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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 i
by 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 agoNot 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 agoCan you give some examples (because that sounds interesting, not because I don't believe you)?
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoYeah 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.
- halpert 5y agoThis is notoriously playing out in the ETF space. Large institutions own vast quantities in stock in competitors and competition decreases as a result. See Rise of Institutional Investors Raises Questions of Collusion.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoCan you give a concrete example? This seems vague. It's certainly not notorious.
- halpert 5y agoNotorious is the wrong word you’re right. It’s an active area of research. It’s called the “common ownership hypothesis”.
- eagleinparadise 5y agoI haven't studied this in depth but I recall that there's a book out there that sort of blasts the management consulting industry. How a lot of corporates will hire the same consulting company such as McKinsey to learn what their competitors are planning/how they are performing. IIRC
- takinola 5y agoThis is absolutely incorrect. Consulting companies, at least the major ones, will never let any consultant work for more than one competitor throughout their career. They also strictly forbid sharing any info learnt about a company with anyone else, talk less of with competitors.
- SmellTheGlove 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. They even had an office you could _see_ from Stripe's. Right across Brannan.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoWe were in Townsend when I was there :) Regardless, seriously, I don't think anybody paid any attention to them ever. I'm not even convinced they are a competitor from looking at what they do. Payments is a big space, lots of players fit into different parts of the value chain and/or target different customers. I'm speculating, but I'd guess their issues raising money came from bad messaging. They aren't clear about what they do. I'd guess VCs were confused about what they did and/or explicitly misunderstood it.