Thanks for the feedback! Will take a look at this, agreed that sounds easy and helpful.
240 karma · joined August 17, 2011
I agree with you, it's very counter-intuitive why these transactions are getting through Radar. We're iterating on some fixes right now that should stop this going forward by addressing this type of attack.
The team is digging into why the risk score is low. In general, the types of signals you describe weigh pretty heavily in Radar’s risk assessment, and should result in higher risk scores. In this particular attack, fraudulent actors are using some pretty sophisticated scripts to try and obtain lower risk scores. We’re iterating quickly to address and stop these types of attacks and score them correctly going forward.
More broadly, we’ve seen an uptick in card testing attempts across Stripe. While the absolute rate of successful card testing across the Stripe network is flat-to-somewhat-down, it’s not evenly spread—some businesses are seeing more than others. For these new testing attacks, we’re deploying mitigants in real time.
If you could, shoot me an email and we can dig in? I'm at wmegson [at] stripe.com (will DM you as well).
It must feel great to be able to support such a "simple" product, as I know there must be a ton of complexity under the hood enabling the simple form factor.
The defaults you set could make a big difference in the user experience. Maybe every first touch is chat/phone, then move to real world? Dunno if there’s a right answer but feels like something to be thoughtful about.
1) bug report: your input on describe yourself is set to email, which messes with my keyboard on my phone. Have that be text input, the other to email as it is.
2) like the idea, connecting influencers can be relevant for sales referrals, recruiting, or networking. All seem like good monetization opportunities.
3) it feels tricky to get the balance right between in person vs phone call contact. Looking forward to seeing how you’re going to handle that.
Good luck!
For EU cards, one experience I'm excited about supporting is the "tap to add" flow which may be even easier than OCR. Unfortunately only Android supports it for now, but love that experience when it's possible.
Our goal for the experience is the Apple Pay OCR experience, but it's embeddable directly in apps (so users don't have to already have it set up, if they prefer to use cards, or navigate to apple pay and come back). I agree this would be for the users not using Apple Pay.
Long term, I agree the trend is moving toward apple pay and digitized payments, but I found lots of people still like / prefer credit cards (so trend is that direction, but slope isn't super high and it'll take a while). I'm also excited about the fraud benefit of this kind of solution for bigger orgs that deal with fraud.
Unfortunately what we have isn't really sharable yet, but we're planning to update as soon as it is - but I get this isn't that helpful when you want to play around with it. We figured out the hard part (OCR algo is pulling the card info) and were hoping to get some feedback on the direction / interest level / use case before completing all the rest of it which will take us several more weeks. We'll journey on.
Would love to answer any questions and hear thoughts!
Imagine an ICO that gives more reward when users provide a proof-of-income, and more tokens go to those worse off (sort of like a graduated income tax, but for ICOs). Not saying it's a good idea, just that it's programable so we can make it do whatever we think is best, it's up to us to determine what's best. The right model would require some iteration and experimentation.
There are hard challenges I don't have an answer for -- eg, the less well off probably overlap with those less likely to be engaged with weird internet experiments -- but they feel surmountable, if we want to solve it.
Maybe something closer to the Star Trek vision of the future (vs. the other two sci fi visions I mentioned).
Despite the hype, I'm bullish on cryptocurrency tokens on potentially being a model of a more equitable design for firm returns. If done correctly, the returns of firms could go to the early participants in the network, instead of the VCs and early accredited investors that have special access. The ICO world today isn't there yet (a lot of pre-sale discount tokens to those privileged VCs; lots of ICOs aimed at the larger public are scams, and it's hard to tell the difference between them) but I think we have the tools to create more equitable models, if we only have the will.
The laws regulate once you hit certain thresholds, like $100-$500 but it's aggregate not individual contributions (and this service is geared toward more mass market crowd funding).
I missed the "skip" button, but I think you get the underlying point. You'll want to accelerate the "magic moment" as much as possible, which is the moment your users grok the value your service provides (and you'll see this in your data as you look at user retention rates for the cohort that hit this moment in your funnel vs. those that did not). You should try to figure out what this is, then obsessively try to remove as much friction as possible to getting to that point.
My guess is that for you it's either a) seeing your coffee page; or b) getting your first coffee donation (probably the second). Either way, remove as much setup as possible to create the coffee page, sharing it to their network, and get money coming in the door.
Cheers!
1. During sign up, I'm super confused why you have to set up anything related to payout before setting up your coffee page -- this is inverted to the way it should be. Get them the page as soon as possible and let them share and accept donations, then IF (big if, I bet the median amount raised is $0) they have a literal financial incentive to set up their friction-filled payout form process. If you're too worried about things going viral, then set a limit (e.g., if after $600 raised they don't have payout set up, e-mail them saying the page will stop being public until they set up payout).
2. You should curate your "creators we love" page. I hit explore and found a softcore instagram BDSM model as the first hit, and a page with a lot of comments about foot fetishes. Probably not the content you want to call out as one of the companies favorites. I would actually look at all the ones you rotate on that page and make sure they are on brand.
There are some tactical things (eg, the dropdown for country should have USA at the top, assuming thats where most of your users are) but those micro optimizations won't matter if you just re-arrange the info gathering to after the delivery of value.
#1 is will going to totally change your funnel in an important way -- I'd try it out!
Good luck!
Another I'll add from my list: "The social costs and spillover of disruption are not fairly priced today, representing a market failure; it's a problem akin to pollution in pre-regulation 19th century manufacturing."
The election of Trump and enthusiasm to "build a wall" to protect manufacturing jobs reflects a real pain felt by a large number (maybe the majority) of Americans who are scared about their future job prospects and inability to provide for their families; many tech companies today are making their problems worse. These externalities are being foisted on society and these workers, who are not involved in the disrupting technology itself, and the companies have no obligation to pay for this cost.
An assumption that disruption will "work itself out in the long run" isn't acceptable (nor is it necessarily true). I think it's like environmental pollution in the 70's, before we had the EPA to penalize the behavior. It's also accelerating, and could reach a tipping point that would put serious risks on our political system and social fabric.
What do you think about the choice of the ACLU to defend the neo-nazis' right to protest in South Carolina? I abhor the content of their speech, but I think I agree it's important that it's defended.
On the other hand, what about the restrictions on neo-nazi speech in Germany after WWII? I think I agree that this restriction of speech was a good idea, as it prevented the possibility of that thinking continuing to take root and spread.
The difference between the two scenarios in my intuition is that one feels far removed from being "real" -- I don't sense that neo-nazis are close to taking over American government (Trump jokes aside) so I see it as important to protect it as minority speech; but in post WWII Germany, it was much closer to "real" that the hate speech would transform into hateful action, including restricting speech on the other side. So the probability of the outcome of speech matters (or the popularity of the speech) in my mind, and the more minority the speech, even if abhorrent, the more important it is to protect; but, as the speech approaches majority or becomes "action" then my intuition starts to flip. But it's always maximizing protection for minority speech, and draws a bright line between speech and risk of action.
It shows how good these kinds of tools are getting that even for an Uber the best way to build an MVP website is to use a tool like Squarespace vs. spin it up using their existing expertise (and, excitingly, the same tool is equally available to everyone).
I think the scale issue is a technology problem... it's finding the right algorithm or model that scales itself vs. being human driven. You might be able to do the latter for a while to build the audience, though, and slowly replace it with the former over time (to help with chicken / egg problem).
2) It would be really cool to get the 'magic' of the command line into the hands of everyday people that don't even know what it is. Magic sort of does with with SMS. I'd love to see an app toy that you totally interact with by emailing it. Then you could email it for all sorts of automated things -- :bcc the app to log data, send it an email for reminders, simple commands could be parsed and understood. It wouldn't have to do a bunch of NLP at first, you could be strict about how the data needs to be formatted for it to work.
3) This one is nebulous, but I think software discovery for the enterprise is really broken right now. There is still WAY too much outbound phone sales and old fashion 'network' selling going on. There should be some place I could go as, say, a sales ops manager to check out the best software eating the uses cases for sales operations (Ambition, BaseCRM, Yesware, etc etc). Maybe it's product hunt style group voting. Maybe it's a curated, impartial look into the 'stacks' of the industry companies that are considered 'best in class'. Maybe it's something looking at Google trend data and finding 'momentum' sort of like Mattermark. Maybe it's a 'pagerank' style connection map by looking at VC investors and the 'client' pages of startups. I dunno the best way to get good information that scales and nimbly identifies new ideas when they emerge, but if you figured out that problem you'd be solving a huge, very real problem and be in the middle of what will be billions of dollars in $ shifting around in the next 10-20 years. Search like Google works when you already know what you want, but it's really hard to distinguish the signal and noise with all the new tech and tools and toys emerging to take over different use cases for large companies. And the people in the large companies that need to know this information often don't have enough time to do the research or even where to begin.
As you get older, long term international travel gets more and more difficult. It can be very valuable as an input on your perspective and worldview, which has long term benefit for ambitious people. PG addresses this in his lecture on doing a startup:
"You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it. "
I largely agree with his perspective. If you are naturally finding yourself at a 'break' (eg, finishing your degree) and you know it's something you want to do, I'd recommend doing it given it will only get harder to do later. Maybe if you aren't fully confident, try limiting your risk by committing to travel for a shorter period of time (eg, 3 months) then re-evaluate the value you feel you're getting from the travel to see if you should extend for another 3 months.
Traveling is hard to quantify the value for because you often won't see the benefits for a long time - it will often subtly affect your perspective in small but important ways over decades by increasing your general human empathy and understanding. And given you have a very employable degree, you will probably not have trouble finding work on your return, which is the biggest risk.
On a more practical note, I like using ephemeral tools to keep my focus on what's important. I use workflowy to keep a simple prioritized list. After something sits for too long, I can easily delete entire trees of notes to remove them from my mind. It's like ripping a page out of a notebook -- it feels great.
I met them at work on a project (I was in a different part of the company at the time). They were the more senior person running the project, and saw my interest and started helping me toward my goals. It was a pretty organic process.
I wish there was a more organized process to get a mentor, especially in areas outside of your current job. It's difficult to meet people in general, and the kind of person that is open to mentor is a small, special group.
I've never mentored anyone but given my experience I look forward to doing it one day very much.
Looking inward it feels like I still struggle with this pattern of thinking sometimes, as I suspect many people do (the feeling of "that project failed" vs. "I'm a failure, this project is evidence of this fact" is worlds apart).