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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

How about Slack ($5bn) and Stripe ($9bn)?

That being said, when you get that big, of course there's problems. You have targets on your back, you're managing thousands of people, etc. Especially if you're entering into a market with regulations... someone is going to fight back.

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Fraud and problems should be seen as two different things.

This looks like a clear case of fraud. lying to investors and regulators. That isn't a "growth problem" from having a target on your back, its a legal/cultural/approach issue that probably existed from the start and grew large enough to bite you in the ass.

gentle/kind souls don't usually want to be CEOs/leaders and accept that stress and risk. People who are cutthroat and willing to step on other people to get ahead DO want to be CEOs.

such is life

Sorry but we live in a country that has rules and regulations for what CEOs and leaders do - regardless of how "cutthroat" they are. Their ambitions do not forgive their transgressions, and we have no obligation to accept that as "life". I do not see such behavior to be the essence of life, and I find it concerning you're so willing to accept it as the natural order.

We as a civilization are two missed meals away from chaos. When that happens, there will be those who eat and those who starve.

Laws are just there to compress the variance of outcomes. Where as in the past you would've starved, today you just struggle to get by.

There is a long storied past of humans banding together. The "kill or be killed" narrative is just a narrative.

Any examination of sociology, anthropology, and history shows a rich, long history of humans helping each other through peril, banding together in the toughest of times, and cooperating. It is by far our most recognizable trait as a species, and it appears in isolation whenever humans are together. I do not buy that there is some primitive animal culture that we will revert to if the Internet went down. There are humans who have never experienced "civilization", and they do not live in chaos and evil so I don't buy your argument at all.

Do we really have that sort of system, though? This company and its former CEO just got fined just shy of $1M combined. Is that a deterrent or an added cost of doing business? I think it's the latter.

And I wonder how much the SEC spent in manpower to arrive at this outcome. I can't really remember the last time any of their enforcement actions ended up as anything significant.

I don't understand the endgame for slack. It's a chat app with some good features and some annoying features. It's easier to write integrations against, I've heard? Where's the $5B value in that?

Umm. What endgame? They get away with charging $6.66 / month / user for the most popular organizational chat application in existence.

After email, of course.

They can only charge $6.66/month until a competitor comes along that creates a better and/or cheaper product. Unlike Facebook, which has a lot of inertia because all your friends may be on it and you can't get them to switch, a company can easily switch all its employees to a different corporate chat app: the CEO orders it, and it's done.

Also, that $5B valuation is based on significant expectations of future growth. Their customers up to now are probably the low-hanging fruit of the market - tech companies whose culture embraces tools like Slack. To grow beyond that (e.g., to Fortune 500 companies), they may need to offer a significantly different product that's sold in a very different way. Or, those companies may not want such a product at all.

Corporate chat apps are much stickier than that. After a while you integrate them into other services, build workflows on them and they become part of how your business functions. The specifics of what they integrate with and how determine what workflows you can build and how they work, which means these services are not fungible. Changing over can be very painful and costly.

Slack has raised insane amounts of money at really good terms just because they can. The funding world is insane right now and they are taking advantage.

They can easily do what Facebook or Oracle did and just buy up any competitions with their huge warchest.

You can't always buy out your competitors. Facebook itself is an example of this, having turned down numerous acquisition offers (including one from its competitor MySpace, and then one from the company that bought MySpace):

http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t...

There's a ton of dirt on Stripe. Info in my comment history, I won't dig it up.

I was curious, so I searched a bit. No mention of stripe at all within the past 372 days of your comments. Mind sharing now that you've piqued my interest?

It appears he had a bad experience with them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833815

and is writing a book about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12749364

I didn't have a bad experience with them. I clean up their mess on the regular. It's a steady source of income for me — you know, people who rely solely on their payment processor to protect them from fraud.

They don't care to do any sort of diligence about who opens an account. Someone, like a fraudster, can use a demo template for Woocommerce, apply and be accepted, only to clean out other people's cards en masse and zero intent to operate as a legitimate business.

How far back do we have to go? I know this isn't reddit, but can't help but feel like this is a joke since there's nothing in 2017.

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