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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

It's a really amazing case of a business going into a crowded space and building a solution to what anyone would have called a thoroughly-solved problem and still managed to disrupt it. They didn't really "invent" anything or make a new market, they just did something better than everyone else. And, I think, got incredibly lucky with entering the market at the exact right time.

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While I see your point, I went through several scammy credit card processing solutions (one from an intuit subsidiary, one from a local bank) back around 2013 before I found stripe.

You wouldn’t think that “it’s easy to use and not scammy” Would have been an innovation, but at that stage, I think it was.

Man, we got burned with a "contracted" credit card solution, complete with horrible support, service and billing.

It is curious to wonder how they managed to lead the company this successfully. How often do young founders actually hang onto leadership this long without either imploding or being replaced? Why are the Collison brothers different?

IMO...value. I personally feel like it's always easier for founders to stay on when their product provides actual, tangible, objective value. It clearly shows that they (the founders) sort've know their market, and know what they're doing (to some degree). When that's the case, I feel investors are happy to get out of the way and watch their equity rise. Whereas when a service isn't providing any real differential value, it's a lot easier to try to swap out the founders for the MBA/finance/corporate type that doesn't really know the market/audience.

>How often do young founders actually hang onto leadership this long without either imploding or being replaced? Why are the Collison brothers different?

Stripe is great, so I assume these guys are good leaders. But Stripe was founded in 2011. Are there not plenty of young founders of that era "hanging on" to their leadership? I don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here.

I think it's to some extent the good old Irish charm, and I say that as someone married to a much better Irish other half.

Is that amazing? It might actually be the standard way.

Google - better search. Search was "solved", just not well. Zoom - better video chat. It was "solved", not well. Amazon - they've never done anything original, always just better. Online books was done, colo servers were a thing. Apple - same. Telsa - better electric cars. Airbnb - better short term rental market. Salesforce - better CRM. Snowflake - better data warehouse.

And on and on and on. It seems nobody actually wants new things. They seem to want better on some dimension.

There are exceptions, but they are few.

I think you’re selectively choosing what constitutes “new” vs. “better”.

As Henry Ford said, if you ask people what they want they’ll tell you a faster horse. It’s not as if the automobile wasn’t new and revolutionary, but nobody cares about cars. They care about getting around. And a way to get around that was faster, more powerful and more reliable…that was new. It’s the details that matter.

If you take your view, the moon landing was hardly anything noteworthy because animals have been migrating to new lands for millions of year.

You just noted an exception, and they exist.

The moon landing wasn't a product.

"New" v "better" isn't saying something is or isn't noteworthy. Tesla is a hell of a story. So is SpaceX. So is Apple. So is Google. Amazing technical leaps. All noteworthy, all creating immense value.

I've learned over the years that most people overlook the bottom part of the iceberg.

Stripe nailed everything else about the business. They made everything that sucked about old credit card processors good. It wasn't just the transaction. It was everything that led up to it (simple integration, debugging, good dev documentation, sane APIs, etc) and everything after. Eventually, they even made the transactions better with alternative methods, fraud, and recurring payment pass-through.

> they just did something better than everyone else

Wow, HN's ability to dismiss and diminish major accomplishments continues to astound me.

Better execution is considered the biggest compliment in the industry. Novel ideas are sort of considered a passé path to success. In that context, it sounds more like idolization than insult.

You think saying "a really amazing case of a business [that executed] better than everyone else" is dismissive and diminishing?

"Just" implies it wasn't a big deal.

Warren Buffett just focuses on business all day. Tom Brady just thinks about football all day.

The word 'just' is used in many cases to show someone did one thing and not other things. Doing lots of things is often just stupid.

"just" has an implication, "only" or "solely" would be more neutral words.

Nope, people say "just" all the time for this case. You might think they should use "only" or "solely", but they say "just" frequently.

Sometimes "just" does have an implication.

If you assume the writer isn't being a dick, it's easy to see what they meant.

> got incredibly lucky with entering the market at the exact right time

I also found this to be a somewhat shallow analysis, considering their sustained success over a decade.

It might be shallow, but it's right. Nothing wrong with getting lucky.Those guys worked hard and are smart for sure, but luck had a lot to do with it.

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