For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.
Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.
You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.
With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they're having major retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.
I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.
OK I've saved the HTML of this page... just in case :-)
Honestly to be the kind of person who runs a company like Stripe you have to be a bit crazy.
To have the chance to be bought out for unfathomable sums at every step, and willingly go manage the headaches of a big and fast growing company (like this thread) instead?
He tricked me into working for a month without a contract and then wouldn’t answer my calls when I asked him to sign the terms we agreed upon. I had to show up and sit on their couch until he showed up to write me a check to go away. He’s a slippery character.
I was also on that contract and can verify this. Here’s an odd wrinkle: just prior to that contract, Patrick wanted to purchase bitcoin from me (this was back in 2013) remotely, with me sending him the bitcoin first and him paying when he had time. He also wanted the terms to be that if the USD price of bitcoin went down before he paid me, that he would pay the lower price(!) and he would choose the time of repayment. I declined to do anything other than an in-person cash transaction. Later, I heard he had previously purchased some from another friend and then ghosted him for many (>6?) months despite persistent requests for payment.
+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have deployed a team to directly copy one of our products.
Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size...
This sounds like typical tech infighting, sadly. We shouldn't normalize this stuff, but we do. I really hope more companies hold their leaders to a governing, conscious culture that they actually follow themselves.
I am not sure about "HN code of conduct" here, but personally I dislike serious allegations posted anonymously and without any proof to back it up.
You may well be right, but posting these kinds of things this way is best way for HN to devolve to be unusable for any serious discussion on anything.
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EDIT: (I can't answer any more because I am being throttled by HN for posting "low value content").
How hard do you think it is to create multiple fresh, throwaway HN accounts to post "corroborating" comments?
I dislike these comments not because I think they are incorrect but because if this is the discussion standard we accept it is basically open season for trolling.
Because of the power dynamic they have to do this. It is sad, but having been in a similar situation with a billionaire, you can't say it with your name attached.
Everybody can say that. Regardless of whether they are or are not leading a large company.
For all I know, one insider holding a grudge could be creating multiple accounts claiming to be leading large companies and thus not being able to divulge their names.
Proof could even include some examples of stories that were quashed, or other examples of abuse. I don't think they necessarily need to out themselves to make a stronger case.
That sounds like a pretty fair position. It does seem difficult, on the other hand, because I don't think we really have mechanisms to protect whistleblowers as a society. The options seem like stay silent, speak out anonymously (clearly subject to abuse), or speak out publicly with the threat of retribution. None of these feel like great options.
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It isn't dang's fault that Patrick has a Google Alert or daemon running for his name (or just has a lot of employees who notify him whenever it comes up). It's not direct control of HN, it's Patrick being enterprising.
dang has done nothing to deserve bad faith, and while I don't like Patrick, either, it's best to keep the knocks on the right doors.
> Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.
This sounds like such BS. They are just very reactive around PR, and Stripe while it might be hated internally (based on what you say), it is loved by external developers, so of course developers on HN will tend to have a positive opinion of anything related to it and vote accordingly. And they are quite a lot.
I almost downvoted you for going with the conspiracy theory route, but I like the irony of this post being on the top 5 on the front page and your comment being the top comment of that post, while complaining about him having "almost direct control" of HN and the press.
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Stripe is a YC company. If Stripe becomes a shit show, YC may lose money. How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?
Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC. And we're not talking chump change like a couple million. More like billions. What's a little push back on negative comments to save a couple billion dollars?
> "How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?"
Firstly, you have dramatically undersold what OP claimed, to the point of dishonesty.
Secondly, what OP claimed is a conspiracy theory because it has no actual evidence. If it had evidence it would be a conspiracy.
> Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC
I don't know about primary function but it's one of them, let's say. The interesting thing is that this has exactly the opposite consequence to what you say. Doing things to jeopardize the good faith of the community would not only be wrong, it would be catastrophically stupid. Therefore, not only do we not to do it, we place the highest priority on not doing it. That follows straightforwardly from the mixture of your premise with raw self-interest, so I'm not claiming anything hard to accept. Well, I guess I'm claiming we're not catastrophically stupid; maybe some find that hard to accept.
Their recent 1yr equity periods to screw employees out of upside caused me to lose interest (even though that equity will still likely be very valuable). I really disliked how they tried to spin this as something good for employees.
Which is a shame because a lot of stuff they do is super cool, stripe press, increment (recently discontinued), blog posts, patio11 etc.
It seems like a great place in a lot of ways.
Don't forget the female engineer they fired for calling Elon "a little shit" on twitter. I don't know if it would be worse if it turned out to be because Elon complained or because he is their hero.
Almost everyone at YC worships Elon, you can see it on Sam Altman’s face when he interviewed him on YouTube.
Sam Altman might actually believe that Elon is superior to him.
That's disgusting really, but looks like it's true.
Probably what parent is referring to: https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1171236137932771328 https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1171236137932771328
https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867 https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867
Elon is no angel, but I gotta say it would shock me if he was such a huge loser that he would complain about something like this
I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)
All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
> We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... you did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did not ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?
Also:
> I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.
"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?
The challenge I see with some phrases like "mined them" and "ghosted" is that they can be very subjective statements. The person on the receiving end may perceive the actions as such, whereas the person on the giving end may seem them differently.
I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.
I'm also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.
I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.
People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.
There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:
- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal
- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)
- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.
Strange that the downvote button was hidden on this post. I had to manually submit the GET request.
Have you considered that he might just avoid sharking out on people he considers friends, or people with too large a platform?
Genuine question.
I can't comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon.
I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.
I was fortunate to work with pc/jc/will in ~2016-18, and my experience has been the opposite. They were super professional and in the time that I've worked with them seemed like genuinely good people. They can be tough negotiators which hey, sucks if you're on the other side of the table, but that's exactly what you want out of a good leadership team. And a lot of stuff slips through the cracks, but I'm not sure what else you'd expect from a company that went from 0 -> $100B in a decade.
I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.
(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)
TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.
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>"I run a $XB fintech, ..."
I've seen this term a couple of times no in this post. Might you are someone else explain what a "$XB fintech" is?
“$X billion fintech” was my interpretation
A billion dollar fintech company, the X being how many billions.
Ex-Borg financial technology... Resistance is futile!
$XB is the symbol for a new cryptocurrency called XBitCoin, it’s a fork of Bitcoin Cash.
Could you elaborate what "$XB fintech" means? Couldn't google answer myself.
From this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389350
market cap or "valuation" company, x is a place holder so $1,2 or 3 billion
3 comma club
> On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine.
That's why we still need a thing like Gawker to come back. Almost all of SV hated on Thiel for standing behind Trump but when it came to him bringing down Gawker nobody left a finger in Gawker's defense, and so that here we are, a multi-trillion dollar industry with no internal means to self-regulate ourselves.
Gawker did come back FWIW.
Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
Big TIL for me, to be honest.
> Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
That explains why I thought they were gone for good.
Specifically ValleyWag, Gawker is the conglomerate that owned it:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/r-i-p-valleywag-2006-2015-1750419908 http://valleywag.gawker.com/r-i-p-valleywag-2006-2015-175041...
Gawker were scum. The worst of the worst in “journalism”. Their whole business model was based on creating outrage and division. They don’t deserve an inch of sympathy.
I do miss Mike Arrington's Techcrunch, though
I'll stick to NYT and WSJ breaking real stories, thanks.
Gawker's issues were entirely of their own making. What was their big scoop? That Thiel was gay? At least Gizmodo did some coverage on a pre-release iPhone 4 before being exiled.
> have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this 'huge amount of reporters' that Stripe has 'under their control'?
We are approaching this wrong. We should not look at ghosting as a personal attack. If you want a fiend to bring to yhe interview get a dog, comes to mind.
Also compare how a lowly cook handles interviews at a new dinning place. It's none of the entitled BS but oh a new adventure...lets see what happens.
I am also a founder of a $XB fintech startup.
Inspired by this comment, I have created a tracker in the Open Market Research project https://github.com/OpenMarketResearch/Labs/issues/new?labels=0001+Broken+Companies+Hiring&template=report_broken_companies.yml&title=%5B0001%5D%3A+ https://github.com/OpenMarketResearch/Labs/issues/new?labels... Please feel free to share any comments or suggestions.