It's interesting to compare this comment with one of the other top comments on HN right now, an explanation of how Google's culture of promoting users for solving "hard problems" is ultimately a terrible, terrible strategy for their users and their company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262428

As engineers, we should to step away from our egos and our desire to do something "interesting" and focus on where our solutions actually solve real problems, like Stripe's products (often, not always!) do. Whether something is "middleware" or "not interesting" has nothing to do with how useful or valuable it is.

I'm sure there are plenty of people working at Plaid who are really interested and dedicated in working on the kind of middleware that their co-founder is denigrating here. It's a shame they have to work for a company where that kind of polish is pushed aside in favor of ambiguous "innovation". As an engineer and a customer, I know which kinds of companies and engineers I want on the other side of the table when considering business partners, and—going solely from your comment—it sounds like Plaid isn't one of those companies.

This kind of comment throwing shade on your competitors does not reflect well on you or your companies.

People want alternatives to Plaid. How do you know they are simply wrapping 3rd parties instead of building these deep integrations themselves?

It's probably financially optimal to put a nice veneer on an existing solution than to make something whole-cloth. They're running a business, not a charity, and besides -- as the consumer, why would you care? All you see is the facade anyways; unless you're making a point that the API's are actually leaky abstractions and the facade isn't that good (and I would respect that argument, if it were the case).

lots of respect for what you and the team have built at Plaid, but this is exactly the opportunity. As a developer who's worked at multiple fintechs and integrated with Plaid more times than I care to remember, it's an incredibly frustrating experience.

Ask any fintech and they'll tell you - Plaid is simultaneously the best and worst vendor they use. Best because there's no real alternative, but worst because it causes so, so, so many headaches with how unreliable the product is. The time spent building product workarounds at every company to account for Plaid issues is tremendous.

If Stripe thinks they can build something better, then I'd really love them to try.

Edit: William (co-founder of Plaid) seems to have deleted his comment, but it was basically accusing Stripe of repeatedly copying other companies.

Screenshot of deleted comment: https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1521915016668090368/photo...

If Stripe knows how to pay developers appropriate salaries (this is the under-discussed reason for SV companies being the only ones who can make good APIs - BoA is never going to pay their web team more than they pay their web team's department head, that is not possible for their culture) to develop appropriate interfaces on things, then more power to them if they can do very simple things to profit in the context of the oversights of other companies.

For those wondering, this was originally a salty comment by one of Plaid's founders calling out Stripe for being "so damn boring".