Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

https://twitter.com/collision/status/1522541067777753090

by ekovarski • 4 years ago

203 180 4 years ago

twitter.com

iambateman• 4 years ago

This is a good, helpful response!

As an aside, I’m excited to switch to Stripe’s transactions API from Plaid for MoneyHabitsHQ.com.

Plaid’s security review process is “submit questionnaire and wait an unspecified amount of time.”

I’m at five weeks of waiting and three help tickets and it’s been absolute silence.

goleary• 4 years ago

Pretty sure I've been waiting 3+ months at this point and am now unable to connect new items via Chase.

phoenixy1• 4 years ago

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

koch• 4 years ago

What is the front page test he refers to (second image, last bullet point)?

felixrieseberg• 4 years ago

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.

ergocoder4• 4 years ago

It is a great principle. Great benefit, easy to upkeep

I have no idea why most companies don't install this principle since the beginning.

I basically assume every email and slack message would be public at some point.

It is a bit extreme but it doesn't require that much effort to maintain such principle.

onphonenow• 4 years ago

We use this test in a related field.

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.

endisneigh5• 4 years ago

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.

abirch• 4 years ago

If Reddit made it easy for me to follow people and have stuff pop into my feed like Twitter, I'd walk away from Twitter.

tootie• 4 years ago

Ironically, Reddit's main source of news is screenshots of tweets.

tempest_• 4 years ago

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.

lotsofpulp2• 4 years ago

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.

dylan6044• 4 years ago

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

a-dub• 4 years ago

it seems the maladaptive images of text thing is being used to work around the 140 character limit rather than any sort of authentication here.

it's pretty funny where you see this and twitter "threads" of like 14+ posts.

life is complicated, 140 characters is not enough.

dylan6044• 4 years ago

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?

endisneigh5• 4 years ago

It’s not about validity, it’s about accessibility. For example in the image there’s a link which can’t be clicked because the info wasn’t included

throwaway09223• 4 years ago

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.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

Luckily, Twitter has accessibility options which you can use to describe/transcribe images so that people with visual disabilities can enjoy your content too!

Not that anybody ever uses that feature.

ivank• 4 years ago

I use that feature, but it’s effectively broken with the 1000 character restriction.

notyourwork• 4 years ago

And Elon Musk but the damn platform. Sigh.

throwaway1777• 4 years ago

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.

endisneigh5• 4 years ago

https://imgur.com/ju8XgGd

kyle-rb• 4 years ago

Twitter allows alt text but it's dependent on the user including it when they post (@collision did not) and it's limited to 1000 characters.

greenthrow• 4 years ago

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.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

It's definitely regressive, it's not even accessible. Some people literally won't even be able to read it.

op00to• 4 years ago

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!

dang2• 4 years ago

"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

endisneigh5• 4 years ago

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

fdgsdfogijq• 4 years ago

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.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

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.

staunch• 4 years ago

No one hates middlemen more than other middlemen.

lern_too_spel• 4 years ago

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.

cyberlurker• 4 years ago

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.

echelon• 4 years ago

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.

axg11• 4 years ago

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.

kbos873• 4 years ago

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.

alonmower• 4 years ago

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

adam_arthur• 4 years ago

Strike while the iron is hot. Any SaaS or speculative tech that sat on the sidelines during this massive bubble did themselves the injustice.

Probably most of them actually believed in the numbers though

vsareto• 4 years ago

Not as bad as a cancer diagnosis, but certainly worse than a rejection from your dream school.

We leave rich, but maybe not-as-rich as we thought?

spiffytech• 4 years ago

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.

ec1096852• 4 years ago

Plaid has been thinking about this space for 9 years. It seems odd that they wouldn’t be able to continue being a strong entrant here.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 4 years ago

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.

ec1096852• 4 years ago

This is a good point. I don’t think companies can have gentleman’s agreements to not compete with each other.

kehphin• 4 years ago

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.

heromal• 4 years ago

Mint doesn't use Plaid, it uses Intuit's API since the acquisition.

cobbal2• 4 years ago

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.

wmf2• 4 years ago

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.

ridruejo• 4 years ago

That’s freaking good leadership in written form if I have seen one…

rabidonrails2• 4 years ago

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.

bestcoder693• 4 years ago

Please… my violin can’t get any tinier or we risk splitting the atom.

Jcowell2• 4 years ago

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.

devoutsalsa• 4 years ago

Maybe we can harness the energy from pity parties of sufficiently notable scope.

darkerside9• 4 years ago

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.

rchaud• 4 years ago

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!

pastor_bob2• 4 years ago

A CEO like Steve Jobs would have sought to destroy them and wouldn't have been afraid to openly snub them. Sometimes you go for the jugular

bernardom• 4 years ago

"NBA players are literally paid to entertain us. They should just absorb the verbal abuse."

"Waiters are literally paid..."

Or we could be humans?

SnowHill99023• 4 years ago

Ideas are not free. Good execution is better than good ideas alone, true. But ideas can definitely be worth a lot.

itslennysfault• 4 years ago

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.

voidfunc• 4 years ago

Im rolling my eyes at this. Dont get into business or politics if you have thin skin.

Dayshine• 4 years ago

So... Be born into a lift of luxury?

gigatexal• 4 years ago

When your business becomes a feature of another larger offering it’s time to sell and move on.

peyton2• 4 years ago

10 years in I highly doubt either of them take anything that personally.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 4 years ago

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.

peyton2• 4 years ago

Ok, the truth on the Jobs one is significantly more nuanced. Not everything is public. I don’t think it was a friendly thing haha.

cj• 4 years ago

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.

collectedparts• 4 years ago

Nit: I think you meant "I don't think anyone would dispute that it's a blow".

Saying "I don't think anyone would argue that X" means "I don't think anyone thinks X".

pbreit4• 4 years ago

Especially since Stripe indicated exactly what it was doing via RFP.

wmf2• 4 years ago

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.

powerslacker• 4 years ago

Seems like they pull a stunt like this every year.

snake_doc• 4 years ago

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.

stu2b50• 4 years ago

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.

arinlen2• 4 years ago

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.

What's wrong with that?

kelnos• 4 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross2• 4 years ago

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.

ergocoder4• 4 years ago

Not only that. His tweet misled people.

"Interview" turns out to be a job interview Jay had in 2014 before Jay even joined Stripe.

Jay started working on this product in 2019.

This is malicious. Plaid CEO intended to character-assassinate Jay.

cercatrova• 4 years ago

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.

Dma54rhs• 4 years ago

And the the valuation fir the smaller company is 10 billion. Its not like they are crushing your mom and pop shop here.

anon_3b41502• 4 years ago

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.

sbierwagen2• 4 years ago

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?

anon_3b41502• 4 years ago

No, that is not what happened.

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.

themacguffinman• 4 years ago

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.

password4321• 4 years ago

A lot more anecdata: Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264 (672 comments; 20211130)

Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.

Follow-up discussion of the initial announcement: Stripe releases Plaid-like project, Plaid CEO objects to process

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31263288 (15 comments; 2 days ago)

Unless I'm mistaken, Stripe has a history of behaving this way.

Initial announcement discussion -- Plaid CEO's comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262361#31263005

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262361#31263017

0xedb• 4 years ago

"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?

wsinks• 4 years ago

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.

kbos873• 4 years ago

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.

websap2• 4 years ago

Stripe seems to be gearing up to become the AWS of the FinTech world.

pbreit4• 4 years ago

Well, Yodlee & Finicity pre-dated Plaid by many years. But Plaid executed much better.

kbos873• 4 years ago

Thank you for the education on the history here. That makes Plaid’s indignance about new competition even less palatable.

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

Maybe this entire thing will serve as a warning to those who don't have an easy pricing calculator on their website.

pastor_bob2• 4 years ago

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."

All so underhanded

[0]https://twitter.com/zachperret/status/1522444749877088256

nazka• 4 years ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWaTjYpczKQ

gimme_treefiddy• 4 years ago

What we really need a thread by Ryan Breslow.

vmception• 4 years ago

The only thing I learned from this is that both companies have ways to connect directly to banks via API…. sometimes for some banks, sometimes

and the consumer cant tell at any time.

astrange• 4 years ago

It's pretty obvious, you go through an OAuth flow on the bank's website.

samirsd• 4 years ago

Plaid was and is “just a feature” so this day should have come as no surprise… or am I missing something?

drcongo• 4 years ago

Why is so much of Stripe's dirty laundry aired out in the open? It never looks good.

0des• 4 years ago

Probably because of the association of HN and YC

websap2• 4 years ago

The problem with being successful

eins12342• 4 years ago

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.

eins12342• 4 years ago

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.

Aeolun• 4 years ago

The product maybe, but my interactions with the company have been dissapointing.

sangnoir3• 4 years ago

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.

fishywang• 4 years ago

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.

mupuff1234• 4 years ago

Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorn

That was at peak bubble. Given that most public Fintech companies crashed around 70% from ATH I assume the same holds for Brex and Ramp.

B1FF_PSUVM• 4 years ago

So now they're just tricorn?

(The things you can do to/with a language ... "Verbing weirds language" takes the cake, though.)

pbreit4• 4 years ago

There will be plenty of users (skewing large) who will want to get account validation and payment processing from different vendors.

I wonder if this opens up a Visa acquisition?

mbesto4• 4 years ago

A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn't be so sure.

The fact that no one has mentioned Yodlee once makes me think very few people in this thread actually know this market.

Not to mention there are probably quite literally thousands of Stripe competitors.

The world is a big place and the SV bubblethink of "only one person wins" is highly myopic.

Plaid will be fine. They just might not be $10B valuation fine. That's all.

EDIT: Doh, saw Yodlee mentioned once much lower in thread now.

ericlewis• 4 years ago

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.

webmaven• 4 years ago

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:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Startup.html?id=UK7qDwA...

smugma• 4 years ago

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.

guelo• 4 years ago

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.

ergocoder4• 4 years ago

I'm surprised that all the comments here are not about how Plaid CEO maliciously misled people.

"Interview" turns out to be a job interview before Jay even joined Stripe back in 2014. Jay started working on this product in 2019.

"RFP" turns out to be a regular RFP where Stripe wants to integrate with multiple partners like MX and finicity.

In the past few years, Plaid CEO and Plaid requested meetings with Jay. Jay never initiated those meetings.

Now Plaid CEO has deleted the tweet and acted like Stripe Mafia has got to him. LOL

Plaid CEO has very low ethics, it seems.

lvl102• 4 years ago

They’re both suspect in my view.

ergocoder4• 4 years ago

Can you point me to what Jay did wrong here?

Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle

Related Stories