Comment by temp7536
5 years ago
For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.
Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.
You don't hear anything about this online, they're incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.
With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they're having major retention issues - so I'm not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.
I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.
+1. Also a founder of an $XB fintech. Exact same story. Patrick + John dangled an acquisition to get a look inside, and ended up re-trading on the terms. Then proceeded to target 2 of our team members to recruit. Fast forward a few years, and now they have deployed a team to directly copy one of our products.
Amongst their L2 team, Patrick and Will are described as the "killers". I guess maybe a bit of duplicity is required to build a company of that size...
As much as the parent comment strained credibility, this double-down (posted exactly 10 minutes after the original) breaks it. Seriously, how many $XB fintech founders are out there, waiting to tell their salacious tales about one of the most transparent and accountable individuals on HN?
It's OK, come out $XB fintech founders, it's safe for your temp accounts here...at least until the moderators get here and start checking the IP addresses.
It's not that surprising there are many founders lurking on HN. Many people who are famous in the tech world comment here once in a while. It's not a stretch to imagine that a lot of people from that demographic are active but silent users/consumers.
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By that logic, couldn't you just undermine the credibility of all temp accounts by creating your own temp accounts to enthusiastically agree with them?
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Fintech is worth trillions. A trillion is a thousand billions. HN/YC is the de facto hub for those. These comments are doubtful (given the money and the strong emotions involved I wouldn't trust a single one of them, positive or otherwise), but this isn't the best arguments against them.
I have always wondered why nothing humorous or fun appears/happens on HN in the comments. This post and subsequent comments are very telling.
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I'm the real Satoshi, so I have you all beat.
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I do think it's a competitor too. Just screwing up Stripe.
Lovely to know. $XB fintech founders, swimming in the money, yet they still end up on social media towards the middle of the night (US based at least)
Hahaha. Or something like that.
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I mean considering blockchain I think it’s a safe bet there’s a lot more $XB fintechs than you seem to think. Technically X can be 1, mind you
Note that I did not say whether this was a good or bad thing, I just think you’re overthinking billion dollar fintech startup scarcity given a single bitcoin is basically a billion dollars. Those folks are also more likely to identify themselves as fintech during an introduction in my experience, and Stripe undoubtedly plays in the crypto pool, so it fits
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This sounds like typical tech infighting, sadly. We shouldn't normalize this stuff, but we do. I really hope more companies hold their leaders to a governing, conscious culture that they actually follow themselves.
> typical tech infighting
> We shouldn't normalize this stuff
You literally normalized it in your comment.
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That's sad. Sorry that happened to you. I hope you guys are still moving forward and building.
There are so many founders of $XB fintechs in this thread, I want to start one! Thanks for sharing.
X = 0.000001B$ Your side gig qualifies.
You were brain raped. Bill Gates was famous for this. There was even a Silicon Valley episode about the practice.
This sounds painful.
Yikes
Good thing ideas aren't property. What a lame business landscape that world would have!
+2. Founder of $XXB fintech. I had heard rumors about their shady practices, but I was young and dumb and was excited by the prospect of an acquisition (good thing it never materialized, in hindsight). Patrick has a proven history of using this ploy to just get more information on sensitive assets. After a couple months of talks with Patrick I found out my wife was having an affair with him. I've sent email after angry email asking him why, why he passed up my company and didn't have the decency to tell me he chose a better candidate, but have never gotten a response. I don't even want an apology, I just want Patrick to admit that he fucked my wife.
Gross. We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.
I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.
People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.
There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:
- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal
- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)
- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.
Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?
The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.
Some context: I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?
That sounds weird to me. There was no "HN team" before I started working on HN in October 2012 - just pg, and no one would have referred to him as "the HN team".
The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.
I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.
As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
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I'm also a YC founder of a (smaller, but top ~100 in terms of valuation) YC company. I don't know what your experience was like with Stripe, but the notion that Patrick has some unduly amount of power to exercise over HN and YC immediately flags to me as untrue. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of HN criticism, and I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.
To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).
I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.
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I think you might be getting conspiratorial about this. Here's my take on reading the comment thread. I am an outsider peering in - no connection to the companies etc.
1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.
2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.
3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.
At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.
No he did not. We didn’t even discuss it.
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> And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
Ah yes, surely the reason you didn't create the most valuable YC company ever is because more was done for Stripe.
This is the first time I’ve seen a post with anything negative about Patrick and having a Coinbase founder come out of the woodwork to make a post like this defending all of this with nothing more than conjecture sends a completely different message than you think.
this is such a key thing people in immense power forget, once you’re on the inside things start looking really different and you can’t see it
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I’ve personally conducted business with Patrick, and integrity isn’t a term I’d associate with him. Most polite term I can think of would be “shrewd”.
I don't think integrity fits into any of the metrics that you have to report to YC.
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It also may be a way how Irish do business. Had many interaction with CEOs from there, very poor experience I must say.
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Props for attaching your name to your comment, something I wish the throwaway OP also did, though in the spirit of believing the victim, I can understand why they didn't.
That said, with threads like this, there's also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there's any sort of pattern; any such patterns can then inform future interactions with the people or companies involved.
My own personal experience over the last year as a manager of managers that may be relevant to both pc and barmstrong: seeing a surprising number of security resumes on the market from current Stripe talent suggests there may be a bit of impending brain drain (for reasons I can't put a finger on as I'm not inside). I've seen less of this with Coinbase talent.
"in the spirit of believing the victim"
The only kind of sense this could make is as a tautology. If the commenter is a "victim" then you've already decided to believe him or her. But what evidence do you have to support this belief?
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there ABSOLUTELY is a pattern of Stripe doing this stuff.
Sure, but you run Coinbase. It wouldn't surprise me if people with less soft power than you had negative interactions.
Yeah, it is no wonder that a founder-CEO of a 70 billion dollar company is having very little negative interactions with about anyone.
Personally I have became from poor ass bootstrapping startup founder to rich and successful retired entrpreneur (now investor) and it is ridiculous how people will treat you wildly differently as you get wealthier. And at times the exactly same people.
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Not to fuel the fire here, but from the startups perspective I'm not sure there's much functional difference between a company attempting to acquire a startup and then deciding to go it alone, and using the acquisition process for research on their future products other than intent.
No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you'll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.
There's even a PG blogpost about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html
Side Note: I'm always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I'm interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :D
Small world.
I know so many people who have been screwed over by Coinbase, it's complete lack of customer support, and dark business practices (it's borderline criminal at this point). The fact that you're associated directly with Coinbase does not benefit your reputation nor does it add any weight to what you're saying - it in fact does the opposite.
This is biased because they are your acquaintance. Because they act a certain way in your circle doesn’t mean they aren’t being a bad actor in others.
Your post makes it clear you’re very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. I’ve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. It’s draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.
> Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.
If the features looked similar then they 'copied' if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you're following best practice UI/UX guidelines.
I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.
Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone's lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.
If the market isn't growing, it is a zero-sum game so this behaviour isn't surprising.
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> most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
> also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
All reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.
I accept all outcomes - all except ghosting.
Have you considered that he might just avoid sharking out on people he considers friends, or people with too large a platform?
Genuine question.
I don't think Coinbase and Stripe are in the same business but...
> As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
I'm not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn't have to tell you, he probably shouldn't. He runs a private company and that's what he should care about.
Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?
Sometime one does favors in the hopes of being treated likewise in future. It is an investment, even though not guaranteed to pay-off; but when done to powerful people, that off-hand chance can pay-off handsomely and be worth it.
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> any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences... and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)
Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226
> I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this.
You must be new here.
I agree with you but after being an employee of a dozen of companies and founded some, I started the Stripe's application processe and after a waterfall or red flags I decided myself to do not continue. I couldn't ignore my gut feeling clearly saying me that there is the place to have a good salary in a very miserable, unhealthy and unstable job.
PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.
Japan has a long tradition in coopetition. SV has adopted many Japanese traditions. Unfortunately some people seem to take competition too seriously, ruining the culture. It seems some are suggesting Patrick and John take competition too seriously. Whether the allegations are true or not, it can unfortunately be damaging.
Adam Smith, on his work on competition, took many ideas from the Muslim Caliphate. Where markets can only work on trust. That nobody will do business with someone they don't trust.
Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.
> There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations (…). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first.
That’s Hanlon’s razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I have never interviewed at Stripe, but I did interview at Coinbase in mid-2020 and it was among the best interviewing experiences I've had. The hiring manager for a TPM role (NM) was awesome, as was the entire loop. I didn't end up with an offer (I suspect that I flubbed one of the interviews) but left with a mostly positive experience (aside from what seemed like an implied offer from the recruiter, which I consider to just be miscommunication).
As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB's pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).
These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.
> You always have to assume ignorance over malice first
At a certain valuation (namely, well before yours or Patrick's), ignorance becomes malice. With the resources Stripe has, it is outrageous that there have been a non-zero number of cases where for example references haven't been checked before an offer letter was sent. That Patrick is ignorant about this, as you claim, is even more damning, as it suggests no one knows what is going on at Stripe.
So I guess thank you for your scathing review of Stripe's hiring process, and for giving us the notion that Coinbase is probably an equally toxic workspace?
Funny that you think your endorsement works in their favor. Coinbase is not entirely kosher in the crypto industry so there's that.
Strange that the downvote button was hidden on this post. I had to manually submit the GET request.
You know the best you could have done is say nothing. People like this, best way to prove them wrong is to show there's nothing. Even a "oh it's true but we ll try to change" helps more than doing exactly what the OP did with his catch-22: if you defend here, he's proven right.
Well now we know who is your master.
I'm too am also a founder of an $xB fintech, and I have to say I disagree with your assessment. The initial poster was right on all counts.
I'm working on my SECOND $billion!
...I gave up on my first.
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Newswire: Coinbase founder says Stripe founder is a good guy. People not convinced.
Patrick and John asked brian armstrong to run damage control for them lol.
Why would we ever listen to someone who runs a ponzi coin company?
You TWO could be the same person? Just a wild guess...
I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)
All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
I'm sorry but no. Patrick, we met with you once, Gaybrick and Claire multiple times and opened up a data room to you all. I then emailed you (and the others) three followups over a couple weeks only to see them opened but never replied. Your team then sent targeted cold emails to multiple people on our team. I've validated this experience with multiple founders.
You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1]. You've also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.
You've clearly crushed it in the business and developer brand space, hats off to you. You want feedback - I (and the broader founder community) just wish you stop the dance of pretending and just admit you all are sharks, and it works for you! Just own it.
But I will admit, the HN comment was a bit trolly and written in frustration. But you have to admit - you are documented as proofreading every one of PGs posts, are a huge LP in YC and are friends with a lot of people there. You can't believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in "bad faith"....
And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I'm sorry. But sadly there aren't very many other options.
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...
I genuinely have no idea what situation you’re talking about (not saying we didn’t screw up, though — I preemptively apologize assuming we did!), and a bunch of the narrow claims above aren’t true (we aren’t YC LPs, Sequoia made its own decisions without any suggestions from us on Finix, etc.), but I really would appreciate an email so I can figure out what happened.
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> You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix's term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as "giving it away")[1].
How is it reneging on a term sheet if they wire the money? That's fulfilling the terms of the term sheet (despite the fact that term sheets aren't binding), no?
It bears repeating that exactly 10 minutes after temp7536's accusations were initially posted (2:45:57 UTC), account temp3728 posted (at 2:55:47 UTC) a two paragraph affirmation of temp7536's salacious accusations.
Both of these comments were posted almost three hours after the initial post. So, in a 10 minute window 3 hours after the post, we are to believe a second commenter came to HN, saw temp7536's post (presumably after reading OP's narrative?), registered their own fake HN account, verified said account, and wrote a two paragraph post that almost exactly mirrored the original accusations of temp7536? Ok.
I have better things to do than Sherlock Holmes a case involving an individual (pc) who I have never met or spoken to, but there is much to be desired in the credibility dept for temp7536 and temp3728.
When you’re in top position on a Stripe-related post, that has nothing to do with your karma score. It’s because dang has a pin button that he usually uses for himself, but very often is used for exactly the situation you describe when it comes to YC portfolio or celebrities showing up or something (without visual feedback of such a pin, as every single other website with the capability provides). It’s pretty obvious if you keep an eye out for it
This can undoubtedly be spun as “HN just trying to bring the right voice to the top of the discussion” but the alternative take is just as valid. It’s not bad faith feedback, it’s HN UX and practices confusing readers as usual
You got me curious to look at the data. pc has had the top comment in 41 threads since Sept 2007 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25073749. I vaguely recall that had to do with wanting to correct the misleading impression left by an inaccurate headline. All the other cases got there via the usual ranking algorithm. I guess you guys can decide whether 1/41 is moderator overreach or not.
We mostly use that mechanism for tedious moderation announcements ("All: please don't bash each other with clubs, even if you feel strongly about $topic") and for cases where project creators/authors show up belatedly in threads to discuss their work—those are extremely high-value comments that would otherwise get overlooked. Occasionally I use it if a thread is mostly aflame about some controversy and some commenter points out how the whole thing is inaccurate. We don't use it to systematically privilege high-karma users or YC founders relative to other users—that wouldn't be in the spirit of the site guidelines at all, and we take those pretty seriously.
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Chances are these founders are just permanently behind their computers and have an alert set up for whenever someone mentions the company/domain on HN.
That allows you to get in first on an awful amount of threads.
Are you talking about posts, or comments? Do HN celebs get comment boosted by virtue of that fact too? I would've thought it's only for posts.
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> We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... you did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did not ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?
Also:
> I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.
"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?
I’m trying to not overstate my certainty. I have no idea what situation OP could be describing, and I have no recollection of anything along those lines, but I don’t want to definitively state that nothing like it happened over our decade of operation without knowing more about what’s actually being alleged.
We obviously never intentionally ghost companies, “mine them for information”, etc. The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior. (And we’ve invested in dozens.) But maybe some communication got dropped in some particular case or something? I don’t know.
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The challenge I see with some phrases like "mined them" and "ghosted" is that they can be very subjective statements. The person on the receiving end may perceive the actions as such, whereas the person on the giving end may seem them differently.
I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.
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Say "Bloody Mary" ten times in the mirror at midnight and she will appear...
I honestly do not see your participation in this thread as good faith. You apologized to the candidate in public—- good start, now do something of consequence in private. But any further involvement from you (especially trying to out the OP) is simply fanning the flamewar. Even HN moderation is helping fan the flames by adding stats and other commentary. This is why I find YC so utterly untrustworthy.
Hey Patrick, I hear you have an estate in Abbeyleix now, which means you have Notions and therefore are A Bad Man. Sorry! Those are just the facts :/
> Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you'll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.
This sounds like such BS. They are just very reactive around PR, and Stripe while it might be hated internally (based on what you say), it is loved by external developers, so of course developers on HN will tend to have a positive opinion of anything related to it and vote accordingly. And they are quite a lot.
I almost downvoted you for going with the conspiracy theory route, but I like the irony of this post being on the top 5 on the front page and your comment being the top comment of that post, while complaining about him having "almost direct control" of HN and the press.
Stripe is a YC company. If Stripe becomes a shit show, YC may lose money. How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?
Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC. And we're not talking chump change like a couple million. More like billions. What's a little push back on negative comments to save a couple billion dollars?
> "How is it a conspiracy theory to suggest that both YC and Stripe might want to exert some control over bad PR?"
Firstly, you have dramatically undersold what OP claimed, to the point of dishonesty.
Secondly, what OP claimed is a conspiracy theory because it has no actual evidence. If it had evidence it would be a conspiracy.
> Let's not forget that HN's primary function is to attract people with ideas for YC to turn into companies whose equity generates money for YC
I don't know about primary function but it's one of them, let's say. The interesting thing is that this has exactly the opposite consequence to what you say. Doing things to jeopardize the good faith of the community would not only be wrong, it would be catastrophically stupid. Therefore, not only do we not to do it, we place the highest priority on not doing it. That follows straightforwardly from the mixture of your premise with raw self-interest, so I'm not claiming anything hard to accept. Well, I guess I'm claiming we're not catastrophically stupid; maybe some find that hard to accept.
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He tricked me into working for a month without a contract and then wouldn’t answer my calls when I asked him to sign the terms we agreed upon. I had to show up and sit on their couch until he showed up to write me a check to go away. He’s a slippery character.
I was also on that contract and can verify this. Here’s an odd wrinkle: just prior to that contract, Patrick wanted to purchase bitcoin from me (this was back in 2013) remotely, with me sending him the bitcoin first and him paying when he had time. He also wanted the terms to be that if the USD price of bitcoin went down before he paid me, that he would pay the lower price(!) and he would choose the time of repayment. I declined to do anything other than an in-person cash transaction. Later, I heard he had previously purchased some from another friend and then ghosted him for many (>6?) months despite persistent requests for payment.
Holy crap that sounds shady. Can you point to the transaction on chain?
I was fortunate to work with pc/jc/will in ~2016-18, and my experience has been the opposite. They were super professional and in the time that I've worked with them seemed like genuinely good people. They can be tough negotiators which hey, sucks if you're on the other side of the table, but that's exactly what you want out of a good leadership team. And a lot of stuff slips through the cracks, but I'm not sure what else you'd expect from a company that went from 0 -> $100B in a decade.
I can see how the intersection of these two properties may sometimes look like what you're describing, but from everything I've seen (which isn't too much, but it's enough) your interpretation of the facts really doesn't seem accurate.
(As a disclaimer, I do have a horse in this race because I have some stock, but I'm pretty certain I'm being objective about this)
TL;DR: me and you are looking at the same screen but aren't watching the same movie.
It isn't dang's fault that Patrick has a Google Alert or daemon running for his name (or just has a lot of employees who notify him whenever it comes up). It's not direct control of HN, it's Patrick being enterprising.
dang has done nothing to deserve bad faith, and while I don't like Patrick, either, it's best to keep the knocks on the right doors.
HN routinely shadowbans and apparently shadow-pins with at least some frequency per this very thread. It's not an organisation that warrants assuming good faith.
HN's hellbans aren't real shadowbans, because other users can see them. They just have to opt-in to seeing potentially offensive content (it's a setting in your profile). Other users can even make banned users' posts visible to everyone!
And when they pin comments, it's pretty obvious. dang often points it out: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
YC isn't trustworthy, sure, but HN is.
Believe me, the people who are phased out deserve to be. I've had the unlucky experience of using an HN client that showed all comments by default, and you wouldn't believe the amount of deranged, vile shit that gets posted here.
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Their recent 1yr equity periods to screw employees out of upside caused me to lose interest (even though that equity will still likely be very valuable). I really disliked how they tried to spin this as something good for employees.
Which is a shame because a lot of stuff they do is super cool, stripe press, increment (recently discontinued), blog posts, patio11 etc.
It seems like a great place in a lot of ways.
How did this screw people?
If you reprice equity comp each year then you lose most of the upside.
Compare the two following equity plans:
Example Year 1:
---
PLAN 1
FMV: $1
Strike: $1
Total #: 40k ISOs
Vesting: 4yrs
---
PLAN 2
FMV: $1
Strike: $1
Total #: 10k ISOs
Vesting: 1yr
---
In the second plan you get granted new equity per year targeting some total comp.
This means if the equity goes up in value a lot in the first year, when your new amount is recalculated it'll be way less than 10k.
Example Year 2:
---
PLAN 1
FMV: $2
Strike: $1
Total #: 40k ISOs (10k vesting in year 2)
Vesting: 1yr into 4yr period
---
PLAN 2
FMV: $2
Strike: $2 (new grant)
Total #: 5k ISOs (The 10k from the first year, and now half that # determined by new FMV for a cumulative total of 15k instead of 20k ISOs).
Vesting: 1yr on new grant
---
This lets the company keep the majority of the upside, taking it away from employees. It also hurts employees that stay longer or have a longer term interest in the company from capturing the value they helped create.
And the more the company goes up in value, the worse the trade off becomes.
I’m guessing because the equity vests at 1 year, you can’t realize huge gains in stock prices
I can't comment on Stripe, but I had a similar experience with a B2B $XB company, but a bit worse. So I can sympathize going anon.
I agree that the public has a rosy view of a lot of these $XB founders, when in reality it's lies and back stabbing behind the scenes.
Honestly to be the kind of person who runs a company like Stripe you have to be a bit crazy.
To have the chance to be bought out for unfathomable sums at every step, and willingly go manage the headaches of a big and fast growing company (like this thread) instead?
OK I've saved the HTML of this page... just in case :-)
> On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine.
That's why we still need a thing like Gawker to come back. Almost all of SV hated on Thiel for standing behind Trump but when it came to him bringing down Gawker nobody left a finger in Gawker's defense, and so that here we are, a multi-trillion dollar industry with no internal means to self-regulate ourselves.
Gawker were scum. The worst of the worst in “journalism”. Their whole business model was based on creating outrage and division. They don’t deserve an inch of sympathy.
I do miss Mike Arrington's Techcrunch, though
I'll stick to NYT and WSJ breaking real stories, thanks.
Gawker's issues were entirely of their own making. What was their big scoop? That Thiel was gay? At least Gizmodo did some coverage on a pre-release iPhone 4 before being exiled.
Gawker did come back FWIW.
Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
Specifically ValleyWag, Gawker is the conglomerate that owned it:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/r-i-p-valleywag-2006-2015-175041...
Big TIL for me, to be honest.
> Not that I've heard a peep from them since they re-launched.
That explains why I thought they were gone for good.
Inspired by this comment, I have created a tracker in the Open Market Research project https://github.com/OpenMarketResearch/Labs/issues/new?labels... Please feel free to share any comments or suggestions.
> have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that... Can you list this 'huge amount of reporters' that Stripe has 'under their control'?
We are approaching this wrong. We should not look at ghosting as a personal attack. If you want a fiend to bring to yhe interview get a dog, comes to mind.
Also compare how a lowly cook handles interviews at a new dinning place. It's none of the entitled BS but oh a new adventure...lets see what happens.
>"I run a $XB fintech, ..."
I've seen this term a couple of times no in this post. Might you are someone else explain what a "$XB fintech" is?
A billion dollar fintech company, the X being how many billions.
Ex-Borg financial technology... Resistance is futile!
“$X billion fintech” was my interpretation
$XB is the symbol for a new cryptocurrency called XBitCoin, it’s a fork of Bitcoin Cash.
Not everything in the world has to do with Bitcoin.
This one means a >unicorn
Could you elaborate what "$XB fintech" means? Couldn't google answer myself.
From this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389350
3 comma club
market cap or "valuation" company, x is a place holder so $1,2 or 3 billion
I am also a founder of a $XB fintech startup.
Don't forget the female engineer they fired for calling Elon "a little shit" on twitter. I don't know if it would be worse if it turned out to be because Elon complained or because he is their hero.
Probably what parent is referring to: https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1171236137932771328 https://nitter.net/isosteph/status/1459566899151396867
I blocked that account a long time ago, if their IRL persona is anything like their twitter I doubt this was the only reason they were fired.
Almost everyone at YC worships Elon, you can see it on Sam Altman’s face when he interviewed him on YouTube.
Sam Altman might actually believe that Elon is superior to him.
That's disgusting really, but looks like it's true.
I'm beginning to think that we should extend Godwin's Law to include Elon. Just about every online conversation nowadays eventually deteriorates into a discussion about how terrible Elon is.
Btw, I'm exaggerating, but still.
Firing doesn't seem like a proportional response... But representing herself as a Stripe employee after flaming on the internet isn't a good look for their business.
Elon is no angel, but I gotta say it would shock me if he was such a huge loser that he would complain about something like this
Well, he called a rescue diver a pedophile because said diver didn't like Elon's sub and had specifuc idea where Elon should put said submarine.
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Here’s an example of Elon going back to a multi-year old Twitter thread to reply, after blocking the person who started it so they can’t reply back:
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/14646864235969454...
That’s the world’s richest person demonstrating willingness to go to some lengths just to get the last word in against some random webcomic author. Yes, I can totally believe they’d be petty enough to complain about online snark to someone’s employer. Doesn’t mean it necessarily happened, but it wouldn’t be that far out of character if it did.
Huh? He does this type of thing all the time, it's a defining part of his personality. You only need to follow his Twitter so see how consistently and strongly he counters anything that makes him look bad. For the really nasty stuff he does behind the scenes you need to dig a little deeper.
A few examples off the top of my head:
Never mind the stuff he does to his own employees, especially whistleblowers.
In fact it would be contrary to his personality if he didn't send an e-mail to the founders with a message like "Does this person work at Stripe?" with the tweet attached, making it clear what he wants done without explicitly saying it so he can pretend to have plausible deniability.
I am not sure about "HN code of conduct" here, but personally I dislike serious allegations posted anonymously and without any proof to back it up.
You may well be right, but posting these kinds of things this way is best way for HN to devolve to be unusable for any serious discussion on anything.
--
EDIT: (I can't answer any more because I am being throttled by HN for posting "low value content").
How hard do you think it is to create multiple fresh, throwaway HN accounts to post "corroborating" comments?
I dislike these comments not because I think they are incorrect but because if this is the discussion standard we accept it is basically open season for trolling.
Totally agree, it kind of sucks to have to do this. But this is sadly the world we live in. People like the Collison's and Stripe have immense power to ruin people and companies, and there are a lot of ruined bodies in their wake. So there is zero chance myself or anyone will do anything publicly.
Hard to give proof on this, so I understand how everything needs to get taken with a grain of salt. The only thing I can say is to talk (or just email) any fintech company founder in the states and I'm 100% sure they will privately agree with what I've posted.
There's many other ways for you to share some of your story, without revealing too much.
Disagreed. It’s clear it’s a throwaway and they’re saying unsubstantiated things, but the readers can make their own minds up about what to believe in and what not to. I like HN to get the insider scoop, precisely this type of comment. I’m not gonna hate on stripe or PC, but now I’ll know to look a little more carefully at someone asking questions about my future company (lol) to see what their intentions maybe. What’s wrong with that?
> I like HN to get the insider scoop, precisely this type of comment.
How can you treat it as "insider scoop" if there is no way to tell whether the facts are true or the person is what who they claim to be?
Would you accept that level of journalism? We can see what journalism does to society when you forgo any checks on the fact or the provenance. Just watch Fox News and come back to tell what you think about it.
If you are taking unsubstantiated, anonymous posts as facts you are just easy to manipulate.
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Because of the power dynamic they have to do this. It is sad, but having been in a similar situation with a billionaire, you can't say it with your name attached.
Proof could even include some examples of stories that were quashed, or other examples of abuse. I don't think they necessarily need to out themselves to make a stronger case.
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Everybody can say that. Regardless of whether they are or are not leading a large company.
For all I know, one insider holding a grudge could be creating multiple accounts claiming to be leading large companies and thus not being able to divulge their names.
That sounds like a pretty fair position. It does seem difficult, on the other hand, because I don't think we really have mechanisms to protect whistleblowers as a society. The options seem like stay silent, speak out anonymously (clearly subject to abuse), or speak out publicly with the threat of retribution. None of these feel like great options.
This is a role that I think journalists have more traditionally played. Source is known to the journalist but anonymous to the public and the public then chooses whether to trust the named journalist who is representing the nameless source.
However, with forums, I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe having verified accounts reporting on behalf of anonymous accounts, because the current way, I just have to trust an anonymous account and with how easy it is to defame people anonymously because of no ultimate accountability, I tend to view anonymous posts skeptically. With the journalist way, there isn't anonymity but rather veiled identity, because it's ultimately traceable.
Having anybody be able to create a noise of slanderous comments seems like absolutely worst option to me.
I personally back my posts by my real name and I think this is fair. If I did not feel safe posting something important, I would make sure to include proofs. If I can't include either, I keep my mouth shut.
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Dislike? Sure. See the need for? Also true.
Especially considering these are corroborating messages (two of them), I am quite fine with this.
As a leader of a competing company, attaching your name to messages like those would be quite the bold and risky act (and likely not in line with duties to investors and shareholders, etc.)
Sorry but even if the anonymous OP allegations are all completely true, so what? I don't see anything there that Stripe did that was illegal - only aggressive/predatory along the lines of what happens daily in business. You could probably google up multiple examples without ever leaving the first page of results.
If I were a Stripe investor I would honestly be validated that the leadership is acting so boldly in the company's favor.