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88913527 4y ago
It's probably financially optimal to put a nice veneer on an existing solution than to make something whole-cloth. They're running a business, not a charity, and besides -- as the consumer, why would you care? All you see is the facade anyways; unless you're making a point that the API's are actually leaky abstractions and the facade isn't that good (and I would respect that argument, if it were the case).
whatshisface 4y ago
If Stripe knows how to pay developers appropriate salaries (this is the under-discussed reason for SV companies being the only ones who can make good APIs - BoA is never going to pay their web team more than they pay their web team's department head, that is not possible for their culture) to develop appropriate interfaces on things, then more power to them if they can do very simple things to profit in the context of the oversights of other companies.
- astrange 4y ago
  I've wondered why Stripe and Square are more successful than their older competitors, considering they don't have a moat and there's nothing particularly special in the space for them to invent. It seems like it is just that the older companies aren't willing to try to improve.
lambda_lord 4y ago
This kind of comment throwing shade on your competitors does not reflect well on you or your companies. People want alternatives to Plaid. How do you know they are simply wrapping 3rd parties instead of building these deep integrations themselves?
- stu2b50 4y ago
  Yeah, have to say, the level of knee jerk defensiveness here and on Twitter from cofounder level figures from Plaid does not exactly evoke confidence in their ability to outcompete.
kbyatnal 4y ago
lots of respect for what you and the team have built at Plaid, but this is exactly the opportunity. As a developer who's worked at multiple fintechs and integrated with Plaid more times than I care to remember, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Ask any fintech and they'll tell you - Plaid is simultaneously the best and worst vendor they use. Best because there's no real alternative, but worst because it causes so, so, so many headaches with how unreliable the product is. The time spent building product workarounds at every company to account for Plaid issues is tremendous. If Stripe thinks they can build something better, then I'd really love them to try. Edit: William (co-founder of Plaid) seems to have deleted his comment, but it was basically accusing Stripe of repeatedly copying other companies.
- mtrap 4y ago
  What makes you say there are no real alternatives? Yodlee and Finicity were both around long before plaid. MX is newer. Asking out of a genuine interest in which aggregator people with experience find is best in terms of connection stability, data quality, and coverage.
  - amonroe369 4y ago
    MX has the best stability and connections. Plaid tends to be better for Payments and early stage fintechs. Yodlee for investments.
    - seandoh 4y ago
      Yodlee is the lesser evil here... it still disconnects accounts frequently and data is only pulled every ~12 hours. I'm the co-founder of Realize (https://realizefi.com/ https://realizefi.com/), we tried using all of these APIs for our first app and found them to be super broken. Our API uses a mix of brokerages public and private APIs, which allows us to provide reliable connections and pull data in real time.
      - amonroe369 4y ago
sicromoft 4y ago
For those wondering, this was originally a salty comment by one of Plaid's founders calling out Stripe for being "so damn boring".
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Screenshot of deleted comment: https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1521915016668090368/photo/1 https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1521915016668090368/photo...
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  GP clearly retracted his statement. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, what I'm much more sure of is people will be far too careful in expressing thoughts if the moment it's out there it will be forever imprinted into the internet and associated with themselves. I wonder if it's possible for truly ephemeral messaging wiped-clean when you would like, given the issues with someone just writing it down physically.
nightpool 4y ago
It's interesting to compare this comment with one of the other top comments on HN right now, an explanation of how Google's culture of promoting users for solving "hard problems" is ultimately a terrible, terrible strategy for their users and their company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262428 As engineers, we should to step away from our egos and our desire to do something "interesting" and focus on where our solutions actually solve real problems, like Stripe's products (often, not always!) do. Whether something is "middleware" or "not interesting" has nothing to do with how useful or valuable it is. I'm sure there are plenty of people working at Plaid who are really interested and dedicated in working on the kind of middleware that their co-founder is denigrating here. It's a shame they have to work for a company where that kind of polish is pushed aside in favor of ambiguous "innovation". As an engineer and a customer, I know which kinds of companies and engineers I want on the other side of the table when considering business partners, and—going solely from your comment—it sounds like Plaid isn't one of those companies.

[]

It's probably financially optimal to put a nice veneer on an existing solution than to make something whole-cloth. They're running a business, not a charity, and besides -- as the consumer, why would you care? All you see is the facade anyways; unless you're making a point that the API's are actually leaky abstractions and the facade isn't that good (and I would respect that argument, if it were the case).

whatshisface 4y ago

If Stripe knows how to pay developers appropriate salaries (this is the under-discussed reason for SV companies being the only ones who can make good APIs - BoA is never going to pay their web team more than they pay their web team's department head, that is not possible for their culture) to develop appropriate interfaces on things, then more power to them if they can do very simple things to profit in the context of the oversights of other companies.

astrange 4y ago
I've wondered why Stripe and Square are more successful than their older competitors, considering they don't have a moat and there's nothing particularly special in the space for them to invent. It seems like it is just that the older companies aren't willing to try to improve.

lambda_lord 4y ago

This kind of comment throwing shade on your competitors does not reflect well on you or your companies. People want alternatives to Plaid. How do you know they are simply wrapping 3rd parties instead of building these deep integrations themselves?

stu2b50 4y ago
Yeah, have to say, the level of knee jerk defensiveness here and on Twitter from cofounder level figures from Plaid does not exactly evoke confidence in their ability to outcompete.

kbyatnal 4y ago

lots of respect for what you and the team have built at Plaid, but this is exactly the opportunity. As a developer who's worked at multiple fintechs and integrated with Plaid more times than I care to remember, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Ask any fintech and they'll tell you - Plaid is simultaneously the best and worst vendor they use. Best because there's no real alternative, but worst because it causes so, so, so many headaches with how unreliable the product is. The time spent building product workarounds at every company to account for Plaid issues is tremendous. If Stripe thinks they can build something better, then I'd really love them to try. Edit: William (co-founder of Plaid) seems to have deleted his comment, but it was basically accusing Stripe of repeatedly copying other companies.

mtrap 4y ago
What makes you say there are no real alternatives? Yodlee and Finicity were both around long before plaid. MX is newer. Asking out of a genuine interest in which aggregator people with experience find is best in terms of connection stability, data quality, and coverage.
- amonroe369 4y ago
  MX has the best stability and connections. Plaid tends to be better for Payments and early stage fintechs. Yodlee for investments.
  - seandoh 4y ago
    Yodlee is the lesser evil here... it still disconnects accounts frequently and data is only pulled every ~12 hours. I'm the co-founder of Realize (https://realizefi.com/ https://realizefi.com/), we tried using all of these APIs for our first app and found them to be super broken. Our API uses a mix of brokerages public and private APIs, which allows us to provide reliable connections and pull data in real time.
    - amonroe369 4y ago

sicromoft 4y ago

For those wondering, this was originally a salty comment by one of Plaid's founders calling out Stripe for being "so damn boring".

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Screenshot of deleted comment: https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1521915016668090368/photo/1 https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1521915016668090368/photo...

reducesuffering 4y ago
GP clearly retracted his statement. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, what I'm much more sure of is people will be far too careful in expressing thoughts if the moment it's out there it will be forever imprinted into the internet and associated with themselves. I wonder if it's possible for truly ephemeral messaging wiped-clean when you would like, given the issues with someone just writing it down physically.

nightpool 4y ago

It's interesting to compare this comment with one of the other top comments on HN right now, an explanation of how Google's culture of promoting users for solving "hard problems" is ultimately a terrible, terrible strategy for their users and their company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262428 As engineers, we should to step away from our egos and our desire to do something "interesting" and focus on where our solutions actually solve real problems, like Stripe's products (often, not always!) do. Whether something is "middleware" or "not interesting" has nothing to do with how useful or valuable it is. I'm sure there are plenty of people working at Plaid who are really interested and dedicated in working on the kind of middleware that their co-founder is denigrating here. It's a shame they have to work for a company where that kind of polish is pushed aside in favor of ambiguous "innovation". As an engineer and a customer, I know which kinds of companies and engineers I want on the other side of the table when considering business partners, and—going solely from your comment—it sounds like Plaid isn't one of those companies.