22 ms·

Bolt founder on Stripe/YC

• pphysch 5y ago
  Unrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1485784823641755648.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1485784823641755648.html
• possiblelion 5y ago
  I'll be honest, I've never heard of this Bolt (immediately thought of the multi-billion ridesharing/fooddelivery/micromobility conglomerate). Not a good look posting such a thread, does he have PR consultants? If not, then an immediate red flag from me.
• jusben1369 5y ago
  Let's hope they're better at payments than they are at being the mafia because this guy raised a billion dollars 5 blocks away from them.
• jamestimmins 5y ago
  This is an argument that needs more receipts. I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.
  • parhamn 5y ago
    Be careful with this sort of reasoning for the sake of false negatives. Under this lens only 0.001% of all actual incidences of what he's describing would be deemed as enough proof (your bar effectively requires testimony under oath and document subpoena). Obviously, I'm not saying the case is made in the other direction. Given this is all the information that we'll get we have to take into consideration our intuition, his incentives, his reputation, etc. I'm personally not so comfy dismissing it with a "need more proof" stamp.
    • jamestimmins 5y ago
      I'm not trying to dismiss it, merely trying to open the door for more evidence. Such as emails with redacted identifying info where VCs are saying what's going on and why they won't fund him. I agree there's a risk of raising the bar too high, but it's also a scenario where he has a financial incentive to paint Stripe in a bad light and he's also trying to make character accusations about actual people. The bar *should* be quite high imo.
  • toomuchtodo 5y ago
    I’m curious: you ask for receipts but are sure stuff gets shady. What does that look like “without the receipts”? The extremes are likely too wild to be true, and I think it’s highly unlikely this activity transpires on the YC Slack or BookFace, but I could absolutely believe calls and messaging takes place between what are now startup power brokers, whether that’s founders, VCs, or PR folks, to shape the narrative and drive towards specific objectives.
    • jamestimmins 5y ago
      I'm just saying that human nature is, unfortunately, somewhat inclined to do shady things when a lot of money and power is on the line. Silicon Valley is definitely not immune to this reality. That's all I mean. Given the amount of publicized cases where high-profile companies had unethical behavior at the founding level (Facebook, Apple, Twitter), I think it's naive to assume any company makes it to that level while maintaining 100% ethical decision making.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• canniballectern 5y ago
  I don't get it - if "the mafia" wants "7% on your cap table", why would they reject your YC application and backchannel to get VCs to back off?
  • wmf 5y ago
    The theory is that YC would rather support Stripe's "monopoly" than take 7% of a bunch of different payment startups.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • dang 5y ago
      YC has funded and continues to fund a lot of payment startups. More generally: YC funds close to a thousand startups a year at present—obviously it's impossible to avoid funding competitors in such a model, nor would that be in keeping with YC"s founding principles, one of which is to try to fund as many good startups as possible (https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/ https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/). But you can have good practices around it, such as not playing favorites, not giving inside information about one to another, reminding founders that startups mostly don't die because of competition, big markets are big enough to support multiple players, and so on.
  • manquer 5y ago
    In this scenario (not getting into if its true or not) logically the "mafia" would want to get 7 % in successful companies, and the key to that success is to influence everyone else not invest in anything they reject, which means less competition/resources to their portfolio. This makes life harder if you never applied so you are kind of forced to apply and be forced to pay "protection" even if you may not like it. More powerful a mafia is, more likely their rejection dooms your venture, making it more likely you would be okay with deal even if terms are not too favorable.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• parhamn 5y ago
  I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting. Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very likely become predatory to the potential innovators that SV is supposed to support. At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade in the same way as everything else does because it won't be able to entertain a wave of innovators, and they will, as he did, seek and build the next SV.
  • mushufasa 5y ago
    > the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear Yes, I think the incentive argument is certainly the more interesting piece than the notion that there is any sort of coordinated conspiracy, which seems far-fetched. > At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade I'm not sure that this follows. This argument doesn't really apply to new approaches, it only applies to direct competitors of market-dominant darlings, not fresh approaches within a vertical.
  • dang 5y ago
    If that's the main result of the post, then it's a reductio, because YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons—only because they thought it wouldn't be a good investment at that moment. Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles (https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/ https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/). Of course it still happens that YC turns down good companies which go on to innovate and succeed—but only by mistake. Edit: by "principles" I don't mean some sort of moral edict, I mean YC's investment thesis, which is described at https://www.ycombinator.com/principles https://www.ycombinator.com/principles.
    • parhamn 5y ago
      I find this comment surprising. I didn't say anything too controversial. Investors regularly refuse (and it's often the morally correct thing to do) investments in competitors. It's also often in their financial incentive too. To assume any investment organization in broad does differently because of their stated principles is absurd. Most investors would comfortably say this. > YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons While I know your intentions weren't bad, it feels disingenuous to speak so confidently about the behavior of hundreds(?) of investors/employees, regardless of the take. Also getting a seed check from YC doesn't really disprove any of this. The forces of the business immune system he's describing probably wouldn't kick in until later anyway. To be clear I don't think any of this is abnormal behavior (or reprehensible). Regardless I stand by my bet: the successor to Airbnb & Stripe probably wont be YC backed.
• anon2020dot00 5y ago
  If the premise of the tweets are true, then anything negative about Stripe will be hidden from Hacker News and so following this thread to see if that is the case. There was also a hacker news thread sometime ago about predatory tactics used by Stripe if I'm not mistaken and so there does seem to be an increase in negative sentiment.
  • floatingatoll 5y ago
    The top HN search result for Stripe is, by a considerable margin, the post from two months ago, about Stripe ghosting candidates and retracting offer letters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264 On the first page of top-ranked results for the word “Stripe” I noted two other articles as well that appeared, on the surface, to be critical of Stripe. I encourage performing your own search and assessment rather than trusting my brief skim, but it’s certainly enough for me to recommend further research along those lines if you’d like to contrast the historical data with moderation concerns.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway_4ever 5y ago
  Ok so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 is Ryan (and probably the other copycat temp accounts). I’m having a hard time believing him when he gets basic facts like Lyft not being in YC wrong… I guess it’s like Grove said, “only the paranoid survive.”
  • bigcat123 5y ago
    You have to understand Twitter is itself not meant to be that serious. (FWIW US media reporting in general is primarily advertising nowadays, I never see any reporting that is without a clear goal for certain ideas, reporting facts are simply not the primary goal) This Twitter thread is of course a combination of business promotion (bolt is for start-up, bolt standard up against stripe, bolt founder stands up against bullies). I am not questioning his intention. I am saying promotion is simply a unconscious drive in US business man. When they talk they always put the business interest at the center, intentionally or unconsciously.
  • dang 5y ago
    Let's be careful here. I don't know of any reason to believe that those are the same person, and somebody getting a marginal fact wrong is a bad reason to dismiss everything they're saying. Humans are far too error prone for that to be much of a signal. Of course I'm not 'siding' with that poster, or this one. I just say these things out of habit.
• dvt 5y ago
  > The reality… if you stand in their way, they will do more than compete with you head on. Flushed face They will use every power move imaginable. Blocking you from capital, media, talent. And funding competitors just to get back at you. Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company by the power of rainbows and unicorns? The idea that you need to reach top of HN to be relevant in SV is also a bit silly. Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."
  • tomcat27 5y ago
    > Pretty sure this is how business is done. FYI - It's illegal to do what Bolt founder tweeted. Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it. Not sure how this ever gets proven..
    • dvt 5y ago
      > Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it. Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction. Breslow himself admits there are competitors. We're also conveniently forgetting that Bolt just raised $355M at an $11B valuation, who am I supposed to feel sorry for again?
      • tomcat27 5y ago
        > Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction. I didn’t say they are.
    • tptacek 5y ago
      What does Stripe have a monopoly on?
      • rswail 5y ago
        Excellent execution in the payments space and expanding beyond that to support business infrastructure and development through things like Treasury and Atlas etc. Not sure that qualifies as a monopoly, but in general Stripe is an example of one (so far).
• jimhi 5y ago
  I don't really have an opinion on this but as a 2x YC founder, two assumptions are wrong 1. There are dozens of Stripe competitors funded by YC and new ones get accepted every batch from what I've seen. 2. VCs will ghost you last minute no matter who you are. Edit: You can see public YC companies here https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Payments https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Payments
  • ridruejo 5y ago
    Yep
  • buryat 5y ago
    your message contains less proofs than the post
  • tempsy 5y ago
    What is an example of a direct Stripe competitor that has been recently funded? I think the gist of the argument is correct though - there are a few main horses like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart that get funded by a swarm of SV insiders including YC and marquee VCs and then those same insiders have a strong incentive to block investment in direct competitors to those companies. Competitors that do end up popping up are usually being funded by outsiders or smaller firms as mentioned.
    • tptacek 5y ago
      Here's a list of the Summer 2021 batch companies. You can just cmd-f "pay". https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies-from-y-combinators-summer-2021-demo-day-part-1/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/31/here-are-all-the-companies...
      • tempsy 5y ago
        just because a startup is doing something payment related does not mean “direct competitor to Stripe” and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.
• bobobob420 5y ago
• thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
  Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?
  • tptacek 5y ago
    They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this. You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcoming about it!
    • dannyw 5y ago
      It's been known that HN has applied keyword-based, domain-based, and manual penalties in the past: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.
      • tptacek 5y ago
        I didn't say HN operates on an "unmoderated scoring function"; it most certainly doesn't, as Dan has (again) repeatedly said. I said that YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC votes don't count differently.
        • thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
          You are arguing the specifics of my comment and not the spirit of it. It’s not clear all the ways posts are modified and it isn’t clear who all knows all the ways posts are identified.
• civilized 5y ago
  Man I wish I could be a person where the mafia would throw very mild obstacles in my way as I became a billionaire
  • arrakis2021 5y ago
    I LOLEd at “very mild obstacles”
• seibelj 5y ago
  You can still win the game playing on hard mode. Most prefer easier difficulties.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• onphonenow 5y ago
  So weird - someone raising on a 11b valuation
• ChristianKletzl 5y ago
  It's weird that he's arguing that Stripe/YC destroys the competition by being the main investor in their competition (Fast)
• manquer 5y ago
  Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ? Everyone wants the exclusive network that YC founders get access to. The doors that YC stamp can open. The obvious corollary to that is for not YC company it is harder to open those doors and build those connections. This is central to the model for any exclusive network, tech companies (FAANG) education institutions (Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc) or even schools like Eton all do the same to someone's(or company)'s profile. It is lot more likely that you will get funding (not just YC) if you studied in best schools, worked at top company or a hot startup all else being same. It is true of the ex-founder badge as well, second time founders get better chance at fund raise than a first time founder for the same idea. VCs would say there is strong correlation between such attributes and success, but it really hard to prove (or disprove ) causation for this. It is quite hard to know how much is such experiences or education a factor of merit or is it only because of the network effect and brand recognition more opportunities open up rather than any real merit to those brands alone.
  • abernard1 5y ago
    > Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ? Yes, but it would be nice to dispense with the mythology that what is going on is the best technology is winning. YC might as well be the alumni association at Harvard. The whole culture in SV / YC / HN / FAANG (and I understand the differences between those) is a value capture mechanism. It simply could not exist without extreme VC funding and pushing market entrants out via capitalization and size. Additionally, 20 years of this has proved that only certain types of low-hanging fruit can succeed with that model: (1) low cost-of-capital software industries, with (2) relatively known risks and favorable governance (see SF politics), and (3) an endless supply of knowledge workers who don't need domain experience. Make the technology physical, requiring real science or engineering experience, have to pay the taxes that every other company in America pays, and not be able to push out market entrants from capitalization, and this whole world would collapse. Personally, I think it's obvious it's collapsing right now. I have no dog in the Stripe vs Bolt fight, but the idea that this forum and the VC network culture of the Bay Area are talented underdogs as opposed to the extremely privileged is a deliberately concocted fiction.
• catsarebetter 5y ago
  Possible this is just a marketing piece to generate discussion? Bolt the david vs Stripe/YC the goliath of SV, reconciling traditional startup pains to a monopoly but they made it anyway... Some interesting points though, particularly the one where stripe took investment from many vcs in order to block other companies... that could've been to get access to existing networks and sell to those companies too. But I could see how that could be a blocker too.
  • pm90 5y ago
    Seems like the person had been mulling on this for a while and for whatever reason decided today was the time to share his thoughts publicly. If it was a deliberate strategy I suspect it would have been better argued (there’s a few factual errors that undermine most of the argument which any competent PR person would have thought to verify).
  • kyawzazaw 5y ago
    Is Bolt really Davis though? They are $11 Billion valuation
• nus07 5y ago
  Is this the end of Silicon Valley and the tech utopia - when HN also starts acting like a paid media with vested interests like Fox News or CNN . Assuming of course that Ryan’s accusations have any truth to it. Then again HN moderators and leaders are people and have their biases and I would not expect them to be truly altruistic. Maybe they shafted Bolt. Edit- Whether there is any truth to it is another matter but I applaud Ryan’s guts to bring this to the forefront. It reads like an episode of the show Silicon Valley.
• aerosmile 5y ago
  Public fights can occasionally be net positive for one of the participants, but your arguments will be publicly scrutinized and they better be watertight. If the logic you presented is your best work, then I can easily see why you've experienced some trouble in getting people to support you. Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion. Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley. I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move. I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.
  • DarylZero 5y ago
    I don't think you're using the word "contrarian" correctly.
    • reilly3000 5y ago
    • r-w 5y ago
      Or if we're keeping with the movie references, "I do not think that means what you think it means."
• jhchen 5y ago
  At first https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 seemed pretty damning but if you hover over the dates of the HN posts, the title attribute shows the timestamp, and it would appear Stripe's came in a couple hours before Bolt's. Add in Lyft and the "facts" around this story really seem to fall apart.
  • chrisfrantz 5y ago
    Stripe also launched the product that day on their blog. If anything it seems like Bolt tried to preempt the Stripe launch.
  • collectedparts 5y ago
    By add in Lyft, I assume you mean the fact that Lyft is not actually a YC company? (vs, the tweets refer to Lyft as Stripe's batchmate)
    • jhchen 5y ago
      Yes, Lyft not being YC is is mostly it but also from an early Stripe employee [1]: "Lyft was also not originally on Stripe. They were on Braintree and switched over to Stripe after both Stripe and Balanced (another YC-funded payments company) competed for their business." Balanced was definitely a payments company also backed by YC. I cannot verify the switching from Braintree as I'm mostly an observer in all this but the other details are easily verifiable. https://twitter.com/cjc/status/1485803509110894596 https://twitter.com/cjc/status/1485803509110894596
  • floatingatoll 5y ago
    Post IDs also support that observation, per elsethread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068454
• ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
  Bolt is supposedly worth 11 Billion, they make 40 million a year
• bobobob420 5y ago
  well you got what you wanted, you got your advertisement on hacker news currently sitting at number 10. extremely epic
• kaycebasques 5y ago
  > Stripe and YC effectively co-run the most important media asset in Silicon Valley: Hacker News. A few of my articles [1] have made the front page so I can weigh in on this a (tiny) bit. > The readers know: any time Stripe comes out with a new product, it’s #1 on the site I do believe that "the mods" have the ability to boost articles at their discretion so I would not be surprised if YC companies frequently get a boost. This is a separate admin feature from the open role posts that YC companies post (which cannot be commented on and which drop from page #1 over a fixed timeframe I think). I will have to dig for the source on that but I believe dang has publicly commented on it here. That does indeed feel somewhat shady IMO if correct (and let me be very clear that I could be incorrect here). Edit: let me elaborate on this because I'm sure dang will see it and possibly take it the wrong way. dang, isn't there a feature where you can boost "interesting" articles? I believe it was described as "articles that are probably interesting to the HN community but have not gotten enough attention" (bad timing, etc.) Are you the only one with the permissions to do that? That feature is never used to boost YC company posts? I.e. it's only used for intellectually stimulating content where no YC-related conflict of interests is possible? But on the other hand, if you have a huge name like Stripe (or Chrome DevTools) it really isn't as hard to make it to page #1 as the Bolt person is making it out to be. The hardest part IMO is crafting a title that succinctly summarizes how new feature X is a big deal. > Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views. Millions of views sounds like a stretch. 250K to 1M sounds more accurate to me. [1] I wrote the Chrome DevTools docs for 3 years. DevTools docs made the front page probably 10-15 times. I also was content lead for https://web.dev https://web.dev for a couple years. Those docs made the front page another 10-15 times. I've also had 2 or 3 personal articles make page #1.
  • tptacek 5y ago
    Dan has said repeatedly that YC companies do not get artificial boosts. He's said that on this thread, as well. Ranking is definitely not a strict function of votes; HN does a bunch of stuff to groom the front page. But, according to Dan, none of that involves giving preference to YC companies.
    • floatingatoll 5y ago
• greyf 5y ago
  YC invited Ryan to apply again and he declined? If the establishment was so anti-Bolt that they were colluding against him, why would they want him to apply again? Regardless, why wouldn't he? It seems like he's had a chip on his shoulder ever since the initial rejection, and he deliberately made it more difficult for himself and his team by passing up another opportunity to get into YC. If YC is as powerful and as big of an advantage as he says, why wouldn't he apply again?
  • rkk3 5y ago
    I just assumed it was an "invitation" to apply again like you get on a form rejection email from companies that use Lever or Greenhouse.
• nkotov 5y ago
  To be honest, this feels like a PR stunt since we all know if you add "YC is bad" and share it on HN, people will look and react. I haven't heard of Bolt, I'm not familiar with the space at all. I use Stripe because the product just works and I can trust my business with it. Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product. On a related note - I helped review a little over 100+ YC applications since getting in myself in S20 as a way to give back. There were a lot of bad applications or just ideas that seemed over saturated (a social media for some niche as an example). Literally tens of thousands of people apply for YC every batch. I personally recommended around 20 with around 15 getting interviews and around 10 getting in. I only recommend companies that I personally would want to invest in if I had the capital. YC has funded a handful of competitors in my space (PaaS) and I actually had calls with them to exchange notes and see where we could help each other.
  • demux 5y ago
    What similarities did you find in good applications that you selected?
    • nkotov 5y ago
      Great founder-market fit, some traction or a clear path to getting traction, and market-size over $b.
  • ma2rten 5y ago
    It looks to be more like a heartfelt rant than a PR stunt, the person who posted this to HN doesn't seem to be same as the one who wrote the tweet. But it does amaze me how often HN seems to fall for this kind of sensationalist story.
  • rlt 5y ago
    I have to agree, it's suspicious coming a couple weeks after another negative Stripe post that got a lot of attention. And the timestamps on the HN posts he linked to are pretty damning as well. What's more likely: an established startup scrambling to launch a new product a couple hours after a small startup's blog post, or the smaller startup piggybacking off the more established startup's announcement?
• danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  I was at Stripe a few years back and I don't remember Bolt coming up as a competitor, ever. Stripe was more worried about Paypal and Adyen. One thing to keep in mind - all companies at this size have a corp dev function. Over the past decade, they've likely spoken to several hundred companies and patrick has probably personally spoken to over 100 about an acquisition and looked at some of their data. Anyone who looks seriously at 100 potential acquisitions, while trying to run a company, will drop the ball somewhere on maybe 10 and screw a few up kinda badly. It happens even if you have good intent and try to do the right thing. A number of people on the team will be working on the deal and interacting with the target founders/execs etc and things slip. It happens everywhere, it's a messy process. Many/most VCs have a policy of not funding competitors. If I had an investor fund a competitor I'd be wary - are they going to share private data? I doubt anyone ever sat on the board of both pepsi and coke simultaneously etc.I get that not all investors are on the board - but they will all get information that isn't in the public domain.
  • danielvinson 5y ago
    Not related to your actual point, but I researched corporate boards a few years back and found many instances of people on boards of two direct competitors. In fact, I found a couple of companies with CEOs who also served on the board of a competitor. This was going through maybe a few hundred large corporations, so I’d have to assume it’s incredibly common.
    • patrec 5y ago
      Can you give some examples (because that sounds interesting, not because I don't believe you)?
      • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
        Yeah I'd be interested to see the examples too. Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board while running Google, but left in 2009 when they became competitors in the smart phone business. Before that, Apple & Google weren't competitors.
• ergocoder 5y ago
  I can see why VC avoided Bolt's founder. A lot of his claims seem weak. I wouldn't work with a person like this either. The tweet about the fraud detection seems straight up false. People pointed out that Stripe posted it before Bolt. Can someone confirm? Even if Stripe posted after Bolt, it would be pretty damn strange for Stripe to write a blog within an hour.
  • sailingparrot 5y ago
    > Can someone confirm? Hover over the dates in the links. Stripe's post [1]: 17:41 UTC Bolt's [2]: 20:08 UTC Considering this is the only thing he claimed to have "proof" on, and it turns out not only to be false but to be the actual opposite, this is really damning for the rest of his claims. If that was such a traumatizing event, how can one not think of checking the timestamp once in 4 years to at least know if you have a reason to be mad. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692
    • vmception 5y ago
      Can we check internet archive? The database entries could be modified easily Not to entertain the conspiracy, I’ve just done it before so it comes to mind
      • dang 5y ago
        I'm on my phone so can't dig as easily, but you can tell from the item IDs that the Stripe post preceded the Bolt one, and we never change those. Edit: internet archive links are now at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
        • gondo 5y ago
          So you change the dates sometimes? :)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tzury 5y ago
  Never herd of Bolt till this post. That made me think, how come I've never heard of bolt up until this moment? Is their marketing so bad? They managed however to get to a poont of a "successful company with 600 employees, billions in GMV, and growing rapidly", right? I visit HN at least 10 times per week. So I decided to check how many posts have they posted on this site since founding the company. I currently see 4 posts. Only 4. So perhps, not posting in HN makes it harder if you wish to make it to front page. search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=.bolt.com&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  • ttty 5y ago
    Actually you should use this https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bolt.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bolt.com Not much difference, I think 1 more and many dead/flagged
    • nextaccountic 5y ago
      Why so many [dead]?
      • dang 5y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23862027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23862027 was flagged by users. The others were job ads, and job ads aren't allowed to be regular submissions. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
  • Aliabid94 5y ago
    Also 3 of their 4 posts got traction, 2 of them with lots of discussion. I would bet this is better traction than most YC companies get.
  • anonymouse008 5y ago
    Every time I see a bolt post from this company, I keep thinking it's Bolt the hardware incubator.
• vmception 5y ago
  mmmmmmmm this so juicy but I dont care its sooo easy for him to raise $1bn++ and his accomplishments for me are really overshadowed by wondering if his skin complexion was different if the solid products and pitches would have hit, if his pedigree would have still helped at all so that really dilutes how much I care about the drama, but nice for him to feel comfortable using his platform now
• enigmatic02 5y ago
  Guy's name is Ryan King (not his real last name), and his handle is Ryan Takes Off elsewhere... Almost certainly some truth to this, but majorly blown out of proportion
  • rkk3 5y ago
    This was a provocative ad hominem take but kinda underwhelmed when I bothered to look. > Guy's name is Ryan King (not his real last name) It's "the Ryan King" and I'd have to guess with the lion picture, is a play on "the Lion king" and similar pronunciation between l & r and ending sound to lion and ryan. > his handle is Ryan Takes Off As in takes off... from work. Pretty innocuous? https://ryantakesoff.com/ https://ryantakesoff.com/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mattmaroon 5y ago
  I guess I’ve been out of YC a long time but I have a really hard time believing they are torpedoing investments in any company that competes with one of theirs, both because they wouldn’t want to and because they couldn’t. This sounds like all the same shit I (and most founders) went through even when there was little to no competition. I can totally see that somebody could easily misinterpret the craziness that is raising money, and endeavor I can only like into online dating. I’d need some pretty compelling evidence of this sort of collusion and there’s nothing given.
• mattmaroon 5y ago
  I guess I’ve been out of YC a long time but I have a really hard time believing they are torpedoing investments in any company that competes with one of theirs, both because they wouldn’t want to and because they couldn’t. It’d make a lot more sense for them to just invest in potential disruptors, and in fact they do that all the time. This sounds like all the same shit I (and most founders) went through even when there was little to no competition. I can totally see that somebody could easily misinterpret the craziness that is raising money, an endeavor I can only liken to online dating. I’d need some pretty compelling evidence of this sort of collusion and there’s nothing given. Also I haven’t talked to Patrick in a long time but he always seemed like a really good dude and I can’t imagine he’s doing that either.
• fattybob 5y ago
  might help Bolt if you could actually open their web page!
• amitmina 5y ago
  Hi Ryan - welcome to capitalism! he is just picking a fight to get to the next wave of twitter followers. Top players will always have strong network effects and will defend their territory. We have been rejected twice by YC which means nothing. You can beat a strong network by innovating in distribution and product. But that is very hard to do so the simpler thing is pick the biggest guy on the street and start a fight to get attention.
• trentgreene 5y ago
  “ Meetings would go phenomenally well. VCs would get excited, and many even commit to term sheets. Then, mysteriously, they’d back away. ” I am but a lowly code slinging peasant, but my dad raised some serious cash in his day. I’ve heard this exact story more times than I can count. The inflection however wasn’t conspiratorial; it’s that your idea / meeting / pitch was strong but not strong enough in the end, and a soft unspoken “no” helps maintain relationships (its a small world!)
• MrStonedOne 5y ago
• sireat 5y ago
  Bolt is huge in Eastern Europe (taxis, food delivery). They are not exactly without controversy. Bolt announced and defended further expansion in Belarus amid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Belarusian_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Belarusian_p... What is interesting that my Google searches fail to find the offending article from Bolt's founder. All I can find is Russian and Belarus sources and Usain Bolt. Linkedin does show Bolt has an expanion ongoing in Belarus.
  • pm90 5y ago
    FYI, this is a different Bolt. Bolt, US: https://www.bolt.com/ https://www.bolt.com/ Bolt, EU: https://bolt.eu/ https://bolt.eu/
    • sireat 5y ago
      Thank You! Interesting there are two unicorn Bolts then.
  • thiscatis 5y ago
    It's not the ride sharing company.
• enra 5y ago
  This such a bad take, too many things comment on but one thing to note is that I’m not even sure how much Stripe competes with Bolt. Bolt marketing pages mostly talk about e-commerce checkout. It’s probably something Stripe does as well but the reason Stripe became a SV darling because it was easiest way to integrate payments for your software startup. Probably 95% of YC startups are not e-commerce sites, and have no use what Bolt offers. He mentions Lyft who I don’t think could be their customer either. So SV software companies “collude” by using the platform that offers what they need. There are dozens of e-commerce payment platforms, often integrated already on the product like Shopify, so probably the investors just weren’t excited about the market and likely though Shopify/PayPal/Stripe will eventually eat that market.
• ngngngng 5y ago
  This might not add much to this discussion in particular, but I find it interesting how much I want the big billion dollar company to be evil. This guys post and the other Stripe hate really draw me in and then of course lots of the arguments fall apart on further inspection. Is that a natural thing? Maybe a sort of robin hood feeling, like we're sticking it to the big bad rich guys? I do still have some negative feelings towards wealth in general from growing up so poor, even as I pull in a comfy "HN reader" level salary, so that probably doesn't help.
  • thedogeye 5y ago
    It's crucial to retrain your brain not to have negative feelings toward those who have a lot of money. Otherwise you will subconsciously undermine yourself to ensure you never get a lot of money.
  • rlt 5y ago
    The strange thing is how quickly peoples' perception of a company can flip flop. 5 years ago Stripe was the underdog startup, now they're the big evil corporation?
  • pm90 5y ago
    1. Most of the top valued tech companies have some degree of unethical behavior, almost all of them are successful by leveraging market monopolies in industries that are too new to have faced regulation. 2. If you become large enough, you will end up doing some shady shit. The question then becomes, is most of the company shady? Is it the CEO who is shady and the culture permeates from that? And so on. So its not surprising to have a neutral/negative attitude w.r.t to these companies. None of this is hyperbole, btw. A lot has been uncovered about what actually happened within the companies v/s what they like to promote themselves as; mostly from lawsuits but also by some excellent, professional journalists examining these companies more closely than they would let on.
  • ilikerashers 5y ago
    We're naturally attuned to the David/Goliath story. It's hard to stick up for billionaires. At least Musk went and did some interesting companies after Paypal. That's a net positive for society. The YC agenda seems slightly toxic now. I do think it's all legal but reeks of VC, PR spin and Billionaires playing with society. How American.
• Manuel_D 5y ago
  The line between leveraging networks and being a "mob boss" is really more of a matter of perspective. Say I'm a photographer, and I know a couple good makeup artists. A client is searching for a makeup artist and I refer them to someone I know. Chances are, had I not given this referral some other makeup artist would have been chosen by this client. From the perspective of other makeup artists, I acted like a mob boss. From my perspective, I just made use of my network. A lot of what's alleged in this thread can be attributed to network effects among YC. Startup gets referred to Stripe because YC knows them. Stripe gets more coverage on HN because YC-backed companies are of more interest to the HN readership. Ultimately, I can empathize with Ryan's perspective. But I'm not seeing any sort of "mob boss" behavior here.
• tibbar 5y ago
  > A number 1 ranking on Hacker News gets millions of views I don’t think this is strictly true. I had a post go #1 for like ten hours. It’s more like 50k views, counting the visitors from the Reddit repost etc too. A million visitors is a lot, even for HN to generate. (I suppose the comment thread itself might gets millions of views.)
• nthngtshr 5y ago
  I'm having a hard time parsing why he would post this. Did he think he'd get customers? I doubt it. Investors? They already raised hundreds of millions. To me it seems like the only thing he's going to get out of this is twitter followers. But at what cost? Are twitter followers that valuable? Why do some CEOs spend so much time growing their twitter audiences? Do they do it for recruiting? Is this really the best way for them to spend their time? Or is it just an ego thing? Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious.
  • jb1991 5y ago
    Sometimes if you see a wrong, you just want expose it. Sometimes that can be good for you and others, other times it doesn’t matter, if the wrong is worth exposing.
  • pm90 5y ago
    More famous people have said stupider things on Twitter. It’s a platform that just begs you to over share (like all social media tbh).
• kodah 5y ago
  > Both had organically made it up to #1 on Hacker News with 100s of upvotes. Upwards arrow > Within the hour, Stripe posted, gotten theirs to #1, and ours was gone. Except they didn't. The Bolt announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 (April 4, 2018 @ 20:08:08) The Stripe announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290 (April 4, 2018 @ 17:41:37) Stripe doesn't expose post times and the Bolt announcement appears to be dead. So, Stripe posted before Bolt - at least on HN. > 1/ Stripe had deliberately taken checks from nearly all the top-tier Silicon Valley investors in order to block new companies > IN FACT, many of their investors had told me as much, and commented on it as a great strategy! > The pro-startup payment processor was on a mission to make sure no other payments company would ever be built in Silicon Valley. I really doubt the investors know the fundraising strategy Stripe was using internally. I doubt this strategy is even legal and is doubly against any good judgement that YC could exercise - profiting off of competitors as an incubator would be fantastic. This statement is as good as speculation and is on the reader to determine Ryan's investors credibility. > Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views. Millions of views sounds falsey. The most upvoted comment I've ever had here was on a thread about Amazon's relationship with FOSS and still only garnered 500 votes. This is Ryan talking about Stripe on a green account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 I'm just really skeptical of everything said in this tweet storm, especially given the things he said under an anonymous account.
• polote 5y ago
  I call bs on this. HN #1 don't generate millions of views. You don't need manipulation to get #1 often, OCaml posts do it often even if the language is not used by anybody. Anyone can be rejected from YC. Anyone can struggle to raise funds. There are two many vc to raise from all of them. How could stripe launch and post about a feature in a few hours? Sequoia is not the most powerful vc in the world, it actually doesn't mean anything. Same for YC. I feel like nothing is true on this thread
  • kyawzazaw 5y ago
    Yeah, I posted a devtool that i thought was interesting and got on the front page.
• artellectual 5y ago
  Generally, in such cases, he may be right / wrong. It doesn't really matter if you ask me. The way I see it he already has a successful business. He doesn't need to pick on stripe / YC. Building a successful business is difficult. A great idea / execution / being resilient will always get you a good share of the pie. That's the beauty of free market. Just because 1 or 2 people don't like you doesn't mean the whole world doesn't like you. I think the author is making Stripe / YC much larger / bigger than it is. If the author is reading this. Just focus on building and shipping the best product. Everything else will work itself out.
• rkwasny 5y ago
  "A number 1 ranking on Hacker News gets millions of views" Yeah, anyone who got to #1 knows this is not true.
• gadders 5y ago
  Thread for anyone who needs it: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1485784823641755648.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1485784823641755648.html
• ummonk 5y ago
  I don't see anything in there that would actually reflect badly on YC itself. What is interesting though is the fact that Stripe raised money from all the major VC funds, either intentionally or unintentionally blocking investments by these firms into competitors. Kind of like the startup equivalent of consulting with every good divorce attorney in the town so your spouse can't hire them.
• yaseer 5y ago
  Human beings often perceive patterns and deliberate action, where systemic explanations would suffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia A good example is popular discourse on 'elites'. You could perceive this as a shadowy cabal consciously acting, or as systemic flaws in society which perpetuate inequality. Ryan's account leans towards the former, shadowy Cabal. VCs have systemic flaws in perception and they're subject to a herd mentality (e.g. startups are bimodally hot or not). The systemic theory can explain Ryan's fundraising experiences more simply than the 'Mob Bosses of Stripe and YC' theory.
• dang 5y ago
  His claims about HN are false. Short version: his post was 2+ hours later than Stripe's, not an hour earlier, and fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything (which I suppose is what his mafia/mob language was intended to imply). The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to. Quoting from https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784877060349953 https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784877060349953 and https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680: > Both had organically made it up to #1 on Hacker News with 100s of upvotes Their first post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092, made it to #2 (http://hnrankings.info/16215092/ http://hnrankings.info/16215092/) and got 171 upvotes. The second, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692, made it to #4 (http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ http://hnrankings.info/16870692/) and got 70 upvotes. > On April 18, 2018, we posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 [...] An ~hour later, this showed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290. Ours disappeared. Stripe's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290) was submitted at 17:41 UTC, and Bolt's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692) was submitted over 2 hours later, at 20:08 UTC. If you want external evidence for that, look at the hnrankings.info pages for the two posts (Stripe: http://hnrankings.info/16869290/ http://hnrankings.info/16869290/, Bolt: http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ http://hnrankings.info/16870692/). You'll see that they first pick up Stripe's post on the front page at 17:45 and Bolt's at 20:30. You'll also see that Stripe's post made it to #2, not #1 as he claims. Here's the HN front page at 19:09 that day: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418190904/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180418190904/https://news.ycom.... Stripe's post is already at #2. Bolt's hasn't been submitted yet. The first snapshot with Bolt on the front page is at 20:35: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418203508/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180418203508/https://news.ycom.... By 21:21, Bolt's briefly makes it higher than Stripe's: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom.... > Ours disappeared Bolt's post fell in rank because it was flagged by users—that is the drop you can see in http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ and in this snapshot by 21:21: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418222105/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180418222105/https://news.ycom.... I don't know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That's standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.) None of the flags came from YC founders or staff. (Edit: I looked into whether it might have been Stripe people doing the flagging here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070445.) HN moderators did not make the post fall in rank, or moderate the post at all. I don't think I'd ever heard of Bolt before today. The article no longer exists on bolt.com, but if you want to compare it to the stripe.com article, the articles are here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt.com/better-fraud-detection-with-bolt/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt... https://web.archive.org/web/20180418171628/https://stripe.com/blog/radar-2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20180418171628/https://stripe.co... His insinuations about HN are false too. He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do. Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status on HN. It's true that this is incredibly hard to do. Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup). Startups achieve this by doing three things: producing products that the community considers good, producing articles that the community finds interesting, and mastering the art of interacting with the community. You need all three. I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC). All 4 of the startups I've mentioned have the advantage that they were|are targeting programmers, which gives them a fast track to rapport with this community—sort of a ladder in the snakes-and-ladders game. However, that's not a sufficient condition for getting a satisfying click with the community, and it isn't required either. The real problem is that so much of the content that startups produce to try to interest this community just isn't interesting enough (to this community), and often gives off inadvertent signals of being uninteresting—things like seeming too enterprisey, or too slick in the marketing department. If the bolt.com people had asked us for help, I would have been just as happy to help them as anybody else. I would have told them that the opening of their article (https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt.com/better-fraud-detection-with-bolt/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...) was too enterprisey to appeal to HN. The language is drawn from ecommerce retailing, which makes sense given the little bit we've all learned about Bolt today, but is the kind of thing that comes across as boring on HN. The references to Gartner and Experian feel like reading an enterprise whitepaper, which detracts from credibility with the HN audience. This is the sort of thing I've told countless startups over the years. It's dismayingly difficult to express this information in a way that people can actually absorb, but I have a set of notes that I've sent to many startups in this position, which I plan to turn into an essay about how to write for HN. if anyone wants a copy, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll be happy to send it to you. I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say here, but mercifully, I've forgotten them.
• kuroguro 5y ago
  There's no such thing as bad publicity, I guess. Never heard of Bolt before.
• phantom_oracle 5y ago
  784 upvotes at the time of writing this comment. I see a lot of links/threads bashing Google for their shitty AI and non-existent human support on HN all the time but ... I think the same resentment is slowly brewing for YC too. Whether it is misinformation or weak arguments, it won't matter too much. People generally don't like monopolies at all and YC does have a monopoly on the SV startup scene at the moment (from an outsiders view, every startup with even an idea knows that YC is the springboard for unlocking more opportunity/capital/network). I wonder if the end result is YC ending up being innovated out of the startup scene itself. I don't think so because they are in the money game, not the tech game (see JPMorgan, Goldman). As for the content, I can't be arsed. Capitalists will be capitalists.
• Etheryte 5y ago
  Not to be confused with Bolt [0], the European Uber competitor who does ride-sharing, rental cars, rental scooters, food delivery, and more. [0] https://bolt.eu/ https://bolt.eu/
• adenozine 5y ago
  Seeing mods immediately show up, post "proof" that could be easily manipulated, decry the post rather than respond, imo it all lends credit to what this person is tweeting about. I've long considered HN a source of techno-entertainment and never a source of news or integrity of any kind. It's just fun to look at. It is certainly manipulated often, in obvious ways, that are directly beneficial to YC companies. I think we can all appreciate the absolute nerve to dodge YC money, build a competitor to a major YC cartel brand, and then strong-arm the YC controlled HN into free publicity with these tweets. Actually a very efficient and cunning tactic. And good lord, I'm so glad I'm a 1099 guy and doing okay for myself. Startups seem more brutal every quarter.
  • dang 5y ago
    > decry the post rather than respond Do you really think that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287 is "decrying" rather than "responding"? and that archive.org (or hnrankings.info, for that matter, which we have no connection to) "could be easily manipulated"?
    • adenozine 5y ago
      Yes. There's literally billions of dollars at stake. Obviously, it'd be simple and profitable to orchestrate. I'd be ashamed to reveal such naivete, friend.
• Graffur 5y ago
  I actually came across Bolt's founders twitter the other day. He was promoting how he saves time by being efficient. Funnily enough all the comments were along the lines of "you forgot time to actually live your life". I clicked through to his profile and found Bolt. I went to the homepage but I wasn't able to tell what exactly it was. From this post I understand it to be a Stripe competitor. I think Stripe will be voted up on HN because we know what it is. I wouldn't have upvoted or even clicked into something about Bolt.
  • jyriand 5y ago
    What's even more confusing is that https://bolt.eu https://bolt.eu is an Uber-like service in Europe. Too many bolts.
    • squeaky-clean 5y ago
      >https://blog.unity.com/news/bolt-visual-scripting-is-now-included-in-all-unity-plans https://blog.unity.com/news/bolt-visual-scripting-is-now-inc... Bolt is also the visual programming language which the Unity game engine acquired in 2020. When I saw the HN title, my first thought was "Why does a video game scripting tool founder care about Stripe and YC?"
• elorant 5y ago
  I don’t think that getting #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY hard. I’ve submitted stories that made it to #1. Sure, I didn’t write them myself, but my point is that if you have something interesting to say people will upvote you. It’s not all some big freaking conspiracy.
• jyriand 5y ago
  Not related to this Bolt, but I remember that in early 2000s bolt.com[0] was a pretty active social network. Probably the first one I ever signed on to. -https://web.archive.org/web/20000520042715/http://www.bolt.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000520042715/http://www.bolt.c...
• mathattack 5y ago
  Strange rant. Is the goal to attract investors and customers or fire up the troops? My only interaction with them was at the behest of a VC so it seems like they aren’t completely in the cold.
• SahAssar 5y ago
  > Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views. I might just have lucked out, but my random framework made it to #1 (based on http://hnrankings.info/26722051/ http://hnrankings.info/26722051/, didn't know about that site until dang linked it now). HN does not generate millions of visitors/views, even including all the random bots that start scraping your site. I base that on log analysis without any CDN or similar, so pretty sure I'm not underestimating. There might be a large secondary effect based on things shared on other social networks that posts like mine do not get, but just getting to #1 on HN is not millions of views in my experience.
  • par 5y ago
    Yeah I had this feeling as well. I've also gotten a #1 ranking on HN, and held the top 5 most of the day. Friends were messaging me about it, and it did result in decent traffic but hardly MILLIONS.
• joshstrange 5y ago
  I had never heard of Bolt before today that I can remember but since I'm woking on a project that needs CC processing (it has Stripe currently, I'm moving to another provider) I was interested. I looked at their website and immediately felt like it wasn't aimed at me. I don't care about 1-click anything, I want to know about how to use this, api calls, how to capture an auth, etc. I see the developer menu item and I click on "Get Started". Immediately I'm shown a list of plugins for CRM/e-commerce-type tools which, and maybe this is elitist, but that's turn off for me. Don't get me wrong I cut my chops on WP/Drupal and the like but it been a long time and I want docs with an API call to charge a card or similar. I see the "API" and "SDK" in the sidebar and check both out. API docs are swagger, that's fine, but it's not clear at all and the "workflow" to charge a card is. I go look at "SDK" and they only have an iOS SDK, is this a joke? Not to mention that it looks like you need to bring your own payment processor [0] and "The processor implementation timelines average 2-4 weeks.", at this point you are better off talking directly to someone like First Data. Let's not get started on the apparent "contact us for pricing". Bottom line: Bolt is completely uninteresting to me as a developer and the creator sounds like sour grapes in his twitter tirade. I'm glad to be moving off Stripe for way cheaper processing but I love their docs, dashboard, etc and I'll miss it. Bolt would have been discarded as not a serious competitor almost immediately had I seen it back when I first integrated with Stripe. In fact, they seem to provide something 100% different to Stripe and even have Stripe as a payment processor. [0] https://help.bolt.com/developers/guides/processor-guides/ https://help.bolt.com/developers/guides/processor-guides/
  • bmc415 5y ago
    just curious - why are you moving away from stripe?
    • joshstrange 5y ago
      Pricing and pricing only. The flat fee is one of the biggest killers. $0.30/per makes it near impossible to offer certain features and 2.9% is decently high (and that's before you turn on any other services). Instead I'm able to get ~2% (varies by card, some are higher, some are lower, but I'm just paying the interchange fee + a small percent to the processor) and zero flat fee on the transaction. EDIT: Just to expand on what I'm doing, it's software for food festivals where people pre-load their accounts with money and then spend it at the vendors. It means we only need in-person CC terminals in a few places and vendors can use their smart phones to charge someone's account. It also means all transactions go though our software and the festival can take it's cut. Without this vendors would provide.... creative records of how much they sold (festival takes X% so if the vendor can hide some sales it can keep 100% of those sales). Because of this there isn't a ton of room for more percentages/flat-fees to be taken out. If someone wants to buy something and needs 1 more dollar in their account then we give up over 30% to Stripe. Even on a $5 charge we give up close to 9%. If I can get rid of the flat fee we could do a number of things like just linking a card and charging it on the fly with every purchase instead of first loading money onto your account. I'd be killed with fees if I did that with Stripe since we are talking about $2/3/5 items (it's a food festival, the portions/prices are small so you can try a bunch of things). Also things like "auto-reload if your account dips below $X", with Stripe I'd need to make the reload amount minimum decently high to avoid taking a bath in fees.
• philip1209 5y ago
  The reality is that tech promotes winner-take-all markets, and in that environment - second place is the first loser.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  Just a reminder that this site is not going to be an unbiased discussion of this Tweet thread.
• wglb 5y ago
  So they were invited to apply again, but declined, and are just now complaining about the power exercised?
• chrismeller 5y ago
  “A game-changing product”… that was an Uber clone?
• yaseer 5y ago
  "i'm glad we're finally talking about this because the first time i met patrick collison he said "hey, nice to meet you, tell me about your startup" and then halfway through my pitch he waved over his guy silently and they busted my knee caps with a tire iron. ...his guys were paul graham and roelof" https://twitter.com/nealkhosla/status/1486024266252390400 https://twitter.com/nealkhosla/status/1486024266252390400
• dannykwells 5y ago
  Startup life: "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Stripe joins the ranks of Facebook, Google, and Amazon as reaching the villain stage ;)
• rdlecler1 5y ago
  Going back to at least 2015, YC was blocking TechCrunch from covering the 500 Startups backed.
  • dang 5y ago
    That doesn't sound right to me at all. What is the evidence for this? I'm not part of every conversation at YC of course, but I've been in many, including many where TechCrunch was mentioned, and I never heard anything about "blocking" (that actually sounds absurd to me) or any indication that YC had power over TC. It was the other way around; YC or YC startups were always hoping that TC would cover a story and not always getting what they hoped for.
    • rdlecler1 5y ago
      I was going through 500, and asked why TC never covered 509 Startups demo day (which was sizable and on batch 12), and a senior partner told me this. There was supposed to be some kind of deal to get a TC writer in to meet with a few companies but it never happened. At the same time there was an all out TechCrunch blitz in YC companies.
      • dang 5y ago
        Unless there was specific evidence, I would take that report with a retroactive grain of salt. I'm not saying I know it to be false - just that it doesn't sound like what I've seen at YC.
• salarhaji 5y ago
  It’s interesting the things founders end up focusing on as the company grows
• pl0x 5y ago
  YC is sleezy full of snake oils salesmen, yes men its mostly cismen.
• boleary-gl 5y ago
  It started to lose me because Lyft wasn't a YC company: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/
• pl0x 5y ago