I (almost) met Patrick Collison at a conference a month ago where he gave a talk. He seemed extremely smart and interesting and I had no idea he was rich and famous. So after he gives his talk, I stand in line to get his phone number to see if we could meet up sometime so that I could pick his brain. While I was in line to talk to him, I mentioned to the guy next to me "Man that guy sure is interesting", and he said "Yeah, most billionaires are pretty smart".
I was floored that Patrick was a billionaire, and then got super nervous and exited the line.
What is that makes people so intimidated about addressing someeone rich or famous? I see it all the time. Why put yourself beneath him, you’re a human being and so is he, he goes to the toilet and takes a dump and so do you. He will die and so will you. We’re all just people.
> he goes to the toilet and takes a dump and so do you
I say the same exact thing to my friends who are mesmerized by rich and famous people. Both money and fame are man-made and didn't exist in pre-historic reptile era of the earth.
There are still hierarchies. Both male and female hierarchies are present in primates. It's not alpha and the rest, it's the whole alphabet and each level dominates the next.
Whenever the hierarchies are unestable primates can behave very violently. Hierarchies preserve status quo and reduce violence.
Also, the studies done with Bonobos were flawed as well, because they were only studied in captivity. Bonobos when free are only a bit less aggressive than chimpanzees, and they don't avoid all violence by using sex.
Reminds me of a show I watched a while back about the dot com bubble. A guy was worth 100s of millions on paper and couldn’t pay a dinner bill for the company.
I remember that one. He was not allowed by SEC rules to sell any of his stock for a while. By the time the waiting period expired, the stock price had tanked.
I'm not knocking what they've accomplished, I just think it's cool they know they're not done yet. Makes me think more of Stripe than I would otherwise.
>Stripe is not widely known because it doesn't sell anything that consumers can buy. Instead its software systems enable companies around the world to more easily accept online payments and run their websites.
What does Stripe do that makes it a better choice for companies than PayPal?
Well, they don't steal their clients' money through abuse of their own terms of service, so that's one thing. Mainly, though, it's because they have a fairly simple API, compared to PayPal, which makes their service easier to integrate into others.
Yes the PayPal API and its documentation has always been terrible. It really wasn't hard to beat.
That said, I think that Y Combinator was crucial for Stripe's success. So many developers read HN and pracyically all of them needed a better alternative to PayPal.
They were one of the first to allow accepting of credit card without leaving the site or requiring heavy PCI compliance work. They did it using client-side tokenization so the server never needed to see the credit card data. Paypal either required you to leave the site or put you in territory where you need to meet fairly expensive PCI compliance rules.
So the UX was simply better for the buyer. And the API is drop-dead simple to implement.
Now a days PCI caught up and requires some compliance for users of Stripe like platforms but still nowhere near as much as the ones who see the card.
Also, being able to be up and accepting payments in less than 15 minutes is pretty great.
And as other's pointed out, Paypal has (had?) a nasty habit of taking people's money. To be fair I know some stripe merchants where Stripe held back payments as protection against chargebacks. But that is just a delay, not flat out taking the money like Paypal used to do.
I really wonder what the purpose of these kinds of articles are. Millionaires become billionaires? People who attend prestigious universities get rich?
It pleases the HN crowd, after all a lot of people here are in the startup business so that's sort of understandable.
What worries more is that this article, like the one about Musk, are really too ego driven. Not a word on teams. That is more understandable here I guess, but the Musk article took it to the next level - the lone genius furiously and successfully solving the world biggest issues with nothing else than his own brain and the moral support of his family.
The moral of those article: there is no place for sidekicks in this world, you are at the top, or you are a loser. And that's where all those ultra-secretive, "I will give you 1% of the company, all you have to do is implement this idea in software", "that will make you a millionaire if we exit don't complain", founders are born.
It all depends on how liquid those assets are. "Paper" billionaire or millionaire typically refers to situations where someone is a millionaire but wouldn't be able to come up with a million dollars in funds in the short term (in less than a week, say).
Paper ones might be able to take a haircut on their assets for additional liquidity, but that haircut might be enough to make them not a millionaire.
That article is incorrect.
The youngest self made billionaire is Vitalik Buterin at an age of 23, the founder of Ethereum.
Ethereum has a market cap of currently 35B.
Its rumoured that he has 5-10% of the coin supply.
In the crypto space the lending facilities are just getting started, SALT, the central bank of Mauritus and others will also provide fiat liquidity for cryptocurrency collateral.
Loans against their stock, the company selling bonds. But after cryptocurrency enters the traditional financial system (eg ETH futures), I'm sure he will be able to get loans against it without a problem.
Absolutely... market depth wouldn’t come close to supporting selling that much ETH without dropping the price. Markets would also react quickly on the news that the balances in his wallets were changing significantly.
Saying he isn’t a billionaire because of that is sort of a double standard though. Most billionaires don’t have billions in liquid cash, they almost all have illiquid property, stocks, bonds, etc. Selling off some of these assets would cause a very similar effect, and often they can’t easily be sold at all.
There are full fledged wall street trade desks that handle buys and sells in large amounts using same day wires, they would get ethereum and he would get USD, and "the market" would never know.
1.1 billion would take a few days, but it would be shopped around to other firms that want to buy that much without moving the market.
OTC markets would probably price his assets at a much lower value than current trade price because of the volume and reaction from the markets. Public would know because the only way to safely trade ETH without letting Vitalk continue to have access is via a transaction, which is publicly accessible. I don’t know if his wallet addresses are publicly known, but a $3.5 billion transfer wouldn’t go unnoticed. Markets would almost certainly react negatively to him liquidating.
That said OTC price of everything could still be over $1 billion.
People don't know Vitalik's addresses. People estimate his worth and have no idea how much he kept or sold after the ICO in 2014 or at low prices in Ethereum.
Also, Ethereum won't mix inputs from different sending addresses, so it would have to be done in multiple transactions if he has multiple addresses. This would be indistinct from all the other transactions on the network.
OTC markets would try to price his assets at a lower value, and thats where you negotiate, and find counterparties yourself. If you know of several hedge funds that want to BUY ethereum without moving the markets UP, then you can sell straight to them, and tell the OTC trader that they won't get any volume and then you'll get a better price.
"Patrick successfully applied to study maths at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, near Boston in 2007. Two years later John was accepted nearby, at the equally well respected Harvard University."
Right. I think virtually everyone reading the BBC would know what Harvard is; MIT less so (especially when written out more formally and not referenced by acronym).
In the context of saying that MIT is highly respected for math(s), it was then important to point out that Harvard is also highly respected in the subject (and not, say, a globally-known liberal arts college that might be surprisingly weak in math).
If you’ve never used Stripe or had to implement a payment system it may be hard to understand. Like others have said, Stripe made it simple to accept credit cards online and since have expanded to offer several different products that focus on helping internet companies (sass, ecommerce, marketplace payments).
What they did right was their developer first approach. They eliminated all of the bullshit you had to do to start accepting payments. They took something that more and more companies needed to do, was unusually complex, and made it easy. It certainly qualifies as “special” if you’ve ever had to do it.
I was floored that Patrick was a billionaire, and then got super nervous and exited the line.