Braintree Founder On Decision To Raise Capital vs. Continuing to Bootstrap | Hacker News Reader

Braintree Founder On Decision To Raise Capital vs. Continuing to Bootstrap

braintreepayments.com

73 pointsdaniel_levine11 comments

A good reminder to entrepreneurs -- even if you don't need the capital, having outside investment (especially from a top VC firm) essentially provides you with:

1. Validation and hopefully constructive criticism of your business model by virtue of their due diligence process.

2. Network and contacts.

These two alone are often worth more than the cash.

I'll second.

Way to go BrainTree! We use them at http://cam.ly, and the straightforwardness of their terms, and customer service has always been in a different league, compared to other merchant account providers.

Not to mention, a sane, documented API, and features / terms that actually make sense.

If that's true, I for one will support them, even if it's just out of spite for Paypal. Paypal has the worst customer service I've ever seen in my life.

I have a friend who has worked support for Braintree (he moved into coding but still sometimes helps out with support) and I can promise you their support blows Paypal out of the water. It's a pretty awesome company.

If any of the "Braintreeps" are here, could you comment in more detail on the Blockbuster -> Netflix'esque transformations in the payments industry?

Other than Square and possibly a mobile phone wallet I can't think of many major sea changes that are underway right now.

We'd love to go into more detail on our thoughts about the future of payments, but we'd like to take adequate time to articulate them well. Maybe we'll do a blog post about this soon.

One of the big recent changes I'm aware of is that users can now host their own page and merely post to a payment service, without being PCI compliant. Before the payment service had to host the page, which meant an iframe or a PayPal style redirect.

That's a technique that Braintree has popularized if not pioneered, but it's a neat trick that most people agree is PCI compliant (I also hope and believe this), not a change in the security standards.

Among others, USAePay has also made this possible for some years (not as well as braintree does), and the payment startup stripe http://stripe.com/ achieves the same result in a more JavaScript-y way.

It is getting more popular, though, I suppose.

I hope Braintree can now afford an across-the-board price cut. Without that, the market remains wide open for new entrants.

Congrats to BT- though my site doesn't use them, their mentality of trying to cut out fine print for CC processing is a good step in the right direction.

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