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Comment by ihaveqvestion | Hacker News Reader

Why don't Balanced and Stripe work together on these features? I understand that they're competitors, but it seems as though we've got good engineers in both companies needlessly duplicating effort. Why not work together to provide this feature and spend that limited engineering time, expertise, and innovation on the things which differentiate the service? Stripe and Balanced aren't direct competitors, I think - why not work together on the common ground and use the time saved to make the differences really shine?

[I think I'm being overly utopian, but I don't understand why. Can someone explain it to me?]

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For the same reason most companies don't share trade secrets.

- Stripe and Balanced ARE direct competitors, much more so than say Stripe and Braintree or Balanced and PayPal. Balanced handles the money in a bit of a different way, but the end product is very similar (i.e. receive payments from cards and bank accounts, and send payments to bank accounts [and now debit cards for both as well]).

- One or both companies may feel they have the better solution (see steveklabnik's comment above), and thus collaborating would be giving away intellectual capital for less in return

As a potential customer, you should prefer that they do work separately, because when different teams come up with different solutions, the chances are greater that at least one of those solutions is correct. This leads to greater long-term health in the industry as a whole.

Read the "Founders at Work" chapter on Max Levchin and Paypal. In PayPal's early stages, there were multiple companies all trying to do online money transfers securely. They were all fighting fraud to the tune of millions of dollars daily. Eventually, PayPal was the first to figure out some ingenious ways to combat fraud. With the first reliable online money transfer network, they were able to dominate the market, especially on Ebay then the largest ecommerce site. tl;dr - Winner-take-all market.

I'm not even sure how that would work and it makes no sense at all.

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