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A lot of why people didn't build Stripe before was that to enter the payments space you needed connections to get the banks and payment processors to work with
by Macha 2y ago
A lot of why people didn't build Stripe before was that to enter the payments space you needed connections to get the banks and payment processors to work with you. In comparison, you don't need anyone's permission to make uber for dry cleaners or something in line with other trends of the time. I doubt the Collison brothers would have been as successful getting Stripe off the ground if it had been their first company.
- coolThingsFirst 2y agoAnything thats remotely disruptive requires the same deep connections. Tech just doesnt have many opportunities left.
- morkalork 2y agoWorking at a start-up now and seeing how many partnerships are solely due to connections of the CEO or a random board member is crushing. The tech side is an entirely and relatively easily solvable problem in comparison to the rest.
- mlinhares 2y agoHas always been, there are a few cases where this wasn't true but odds are any industry you want to "enter" needs someone with connections to open the doors for you. Tech is a problem that needs solving but it isn't the biggest problem to be solved, having a network and knowing people is more than half the job.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoAnd? Those connections didn't materialize out of thin air, you know. Your CEO/random board member had to meet people, understand what they do, keep those connections alive, etc. Why can't you do the same? Start now and in five years you'll be a lot more connected than you are at this moment. This is also an entirely solvable problem.
- billybones 2y agoSet a reminder for 10 years from now. Let's see how many incredible new tech products have been built. My guess is that ~any judge will decide that it turned out there were a lot of things still to be built
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoRight? I'm willing to bet that people have been saying this in one form or another for the last thousand years or so.
- charlie0 2y agoDeep connections: the invisible wall the common man cannot pass.
- rat87 1y agoBanking is both deeply entrenched and well regulated. I suppose people could make a venmo/PayPal/
- rat87 1y agoBanking is both deeply entrenched and well regulated. I suppose people could make a venmo/PayPal/cash app payment system but dealing with cards would be more difficult
- jes5199 1y agoyeah. I worked on the internal banking connection at Square in the old days (~2011) and it was a _nightmare_. like, pre-TCP/IP connectivity that depended on dedicated copper to do teletype in COBOL-style fixed length fields in a cryptic format that was only specified in scans of paper documents. We had to write an adaptor that looked like, you know, REST on one end but then shoveled all of the traffic onto that single upstream connection, and then had to try to map responses that came back out of order to the right client. Miserable stuff and a threading nightmare.