Plaid CEO has some words for Stripe: https://twitter.com/zachperret/status/1521898404061716480
> Wow! Jay, you took interviews with Plaid & asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years, and your team sent repeated RFP's (under NDA!) to us asking for tons of detailed data. I wish y'all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods.
I don't know. Talking with a company shouldn't disqualify you from ever working on a competing product. Sending an RFP doesn't mean you can never build your own product.
The Plaid CEO is trying to anchor the conversation around malicious intent, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where this product-minded person legitimately explored working with Plaid, legitimately explored partnership opportunities at Stripe, and walked away believing it would be better for Strip and for himself to build a competing solution at Stripe.
Plaid's product isn't entirely novel. In my experience as a consumer it has failed at least 3/4 times I've tried to use it with my financial institutions. I'm frankly more surprised that it took this long for anyone to enter their space to compete against Plaid.
Talking to companies about their product and then later deciding you'd rather build your own isn't really surprising. Plaid was definitely aware that Stripe was a potential competitor going into those meetings.
https://twitter.com/jay_ssh/status/1521973965098561536
Plaid CEO maliciously misled people.
1. Obviously this is a product we'd want to build because our customers want it
2. We contacted Plaid to see if they wanted to be part of it
3. Plaids pricing didn't work for us so we built it ourselves / went with other providers
Not sure what you'd even get from talking to the team at Plaid that couldn't be learned in an afternoon or two using product that use Plaid and hacking on banking API's.
In my view, ethics go out the window when the mantra is to eat the world. The kind of ultra-fast, ultra-huge growth that Stripes pitches to investors and also to its employees comes at great cost. We've seen this with prior tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Google who also invested heavily into developer PR.
Jay met with people from Plaid a few times. All were at Plaid's requests...
RFP is about Plaid becoming the service partner for Stripe like how MX is currently a partner. Plaid decided not to become a partner.
Source: https://twitter.com/jay_ssh/status/1521973965098561536
And of course plaid CEO doesn't respond.
Plaid CEO mentioned "interview" but intentionally left out "8 fucking years ago, and it was a job interview".
Plaid CEO also got the RFP, so they have been aware that Stripe is building this because Stripe wanted to depend on MX, Plaid, and etc. But Plaid CEO acted surprised to this launch.
It sounds like Plaid CEO maliciously misled people. Does this guy have any ethics left?
> Wow! Jay, you took interviews with Plaid & asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years, and your team sent repeated RFP's (under NDA!) to us asking for tons of detailed data. I wish y'all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods.
On the other hand, if I, a random hypothetical engineer, were interviewing someone for a team, in a 1-1 situation, and they asked about what I worked I'm, I'm naturally going to be less guarded nor really prepared to sufficiently redact my answers.
> Zach, sorry you feel this way, but this isn’t true and I think you know that. You reached out to me repeatedly—I never reached out to you for information. Stripe did an RFP because we work with partners for this product, and we had hoped to include Plaid.
A couple years ago Stripe reached out to me saying they like my background and that they want to discuss potential roles. I was working on a payments product at a FAANG company at that moment and was starting to think it’s time to do something else. So I said I am interested. Stripe scheduled an interview with Q… J… (Eng Director at Stripe). After a few generic questions about my past experiences, Stripe’s Q… J… asked a series of very specific questions about vendors/partners, API integration details, txn costs, etc. at my current company. I politely declined to answer these questions citing my employment agreement and NDA. I never heard back from Stripe again.
Edit: fix autocorrect
I'm going to do the low-effort comment and link to a Silicon Valley series video someone posted here not long ago (Brain Rape): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
Does Plaid think they are the only one who is allowed to use Bank APIs?
Anyone who uses that is considered as copying Plaid?
Plaid's CEO sounds like he is so angry he didn't know what to do.