A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure. Stripe has launched competitors to existing fintech products and failed to gain traction plenty of times before.
Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was "launched" as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns through crazy revenue growth.
It's not really just a Stripe thing either. I think people are way under-estimating how hard it is for a large company to launch and succeed with a product outside of their core offering, especially when the competition is a small nimble startup with a singlular focus on that one product.
Startups die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but "large company started competing with it" is a rather rare one.
As someone intimately familiar with the space Yodlee is often not mentioned for a few reasons. But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered. When you’re trying to maximize the ability for people to access your service (and require a bank account or related information to do so) there is really no comparison to plaid. Further, plaid long had a better developer experience than yodlee and for some amount of time was much cheaper (thanks to enterprise discounts in exchange for prominence in leading apps)in a few cases.
People likely aren’t familiar with yodlee and maybe it’s an indication they’re not aware of the space. But for those who are - I’d not have mentioned it either, they barely touch plaid on many facets.
Edit: I know in one particular instance we “considered” yodlee at what is now considered a big consumer banking unicorn. But in no way was actually considered. It was used as a negotiation tool.
> But their ability to handle the long tail of accounts is the biggest reason it’s often not considered.
According to a few google searches, this is simply not true:
Yodlee supports 14k banks and Plaid supports 11k banks
I personally have used Kubera as a consumer who use both Plaid and Yodlee to connect to banks. I have ~3 bank accounts (that represent great candidates for long tail) that simply do not work with EITHER service provider. Having spoken to the support staff from Kubera (who are great btw) they prefer to use Plaid for some of the reasons you mention, but not because its all encompassing.
Categorizing Yodlee as "they barely touch plaid" is simply disingenuous. Much of the functionality is comparable, it's just MUCH better on Plaid for both the developer and the consumer in terms of overall experience.
Re: Plaid itself, having used some of their competitors, specifically Finicity, which is one of Stripe's partners for this, I wouldn't be too worried if I were them.
IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.
> IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.
I regret handing over my bank login details to Plaid, since they scraped my bank statements without stating so upfront and offered that information to 3rd parties (indirectly, as a score of some sort, IIRC, but that's scraping very personal information).
When I mentioned it on HN a year or 2 ago, someone who works there denied the practice - might have been a cofounder. A few months ago I was contacted regarding a settlement for a Plaid class action suit regarding the very actions that had been denied on HN. Plaid - never again.
This is something that absolutely blows my mind. The bank's terms of service say you can't hand over your password to anyone, and here is Plaid asking users for their login information! I can't understand how they can ask users to breach terms of service, and have gotten so far.
I was dubious while doing it - and I gave Plaid access to my settling account. I consoled myself that they wouldn't have by income, but then realized they had a copy of my financial information on spending, which is equally bad, or worse than just income. I ought to have been more vigilant - I unfortunately fell into the trap of thinking that banks are slow-moving and reluctant to develop API access.
I will never sign up for a service that requires Plaid.
I think websites would have a tough time preventing users from sharing username/password. It would certainly be acceptable in a power of attorney situation.
Not only do they relay the login and 2fa information, they even show the login as a window with company colors and branding as if you were logging in to your bank directly.
The class action was settled — which just means it was cheaper to settle than to fight in court, not that there was wrong doing. This kind of thing is very very common, and the settlement amount was modest in the scheme of class action settlements.
Plaid is pretty clear in their privacy policy that they DO NOT repackage and resell data (they do sell data - as in, when you use Plaid to give your banking info to a mortgage broker, the broker is paying Plaid for your data, but it is at your explicit request).
If banks didn't want Plaid to do screen scraping, they could build APIs. Some are now. But they've been VERY VERY reluctant to do so, because they want to hold customers (us!) hostage to their services and make it painful to go anywhere else to get financial services. I appreciate that Plaid figured out how to break their stranglehold, which has directly enabled the current blossoming of FinTech apps ... even if they had to do so in a way I don't love.
> If banks didn't want Plaid to do screen scraping, they could build APIs.
Even if we take this as a given - what if customers don't want Plaid to scrape their data? I only used Plaid to verify that I own the bank account - but they went out of their way to scrape my transaction information, just because they could, and that data is valuable - that is messed up. I'm sure if my bank had an API, Plaid would still have hoovered up my transaction information, so the "API access vs Scraping" debate is a sideshow.
If they hadn't scraped my transaction information, I wouldn't have been part of the class, but they chose to maximize data collection. If it had been Facebook or Google that harvested financial info the way Plaid did, no one would be saying "Their TOS is clear about it". Additionally, any big tech company can purchase Plaid and get that data (I can't remember if the settlement has a provision for deletion of that data).
Not really. APIs cost money to develop, and people, and time. And many large banks don’t have robust engineering teams that can tackle new challenges or support a public api.
Small projects as you might imagine are measured in years, not days or months.
An API like you describe could take half a decade to build, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. These are not fake numbers or estimates. This is what it would cost.
I think you will rarely see a class action settlement for a complaint with zero merit. Otherwise, you would be getting a tiny class action check in your mailbox every week for every company that prefers to settle rather than fight.
Do you also believe that Bill O'Reilly and Fox News paid out $30m+ even though he didn't do anything? After all, they admitted no wrong doing in the settlements.
Me: Always been curious - do you (Plaid) use the transaction data or any other data obtained from customers logins for anything other than the reason the customer supply’s their credentials?
I.e if I use plaid to link to my Robin Hood account, do you in any way sell/share/use my data apart from allowing me to fund my Robin Hood account?
Response: Good question! No, we don't. Our official statement on this is at https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/ "Plaid only shares your data with your consent. We don’t share your personal information without your permission, and we don’t sell or rent it to outside companies."
That could easily be a lawyer-speak official statement.
They say “personal information”. That is consumer-facing language for something which in banking has a legally (regulation) defined term: “PII” or personally identifiable information:
It can be argued that lists of money spent at stores cannot be reversed back to a person without other information. So they might not consider your transactions PII.
As for the consent, the TOS click wrap generally gets your consent, in the part where firms mumble about “our partners” for “legitimate uses” or etc. while bucketing various data brokers in that class.
change your bank account password, if you've ever used Plaid or any of the comparable services to verify your account, to prevent the scraping. They are constantly hitting bank accounts where they have access.
>IME, Plaid is lightyears ahead in terms of reliability and overall developer and end-user experience.
I don't know. Maybe their competitors are even worse? But as an end-user Plaid's experience is far from good.
In their current state I really don't have much control after I gave them my banking credentials. If they can actually implement an OAuth model for their paying customers (e.g. third parties using their API) to integrate, that would be much better. For example when I try some service first I can initially only give it access to one of my least important account, evaluate whether it's useful, before giving it more of my accounts, or revoke it access to all my accounts. I have none of those controls today.
I actually also interviewed with them several years ago, and mentioned the OAuth thing during my interview. But after all these years it's still not there. If I have to _guess_ why, I would guess they fear such a feature will make their paying customers (API users) less likely to use their product, e.g. their business model actually relies on the end users' lack of control.
> Startups die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but "large company started competing with it" is a rather rare one.
Currently rare, but as with other aspects of the market for startups, it is irregularly cyclical. Not too long ago Google accidentally killed startups every so often when they launched a product or service (the examples that particularly stick in my mind are Kiko - killed by the launch of Google Calendar in 2006, and Autumn AI, killed by Tensorflow around 2016). Go back to the pre-www days and Microsoft killed startups regularly, seemingly as a competitive sport. A reasonably entertaining account of one such is Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, by Jerry Kaplan, founder of Go Corporation:
Companies fail all the time when large companies start to compete with them. Microsoft was famous for this in the 90s. The biggest example that comes to mind is Netscape.
I don’t know all the specifics of the interaction that happened here, but the hard truth is that if you aren’t eventually expecting this to happen to your business - regardless of the space you are in - you aren’t being realistic about the nature of competition in SaaS.
Plaid has enjoyed years of life without much direct competition. My hunch is that few other businesses were interested in the space because it feels inherently fragile, and Plaid has had the benefit from having spent years doing a lot of sausage making.
The inevitable dynamics of competition are finally catching up to them. In established corners of SaaS a vendor with a unique idea barely gets 6 months before their competitors have replicated anything that shows signs of product market fit. Not saying it doesn’t sting, but that’s reality.
I have dealt with Stripe as a partner for my last three companies, and I do not trust them.
The core team was A+ and very reasonable, but the non-core folks would regularly lie and misrepresent themselves. I have to be careful about examples because I don't want blowback to my colleagues, but here's one: telling a third party that they should not do a hybrid Stripe + my_old_company solution because our product couldn't support the use case. But, of course, we had the exact product requested in market then, and the team in question knew that. It's fine to want to close a deal, and I guess some people lie to close a deal. But saying one thing to me and another thing to the world has happened many times with Stripe.
I don't know anything about this particular case, but it does match a pattern that I have seen firsthand.
>telling a third party that they should not do a hybrid Stripe + my_old_company solution because our product couldn't support the use case.
To be clear, are you complaining about salesmen at a competitor lying to close a sale? Are you also unhappy about water being wet, or bears shitting in the woods?
I don't know why you think salespeople are expected to lie about competitors, I don't think that's normal and I consider it a huge red flag for any vendor if I found out they intentionally lied about their competitors. No one would be surprised at spin or bias, but lying is not okay.
We were partnering with Stripe on a deal that we originated. They verbally agreed to terms. They then lied about our abilities. So we cut Stripe out, got the deal, and moved on.
The point isn't that competition exists; the point is that Stripe will say one thing and do another. If this is how you live your life, fine, but many people would like to know that Stripe has a history of bad behavior.
Sam is either being intentionally obtuse or hasn't worked in a corporation. The idea that sales is the only department that can partner with other companies is just stupid.
> Maybe we should have explicitly reached out to them to discuss this upcoming launch so that they could privately express any concerns they had.
A thousand times no. Companies privately discussing launches with each other to avoid stepping on each other's toes is bad for the consumer. In addition, it may actually cross the line into illegal market allocation.
I am glad that Stripe developed and released a product that they thought would benefit their consumers.
I do not want companies feeling they have to consult another company before entering a market. (which once again may actually be illegal).
EDIT:
Maybe I am being paranoid, but the tone of the Plaid founder and the apologetic nature of this post, kind of brought back memories of Steve Job's indignant emails about other companies hiring, and their apologetic response which ended up leading to an illegal agreement not to hire each other's workers. I don't want any "gentlemen's agreement" about market allocation and collusion about what products/services will be released.
That's really an excessive wait time, I'm sorry. We are working on better systematic approaches to this issue, but in the meantime, would you be willing to send me your info so I can look at what's going on with the ticket? You can DM @plaiddev on Twitter or email customer-feedback@plaid.com
As a consumer, I'd welcome some more competition in this space. All of the personal finance aggregation apps I've tried, e.g. Mint, YNAB, Personal Finance, etc. have used Plaid and almost always, I have issues with connecting one or more banks on any given day. Submitting tickets re: connection issues rarely resolves in a timely manner too.
The reason I hate plaid is that they are training people to hand over bank passwords/2fa tokens to 3rd parties. And sometimes there are no alternatives available to the consumer.
What you hate is not really Plaid but banks for not providing APIs. Banking data is too juicy to ignore, so when banks don't provide APIs of course companies will resort to MITMing.
I hate fintech apps for demanding information that's none of their business. I can't make an ACH payment on Paypal without giving them my bank login. It was an arbitrary requirement that Paypal started imposing after using the same account for years, now I simply don't use Paypal. On Cashapp, I can't withdraw via ACH unless I share my bank login(so I have to pay for "instant transfer to debit" instead. Apple Pay is my p2p of choice now because they don't engage in this nonsense, and I only deal with others on the rare occasion that someone can only pay me with one of the aforementioned abusive services.
I would be OK with Plaid if they let you manage what you share with apps via permission management.
For example: If fintech app wants to make sure I have $500 to send to my friend, I should be able to tell Plaid NOT to share my entire transaction history and it should simply give said app a binary "sufficient/insufficient" balance. No institution should get to look through my transaction history without having a damn good reason. No, I won't give companies the benefit of the doubt in our "ask for forgiveness not permission" tech culture. Assume that any information gathered about you will be monetized or used against you.
No, he dislikes the idea of handing login data over, and if your business requires someone else create an API that doesn't exist and they don't want to make, you don't have a business.
The reason they need login info is because thats the only way to get data, and a huge security risk for everyone (users, bank, and the service). Nobody is required to build an API for your financial business so it can work, and building such an api is not a small challenge in highly secure areas of business.
Personally I won't use any service like this that asks me to break my bank's TOS and hand over login information. That's honestly crazy. I'd rather build my own spreadsheets and dashboards.
Not the original commenter, but no... Banks not providing APIs may be a problem, I guess, but the problem that I really care about is a company actively and purposefully regressing the greater security landscape.
I think that people underestimate what this feels like for the Plaid founder and potentially for Patrick too.
For Plaid you've spent your life building this business. Presumably there are many happy customers and you're working really hard to define the space and provide service. One morning you flip on your laptop and see a headline that one of your customers (and competitors) launched a new service that directly competes with yours.
As the founder of "attacked" company not only do you see the competition coming from a customer but from another "friendly" company in your space. Yesterday you were friends, today you're enemies. Doesn't matter who you are, this comes as a shock and it stings.
Worse still, when you show up on HN, a space that in the past might have championed your service, you are now met with comments about how your customers are excited to switch.
Showing up to HN and seeing your comrades immediately jump ship stings no matter who you are. And if you're Stripe leadership and you believe that you're playing an infinite game, then pissing off another similarly minded company (and supplier) isn't a good feeling either.
I don't think anyone would argue that it's a blow to the chest for Plaid.
But, that's business.
Plaid has raised $700m+ and is valued $10+ billion according to Wikipedia. This move by Stripe is absolutely one that any competent leadership team should have expected would happen sooner or later.
I think his phrasing is also grammatical English. The degree to which it sounds right or wrong is probably idiomatic.
"it's a blow to the chest for Plaid" is a coherent phrase
"I don't think anyone would argue that" is a coherent phrase that contains a pronoun, "that." The antecedent of this pronoun is that first phrase.
I don't think anyone would argue X can mean the statement X is so true nobody would argue it.
An example would be "I don't think anyone would argue the legitimacy of George Washington as the first president of the US" or "I don't think anyone would argue the merits of food when you're hungry"
Therefore the phrase can be correctly interpreted to mean:
I don't think anyone would argue that -> [it's a blow to the the chest for Plaid]
CEOs are literally paid to deal with these emotions constructively. In this case, that would have looked like welcoming a competitor to the space and being ready to win on execution, because ideas are free.
A prime example of this is the response Slack gave when Microsoft launched Teams. It was a direct copy-cat and they didn't throw a temper tantrum. They welcomed Microsoft into the space and saw it as validation of their product.
> it was a direct copy-cat and they didn't throw a temper tantrum
I’m seeing people conclude a lot more about Plaid from the CEO’s outburst than from Stripe’s announcement. If a competitor throws into your ring and your first move is to call foul on technicalities, it suggests you don’t think you can win on merit alone.
Welcoming competition is different from approving of a competitor abusing their platform to sell only their own products. Note that I am not saying this is what Microsoft is doing, just saying that this is what Slack claims to believe they are doing.
IMO, their welcoming of competition, on an even playing field, only strengthens their request that Microsoft compete fairly.
And Steve Jobs was an asshole who died believing citrus would cure his cancer while parking in handicapped parking lot zones so, maybe don't idolize him.
Where did you get "verbal abuse" from? We're talking about competition, so a far closer analogy would be an NBA player having to play a a game against one of their friends. Should they not have to do that in exchange for their salary?
Any sufficiently good idea is really hard to communicate but really easy to demonstrate. That means you get a head start, but the next person gets it for free. That head start is your time to build a business with a moat. If you haven't done it by then, the next person will.
A defined specification is very different from an idea. RSA is a perfect example. I would say the "idea" here is public key cryptography. It was total genius when it was invented, and 99.999% of the world didn't care a lick.
Once it was implemented in several crypto systems, including RSA, and people started using it, the value became clear.
Was the publication sold to anyone? Why did Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman decide to create a company using the concept rather than just sell the publication itself?
Yeesh, I'm glad he didn't say that. What a vapid soundbite. I don't mean that to reflect on you, you worded it exactly as a CEO would. "We welcome competition", what a joke!
A lot of CEOs say this platitude. They are initially worried, but it often turns out to be good news because it accelerates or is a sign of a growing market.
I get the CEO speak, but I think rchaud is saying "no one welcomes competition - everyone wants a monopoly and to make as much money as possible". So saying otherwise sounds like garbage.
People only "want competition" in the manner of controlled opposition, where they know they can beat someone.
Competition is going to come whether you like it or not. You can whine about it, or you can use it as a tool to push yourself to be better.
rchaud find this to be a platitude, but frankly, I don't give a shit what he thinks. If I'm a good CEO, I care much more about how my employees react to the new competition than to how this internet rando feels about my public response.
Speaking of effective communication, I don't think your tone effectively persuades skeptical listeners. You are on a forum of Internet randos, having a polite discussion.
I’ll attempt to gently point out something that’s important to me: this is also an example of how males discuss things.
It’s very difficult to bring up this topic in a constructive, thoughtful, and impactful way. But I urge you to really sit down and think carefully about it, even for a few minutes.
His tone was the tone I used to use. I still do, sometimes. I have to catch myself, because old habits are hard to break.
The reason I decided to break the habit is because it discourages people like my wife from becoming engineers, let alone founders. She’s one of the most talented hackers I know. And you’d be reasonable to suspect that I’m exaggerating or being nice because she’s a woman, but you’d be mistaken. If you’re a react dev, there’s a very strong probability that if you went head to hews with her in a “who can ship a great looking website faster?” contest, you would lose badly. I didn’t believe it until I saw it more than once.
The world is worse without people like her as engineers. And — most importantly — it’s worth altering our behavior in the default case, not to be nice or to be more inclusive, but because it will make everyone’s lives better in the long run.
Just some food for thought. It didn’t sink in for me until I pointed out she could be paid a lot more if only she’d aggressively negotiate. She mentioned “yeah, I know it’s how men do it.” A little switch flipped in my head. It doesn’t need to be this way; we decide to be this way.
Please see my other response to your peer comment. It's a better example of how I typically communicate and describes why I chose to say what I did in the more controversial comment I posted.
I agree with everything you said, and I'd add that this is not unique to women. There are many creators who don't want to operate in a bro culture.
Personally, I consider it a strength to be able to work with _all kinds of people_, and communicate in ways that are effective to each of them.
Edit to add: My default communication is more inclusive. But there are definitely situations where a leader needs to be aggressive (e.g. against an external threat), and failure to do so can jeopardize the well-being of your own employees who aren't prone to that communication style themselves.
That was a bit of a gambit on my part. Operating as an internet rando myself, I knew I didn't need to communicate like a CEO. In fact, I calculated that my message would distance myself from typical CEO-speak, imbuing myself with a bit of anti-authoritarian branding that might actually appeal to the people who least understood my first message.
You're probably right that there are some fence sitters who were put off by that aggressive follow up. I hope they can judge the initial comment on its own merits, and challenge or ask for clarification if it's helpful.
Plaid is a huge company with a CEO who is presumably a professional adult. Making sarcastic, whiny commends on Twitter should be beneath him. He just sounds like a child throwing a tantrum because a company decided to compete with him.
Not saying he shouldn't feel bad, or threatened, or upset -- those are perfectly valid feelings to have -- but airing those feelings like that is unprofessional and, frankly, pretty lame.
> sarcastic, whiny commends on Twitter should be beneath him. He just sounds like a child throwing a tantrum
The problem is it looks like someone who feels they've been beaten. Twitter tantrums are precedented and tolerated for Silicon Valley CEOs at this point.
I mean, I guess? I would feel a bit more sympathetic if it were a very small company, and very young. But while Plaid is small relative to Stripe, it's a _9 year old company_ that's worth 10-13 _billion_ dollars. If you're seriously that affected by other companies in the space launching competitor products... in the _9_ years of your company's existence, in a market evidently lucrative enough to net you a several billion dollar valuation... I'm not sure what to say.
Stripe attempting to devour the entire financial stack should not have come as any surprise; their strategy is by now obvious from the long list of features they've launched over their history.
I don’t think OP isn’t asking for sympathy but empathy? Is this the name of the game ? Yeah it is , always has , always will be. Does it suck for the loser ? Yes for course.
First, I think you hit the nail on the head in:Is this the name of the game ? Yeah it is , always has , always will be. Does it suck for the loser ? Yes for course.
However, I didn't really ask for anything. In fact, what I think that bestcoder69 is missing is that the person who is asking/showing empathy is actually PC.
If we look at what he wrote, he doesn't just come out and say something like tough luck for them, this is business, instead he says things like "we could have handled this better" and "...will retro this next week" and then lays out what the lessons should be for his team_
Just because empathy is important in business doesn't mean you aren't allowed to win.
> I don’t think OP isn’t asking for sympathy but empathy? Is this the name of the game ?
Unless you believe a company like Plaid is entitled to a monopoly and should be free from any semblance of competition, I don't see a problem with that.
It’s nothing about entitlement. It’s not a matter of whether stripe moving into the space is right or wrong. It’s about empathizing that when this kind of thing happens to a company the founder probably doesn’t feel too hot. You can try understand Plaid’s feelings right now while at the same time thinking Stripe is just doing what businesses will do.
This is a strange comment. This is literally how business and competition works, and how customers benefit as a result. No doubt it sucks to have a product competed with but that's just business. Of all areas on the Internet I'd have expected those on HN to understand, as it's run by a VC who is all about disruption of the competition.
> As the founder of "attacked" company not only do you see the competition coming from a customer but from another "friendly" company in your space. Yesterday you were friends, today you're enemies. Doesn't matter who you are, this comes as a shock and it stings.
Some time back, Steve Jobs felt the same way about Apple employees being offered positions at other companies, so he sent an email to his "friends". The result was an illegal "gentleman's agreement" not to hire each other's employees.
Companies basing their decisions about entering a market based on what their "friends" at other companies think is market allocation, and it is illegal.
Minor comment on the infinite game assumption from a game theory perspective . Stripe is clearly deviating, which means that they have made a payoff calculation that it’s better to do say despite being punished by Plaid and other players.
> One morning you flip on your laptop and see a headline that one of your customers (and competitors) launched a new service that directly competes with yours.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Stripe just nuked the whole of Plaid's platform and value proposition from orbit.
Plaid just went from a decacorn to a cheap acquisition target for PayPal, Square, Shopify, etc.
I can understand this being absolutely gut wrenching for the founders and early employees that are still on board. It must feel like having tangible dreams crushed. Not as bad as a cancer diagnosis, but certainly worse than a rejection from your dream school.
Competition is an evolutionary force of nature. Brutal at times.
You are not wrong, although I don't believe this will be the death of Plaid. Their growth is certainly limited. Plaid should focus on improving their product. They made a mistake by not expanding into related product segments. Now they will have to directly compete with Stripe on product quality.
I think this is right. Plaid will get by, but their ability to capture TAM is now constrained. Because they didn’t expand horizontally into some related product offerings, they now look like a feature while Stripe looks like a platform. It sucks to be on your heels having to play catch-up from their position.
What a whirlwind couple of years for Plaid employees. First the Visa acquisition for 5.3 Billion that falls through because of antitrust, then a round that values them at 13.4 Billion, then fintech and SaaS valuations crater, and now this
That depends on their cap table and exit. In some high dollar exits even the founders don't make any money, because the sale price was too low to pay out anything but investors' preferred shares.
"We're the exact opposite of Apple in this regard. People will buy fewer iPhones today if they know what the new one will do. But people are probably more likely to buy Stripe today if they know that the future Stripe will be even better"
Will you keep your old iPhone if you knew what the new version will do?
He's referencing that if you're looking to purchase a new iPhone right at this very minute, no matter if you already have a phone, that purchase decision can be influenced if there's information about a newer product that hasn't been released.
I buy a phone about every 5 years. Will I wait a year if I find out that the new phone has a different chip in it that does something amazing? Absolutely! I'll wait, not give Apple any money this year, and give them money next year.
It's a common test to ensure you're truly comfortable with your decisions and actions: If a major newspaper would describe your actions or quote you directly on their front page tomorrow, would you still stand behind those words and actions?
The "test" is much older than Stripe but we often use it as a shorthand to ask ourselves whether we truly think a certain course of action is the right one.
If you read about X on the front page (in potentially a negative light) would you feel good about it, could you stand behind it. This helps with clients who are considering going sideways. Usually their lawyer will make some long complex argument about why something is "OK" or "legal".
We might disagree technically as well (ie, no its not legal), but sometimes it is easier to ask, hey, if this were on the front page tomorrow, would you feel good about this? The reality is the board members or whoever who have a lot of reputation really would NOT be OK with whatever - and usually speak up at this point, particularly as their personal upside to doing whatever bogus BS is low and their downsides are often much higher.
I want an API to my account data but I don't want any of these 3rd parties having access. The banking free market has failed, we need regulators to require apis.
I’ll never get over how regressive it is that we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text.
I seriously cringe each time, lol.
Anyway, on topic, it’s good to see this little debacle behind them. Both stripe and plaid offer good services and competition is good in any case.
I do wonder if there’s some room for innovation here from Google and Apple. It would be interesting to see if it’s possible to login to any website using plain text passwords in a way that can be delegated to other sites without them knowing the password too.
—-
Thinking about this more, if browsers generally allowed this it would allow integrations between sites to be implemented pretty fast by simply scrapping text.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Given you can’t read the text if you use a screen reader I would hardly count this as an “annoyance”, plus the majority of my comment is on topic. So idk
It's true that such things are annoying but they're so common and so annoying that they easily take over the discussion.
In the case of your comment, literally all of the replies were about the annoyance. Not one was about the on-topic portion of your comment; it might as well not have existed. That's why we have that guideline.
This isn’t regressive at all. It’s a way to preserve and document something that will probably be deleted or made private. The alternative is maybe putting it into a pastebin or rehosting the text somewhere but somehow it seems less trustworthy that way even though photoshop exists. For accessibility purposes alt-text should be possible.
It's super regressive. You should be able to maintain all the content and all formatting and styling using far less data than a PNG or JPG of that same text requires. Images of text are super wasteful and their ubiquity is a condemnation of us both as users and software engineers.
I am pretty sure you can follow users and have their posts show up in some sort of feed but I think it might be a Reddit 2.0 thing and the UI is such trash that I never go there if I can help it.
Screenshots of tweets shared on reddit is so much faster on my phone than loading Twitter mobile. The screenshot is better UX too since I often get re-directed to a sign up page when I load twitter mobile
>we are literally clicking on images filled with text as a way to share… text.
In this case, it sounds like the original post was removed, so the only thing left would be images types of things. Also, does an image/screengrab add any more validity to something rather than text quoted on another page/site?
Just pretend it's your mom bringing you a sheet of paper she printed of the website she wanted to show you, or worse, the ambitious mom that then rescanned the printout so she could email it to you.
I agree. There's a great lesson here when thinking about the complexity of real world interoperability, and the ramifications of attempts to control information flows.
Frankly, this sort of thing has caused me to become a very regular user of Google Lens on my phone. I just copy the text out of the image and go on about my day.
Improving the usability of image -> text translation is probably the most effective way forward, as silly as that may seem.
It is crazy to me too. When I was younger, I thought how great it is that we can use websites as a cheap and easy way to authenticate or reasonably assume the authenticity of what was written or said, and here we are using screenshots of text on twitter as evidence.
What about websites provided something as authentic to you? The not-knowing how easily websites are to make and that anybody can put anything on them? Since you specifically stated "when younger", I'm assuming you no longer feel the same way. Did getting into tech/dev squash the dream of what the internet could have been? It did for me
Presumably, the website has a history or reputation (such as Stripe or Plaid’s official website). I guess Twitter might serve the same function, especially since this is a real person posting under their supposedly verified account, but I do not use Twitter, so for me, it is less easy to verify the source.
A better example is the tech emails twitter account that posts screenshots. How would I know if they are fake or not?
I would think a website with links to the source material such as the court filings showing the emails on a government website would be preferable.
Luckily, Twitter has accessibility options which you can use to describe/transcribe images so that people with visual disabilities can enjoy your content too!
I was about to say something about how pictures of text are not that bad, and then decided to click through first and .. wow. Talk about fine print. Yeah, that's far too silly!
Seems like stripe is constantly getting called out by other fintech companies. Honestly probably points to the key to their success, they play dirty and are in it to win.
I think we'd all be better off with more of this kind of thing. Basing your business on "ownership" of ideas or insider knowledge about some topic which can be trivially shared is a poor quality base for profit. So much of our economy is based on charging a lot to do something which would be quite trivial if the "how to do it" information was open.
If anything, this shows that Stripe's competitors believe that Stripe is competently managed. If Google announced a product in this space, Plaid's CEO would have yawned. Google announced a Slack competitor that would be a free addition to its business suite in 2017, and Slack IPO'd two years later at a $30 billion market cap. SPOT opened higher the day after Google announced YouTube Music. I remember when companies would worry that Google would compete with them, but if your product isn't something that can be served on the search results page, there was never anything to worry about.
Because they kill so many products a few years after launch. They could launch the best whatever app in the world and most people would never touch it because they don’t trust it will be around in a year.
I still find this to be rather passive aggressive. Sharing an 'internal' doc immediately...Why not call a public statement?
Mention Zach deleted his tweet, but not mention what he actually said: "Deleted tweet. Misunderstanding or different styles perhaps. Presuming positive intent."
I actually find him to be too defensive instead of passive aggressive. It's his job to create new products, new features, and new tools for his customers. He shouldn't be so sorry like that. Should any CEO be sorry every time they start to compete with someone else? And what about Plaid here? It's weird if you think about it. That you will have to feel sorry and go public statements and things like that to have to talk about it. Finally. Plaid should have seen that coming a long time ago. In fact I can't even imagine any of their chief officers never having to see that coming.
Edit: the classy way as an example is Airbus response to Boeing after their failure with the 747 Max or what. Now that's some clean PR well done. And they never had to.
Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was "launched" as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns through crazy revenue growth.
It's not really just a Stripe thing either. I think people are way under-estimating how hard it is for a large company to launch and succeed with a product outside of their core offering, especially when the competition is a small nimble startup with a singlular focus on that one product.
Startups die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but "large company started competing with it" is a rather rare one.