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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing to compare here. One company has a vision and a goal and the ability to execute on those. The other is a clone. They will always be second, they will always follow through, they will not innovate. That's for most clones.

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So? A payment processor is, in many ways, a utility. There's only so much innovation I need out of Stripe - they need to process payments for me. Done. If a competitor is cheaper, it's valid to go for them.

If that is all you see, then you're missing the bigger picture here. You need more than just 'an utility'.

You need trust, competence and support.

They need to be good at everything they do. Usually you won't get that from clones.

Don't get me wrong, there are usually where a clone could be good, but the Samwer Brothers don't do it to be the best.

When shit hits the fan, you want to be sure that Stripe will step up - don't expect that from cheap clones.

You're conflating two things here. I agree that clones more often lack innovation - it's inherent in the way they're made. But there's no automatic correlation that they'll be bad at customer service, or incompetent. There's also no guarantee that the original company will be good at these things.

Put simply, there are times when "the best" isn't necessary, for financial reasons. Particularly when we're talking about payment processors that are literally skimming a percentage of your profit.

Yeah. Ultimately they're both trying to deliver incremental improvements to the developer-friendly full-stack payment platform model that had already been validated by Braintree as an incremental improvement on payment platforms that had been around since before the internet. It's updating an old, unfashionable industry for an audience in a particular part of the world, not making "a game that looks a bit like Foo" or yet another Groupon clone. Being incubated by Rocket Internet doesn't necessarily make you a vastly worse-run company than being incubated by YC.

The difference is the way it took to get where they are, technically speaking. On one side, they chose to architecture their SDKs/APIs in a way for some reasons, after some thinking. And they are going to keep improving on it in a consistent way. Same thing for customer support. On the other side: "Hey, it works for them, let's not think, throw $10M and do the same!", but I don't think it's possible to improve the product when you just rely on the innovation on someone else. Until now, the only valid reason that made people chose Paymill was that they were available in Europe, but Stripe is going to change that soon.

One other good example to show how good rocket internet is: Here is a french website: http://www.adopteunmec.com/ (you can translate it by "adoptaguy.com") And here come RI in Germany: http://www.shopaman.de/, looks familiar?

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