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Comment · 1 year ago
In these matters, I always try to keep in mind that technologies aren't themselves disruptive; customer choices are. It'll be interesting to see what customers choose in the years to come.
Comment · 1 year ago
Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo?
I don't think that customers or businesses should see Tempo very much. In the success case, Tempo is a platform like SWIFT or ACH that others employ behind the scenes to orchestrate transactions. "Decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT" isn't exactly the right analogy (there are clearly lots of differences), but it's not totally wrong either.
Why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better?
Yeah, I think this is the natural follow-up question. The answer differs a bit based on the use-case, but there are a few common reasons:
* Instant on-chain transfers avoiding trapped liquidity. If you're transferring money from financial institution A to institution B, and the transfer takes a day, you're either slowed a day in taking the next step or you have to somehow cover that float. Depending on your movements and their predictability, that can require big buffers.
* Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)
* Reliability. This sounds funny, but, when sending money between countries, there are many more manual processes involved at the associated financial institutions than one might think. Money is frequently just... lost, and humans are required to hunt for it. (We see this all the time at Stripe.) Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.
* Fewer currency conversions. Wholesale FX for major currencies is very cheap, but minor currencies can have bigger spreads, and the actual fee incurred by a regular customer (e.g. with their bank) can be significant. Stablecoins often make it possible to skip conversions that would otherwise happen.
* Access to USD-based functionality. The US is the world's most sophisticated financial services market. Having a stablecoin means "having an on-chain asset", but it also typically means "having a USD asset", and a lot of major parts of the ecosystem (e.g. US equities and credit markets) primarily, or only, deal with US dollars.
Acknowledging the obvious, a reflexive answer frequently invoked here is "it's regulatory arbitrage", but I think this is some combination of misguided and incurious as an explanation. First, stablecoins are now formally regulated in the US (with the GENIUS Act) and in Europe (under MiCA), so their use is now very explicitly regulated. Secondly, it implicitly assumes that the only reason one would seek an alternative to the traditional ways of doing things is because someone is doing something illegitimate. I think this usually indicates a lack of understanding of the challenges, complexities, and costs associated with high-volume cross-border money movement. Indeed, and somewhat ironically given the claim, one of Bridge's large customers is the US government.
Comment · 1 year ago
There are lots of crypto skeptics on HN (and we ourselves were disappointed with crypto's payments utility for much of the past decade), so it might be interesting to share what changed our mind over the past couple of years: we started to notice a lot of real-world businesses finding utility in stablecoins. For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America. We're currently adding stablecoin functionality to the Stripe dashboard, and the first user is an Argentinian bike importer that finds transacting with their suppliers to be challenging.
Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit. They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante.
Comment · 2 years ago
Not a lack of commitment -- we just don't want to pre-announce the specifics.
Comment · 2 years ago
We will definitely keep it.
Comment · 2 years ago
There's a lot of online fraud. We invest a ton in Radar, our payment surfaces, etc., to keep this as invisible as possible to businesses. (We don't always succeed, of course. But, despite the growing sophistication of the fraudsters themselves, we do generally get better every year.)
Comment · 2 years ago
I knew Kyle in college. He was extremely smart, kind, patient, and friendly. (He was a few years ahead of me; I was a random Irish freshman who had just shown up.) Looking back, he's one of the people who inspired me to get into startups. While we never ended up working together, it wasn't for lack of trying on my side -- everyone said he was phenomenal, and I tried hard to persuade him to join Stripe in the early days.
Comment · 4 years ago
That comment made my day -- thanks :-)
Comment · 4 years ago
It's kind of you to say that, and people at Stripe certainly try very hard, but there's plenty that's broken or that we're trying to figure out at scale... I don't think those claims are true.
Comment · 4 years ago
I genuinely don't know why there are fewer instances today, and the question at the bottom is literal rather than rhetorical. (I don't even know whether there are fewer instances today -- maybe they're just happening in less legible domains, or something.)
That said, I'm somewhat skeptical of the safety argument, which I often hear. For example, 60 workers were apparently killed during the construction of the World Trade Center[0] -- 4x more deaths than occurred during the construction of the Empire State Building. Nor is it a priori clear to me that safety and speed would necessarily be in opposition -- maybe better planning causes both more safety and more speed, for example. I'd certainly be interested in a more comprehensive investigation of this question.
I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places?
I do believe that state/military intervention clearly plays some role in a few, but there are certainly plenty of examples of remarkably slow military projects, and many of the projects on the page have nothing to do with the military. (Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Boeing 747, NYC Subway.)
So, I haven't found a satisfying explanation, and I'd be curious to read other analyses or diagnoses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_World_Trad...
Comment · 4 years ago
Yep. Until very recently, we weren't able to support businesses selling crypto. (The regulatory details are complex.) We're now rolling out support and this page is basically about that change.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
I'm sorry; that's bad. Can you email me with details so that we can investigate what happened? ([email protected]; others welcome to do so too.)
More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so "several sigma bad" still happens to an unfortunate number of people. That said, we want those who interact with Stripe to come away having been treated professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures. On behalf of Stripe, I apologize.
I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.