Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse | Hacker News Reader

Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse

numair.medium.com

136 pointsnumair80 comments

There was a point in time, maybe circa 2008, where platforms were expected to be a thing. The web was/is a platform. Operating systems were a platform, and MSFT even got rich. Platforms had the power to support an ecosystem so rich their inventors' could never have imagined it.

Facebook and Twitter genuinely had plans to be platforms, remember? Paul Graham even called it a new core protocol, and YC recruited startups specifically to build onto it.

...It didn't work out that way. The "platform" analogy doesn't really hold. What did emerge was one of two things. One model is the "portal" concept, of dotcom buzz. Google & Facebook are portals to content, and they have all the power/profit that comes with controlling access... AKA, exactly what we were afraid ISPs and AOL-like efforts would try to do... the reason why "net neutrality" got a name. The other model is private marketplaces: Youtube, amazon, spotify, etc. You make the rules, cream the market and tax the participants.

Stripe is a portal, sort of. They're a lot like Visa.

I think 80s/90s operating system wars an anomaly that led smart people at that time to think private companies could be real platforms. PG even wrestles with the problem in his short not on the topic re: twitter. Modern, locked down app store OSs are the normal outcome. The "ecosystems" exist to support the portal, not the other way around.

Closed platforms are still platforms.

I don't want to argue the semantics.

Beyond that, I did note that windows is a platform, so obviously there are exceptions. In any case, the implication of "platform" in the sense that I (and pg, in 2008) used it implies that the ecosystem transcends the platform. Salesforce is a platform in a sense, but it can only go so far.

That is possible, for a private platform, but unlikely. OSS has, empirically, been much more amenable to this sort of thing.

Agreed, with perhaps the exception of Apple. They've remained a platform, with a healthy amount of apps they own and operate outright, and sweeping control of their ecosystem elsewhere.

Maybe not forever it looks like though.

It appears Salesforce.com has mostly remained a platform.

Edwin from Stripe here. At first, I think I agree with the title (the article itself, not so much). Stripe isn't really a platform. It's a platform of platforms.

The three products linked to in the article, Invoicing, Payment Links, and Capital, were three of the most requested features from our users. So we built them.

And platforms use all of them to provide these services to their users. Invoicing's smart dunning enables 14% more revenue collection; Payment Links lets businesses get started with payments with no code (and no additional cost!); Capital not only gives businesses instant access to financing that flexes with income — but allows platforms to provide that fast financing to their customers. Since these products were requested by our users, we think they'll be useful for other businesses and their customers too.

The core of Stripe is very much still platform-focused. After all, Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the internet. It'd be a bit naive to think that that just means payments processing in today's economy. Starting and running an internet business will always be evolving (and is getting increasingly complex), and Stripe will continue to build the products that our users ask of us.

> Stripe isn't really a platform. It's a platform of platforms.

See? It's not a pyramid. It's an inverted funnel!

hilarious. thank you

It's a trapezoid!

Hey Edwin,

Think it would be reasonable to also simply acknowledge that good small ideas might eventually become features of the platform:

<< Smaller companies make products that build upon, or fill gaps within, platforms from larger companies. The best of those ideas — ideas that truly would be better “built in”, eventually do get built in. The small innovators need to adapt or die (or get acquired, and become the built-in version) >>

from https://daringfireball.net/2021/05/apple_built_in_advantage

Stripe WAS "just means payments processing" and changed course to "increase the GDP of the internet". That is exactly the point of the article.

This is true of basically all platforms, including every major cloud provider.

AWS's playbook can be described as: 1. Provide low level infra 2. Observe what customers build on it 3. Create a general solution and charge a premium for it 4. Repeat, moving higher up the stack.

Not to mention Amazon.com's "Basics" playbook of finding what sells, then knocking it off, releasing their own version (and ranking it higher for search).

To be a little fairer to AMZN, they didn't invent store brands. Every major big box retailer/supermarket does this.

There's a 99% Invisible podcast related to the development of store brands[0]. Very interesting listen.

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/podcast-episode/

The issue there needs to be a mechanism, say an added/increased tax, to extract more value from the companies covering more services or industries due to the economies of scale and other advantages - and then that money funneled into smaller, new(er) entrants so there are competitors that can exist as a fallback/failsafe.

Im not sure I follow. You’re suggesting that the government should somehow get involved to levy taxes on companies based on subjective criteria, like how big they are, and then … fund startups to compete with them?

We already have a Small Business Administration that gives loans to small businesses, including start-ups. There’s also an extremely vibrant venture funding industry out there just waiting to write checks.

Additionally, it would be hard to argue that Stripe has anything like a payment processing monopoly. If you don’t like their products, use one of the myriad other companies offering payment processing solutions.

It's more complex than this but yes, allow smaller competitors to exist long enough to compete by offering similar enough products as a large, evolved ecosystem/platform provides, as to eventually have competition in place to keep fees/how much they extract from society in check.

I didn't argue Stripe has a monopoly but even ogilopolies once mature enough are problematic.

Also of you're trying to argue VCs make investments in companies that ultimately make good decisions for society vs. self-interested - then I disagree.

"everyone agreed on a solution: let the cat handle it. And so, for what seemed like an eternity, the cat went to work on the mouse, slowly torturing it limb-by-limb. This went on for at least a day, probably longer."

Yikes. What the hell is wrong with these people?

> Former Motorola exec and entrepreneur Numair Faraz

Rich tech assholes. There was other hints earlier in the article, including negging his rich friends while simultaneously humble bragging about how rich his friends are.

It's like a real-life Voight-Kampff test scenario.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but animals don't care about the humane treatment of the other animals they kill.

I don't think he was expecting the cat to care, but the cat owners.

Also glue traps are heinously cruel.

Right. Followed later by this gem:

> And when faced with a mouse, there’s three options: kick it out, run away in terror, or catch and torture it.

I think you learn more about the author than about Stripe from this article.

This is "dark humor", and probably involves a healthy amount of poetic license. I found it funny. But I also butchered, cooked, and ate a rooster last weekend.

Nothing wrong with (presumably) humanely butchering an animal to eat. I would guess you didn't pull it's legs and wings off one-by-one and watch it scream and writhe just for fun.

I found this very weird too. If the cat found the mouse by itself, sure, there's not much you can do about it. But giving the mouse to him and watching him torture it for a day? That's honestly very weird and cruel.

Have you really never done this? This is the main reason to own cats.

My cats brought me dead mice a few times, and one time I saw one playing with a mouse and didn't interrupt him. However I've never given them a live mouse to play with. I feel like letting them hunt a mouse and giving them a mouse that you've already caught and could kill quickly is very different.

Uh yeah, I've never given my cat a live animal to torture on purpose. I also don't let it out to roam and kill all the local songbirds either.

If you have a barn full of crops to protect from rats or something, then sure, use a cat as a ratter, though there might be more humane ways to deal with your rat problem.

But if you're giving animals to your cat to kill for your own entertainment, then you seriously need help.

We're talking about mice. They have been the bane of humanity since the dawn of agriculture. Imagining they have some sort of moral worth is living in a dream world.

Mice in or around my house has no relation to "the bane of humanity since the dawn of agriculture", I live pretty far from any farm, and the most they ate from me is crumbs on the floor. Wanting to kill them is fine, and I understand totally. Letting your cat kill them if he catches them before you, totally fine for me too. He hunted her, it's his prey, why not? On the other hand, giving mice that you caught to your cat so he can torture them is not in the same in my book.

I give all mice to the cats, whether dead or alive. Supervising a cat's treatment of a mouse is not something I will ever spend a second of my life doing. Enjoying how demented and evil cats naturally are, I have spent so far, in total, at least twenty minutes over 45 years doing.

I'm glad that cats are on our team.

Enjoyment of the torture of small mammals is literally the textbook definition of psychopathy. I don't care that my cat plays with it's food, but it is grim reality that I try to avoid thinking about, like where my burger comes from.

I keep chickens, and I hate the bastards - They're an incredible pain in my ass. I have never slaughtered one for supper, but I know I could do so. Again, though, I would handle it with grim reality.

If there are "grim realities" involved with eating meat, it may be time to consider vegetarianism, or at least more ethical butchers.

There are grim realities involved in eating vegetables, walking to work, and taking a piss. I will not stop doing any of the above.

I'll admit that it feels a bit alien to me, but I don't know anything about you so it's not my place to judge. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

You're welcome, and thanks for the reasoned conversation. You seem to be the only person in the thread not to attempt at amateur psychological diagnosis.

Did you read the whole article? They already had trapped the mouse and then deliberately led the cat to slowly torture the mouse to death.

It's one thing if the cat finds the mouse, but to go out of one's way to trap an animal yourself and then present the helpless trapped animal to another animal so they can be tortured for hours is extremely sadistic and psychopathic, in my opinion.

>living with my lawyer and his family at their townhouse in New York City

What the fuck? Who is this person?

> Former Motorola exec and entrepreneur Numair Faraz

Aha, so I'm reading a propaganda piece by someone with financial incentive to... convince me to invest? convince me to not invest? I don't know, because I know whatever message it is, it's not to my advantage to read it, but to his advantage.

Ya I’m pretty sure that’s a sentence in English that’s never been written before. I love how that was dropped in as if that were totally a normal thing to do with no explanation.

Hunter S. Thompson would like to have a word with you.

I feel like its inevitable to grow most businesses in which they are structured from outside investment. Outliers here may be Microsoft And Apple, but they swallowed nascent markets that were either just underway or they had major capital to spend their way aggressively toward the top of the heap (Apple, with the Macintosh and later the iPhone, Microsoft with Office / Windows and now Azure)

Most other platforms struggle to stay platforms because the profits and/or growth slows or flatlines. Facebook has had massive growth since dumping any platform focus that they used to have, in terms of revenue. They instead made strategic investments so they have a near iron lock on the market in which they exist, all while burning the platform from a provider side.

It hard to be a platform and remain true to core values when there is outside investor pressure. I sure hope this never befalls a company like Cloudflare (which has so far remained a platform), but we shall see as time goes on.

I wonder are they awaiting a big wave to take them to the next level of profitability and releasing "nibble" features until it happens.

A comparative YouTube/Cloud Computing/Whatsapp moment. It might be crypto who knows.

Will be interesting to see if there is enough vision there to spot/pursue the opportunity.

I don't understand this analogy. A business solves one problem very well, then slowly expands to related areas where they can apply their existing strengths and experience. This is true not just for Stripe but any successful company ever created. So are they all mice?

As developers it's easy to look at these things and think "wait, that's my job".

Except... it isn't. If these things can be abstracted away, made easier... that's good. That's what we strive for. You don't have to be the millionth dev to develop invoices or shopping carts. That's wasted effort imo.

These things becoming available as a service frees us up to solve more interesting problems. If devs 20 years from now still have to put deep thought into invoicing for ecommerce after we've already spent millions of hours on the problem, that would be a failure of the industry.

So I guess I disagree with the other commenters and hope software service providers continue to expand their offerings to meet my technical and business needs.

I don't think there is any argument here isn't that everyone should build their own payment stack, or their own shopping card, or invoicing software.

It's that other companies that have built on top of Stripe as a platform are all being eaten away at, and often done in a way that a "stripe platform" user can't compete with (either through private APIs, or across-the-board data access, etc).

Stripe bills itself not just as an end-user service, but also as a "platform". The argument is if you effectively kick your "business partners" off your platform as soon as you want to do the thing they do, then you're not really a "platform".

While I understand and somewhat agree with your perspective I think the opposite can also be true. For example Stripe subscriptions. If you use them you paint yourself into a corner where you can’t innovate on that aspect of your business model. You have to take what you get but really there are many optimisations you can do you make subscriptions better or unique if you just use payment intents (or whatever preapproved cards are called) and write the subscriptions logic yourself. These will help set your business apart from the competition and provide you with more opportunities to deliver what your customers want.

Stripe’s trajectory seems limitless - what can’t they do next? I love them as a company and their people are driven, smart, and kind.

However, the grip they have over the Internet keeps increasing. Whether they eat into your product or increase your fees it seems inevitable given a lack of competition. The PayPals / Braintrees, Adyens, etc are just not innovating at the same rate.

Even their largest customers likely feel "too integrated" and have minimal leverage as Stripe continues to dominate whatever it chooses. I hope before long there is a solid challenger to keep them in check, but I don't have my hopes up.

I believe this holds true for all platforms (profit motive will beat any altruism in the long run). All platforms are "mice" (or will become mice, given sufficient time and pressure).

Building on top of any platform should trigger your "I'm making a tradeoff" spider sense. It's pretty obvious that using Stripe is net positive for any small company starting up right now. In 5 yrs, ehen that startup is doing $100M/yr in sales, the net gain of using Stripe is less obvious. But would the startup have been able to grow to $100M/yr without sending payment links or invoices via Stripe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When I saw payment links had launched my first thought was, "Wow I bet there are a lot of little guys that have built or are building similar products on top of stripe"

As far as "being a mouse" goes, I think payment links has to be the absolute lowest hanging fruit.

It will be interesting to see how much Stripe backs into Shopify's offering - all their hosted checkout pages and customer portals start to overlap with other hosted retail solutions and it still aligns with their mission to increase the GDP of the internet.

I thought about building it as an indie hacker project.

Square does most of these things too, and Square Capital existed years before Stripe Capital. Stripe provides servers to SMBs. It's likely that a lot of them want a simple, bundled solution versus a large enterprise using Adyen along with a different provider for invoices, etc.

I'm in need of a platform I can point to for my business and businesses I partner with. So if I can't reliably use Stripe without looking over my shoulder, who should I turn to? Square is not the solution I'm looking for, as they seem to cater to POS.

What the author fails to account for is that even if Stripe is a mouse, the majority of its customers are insects. Small businesses with <$10000/mo revenue are not going to care about Stripe's other services because the small business only has a few avenues of revenue generation anyways. Larger businesses have the capital to just cut Stripe out when they need to. Not everyone who uses Stripe is making millions of dollars a year, and not everyone needs to worry about their payments provider nullifying their business model when they sell coffee down the street.

Uh... not sure I want to learn from the perspective of someone who thinks torture -- literal torture -- is the solution to a problem, even if it's a mouse.

Yeah, what the fuck? Their decision to let the cat play with the mouse over an entire day startled me when I first read it, and then bringing it up again later in the article as one of the only solutions for dealing with a mouse really threw me out of the article.

It's hard to tell ahead of time. When I was a kid, our cat would immediately chew the head off mice.

We lived in a cottage. During the winter, when there were mice in the house, you might hear one rustling around the grill (I think that's a broiler to Americans) of the electric cooker, eating crumbs and whatnot. The easiest way to catch these mice was to put the cat up on the counter then rattle the grill pan around until the mouse jumped out, whereupon the cat pounced.

My sympathy for the mice was limited. Finding mouse droppings in your breakfast cereal, your bread nibbled into, footprints across your butter, etc. gets old pretty quickly, and we were poor. The nearest shop was 2 miles away, and we couldn't afford a car. Mouse traps didn't catch all the mice.

I'm perfectly fine with letting cats take care of mouse infestations, but it sounds like the humans caught the mouse, and then gave it to the cat to play with like a toy:

> Strategies were formed. Glue traps were laid. Bait was provisioned. And then, surely enough, the mouse was caught.

> Having caught the mouse, the question became what to do about it. Due to the host of frustrations and problems that the mouse had caused for the inhabitants of the house, everyone agreed on a solution: let the cat handle it. And so, for what seemed like an eternity, the cat went to work on the mouse, slowly torturing it limb-by-limb. This went on for at least a day, probably longer.

I collect payments on my website with PayPal and Stripe, and am satisfied with neither. So what alternatives do I have?

From my perspective, the advantage of PayPal is that users worldwide can pay in weird currencies and it just works. Stripe is much better designed but I'm not keen on their plans for world domination. I just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees for routine transactions.

I'm not sure what you're looking for beyond what PayPal offers. You say you "just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees" but you also say that PayPal "just works," which seems to satisfy your requirements.

So, can you elaborate more on what you want? Do you feel that PayPal is taking exorbitant fees? What would make a "just works" system better than PayPal?

Does Stripe "just work" for you? If not, what doesn't work?

Are you looking for a payment processor with no "plans for world domination?" (Good luck with that! This problem is hard and globe-spanning ambition seems to be universal among the competitors.)

PayPal's APIs, SDKs and documentation are leagues below Stripe's. It's simply much more of a pain to work with. And if you are using PayPal for a SaaS, it quickly becomes clear that it's not the intended use case (every payment has the option to "print a packing slip", for example).

I agree with all this, and would stress the particularly painful point with PayPal is testing.

I'm fine with plans for world domination in the early stage, I just don't really want to help the drive to monopoly later on. Stripe is now big enough that I'm ready to point my meager business at the next upstart.

As far as being better than PayPal, I mainly want something that customers who hate PayPal can use (there are many of them and they are vocal).

I just feel like Stripe is inherently limited because of who they work with. They're not the top of the totem pole. So it means that they can't screw you over, otherwise some investor is going to wise up, take a small amount of capital and work directly with the processors. I imagine you could bootstrap a Stripe alternative with just under $1,000,000-5,000,000.

I mean what's stopping people from signing up directly with Chase Paymentech or Wells Fargo Merchant Services and just creating their own Stripe? Or if you wanted to, talking directly with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

There's an absolute floor to these solutions, and it's clearly 2.9% + 25-30c. You cannot grow beyond this. You have to do more.

If you're interested in doing this, I'll help you build the team.

Isn't this a natural progression as the business grows? They specialized and now, they're expanding to fill a broader market? Similar to AMZ being a platform, but now they also sell and compete with sellers directly with AmazonBasic

Yup. That’s why I feel a little bit uncomfortable being their customer. You can tell their end goal is to become the e-commerce platform for everyone. It might sound great for customers until they aren’t.

Businesses are there to make money for their shareholders. If the best way of doing that is to become a monopoly and squeeze customers, then that's what they'll do.

I'm not sure what the author is complaining about. Why wouldn't Stripe expand into every available niche it can reach and "nibble" customers for every cent it can?

What kind of board meeting would that be: "we've identified an opportunity here, but we've decided not to pursue it because that would be mean, or something"

I don't agree he is complaining. He is simply pointing out something that others might have missed. He is merely making an observation.

True, I guess. Though he definitely doesn't think mice are good things to have around ;)

Does the mouse analogy hold though?

The relationship between a mouse and food in a house is not symbiotic, whereas there is value provided in Stripe's "nibbling", if there wasn't the merchants would reject it, right?

Does the author have a follow-up post on "how not to be a mouse"? I think that might interesting, unless all "platforms" are fated to be mice?

Am I the only one who finds it weird that somebody is living with his lawyer and family?

Before one writes the next six-figure check to his attorney, he may realize he'll need to sell the Tribeca loft, and be prompted to inquire desperately "where will I stay when I'm in New York?" Enterprising attorneys will put their client at ease and deposit that check at their first opportunity.

I have so many questions

Some people are really social like that. They enjoy guests and think it's good that their kids meet a variety of people.

It's a systemic problem. The issue is that people need platforms and that need supports the monopolistic rent-seeking etc.

The solution is going to be decentralized protocols.

In Stripe's case, wide deployment of scalable cryptocurrency will make their business obsolete.

Wide deployment of a scalable and useful crypto will make a lot of things obsolete.

While I think this would be great, is there any example of this in the real world? I can't think of anything that is gaining even a minutia of traction that is like this.

And I'm not going to count people hoping the technology catches up with the ideals here.

Don’t worry Chamath doesn’t work at Stripe so we’ll be good.

The author got their point across - I understand the author is frustrated with Stripes business practices. However, the author fails to get me to agree with their view, in part because of the poor taste comparison of Stripe to record industry executives. The author tries to keep the record exec comparison to the record industry's fiscal stranglehold over artists, but as a reader all I think about are the stories that have come out from the girls that were physically taken advantage of by those execs. It feels like a dog whistle, and in my opinion discredits the rest of the argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com