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

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.