https://www.ftb.ca.gov."
ericjang 10y ago
@patio11: may we get a post-mortem on Starfighter, and more details on what you learned about startups?
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Not wanting to do the concept for Starfighter any injustice but I get the feeling it's as simple as they spent too much time on the tech and not enough on the business. A very easy mistake when the co-founders are technically minded.
  - kbody 10y ago
    That too, but personally I think that it was targeting way to limited subset, required practically non-existant time if you already have a job, so it was mainly targeting capable people between jobs or college students. Even though I loved the subject of algotrading, there was no time for me due to work etc.
    - simonswords82 10y ago
      Totally - the business model just didn't hold up unfortunately.
    - engi_nerd 10y ago
      > required practically non-existant time if you already have a job This. I had Starfighter bookmarked to dive into this Christmas during my holiday break. No time before then.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      This was precisely it for me. I have been excited for this project forever, but just haven't had a chance to filter it up to the top of my priority queue. Sadly, sometimes things remove themselves from your todo list.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I was briefly sad to see that Starfighter was done, but then I realized that despite reading the rules and bookmarking it, I had never actually played the thing. Very cool idea, but realistically I can only spend so much time on dev stuff and it wasn't going to beat out my other priorities.
aresant 10y ago
Patrick @ Stripe just shared via Twitter that he sent original idea for stripe to patio11. To which patio11 perfectly replied that note had gotten stuck in his spam folder :) https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/774309309874221056 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/774309309874221056
- GFischer 10y ago
  He would definitely have replied :) . Patrick replied (very accurately, as it turned out) back in 2011 to my attempt to do a micropayments startup: "I would strongly advise rethinking starting a payment processor as a student. It is relationship-, credibility-, and capital-intensive. It also requires truly massive scale before being worth any money. (Incredibly massive scale in micropayments. If you make $0.01 off each transaction you have to facilitate hundreds of thousands a month just to pay for the founding team's ramen. If you somehow possess the magic that you need to find 100,000 paying customers you shouldn't end up eating ramen!)" As someone who started down the payments path and desisted pretty quickly ("fail fast", they call it :) ) I'm extremely impressed by Stripe, and they've definitely gotten a great talent and great guy in Patrick.
insomniacity 10y ago
patio11: I was just about to start making some progress on Starfighter... are you going to be able to leave it up, or does it cost too much?
Scarbutt 10y ago
Are there any plans in Atlas to support Ireland?
- edwinwee 10y ago
  We only support incorporating in Delaware at the moment, but are hoping to add other locations in the future!
  - cperciva 10y ago
    Can I suggest British Columbia, Canada? It's an English-speaking country, not in the middle of an existential crisis, and BC has very flexible incorporation requirements (you must have at least one director, who can live anywhere in the world; you may appoint officers but there is no requirement to do so; shares can be with or without par value, and if with par value that value can be specified in any currency; et cetera). Also, Vancouver's a great place to visit, for the occasions when Stripe would need to have someone on the ground here. :-)
    - markdown 10y ago
      > who can live anywhere in the world Must the director be a Canadian citizen or permanent legal resident?
      - cperciva 10y ago
        Sorry, I should have been clearer there. By "can live anywhere" I meant there's no legal residency (or citizenship) requirement.
        markdown 10y ago
        Thanks for the clarification.
  - nitam 10y ago
    Any idea when forming a LLC in Delaware becomes available?
chatmasta 10y ago
What I like most about the long term vision for Atlas is that, if it's truly "as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance" to form a new corporation, then it will be possible for a single entrepreneur to create complex global corporate structures previously limited only to multinational corporations. How nice would it be, as say, a digital nomad, to be able to have a single "holding company" based in HK, and dynamically create a new corporation for every new project?
- aeden 10y ago
  Slightly OT, but countries tend to dislike this brave new world where they cannot obviously and clearly collect taxes on business owners that reside in their country. It is going to be a tough day if the other shoe drops on this. No idea what it will look like if it happens though.
  - patio11 10y ago
    There exist some ways to abusively structure international tax affairs. That isn't what Atlas is about -- we help honest businesspeople get on a sound and legally compliant footing. You would not even believe how many weeks of my life I've spent the last ten years paying every cent I owe in Japan and the United States. Like every other business owner, I kvetch a bit about the rates, but I pay my taxes on time and in full because laws are laws. We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves. (Letting folks across the globe participate on equal and solid footing in the US market tends to increase value created worldwide, which is awesome, and also increases US tax collection at the margin.)
    - davidw 10y ago
      > We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves. Oh yes! Italy was like that: it's not so much the taxes themselves, it's all the extraneous BS that surrounds them that takes so much time to deal with.
    - blackbagboys 10y ago
pbnjay 10y ago
congrats patio11! - I think many of us agree that stability and less stress is a nice draw when you got young kids. Startups don't always play nice with family.
emilburzo 10y ago
> The overwhelming majority of jobs in the technology industry do not go to people who cold apply via jobs pages. sigh
- rpeden 10y ago
  If it's any consolation, the same is true for the best jobs in just about every industry.
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Yep, it's not what you know...
    - rpeden 10y ago
      It's not just what you know. I see a good network as a force multiplier. If you have useful skills and can use them to get things done, knowing the right people can provide a lot of leverage. If you know nothing, well...a force multiplier doesn't help much when you're multiplying it by zero.
  - emilburzo 10y ago
    I would understand if that would be the case for the best jobs, but it seems all of them are like that.
    - rpeden 10y ago
      I used to feel the same way; my first dev job came through someone I met at a tech meetup. I've since found a couple of good ones by cold applying. What helped the most was reading a couple of books about sales. Essentially, when you're applying with a cover letter and resume/CV, you're making a very short sales pitch and need to make the most of it. The good news is that most cover letters and resumes people send out don't have this focus at all, so it's relatively easy for you to stand out. Sometimes, the hardest part is accepting that there's nothing wrong or dishonest about selling yourself. When I've reviewed resumes in the past to decide who to interview, I've found that most of them overlook the fact that I have a problem I'm trying to solve, and I'm looking for someone to help me solve it. If the first sentence on your resume/cover letter shows me that you've read the job posting, understand the problems I'm trying to solve, and tells me why you're the right person to help solve them, you really stand out from the competition. YMMV, of course. What I've observed may be atypical, and it's entirely possible I've just had good luck. It's just worth remembering that while cold applications tend to have a low success rate, applications sent in response to job postings are really, really awful. Being non-awful significantly helps your chances, but not as much as meeting people and building a strong network.
cloudjacker 10y ago
> it introduced me to the unthinkable notion that regular old geeks like me could run software companies. I thought it was illegal, ... my background therefore suggested it was either forbidden, risky, or risked being forbidden. I encounter this so much in the states. Everything self directed is "sketchy", "is that legal?". It is really sad, because those same people would fall for scams that actually are sketchy and illegal.
angersock 10y ago
Automating startup of a company online is a bad, bad, bad idea folks. Like, Gibson dystopia bad. EDIT: Okay hivemind. Seriously, can none of you think of any ill use that automatic provisioning of a economic entity--able to own property, intervene in politics, and interact with the legal system, enter into contracts, and so forth--could be put to? Like, really?
- hellbanner 10y ago
  Seriously can you think of any ill use of a hammer? How about a car? Or ooh, money!
- icebraining 10y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but that comment was totally content-free. Try making an actual argument about why the dangers outweigh the benefits and I'll bet you the "hivemind" won't be so hard on you.
- saryant 10y ago
  I can create an LLC in about two minutes for $50 right now. If I really wanted to I could probably script Selenium to turn the Colorado Secretary of State's website into an API and throw it on Heroku. Really is that easy: https://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/FileDocNameAvailCriteria.do?transTyp=ARTORG_LLC https://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/FileDocNameAvailCriteria.do?...
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't comment like this. If you want to make a substantive point about the drawbacks of some plan, that's fine, but stirring up drama without actually saying anything is just lame.
matchagaucho 10y ago
I know from personal experience the sub-title to this article is "How I'm justifying a bad decision". Entrepreneurs know when they're making a bad decision, whether consciously or not. [Edited for brevity. No disrespect, but hate to see a Developer give up on their independence]
- davidw 10y ago
  Calling someone's personal decision bad or good without knowing most of the circumstances of their life... might be something to avoid. Perhaps "I hope this new gig works out for you right now, but really hope to see you running something of your own again at some point in the future"?
- rpeden 10y ago
  Hey, it's not as if he'll be slaving away in an Agile sweatshop with an evil Scrum Master looking over his shoulder and cracking the whip. :) Joining a larger organization can provide the opportunity to accomplish things that would be difficult or impossible on your own. And if it doesn't work out, or eventually becomes disappointing, it's still possible to hop back on the entrepreneurial horse and ride off into the sunset.
- ridruejo 10y ago
  It would be if he was joining a corporate job. This is not "just a job" at a regular company working on a regular product. People talk about making the world a better place all the time but few do. Working on Atlas at Stripe has that potential for impact and you get to work with awesome founders. Congrats both to kalzumeus and Stripe
  - rjvir 10y ago
    > Working on Atlas at Stripe has that potential for impact and you get to work with awesome founders Same with countless other jobs, such as working at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Snapchat, etc
  - matchagaucho 10y ago
    It doesn't sound like Sr leadership role that can influence strategy, so it's basically a "job". He'll come back to the dark side soon enough and build a sustainable business model (with the benefit of experience at Stripe, of course) :-)
vanrysss 10y ago
I'm sorry to hear that Starfighter is shuttering, I had a lot of fun with the stock market portion.
antoniuschan99 10y ago
Wasn't Paypal taking payments over the internet in 2006?
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  > Options for doing this in 2006 were absolutely terrible. yes, paypal was certainly taking payments over the internet in 2006. right around when they locked my account for no reason, and literally took payments meant for me and kept them for themselves. paypal is crooked. you're all idiots.
- patio11 10y ago
  It took me ~2 months to get BCC sold over Paypal, which was my major processor until Stripe came along. (I don't remember what the holdup was, but I very keenly remember the shucks-have-to-do-eSellerate decision.)
  - antoinevg 10y ago
    thr0waway1239 pointed out the obvious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467898 So I thought I'd try to draw your attention to a suggestion I made in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465972 ;-)
benmanns 10y ago
I applied to the Stripe Atlas beta but haven't heard any communication after doing so. Does anyone have insight as to how long the beta queue is?
- edwinwee 10y ago
  We're still in beta, so we don't have an exact timeline for adding new users. Mind shooting me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com with the email address you applied with?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  I applied when it was first announced and got an invitation a few months later. I still haven't used it yet but I do intent do (hopefully they don't expire, eek).
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btcboss 10y ago
Can you start by making Stripe mobile friendly lol :P my clock reads 2016.
jtcond13 10y ago
The penultimate paragraph here must have been difficult to write.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
First time I've seen Atlas. I'm immediately worried. If someone starts a company using this I presume it's subject to US laws? What does this mean: 1. For taxes? If I live in the UK and start my business with Atlas does the US get the corporation tax revenue or the UK (or a split of the two)? 2. For data security/privacy? Is the data I store now subject to access by the US government through National Security letters and the like? I believe that if I was storing EU citizen data I'm subject to privacy shield but all data would be more susceptible to US government requests. Is this accurate? Edit: Quite shocked at the number of downvotes a completely legitimate question is getting...
- fasteo 10y ago
  Unfair comment completely unrelated to Atlas. You better have these questions answered before heading to Atlas.
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    It is related and there is nothing unfair about it. I'm also not accusing them of anything. They're honest questions which should have relatively straightforward answers.
    - fasteo 10y ago
      I believe it isn't. I don't think you are accusing them of anything. Yes, they are honest questions, but unrelated to Atlas. If you have doubts about taxes or privacy in the US, Atlas is not going to help you in anyway. From the FAQ[1] While incorporating in the U.S. can make many things much easier, it also comes with long-term legal and tax implications. You should think carefully about whether it’s best for your business and consult advisors as necessary. Pretty clear. [1] https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#Who-should-use-Atlas https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#Who-should-use-Atlas
    - hluska 10y ago
      Thing is, the answers are nowhere near straightforward. Your first question, about taxes, is particularly complicated. Here are the relevant tax treaties: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/united-kingdom-uk-tax-treaty-documents https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/unit... While they seek to prevent double taxation (and tax evasion), they are packed with dense legalese full of clauses and subclauses designed to make certain types of income taxable in different places. To navigate that question, you'd need a highly experienced tax accountant/attorney with specific experience in UK/US tax treaties. Moreover, that person would need a strong understanding of what you do, how/where you sell, and how/if/when you plan to pay yourself. Your second question is even more complicated. First, if you incorporate in a country like the US, your corporation is considered a person in that country and is thus bound by that country's laws. I trust that you did enough research to know that. Second, recent history has demonstrated that the UK (as a Five Eyes nation) shares intelligence data with the United States. Moreover, recent history has demonstrated that the UK will work at the behest of the US intelligence community. This is governed by years of treaties and high level agreements. Consequently, the first thing you need to wonder is whether your government would just hand everything over, regardless of whether you have a US corporation or not. Third, if you do incorporate in the US, you would be subject to US law, but US law can generally be fought in a court. The question becomes whether or not you could afford to fight an NSL. Could your business afford a long, highly distracting process where it is you versus a government?? But then, you need to look at yourself. Do you have any secrets that could be used as leverage against you?? If you plan to fight a well funded intelligence agency, you'd need to be prepared for them to fight hard. I tend to argue that if a well funded intelligence agency truly wants information, they'll get it. So, while your questions were honest, they were anything but straightforward. And, they aren't actually relevant to Atlas. Rather, you and a group of experts need to sit down and figure out the costs, potential costs and the benefits of incorporating in the US. If it still makes sense, Atlas is a tool. But Atlas can't help you navigate the complicated relationship between your company, international law, agreements like NATO/other intelligence sharing agreements, EU law and two (possibly three) tax authorities. And, with all due respect, neither can Hacker News. Every situation is so different that anyone who is qualified to answer those questions wouldn't as they understand how deeply complicated they are.
cdnsteve 10y ago
Love this part: "When you have just enough crazy, you found a payments company, heedless of the fact that founding a payments company is doomed to failure because it involves mountains of hard and boring work and the incumbents have billions of dollars."
idlewords 10y ago
I don't see any advantage in incorporation if you want to run your own private business, but I'm willing to accept that I'm being the weirdo here.
- koolba 10y ago
  Vs LLC?
  - idlewords 10y ago
    Vs sole proprietorship.
    - koolba 10y ago
      Can you set up 401k and all the other "corporate only" type things with a sole proprietorship or does it just become a legal shield with everything else as passthrough?
      - zrail 10y ago
        You can set up a solo 401K with a sole proprietorship. All you have to show is that you have self employment income showing up on a Schedule C (for a sole proprietorship) or a K1 (for a partnership/LLC/S-Corp).
      - deleted 10y ago
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    - rev_bird 10y ago
      Liability protection, if nothing else. If someone sues a company, they can't (in theory) take the CEO's house. Also, in the US, you can save a bunch of money on payroll taxes if you elect to be taxed as an S-corp. The short version is that you only pay those taxes (Social Security, FICA, Medicare, etc etc) on money you get in paychecks -- so, if you make $100k in a year and "pay" yourself $70k, you end up with the other $30k but didn't have to pay a bunch of tax on it.
lowglow 10y ago
I just want to point out that everything starts off as targeted marketing/spam. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr7mNhuUEAAoHcM.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr7mNhuUEAAoHcM.jpg:large Don't listen when people hate on you for sharing what you're working on. The only thing that matters in the end is success. :)
zbruhnke 10y ago
Congrats Patrick ... This is one of those blog posts that I read and completely think that I could actually go work for a company and be really happy which never happens. I love what you guys are doing with Atlas and will be rooting for you and for Stripe Japan, sounds like a great opportunity to join that team for the right people!
alexkehayias 10y ago
Looking forward to working with you! I'm joining next week to work on Atlas too.
kwilliams 10y ago
HN's favorite soap opera continues.
grellas 10y ago
Back in the bubble days, all but a relatively few would-be founders found themselves crawling out of a hole and into the dark, as it were, in trying to figure out how to get from ground zero to a point of success: it was all super-bewildering and there were virtually no resources to help understand how it all worked: no helpful web-based forums to explain process or to share experiences, no solid resources for helping understand how best to launch, no easy access to funding, etc., etc. Today, it is all different. We are all hyper-connected and the old barriers are much diminished. This means a founder in Silicon Valley, where the infrastructure is solid, can continue to do incredible things but, now, so too can founders everywhere. Yes, it can help to be geographically at the heart of it all but it is no longer an indispensable part of startup success. I think Stripe's Atlas takes a huge additional step in helping to remove the accident of a founder's location from the list of barriers to entry in the world's startup club. I have explained my views in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417#11168750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417#11168750 And what a felicitous teaming between Patrick and Stripe to help further that goal. Great people all round, working to achieve great goals! I cannot imagine a better combination. Very exciting and congrats to all.
_RPM 10y ago
Is Stripe different than PayPal besides maybe having a better API? Is Stripe a subset of PayPal?
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Website integration is incredibly simple. Standard UI is also much better. PayPal also has a terrible reputation for holding money and bad customer support which Stripe doesn't. I integrated Stripe into a website with almost zero web dev knowledge. Really, really simple.
benjismith 10y ago
Awesome! I've been a big fan of Patrick since the days of the old Joel on Software forums, and I've always admired his plucky optimism. Atlas is an incredibly cool, potentially game-changing project, and Stripe was already a game-changing company before launching it. I'm excited to see what happens next! Way to go, Patrick!!
nthState 10y ago
Nice work Patrick!
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Rapzid 10y ago
Is this at all related to MYOB's Atlas? https://www.myob.com/au/small-business/atlas-website-builder https://www.myob.com/au/small-business/atlas-website-builder
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  No.
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    I guess not as well. I wonder if they will brand differently in Asia Pacific to reduce confusion. MYOB's Atlas does not appear to be targeted towards business outside AU, but Stripe Atlas is targeted at international customers so there may be some collision there.
stevoski 10y ago
Patrick writes in the article: > I never thought I could build a Fog Creek, but I saw a bunch of other geeks building Poker Co-pilot and Perfect Table Plan and skeet-shooting scoring software, and I was pretty sure I could at least do something like that. I'm the geek who built (and continues to run) Poker Copilot. Patrick got the order of events backwards. What actually happened is that I started Poker Copilot in a large part because Patrick inspired me by managing to launch a software product (Bingo Card Creator) after just one week of development. All the best working for a boss again, Patrick! I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting twists and turns in the years ahead in this remarkable life of yours .
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  Don't forget, there was the chimney sweep software guy too. :) /oldschool
  - jng 10y ago
    And there was the vi emulator guy too :)
- azernik 10y ago
  Classic mutual recursion ^__^
secabeen 10y ago
>There Is No Future For Scarcity This section worries me a bit, as it's the sort of thing that doesn't consider the possibility of a major world-wide crisis. There are plenty of conceivable futures where these things could happen. A simple one is a small-scale non-nuclear war between China and US, where they disconnect completely from the larger Internet, but we avoid a global thermonuclear war. The continental European countries saw a 50% drop in GDP through WW2, and it could very well happen again.
- smoyer 10y ago
  When Mel Gibson is standing in the road shooting at gas thieves I think we'll all be doing something other than typing comments on HN. I live in an area where you could conceivably forage/hunt for all your food but it would be a pretty harsh life.
- ufmace 10y ago
  You could say that anything is theoretically possible, but the entire extended history of the world contradicts that idea. Economic progress is about as universal as anything in the man-made world has ever been. There have been setbacks, sure, but they have invariably been limited and short-lived. I'm sure there was a large drop in GDP during WWII, and I'm also sure that shortly after, it recovered and proceeded to climb well beyond where it was before the war started, as is the case with every other war ever fought, and any other type of catastrophe you can think of.
owathray123 10y ago
I for one am more than faintly relieved that Starfighter has fallen. It looked to me like an attempt to find the most direct way possible to parlay the prominent position that Thomas and Patrick have in this community into cash - by literally selling its members. There's a line that's crossed here between being a member of HN buoyed up by the good wishes and advice of your fellows, and using the community as a resource to be exploited. Yes, this is a throwaway. Yes, I think it's a problem that I feel I need to use one.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Yes, this is a throwaway. Yes, I think it's a problem that I feel I need to use one. I agree that that feeling is a problem. I don't agree with your unstated but clear implication that its a problem with the community, though.
- smoyer 10y ago
  I'm not down-voting you but I never felt the need to sign up for StarFighter ... And that's despite the fact that I was one of those who originally met Patrick in the BoS forums. I'm still wondering what happened to SumoRunner ;)
- eropple 10y ago
  I think this is super unfair. Connecting people with jobs isn't "selling them". I rip on recruiters a lot--probably more than most people--but a good recruiter, and I know a few of them (hat tip to Bivium here in Boston, among others), is looking for a win-win arrangement because they know they'll be working with you again down the line. Starfighter seemed like an attempt to be a good recruiter at scale. It didn't work out, and that's a bummer, but that's pretty far afield from your allegations. And you didn't need to use a throwaway. Put your name on something if you're going to be casting shade on people. I do (here, regularly), you can too.
  - nialo 10y ago
    fwiw, Starfighter (probably mostly Erin/Thomas? hard to tell from the outside) got me a job that I love and certainly couldn't have gotten without them. It sucks that the business didn't work out, but it certainly wasn't because candidates were somehow getting screwed by Starfighter.
edpichler 10y ago
I am enrolling Stripe Atlas and, to me, incorporating in USA will give me access to modern banking services, and platforms, as Stripe, and it seems USA has very lower taxes than Brazil, my country. That's why I am interested. It all seems fascinating, but I am afraid to continue and do the last step of the enrollment. I don't know how is the process to close the company, what the representative agent can do for me, how much is to have an account on SVB (after the 24 free months), if it's easy to legally hire a person to work remotely anywhere, and if for some reason I will need to eventually travel to USA. If someone have a answer for one of questions, I will be thankful.
- c4n4rd 10y ago
  I live in the US. Let me know if I can help you with anything. Abracos.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    The "ç" makes an enormous difference here.
    - c4n4rd 10y ago
      The international keyboard mapping on Ubuntu makes ç come out as ć, so I gave up on trying that. :-)
- edwinwee 10y ago
  Nope, you don't need to travel to the US -- we'll handle incorporation and opening your bank account remotely. When it's time to sign papers, we'll send you an e-signature link. Silicon Valley Bank's fees after the first 24 months vary depending on which of their services you choose to use, so there's no one-size-fits-all rate card we can point you to -- if you send me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com, I'd be happy to chat more about this in detail. Although we don't offer immigration or employment services as a part of Atlas, I'd love to hear more about your business to see how we can help and walk you through the final steps!
red_blobs 10y ago
I feel like many startup founders, including Patrick, build the technology and hope the business will follow...usually with an unsuccessful outcome. He's great at marketing. He should have spent a year building a network of employers with lower-tech solutions and then expanded it out with starfighter. I've been following Patrick since the BoS days and all of his products have been pretty low profit. Enough to support himself only (some, not even this much) (I'm not including consulting, only products or services) Money is the lifeblood of all companies and you will need it to truly change the world.
strongai 10y ago
For what it's worth, I was never excited by starfighter because of its trading/markets premise - simple as that. It just doesn't float my boat. The entire proposition sounded far too much like real work. Game? Surely not.
- draw_down 10y ago
  Pretty sure that was the idea. Wasn't supposed to be super Mario
- spyrosg 10y ago
  Each level in the game gave you clear directions, an entertaining backstory, and taught you the concepts necessary to think about the problem. All three things turn what would be a boring, real-world project into a game, where only the pleasant part is left for you to do. At least for the kind of people they were looking for.
newintellectual 10y ago
Suggestion: target other - freer - countries as well. i.e. the other 96% of the planet.
Animats 10y ago
There are lots of services to help you incorporate. Incorporate.com and LegalZoom are well known. What's new about Atlas, other than bundling other services and charging more?
- codethief 10y ago
  Compared to incorporate.com they are actually cheaper if you're not a US citizen / reside outside the US. (If I remember correctly, incorporate.com charges about $700 for that.) Other than that, I totally agree with your question.
- markdown 10y ago
  Atlas is also restricted to Delaware, whereas with most of the other services, you can incorporate anywhere (including Wyoming, which is the best for privacy and taxes).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
chuamo 10y ago
Why would someone making 30k a week as a consultant take a job[1]? [1]https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/
- majc2 10y ago
  Sometimes, consultants get tired of consulting and want to build products instead.
- jakobegger 10y ago
  Maybe because 1) 30k contracts don't line up, and you never know when the next opportunity arrives; steady income may be preferable even if it is lower. 2) Money isn't everything. Working on interesting problems with interrsting people is a lot more fulfilling than doing boring work that pays well.
  - exclusiv 10y ago
    Yes exactly. You can get 30k per week consulting but not on the regular, esp. if you're doing the consulting and the biz dev. The sales cycle for getting 30k/week is long. It's very hard to do week in week out. Getting $30k per MONTH for a small business is generally a 3-6 month sales cycle. One-time projects can be shorter of course, esp. in network, but you're always on the biz dev grind if that's your model. He wasn't 250k/yr salary for 2 consecutive years and a suspect accredited investor. I think it's cool what he's done and what he's shared to the community, but I do think he gets glorified for his posts which are not always realistic for most people and the projection is that he's killing it when he really isn't. Also, part of me read this and thought this was sad to see a fellow entrepreneur jump ship, even though I do like Stripe and Atlas.
- angelbob 10y ago
  Patrick had already spun down his consulting business before this happened -- I think before Starfighter started, even. It was lucrative, but not pleasant, and he made more enjoyable money working for himself.
- 10y ago
knite 10y ago
Congratulations! Will you be sharing details on how your salary negotiation went? Reference: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
thr0waway1239 10y ago
I really like Patrick's work, and I have learnt a lot from it. I wish him the best for his employment at Stripe. But I am going to ask all of you to tread carefully when taking advice from well-intentioned experts. Over a period of 9 or so years, Patrick went from expressing opinions about a) why desktop software is still viable b) why web based is a better option than desktop because desktop causes too many pains c) why doing a SaaS model is better than the one time web based software (web version of BCC) d) why it may not be worth the stress of (some stressful event associated with clients in medical industry) for a SaaS which is generating less than $2000 MRR e) why a business like StarFighter is better because you feel like waking up and doing it for 5+ years in a row and f) eventually there will be a good reason for the decision to leave/stop Starfighter. Amongst these opinions, there would be two kinds of takeaway messages - the ones which are true independent of the specific time period (don't piss off your customer) vs the ones which are more subjective and epoch specific - e.g. Patrick's own admission of benefiting from AdSense (via the Content Network or some such thing) for BCC, which was probably not true by the time it was expressed publicly and is almost certainly not true today. There is almost positively going to be a fair amount of time lag before these ideas germinate in the experts' head and they slowly turn into action in their lives, and by the time they are ready to write about it, sometimes they are close to the winding down phase of said idea. For the people who are keen to "follow suit", as they say, it is very hard to know if it is a good idea to invest the next 3-5 years of your lives trying to adopt the same idea. This is all fine and obvious, you say. My concern has to do with the "other side" of the picture. When people were lavishing praise on the SaaS model about 3-4 years ago, I suppose I wasn't the only one who wondered "Wait a minute. What about the fact that a SaaS business takes up your mind space 24 x 7 x 365? Isn't that a cost most of us don't wish to pay?" And after a while, Patrick mentions in a MicroConf talk about doing an eBook or WP plugin first before embarking on a SaaS - all great advice. Just wish more people consider the balancing forces and always ask themselves whether they are getting the full picture.
- forloop 10y ago
  > But I am going to ask all of you to tread carefully when taking advice from well-intentioned experts. Info-marketer. I was previously a member of a paid marketing forum at the same time as him. He got a ton of people hook, line, and sinker. What a bunch of suckers. With HN being transitioned into a feminist e-zine (by YC), I have concerns about this place. I do actually care. Good esoteric information is hard to come by. HN surfaces said esoterica (currently!).
102193109301 10y ago
There are enough fools/cheerleaders here for sure, following the same 20 top commenters for a decade.
- dang 10y ago
  If you want to posture above the rest of this community, please do so elsewhere; it's in bad taste to do it here. Also, we've banned this account for making personal attacks, and please don't make throwaway accounts to break HN's rules with. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466792 and marked it off-topic.
pmyjavec 10y ago
The overwhelming majority of jobs in the technology industry do not go to people who cold apply via jobs pages. This is important for you to know and operationalize. A little off topic, but why is this? I don't doubt what he is saying but why is it not good enough to apply for a job via standard channels and not have to be in "the boys club" ?
- astrange 10y ago
  Public job postings are a market for lemons (most people who apply aren't good enough for any job, or they'd already have one). Why even bother making one if you have an internal candidate or a good referral?
- vidarh 10y ago
  Because the process of deciding to look for someone involves thinking about it and discussing it first, during which a lot of the time someone will go "oh, I know someone who might be great". A lot of jobs never go onto the jobs pages in the first place. Other jobs don't even exist, but get created because someone asks their contacts and one of them goes "hm, we do really need someone with their experience" and creates a position that otherwise wouldn't exist until a lot later. What goes on the jobs pages is what's left.
- superuser2 10y ago
  There are some very different sets of beliefs, practices, and values floating around any craft among people who have the same title. I'll call these "tribes." Tribes are often associated with buzzwords, like "agile." At the highest level of abstraction, practitioners in different tribes do the same job, but the way other tribes do things might be unrecognizable and/or horrifying from your perspective. You want to hire from your tribe. Buzzwords get picked up by people who don't really mean them in their original sense (see: enterprises doing waterfall and calling it agile) so buzzwords on resumes don't identify tribe, and an interview is only a few hours of a candidate in a contrived high-pressure situation where they're nervous/presenting the mask they think you want to see. So you start with people you personally know to be in your tribe. When those run out, you realize you can trust the people you personally know to identify other tribe members, and this works up to the nth degree. If that's not enough, you learn that certain institutions (employers, universities, etc.) select, demand, or instill membership in your tribe, so you go looking for candidates who have been attached to these institutions first. FWIW this is not unique to software by any means. I worked on the tech side of theater in college and have friends now working in that industry. Designers, stage and production managers, etc. in the real world are hired almost exclusively on reputation and recommendation. They are cold-emailed job offers (not ads to come compete for a job, but actual work) based on colleagues' experiences with them at previous gigs. Gigs often last only a few weeks, so you are playing this game constantly. You essentially cannot break in as a total outsider. You need to go to a school that is trusted to provide good interns (because its teachers are from the right tribe and it runs its student productions the right way), and impress at your internship, or else know someone who will convince their boss to take a chance on you. Sometimes hiring does have a formal application process, but you are not getting the job unless someone reading the application has heard of you or has a lot of respect for one of the institutions on your resume. "The boys club" is a (flawed) attempt at instituting meritocracy by a system of recursive trust. I believe it's much better than the resume and interview dance, but I'd still love for software to discover its "blind audition" hiring technique.
chmike 10y ago
Congratulation Patrick. This is a great news for Stripe, Japan and the world ! You just made me discover Atlas (I must have lived under a rock last year) and I'm really impressed by the idea. It is not great, it is huge ! I quickly looked through the Q&A and the first thing that strikes me is that the effective cost is not clear. Ok 500$ entry cost, but there are many other costs like bank, taxes, IRS, 125$ yearly for the agent, etc. Most of these costs aren't even clearly specified. Thus it's actually like an offer to buy a cat in a bag. The strength of stripe is its simplicity and clarity. You know upfront what it will cost you. There isn't any hidden cost. So Patrick, if you can have some influence, please help making Atlas as simple and clear as Stripe.
robin_reala 10y ago
Slightly unfashionable to say this here, but this problem isn’t necessarily something the private sector should be routing around but one that the public sector should be fixing from within. At GDS (GOV.UK etc) we’re working on a programme called GaaP: Government as a Platform. This aims to provide components to radically simplify the difficulty of building services focused on user needs for the rest of government. Tom Loosemoore (now ex-GDS but hey) gave this talk at Code For America last year: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE_zj-7A7A https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE_zj-7A7A . It’s obviously quite long (and in my opinion worth watching the lot) but the topic relevant part comes at ~28 minutes in. Here Tom demonstrates how pulling together the pieces of GaaP could potentially lead to registering s company in 3.5 minutes. That a private sector company could do the same thing is great, but sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom.
- buro9 10y ago
  > sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom. This is also my view on a lot of fintech. However... if the incumbents aren't doing something, then eating away at the edges may eventually either overcome the incumbents or force them into change. I don't think Stripe could replace what govts do, but I can certainly see that Stripe being successful will put them at the table to influence or direct the which the way govts do things.
  - philipov 10y ago
    If innovation is motivated by competition, then the government having a monopoly in governmental services means they never need to innovate, unless they receive some competition. Because barriers to emigration are so high, countries don't have to compete with each other for quality of governance, and so it turns out that only the private sector can do it.
    - robin_reala 10y ago
      If innovation is motivated by competition Your implication is that competition has to be with external agents. It’s perfectly possible to compete with the status quo. The private sector has a profit motive at its core: make more money for shareholders. The public sector also has a profit motive: save more money and be more effective for tax-payers. They’re both examples of efficiency, two sides of the same coin.
hypnotortoise 10y ago
It would be interesting to see the main building blocks of Atlas and if any of it have relations or takes inspirations from Blockchain Tech (e.g. Ether-based http://otonomos.com/ http://otonomos.com/).
reeiwhatu 10y ago
Here lonely girl looking for fun with the guys http://aruxo4.skhit.in/ http://aruxo4.skhit.in/
hvd 10y ago
Good luck Patrick on this new adventure.
hvd 10y ago
Good luck Patrick on this new adventure.

850 points by rmoriz 10y ago

i shall join stripe to help

Is there any official communication re Starfighter? All I can find is this: > Starfighter is not only not hiring, but also closing its doors. We are 'pivoting.' https://twitter.com/boboTjones/status/774303916464930816 https://twitter.com/boboTjones/status/774303916464930816

rst 10y ago
The only other thing I'm aware of is a brief note on Twitter that they're shutting down: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 (FWIW, the "more to come" has so far been about the Ptaceks' next project, which is apparently something focused on security needs of startups, in collaboration with Jeremy Rauch, with details still apparently in flux; contact details for those interested are at http://latacora.com http://latacora.com)
dfabulich 10y ago
There's also this from Sep 1: > We’re winding down Starfighter. I’ll have more to say tomorrow. Long story short: still doing challenges. Just not as Starfighter. https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017

duked 10y ago

I'm happy for Patrick. I have to say, to me the downfall of starfighter was predictable. I LOVED microcorruption it was something I could get in fairly quickly and enjoy. But starfighter was requiring too much commitment to get the basics of operation and if I'm looking for a job I'd rather invest that time into brushing up my algorithms (since that's the hiring criteria these days...) rather than reading some background to play a "game" to eventually beat challenges and maybe get a job interview :/

davidw 10y ago

Sorry to hear about starfighter, but it looks like you've more than landed on your feet. Good luck! I think with a big company at your back, you may be able to leverage that to do some great things. People in the US have no idea how easy they have it with creating a company, something I helped to fix a little tiny bit in Italy: https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-little-bit-at-a-time/ https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt... One of the key points: > All told, the price of creating a company in Italy was several months worth of salary for the average Italian worker, whereas even at minimum wage, someone in Oregon could open that LLC after a few days worth of work.

cloudjacker 10y ago
One thing I like about the US is that there are so many different jurisdictions all in the business of having competitive incorporation services. So although LLC formation might cost $800 in California, it can be like $50 in a nearby state. Both a feature and a bug, is that there is no federal incorporation statute for private persons in the United States.
- runako 10y ago
  > although LLC formation might cost $800 in California That sounded really high, so I looked it up here: http://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/forms#llc http://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/fo... It looks like CA is $70, unless I'm missing something. I've never started an LLC in CA though. (EDIT: keep reading down the thread for more clarification.) (But: there's another thread here that says IL is $500, which does appear to be correct.)
  - cag_ii 10y ago
    The $800 usually mentioned is actually the yearly minimum tax for an LLC in CA. From the LLC-1 form: "Filing Form LLC-1 will obligate most LLCs to pay an annual minimum $800 tax to the California Franchise Tax Board. For more information about taxes, go to https://www.ftb.ca.gov." https://www.ftb.ca.gov."

ericjang 10y ago

@patio11: may we get a post-mortem on Starfighter, and more details on what you learned about startups?

simonswords82 10y ago
Not wanting to do the concept for Starfighter any injustice but I get the feeling it's as simple as they spent too much time on the tech and not enough on the business. A very easy mistake when the co-founders are technically minded.
- kbody 10y ago
  That too, but personally I think that it was targeting way to limited subset, required practically non-existant time if you already have a job, so it was mainly targeting capable people between jobs or college students. Even though I loved the subject of algotrading, there was no time for me due to work etc.
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Totally - the business model just didn't hold up unfortunately.
  - engi_nerd 10y ago
    > required practically non-existant time if you already have a job This. I had Starfighter bookmarked to dive into this Christmas during my holiday break. No time before then.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    This was precisely it for me. I have been excited for this project forever, but just haven't had a chance to filter it up to the top of my priority queue. Sadly, sometimes things remove themselves from your todo list.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I was briefly sad to see that Starfighter was done, but then I realized that despite reading the rules and bookmarking it, I had never actually played the thing. Very cool idea, but realistically I can only spend so much time on dev stuff and it wasn't going to beat out my other priorities.

aresant 10y ago

Patrick @ Stripe just shared via Twitter that he sent original idea for stripe to patio11. To which patio11 perfectly replied that note had gotten stuck in his spam folder :) https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/774309309874221056 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/774309309874221056

GFischer 10y ago
He would definitely have replied :) . Patrick replied (very accurately, as it turned out) back in 2011 to my attempt to do a micropayments startup: "I would strongly advise rethinking starting a payment processor as a student. It is relationship-, credibility-, and capital-intensive. It also requires truly massive scale before being worth any money. (Incredibly massive scale in micropayments. If you make $0.01 off each transaction you have to facilitate hundreds of thousands a month just to pay for the founding team's ramen. If you somehow possess the magic that you need to find 100,000 paying customers you shouldn't end up eating ramen!)" As someone who started down the payments path and desisted pretty quickly ("fail fast", they call it :) ) I'm extremely impressed by Stripe, and they've definitely gotten a great talent and great guy in Patrick.

insomniacity 10y ago

patio11: I was just about to start making some progress on Starfighter... are you going to be able to leave it up, or does it cost too much?

Scarbutt 10y ago

Are there any plans in Atlas to support Ireland?

edwinwee 10y ago
We only support incorporating in Delaware at the moment, but are hoping to add other locations in the future!
- cperciva 10y ago
  Can I suggest British Columbia, Canada? It's an English-speaking country, not in the middle of an existential crisis, and BC has very flexible incorporation requirements (you must have at least one director, who can live anywhere in the world; you may appoint officers but there is no requirement to do so; shares can be with or without par value, and if with par value that value can be specified in any currency; et cetera). Also, Vancouver's a great place to visit, for the occasions when Stripe would need to have someone on the ground here. :-)
  - markdown 10y ago
    > who can live anywhere in the world Must the director be a Canadian citizen or permanent legal resident?
    - cperciva 10y ago
      Sorry, I should have been clearer there. By "can live anywhere" I meant there's no legal residency (or citizenship) requirement.
      - markdown 10y ago
        Thanks for the clarification.
- nitam 10y ago
  Any idea when forming a LLC in Delaware becomes available?

chatmasta 10y ago

What I like most about the long term vision for Atlas is that, if it's truly "as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance" to form a new corporation, then it will be possible for a single entrepreneur to create complex global corporate structures previously limited only to multinational corporations. How nice would it be, as say, a digital nomad, to be able to have a single "holding company" based in HK, and dynamically create a new corporation for every new project?

aeden 10y ago
Slightly OT, but countries tend to dislike this brave new world where they cannot obviously and clearly collect taxes on business owners that reside in their country. It is going to be a tough day if the other shoe drops on this. No idea what it will look like if it happens though.
- patio11 10y ago
  There exist some ways to abusively structure international tax affairs. That isn't what Atlas is about -- we help honest businesspeople get on a sound and legally compliant footing. You would not even believe how many weeks of my life I've spent the last ten years paying every cent I owe in Japan and the United States. Like every other business owner, I kvetch a bit about the rates, but I pay my taxes on time and in full because laws are laws. We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves. (Letting folks across the globe participate on equal and solid footing in the US market tends to increase value created worldwide, which is awesome, and also increases US tax collection at the margin.)
  - davidw 10y ago
    > We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves. Oh yes! Italy was like that: it's not so much the taxes themselves, it's all the extraneous BS that surrounds them that takes so much time to deal with.
  - blackbagboys 10y ago

pbnjay 10y ago

congrats patio11! - I think many of us agree that stability and less stress is a nice draw when you got young kids. Startups don't always play nice with family.

emilburzo 10y ago

> The overwhelming majority of jobs in the technology industry do not go to people who cold apply via jobs pages. sigh

rpeden 10y ago
If it's any consolation, the same is true for the best jobs in just about every industry.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Yep, it's not what you know...
  - rpeden 10y ago
    It's not just what you know. I see a good network as a force multiplier. If you have useful skills and can use them to get things done, knowing the right people can provide a lot of leverage. If you know nothing, well...a force multiplier doesn't help much when you're multiplying it by zero.
- emilburzo 10y ago
  I would understand if that would be the case for the best jobs, but it seems all of them are like that.
  - rpeden 10y ago
    I used to feel the same way; my first dev job came through someone I met at a tech meetup. I've since found a couple of good ones by cold applying. What helped the most was reading a couple of books about sales. Essentially, when you're applying with a cover letter and resume/CV, you're making a very short sales pitch and need to make the most of it. The good news is that most cover letters and resumes people send out don't have this focus at all, so it's relatively easy for you to stand out. Sometimes, the hardest part is accepting that there's nothing wrong or dishonest about selling yourself. When I've reviewed resumes in the past to decide who to interview, I've found that most of them overlook the fact that I have a problem I'm trying to solve, and I'm looking for someone to help me solve it. If the first sentence on your resume/cover letter shows me that you've read the job posting, understand the problems I'm trying to solve, and tells me why you're the right person to help solve them, you really stand out from the competition. YMMV, of course. What I've observed may be atypical, and it's entirely possible I've just had good luck. It's just worth remembering that while cold applications tend to have a low success rate, applications sent in response to job postings are really, really awful. Being non-awful significantly helps your chances, but not as much as meeting people and building a strong network.

cloudjacker 10y ago

> it introduced me to the unthinkable notion that regular old geeks like me could run software companies. I thought it was illegal, ... my background therefore suggested it was either forbidden, risky, or risked being forbidden. I encounter this so much in the states. Everything self directed is "sketchy", "is that legal?". It is really sad, because those same people would fall for scams that actually are sketchy and illegal.

angersock 10y ago

Automating startup of a company online is a bad, bad, bad idea folks. Like, Gibson dystopia bad. EDIT: Okay hivemind. Seriously, can none of you think of any ill use that automatic provisioning of a economic entity--able to own property, intervene in politics, and interact with the legal system, enter into contracts, and so forth--could be put to? Like, really?

hellbanner 10y ago
Seriously can you think of any ill use of a hammer? How about a car? Or ooh, money!
icebraining 10y ago
I didn't downvote you, but that comment was totally content-free. Try making an actual argument about why the dangers outweigh the benefits and I'll bet you the "hivemind" won't be so hard on you.
saryant 10y ago
I can create an LLC in about two minutes for $50 right now. If I really wanted to I could probably script Selenium to turn the Colorado Secretary of State's website into an API and throw it on Heroku. Really is that easy: https://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/FileDocNameAvailCriteria.do?transTyp=ARTORG_LLC https://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/FileDocNameAvailCriteria.do?...
dang 10y ago
Please don't comment like this. If you want to make a substantive point about the drawbacks of some plan, that's fine, but stirring up drama without actually saying anything is just lame.

matchagaucho 10y ago

I know from personal experience the sub-title to this article is "How I'm justifying a bad decision". Entrepreneurs know when they're making a bad decision, whether consciously or not. [Edited for brevity. No disrespect, but hate to see a Developer give up on their independence]

davidw 10y ago
Calling someone's personal decision bad or good without knowing most of the circumstances of their life... might be something to avoid. Perhaps "I hope this new gig works out for you right now, but really hope to see you running something of your own again at some point in the future"?
rpeden 10y ago
Hey, it's not as if he'll be slaving away in an Agile sweatshop with an evil Scrum Master looking over his shoulder and cracking the whip. :) Joining a larger organization can provide the opportunity to accomplish things that would be difficult or impossible on your own. And if it doesn't work out, or eventually becomes disappointing, it's still possible to hop back on the entrepreneurial horse and ride off into the sunset.
ridruejo 10y ago
It would be if he was joining a corporate job. This is not "just a job" at a regular company working on a regular product. People talk about making the world a better place all the time but few do. Working on Atlas at Stripe has that potential for impact and you get to work with awesome founders. Congrats both to kalzumeus and Stripe
- rjvir 10y ago
  > Working on Atlas at Stripe has that potential for impact and you get to work with awesome founders Same with countless other jobs, such as working at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Snapchat, etc
- matchagaucho 10y ago
  It doesn't sound like Sr leadership role that can influence strategy, so it's basically a "job". He'll come back to the dark side soon enough and build a sustainable business model (with the benefit of experience at Stripe, of course) :-)

vanrysss 10y ago

I'm sorry to hear that Starfighter is shuttering, I had a lot of fun with the stock market portion.

antoniuschan99 10y ago

Wasn't Paypal taking payments over the internet in 2006?

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
> Options for doing this in 2006 were absolutely terrible. yes, paypal was certainly taking payments over the internet in 2006. right around when they locked my account for no reason, and literally took payments meant for me and kept them for themselves. paypal is crooked. you're all idiots.
patio11 10y ago
It took me ~2 months to get BCC sold over Paypal, which was my major processor until Stripe came along. (I don't remember what the holdup was, but I very keenly remember the shucks-have-to-do-eSellerate decision.)
- antoinevg 10y ago
  thr0waway1239 pointed out the obvious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467898 So I thought I'd try to draw your attention to a suggestion I made in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12465972 ;-)

benmanns 10y ago

I applied to the Stripe Atlas beta but haven't heard any communication after doing so. Does anyone have insight as to how long the beta queue is?

edwinwee 10y ago
We're still in beta, so we don't have an exact timeline for adding new users. Mind shooting me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com with the email address you applied with?
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
I applied when it was first announced and got an invitation a few months later. I still haven't used it yet but I do intent do (hopefully they don't expire, eek).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

btcboss 10y ago

Can you start by making Stripe mobile friendly lol :P my clock reads 2016.

jtcond13 10y ago

The penultimate paragraph here must have been difficult to write.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

First time I've seen Atlas. I'm immediately worried. If someone starts a company using this I presume it's subject to US laws? What does this mean: 1. For taxes? If I live in the UK and start my business with Atlas does the US get the corporation tax revenue or the UK (or a split of the two)? 2. For data security/privacy? Is the data I store now subject to access by the US government through National Security letters and the like? I believe that if I was storing EU citizen data I'm subject to privacy shield but all data would be more susceptible to US government requests. Is this accurate? Edit: Quite shocked at the number of downvotes a completely legitimate question is getting...

fasteo 10y ago
Unfair comment completely unrelated to Atlas. You better have these questions answered before heading to Atlas.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  It is related and there is nothing unfair about it. I'm also not accusing them of anything. They're honest questions which should have relatively straightforward answers.
  - fasteo 10y ago
    I believe it isn't. I don't think you are accusing them of anything. Yes, they are honest questions, but unrelated to Atlas. If you have doubts about taxes or privacy in the US, Atlas is not going to help you in anyway. From the FAQ[1] While incorporating in the U.S. can make many things much easier, it also comes with long-term legal and tax implications. You should think carefully about whether it’s best for your business and consult advisors as necessary. Pretty clear. [1] https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#Who-should-use-Atlas https://stripe.com/atlas/faq#Who-should-use-Atlas
  - hluska 10y ago
    Thing is, the answers are nowhere near straightforward. Your first question, about taxes, is particularly complicated. Here are the relevant tax treaties: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/united-kingdom-uk-tax-treaty-documents https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/unit... While they seek to prevent double taxation (and tax evasion), they are packed with dense legalese full of clauses and subclauses designed to make certain types of income taxable in different places. To navigate that question, you'd need a highly experienced tax accountant/attorney with specific experience in UK/US tax treaties. Moreover, that person would need a strong understanding of what you do, how/where you sell, and how/if/when you plan to pay yourself. Your second question is even more complicated. First, if you incorporate in a country like the US, your corporation is considered a person in that country and is thus bound by that country's laws. I trust that you did enough research to know that. Second, recent history has demonstrated that the UK (as a Five Eyes nation) shares intelligence data with the United States. Moreover, recent history has demonstrated that the UK will work at the behest of the US intelligence community. This is governed by years of treaties and high level agreements. Consequently, the first thing you need to wonder is whether your government would just hand everything over, regardless of whether you have a US corporation or not. Third, if you do incorporate in the US, you would be subject to US law, but US law can generally be fought in a court. The question becomes whether or not you could afford to fight an NSL. Could your business afford a long, highly distracting process where it is you versus a government?? But then, you need to look at yourself. Do you have any secrets that could be used as leverage against you?? If you plan to fight a well funded intelligence agency, you'd need to be prepared for them to fight hard. I tend to argue that if a well funded intelligence agency truly wants information, they'll get it. So, while your questions were honest, they were anything but straightforward. And, they aren't actually relevant to Atlas. Rather, you and a group of experts need to sit down and figure out the costs, potential costs and the benefits of incorporating in the US. If it still makes sense, Atlas is a tool. But Atlas can't help you navigate the complicated relationship between your company, international law, agreements like NATO/other intelligence sharing agreements, EU law and two (possibly three) tax authorities. And, with all due respect, neither can Hacker News. Every situation is so different that anyone who is qualified to answer those questions wouldn't as they understand how deeply complicated they are.

cdnsteve 10y ago

Love this part: "When you have just enough crazy, you found a payments company, heedless of the fact that founding a payments company is doomed to failure because it involves mountains of hard and boring work and the incumbents have billions of dollars."

idlewords 10y ago

I don't see any advantage in incorporation if you want to run your own private business, but I'm willing to accept that I'm being the weirdo here.

koolba 10y ago
Vs LLC?
- idlewords 10y ago
  Vs sole proprietorship.
  - koolba 10y ago
    Can you set up 401k and all the other "corporate only" type things with a sole proprietorship or does it just become a legal shield with everything else as passthrough?
    - zrail 10y ago
      You can set up a solo 401K with a sole proprietorship. All you have to show is that you have self employment income showing up on a Schedule C (for a sole proprietorship) or a K1 (for a partnership/LLC/S-Corp).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - rev_bird 10y ago
    Liability protection, if nothing else. If someone sues a company, they can't (in theory) take the CEO's house. Also, in the US, you can save a bunch of money on payroll taxes if you elect to be taxed as an S-corp. The short version is that you only pay those taxes (Social Security, FICA, Medicare, etc etc) on money you get in paychecks -- so, if you make $100k in a year and "pay" yourself $70k, you end up with the other $30k but didn't have to pay a bunch of tax on it.

lowglow 10y ago

I just want to point out that everything starts off as targeted marketing/spam. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr7mNhuUEAAoHcM.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cr7mNhuUEAAoHcM.jpg:large Don't listen when people hate on you for sharing what you're working on. The only thing that matters in the end is success. :)

zbruhnke 10y ago

Congrats Patrick ... This is one of those blog posts that I read and completely think that I could actually go work for a company and be really happy which never happens. I love what you guys are doing with Atlas and will be rooting for you and for Stripe Japan, sounds like a great opportunity to join that team for the right people!

alexkehayias 10y ago

Looking forward to working with you! I'm joining next week to work on Atlas too.

kwilliams 10y ago

HN's favorite soap opera continues.

grellas 10y ago

Back in the bubble days, all but a relatively few would-be founders found themselves crawling out of a hole and into the dark, as it were, in trying to figure out how to get from ground zero to a point of success: it was all super-bewildering and there were virtually no resources to help understand how it all worked: no helpful web-based forums to explain process or to share experiences, no solid resources for helping understand how best to launch, no easy access to funding, etc., etc. Today, it is all different. We are all hyper-connected and the old barriers are much diminished. This means a founder in Silicon Valley, where the infrastructure is solid, can continue to do incredible things but, now, so too can founders everywhere. Yes, it can help to be geographically at the heart of it all but it is no longer an indispensable part of startup success. I think Stripe's Atlas takes a huge additional step in helping to remove the accident of a founder's location from the list of barriers to entry in the world's startup club. I have explained my views in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417#11168750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11166417#11168750 And what a felicitous teaming between Patrick and Stripe to help further that goal. Great people all round, working to achieve great goals! I cannot imagine a better combination. Very exciting and congrats to all.

_RPM 10y ago

Is Stripe different than PayPal besides maybe having a better API? Is Stripe a subset of PayPal?

k-mcgrady 10y ago
Website integration is incredibly simple. Standard UI is also much better. PayPal also has a terrible reputation for holding money and bad customer support which Stripe doesn't. I integrated Stripe into a website with almost zero web dev knowledge. Really, really simple.

benjismith 10y ago

Awesome! I've been a big fan of Patrick since the days of the old Joel on Software forums, and I've always admired his plucky optimism. Atlas is an incredibly cool, potentially game-changing project, and Stripe was already a game-changing company before launching it. I'm excited to see what happens next! Way to go, Patrick!!

nthState 10y ago

Nice work Patrick!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Rapzid 10y ago

Is this at all related to MYOB's Atlas? https://www.myob.com/au/small-business/atlas-website-builder https://www.myob.com/au/small-business/atlas-website-builder

ceejayoz 10y ago
No.
- Rapzid 10y ago
  I guess not as well. I wonder if they will brand differently in Asia Pacific to reduce confusion. MYOB's Atlas does not appear to be targeted towards business outside AU, but Stripe Atlas is targeted at international customers so there may be some collision there.

stevoski 10y ago

Patrick writes in the article: > I never thought I could build a Fog Creek, but I saw a bunch of other geeks building Poker Co-pilot and Perfect Table Plan and skeet-shooting scoring software, and I was pretty sure I could at least do something like that. I'm the geek who built (and continues to run) Poker Copilot. Patrick got the order of events backwards. What actually happened is that I started Poker Copilot in a large part because Patrick inspired me by managing to launch a software product (Bingo Card Creator) after just one week of development. All the best working for a boss again, Patrick! I'm sure there will be plenty of interesting twists and turns in the years ahead in this remarkable life of yours .

caseysoftware 10y ago
Don't forget, there was the chimney sweep software guy too. :) /oldschool
- jng 10y ago
  And there was the vi emulator guy too :)
azernik 10y ago
Classic mutual recursion ^__^

secabeen 10y ago

>There Is No Future For Scarcity This section worries me a bit, as it's the sort of thing that doesn't consider the possibility of a major world-wide crisis. There are plenty of conceivable futures where these things could happen. A simple one is a small-scale non-nuclear war between China and US, where they disconnect completely from the larger Internet, but we avoid a global thermonuclear war. The continental European countries saw a 50% drop in GDP through WW2, and it could very well happen again.

smoyer 10y ago
When Mel Gibson is standing in the road shooting at gas thieves I think we'll all be doing something other than typing comments on HN. I live in an area where you could conceivably forage/hunt for all your food but it would be a pretty harsh life.
ufmace 10y ago
You could say that anything is theoretically possible, but the entire extended history of the world contradicts that idea. Economic progress is about as universal as anything in the man-made world has ever been. There have been setbacks, sure, but they have invariably been limited and short-lived. I'm sure there was a large drop in GDP during WWII, and I'm also sure that shortly after, it recovered and proceeded to climb well beyond where it was before the war started, as is the case with every other war ever fought, and any other type of catastrophe you can think of.

owathray123 10y ago

I for one am more than faintly relieved that Starfighter has fallen. It looked to me like an attempt to find the most direct way possible to parlay the prominent position that Thomas and Patrick have in this community into cash - by literally selling its members. There's a line that's crossed here between being a member of HN buoyed up by the good wishes and advice of your fellows, and using the community as a resource to be exploited. Yes, this is a throwaway. Yes, I think it's a problem that I feel I need to use one.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Yes, this is a throwaway. Yes, I think it's a problem that I feel I need to use one. I agree that that feeling is a problem. I don't agree with your unstated but clear implication that its a problem with the community, though.
smoyer 10y ago
I'm not down-voting you but I never felt the need to sign up for StarFighter ... And that's despite the fact that I was one of those who originally met Patrick in the BoS forums. I'm still wondering what happened to SumoRunner ;)
eropple 10y ago
I think this is super unfair. Connecting people with jobs isn't "selling them". I rip on recruiters a lot--probably more than most people--but a good recruiter, and I know a few of them (hat tip to Bivium here in Boston, among others), is looking for a win-win arrangement because they know they'll be working with you again down the line. Starfighter seemed like an attempt to be a good recruiter at scale. It didn't work out, and that's a bummer, but that's pretty far afield from your allegations. And you didn't need to use a throwaway. Put your name on something if you're going to be casting shade on people. I do (here, regularly), you can too.
- nialo 10y ago
  fwiw, Starfighter (probably mostly Erin/Thomas? hard to tell from the outside) got me a job that I love and certainly couldn't have gotten without them. It sucks that the business didn't work out, but it certainly wasn't because candidates were somehow getting screwed by Starfighter.

edpichler 10y ago

I am enrolling Stripe Atlas and, to me, incorporating in USA will give me access to modern banking services, and platforms, as Stripe, and it seems USA has very lower taxes than Brazil, my country. That's why I am interested. It all seems fascinating, but I am afraid to continue and do the last step of the enrollment. I don't know how is the process to close the company, what the representative agent can do for me, how much is to have an account on SVB (after the 24 free months), if it's easy to legally hire a person to work remotely anywhere, and if for some reason I will need to eventually travel to USA. If someone have a answer for one of questions, I will be thankful.

c4n4rd 10y ago
I live in the US. Let me know if I can help you with anything. Abracos.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  The "ç" makes an enormous difference here.
  - c4n4rd 10y ago
    The international keyboard mapping on Ubuntu makes ç come out as ć, so I gave up on trying that. :-)
edwinwee 10y ago
Nope, you don't need to travel to the US -- we'll handle incorporation and opening your bank account remotely. When it's time to sign papers, we'll send you an e-signature link. Silicon Valley Bank's fees after the first 24 months vary depending on which of their services you choose to use, so there's no one-size-fits-all rate card we can point you to -- if you send me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com, I'd be happy to chat more about this in detail. Although we don't offer immigration or employment services as a part of Atlas, I'd love to hear more about your business to see how we can help and walk you through the final steps!

red_blobs 10y ago

I feel like many startup founders, including Patrick, build the technology and hope the business will follow...usually with an unsuccessful outcome. He's great at marketing. He should have spent a year building a network of employers with lower-tech solutions and then expanded it out with starfighter. I've been following Patrick since the BoS days and all of his products have been pretty low profit. Enough to support himself only (some, not even this much) (I'm not including consulting, only products or services) Money is the lifeblood of all companies and you will need it to truly change the world.

strongai 10y ago

For what it's worth, I was never excited by starfighter because of its trading/markets premise - simple as that. It just doesn't float my boat. The entire proposition sounded far too much like real work. Game? Surely not.

draw_down 10y ago
Pretty sure that was the idea. Wasn't supposed to be super Mario
spyrosg 10y ago
Each level in the game gave you clear directions, an entertaining backstory, and taught you the concepts necessary to think about the problem. All three things turn what would be a boring, real-world project into a game, where only the pleasant part is left for you to do. At least for the kind of people they were looking for.

newintellectual 10y ago

Suggestion: target other - freer - countries as well. i.e. the other 96% of the planet.

Animats 10y ago

There are lots of services to help you incorporate. Incorporate.com and LegalZoom are well known. What's new about Atlas, other than bundling other services and charging more?

codethief 10y ago
Compared to incorporate.com they are actually cheaper if you're not a US citizen / reside outside the US. (If I remember correctly, incorporate.com charges about $700 for that.) Other than that, I totally agree with your question.
markdown 10y ago
Atlas is also restricted to Delaware, whereas with most of the other services, you can incorporate anywhere (including Wyoming, which is the best for privacy and taxes).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

chuamo 10y ago

Why would someone making 30k a week as a consultant take a job[1]? [1]https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/

majc2 10y ago
Sometimes, consultants get tired of consulting and want to build products instead.
jakobegger 10y ago
Maybe because 1) 30k contracts don't line up, and you never know when the next opportunity arrives; steady income may be preferable even if it is lower. 2) Money isn't everything. Working on interesting problems with interrsting people is a lot more fulfilling than doing boring work that pays well.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  Yes exactly. You can get 30k per week consulting but not on the regular, esp. if you're doing the consulting and the biz dev. The sales cycle for getting 30k/week is long. It's very hard to do week in week out. Getting $30k per MONTH for a small business is generally a 3-6 month sales cycle. One-time projects can be shorter of course, esp. in network, but you're always on the biz dev grind if that's your model. He wasn't 250k/yr salary for 2 consecutive years and a suspect accredited investor. I think it's cool what he's done and what he's shared to the community, but I do think he gets glorified for his posts which are not always realistic for most people and the projection is that he's killing it when he really isn't. Also, part of me read this and thought this was sad to see a fellow entrepreneur jump ship, even though I do like Stripe and Atlas.
angelbob 10y ago
Patrick had already spun down his consulting business before this happened -- I think before Starfighter started, even. It was lucrative, but not pleasant, and he made more enjoyable money working for himself.
10y ago

knite 10y ago

Congratulations! Will you be sharing details on how your salary negotiation went? Reference: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

thr0waway1239 10y ago

I really like Patrick's work, and I have learnt a lot from it. I wish him the best for his employment at Stripe. But I am going to ask all of you to tread carefully when taking advice from well-intentioned experts. Over a period of 9 or so years, Patrick went from expressing opinions about a) why desktop software is still viable b) why web based is a better option than desktop because desktop causes too many pains c) why doing a SaaS model is better than the one time web based software (web version of BCC) d) why it may not be worth the stress of (some stressful event associated with clients in medical industry) for a SaaS which is generating less than $2000 MRR e) why a business like StarFighter is better because you feel like waking up and doing it for 5+ years in a row and f) eventually there will be a good reason for the decision to leave/stop Starfighter. Amongst these opinions, there would be two kinds of takeaway messages - the ones which are true independent of the specific time period (don't piss off your customer) vs the ones which are more subjective and epoch specific - e.g. Patrick's own admission of benefiting from AdSense (via the Content Network or some such thing) for BCC, which was probably not true by the time it was expressed publicly and is almost certainly not true today. There is almost positively going to be a fair amount of time lag before these ideas germinate in the experts' head and they slowly turn into action in their lives, and by the time they are ready to write about it, sometimes they are close to the winding down phase of said idea. For the people who are keen to "follow suit", as they say, it is very hard to know if it is a good idea to invest the next 3-5 years of your lives trying to adopt the same idea. This is all fine and obvious, you say. My concern has to do with the "other side" of the picture. When people were lavishing praise on the SaaS model about 3-4 years ago, I suppose I wasn't the only one who wondered "Wait a minute. What about the fact that a SaaS business takes up your mind space 24 x 7 x 365? Isn't that a cost most of us don't wish to pay?" And after a while, Patrick mentions in a MicroConf talk about doing an eBook or WP plugin first before embarking on a SaaS - all great advice. Just wish more people consider the balancing forces and always ask themselves whether they are getting the full picture.

forloop 10y ago
> But I am going to ask all of you to tread carefully when taking advice from well-intentioned experts. Info-marketer. I was previously a member of a paid marketing forum at the same time as him. He got a ton of people hook, line, and sinker. What a bunch of suckers. With HN being transitioned into a feminist e-zine (by YC), I have concerns about this place. I do actually care. Good esoteric information is hard to come by. HN surfaces said esoterica (currently!).

102193109301 10y ago

There are enough fools/cheerleaders here for sure, following the same 20 top commenters for a decade.

dang 10y ago
If you want to posture above the rest of this community, please do so elsewhere; it's in bad taste to do it here. Also, we've banned this account for making personal attacks, and please don't make throwaway accounts to break HN's rules with. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466792 and marked it off-topic.

pmyjavec 10y ago

The overwhelming majority of jobs in the technology industry do not go to people who cold apply via jobs pages. This is important for you to know and operationalize. A little off topic, but why is this? I don't doubt what he is saying but why is it not good enough to apply for a job via standard channels and not have to be in "the boys club" ?

astrange 10y ago
Public job postings are a market for lemons (most people who apply aren't good enough for any job, or they'd already have one). Why even bother making one if you have an internal candidate or a good referral?
vidarh 10y ago
Because the process of deciding to look for someone involves thinking about it and discussing it first, during which a lot of the time someone will go "oh, I know someone who might be great". A lot of jobs never go onto the jobs pages in the first place. Other jobs don't even exist, but get created because someone asks their contacts and one of them goes "hm, we do really need someone with their experience" and creates a position that otherwise wouldn't exist until a lot later. What goes on the jobs pages is what's left.
superuser2 10y ago
There are some very different sets of beliefs, practices, and values floating around any craft among people who have the same title. I'll call these "tribes." Tribes are often associated with buzzwords, like "agile." At the highest level of abstraction, practitioners in different tribes do the same job, but the way other tribes do things might be unrecognizable and/or horrifying from your perspective. You want to hire from your tribe. Buzzwords get picked up by people who don't really mean them in their original sense (see: enterprises doing waterfall and calling it agile) so buzzwords on resumes don't identify tribe, and an interview is only a few hours of a candidate in a contrived high-pressure situation where they're nervous/presenting the mask they think you want to see. So you start with people you personally know to be in your tribe. When those run out, you realize you can trust the people you personally know to identify other tribe members, and this works up to the nth degree. If that's not enough, you learn that certain institutions (employers, universities, etc.) select, demand, or instill membership in your tribe, so you go looking for candidates who have been attached to these institutions first. FWIW this is not unique to software by any means. I worked on the tech side of theater in college and have friends now working in that industry. Designers, stage and production managers, etc. in the real world are hired almost exclusively on reputation and recommendation. They are cold-emailed job offers (not ads to come compete for a job, but actual work) based on colleagues' experiences with them at previous gigs. Gigs often last only a few weeks, so you are playing this game constantly. You essentially cannot break in as a total outsider. You need to go to a school that is trusted to provide good interns (because its teachers are from the right tribe and it runs its student productions the right way), and impress at your internship, or else know someone who will convince their boss to take a chance on you. Sometimes hiring does have a formal application process, but you are not getting the job unless someone reading the application has heard of you or has a lot of respect for one of the institutions on your resume. "The boys club" is a (flawed) attempt at instituting meritocracy by a system of recursive trust. I believe it's much better than the resume and interview dance, but I'd still love for software to discover its "blind audition" hiring technique.

chmike 10y ago

Congratulation Patrick. This is a great news for Stripe, Japan and the world ! You just made me discover Atlas (I must have lived under a rock last year) and I'm really impressed by the idea. It is not great, it is huge ! I quickly looked through the Q&A and the first thing that strikes me is that the effective cost is not clear. Ok 500$ entry cost, but there are many other costs like bank, taxes, IRS, 125$ yearly for the agent, etc. Most of these costs aren't even clearly specified. Thus it's actually like an offer to buy a cat in a bag. The strength of stripe is its simplicity and clarity. You know upfront what it will cost you. There isn't any hidden cost. So Patrick, if you can have some influence, please help making Atlas as simple and clear as Stripe.

robin_reala 10y ago

Slightly unfashionable to say this here, but this problem isn’t necessarily something the private sector should be routing around but one that the public sector should be fixing from within. At GDS (GOV.UK etc) we’re working on a programme called GaaP: Government as a Platform. This aims to provide components to radically simplify the difficulty of building services focused on user needs for the rest of government. Tom Loosemoore (now ex-GDS but hey) gave this talk at Code For America last year: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE_zj-7A7A https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE_zj-7A7A . It’s obviously quite long (and in my opinion worth watching the lot) but the topic relevant part comes at ~28 minutes in. Here Tom demonstrates how pulling together the pieces of GaaP could potentially lead to registering s company in 3.5 minutes. That a private sector company could do the same thing is great, but sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom.

buro9 10y ago
> sometimes you need to refactor the root inefficiency rather than patch the symptom. This is also my view on a lot of fintech. However... if the incumbents aren't doing something, then eating away at the edges may eventually either overcome the incumbents or force them into change. I don't think Stripe could replace what govts do, but I can certainly see that Stripe being successful will put them at the table to influence or direct the which the way govts do things.
- philipov 10y ago
  If innovation is motivated by competition, then the government having a monopoly in governmental services means they never need to innovate, unless they receive some competition. Because barriers to emigration are so high, countries don't have to compete with each other for quality of governance, and so it turns out that only the private sector can do it.
  - robin_reala 10y ago
    If innovation is motivated by competition Your implication is that competition has to be with external agents. It’s perfectly possible to compete with the status quo. The private sector has a profit motive at its core: make more money for shareholders. The public sector also has a profit motive: save more money and be more effective for tax-payers. They’re both examples of efficiency, two sides of the same coin.

hypnotortoise 10y ago

It would be interesting to see the main building blocks of Atlas and if any of it have relations or takes inspirations from Blockchain Tech (e.g. Ether-based http://otonomos.com/ http://otonomos.com/).

reeiwhatu 10y ago

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hvd 10y ago

Good luck Patrick on this new adventure.

hvd 10y ago

Good luck Patrick on this new adventure.