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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> The reality… if you stand in their way, they will do more than compete with you head on. Flushed face They will use every power move imaginable. Blocking you from capital, media, talent. And funding competitors just to get back at you.

Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company by the power of rainbows and unicorns?

The idea that you need to reach top of HN to be relevant in SV is also a bit silly. Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."

View on HN

I've only ever heard of tens of thousands of views. Maybe it breaks 100k sometimes. I mean, we don't track who clicks on what links, but we do track HN page views and you can't click on what you don't see.

So, millions of views from an HN post is off by two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately! (or maybe fortunately)

Wow, I would have assumed it's significantly higher than tens of thousands of views, given how often websites get hugged to death. I guess people really skimp out on hosting plans.

Or have an unfortunate habit of hosting their sites on mind-numbingly inefficient architectures. E.g. vanilla Wordpress seems to run 500-1000ms TTFB on a standard shared hosting plan.

PG is on the record talking about being "good" and "nice".

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html

> Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."

Yeah, my posts have been on the front page a couple of times and it's nowhere near millions of views.

I think for a lot of posts, people just comment and upvote based on the title, and never click through to register an actual view. For products this is still valuable because of brand recognition. That being said, I really doubt YC has the bandwidth to target all the competitors of their top companies.

Same here. My blog posts that hit #1 and stayed up for a while never generated over 10k views. Now, a product like Bolt or Stripe might attrack more views, but I doubt that HN even has a million views on an average day.

> Pretty sure this is how business is done.

FYI - It's illegal to do what Bolt founder tweeted. Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it.

Not sure how this ever gets proven..

> Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it.

Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction. Breslow himself admits there are competitors. We're also conveniently forgetting that Bolt just raised $355M at an $11B valuation, who am I supposed to feel sorry for again?

> Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction.

I didn’t say they are.

What does Stripe have a monopoly on?

Excellent execution in the payments space and expanding beyond that to support business infrastructure and development through things like Treasury and Atlas etc.

Not sure that qualifies as a monopoly, but in general Stripe is an example of one (so far).

There are definitely competitors. Stripe just does it better. That is hardly a monopoly. That just means they are the best.

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