His claims about HN are false. Short version: his post was 2+ hours later than Stripe's, not an hour earlier, and fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything (which I suppose is what his mafia/mob language was intended to imply).
The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to.
I don't know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That's standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.)
None of the flags came from YC founders or staff. (Edit: I looked into whether it might have been Stripe people doing the flagging here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070445.) HN moderators did not make the post fall in rank, or moderate the post at all. I don't think I'd ever heard of Bolt before today.
The article no longer exists on bolt.com, but if you want to compare it to
the stripe.com article, the articles are here:
His insinuations about HN are false too. He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do.
Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status on HN. It's true that this is incredibly hard to do. Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup). Startups achieve this by doing three things: producing products that the community considers good, producing articles that the community finds interesting, and mastering the art of interacting with the community. You need all three.
I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).
All 4 of the startups I've mentioned have the advantage that they were|are targeting programmers, which gives them a fast track to rapport with this community—sort of a ladder in the snakes-and-ladders game. However, that's not a sufficient condition for getting a satisfying click with the community, and it isn't a necessary one either. The real problem is that so much of the content that startups produce to try to interest this community just isn't interesting enough (to this community), and often gives off inadvertent signals of being uninteresting—things like seeming too enterprisey, or too slick in the marketing department.
If the bolt.com people had asked us for help, I would have been just as happy to help them as anybody else. I would have told them that the opening of their article (https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...) was too enterprisey to appeal to HN. The language is drawn from ecommerce retailing, which makes sense given the little bit we've all learned about Bolt today, but is the kind of thing that comes across as boring on HN. The references to Gartner and Experian feel like reading an enterprise whitepaper, which detracts from credibility with the HN audience.
This is the sort of thing I've told countless startups over the years. It's dismayingly difficult to express this information in a way that people can actually absorb, but I have a set of notes that I've sent to many startups in this position, which I plan to turn into an essay about how to write for HN. if anyone wants a copy, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll be happy to send it to you.
I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say here, but mercifully, I've forgotten them.
Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup).
We spent a huge amount of time on the Cloudflare blog making sure that it was precisely not a marketing outlet but technical. I think that's why it took off here. And we were/are very honest about when we had/have problems* and use simple, clear language. I personally spent/spend hours per day editing/writing for the blog.
"One of the smartest decisions we made at @Cloudflare was recognizing that the primary purpose of our blog was attracting employees, not attracting customers."
Yes, and I've spent a lot of time on HN over the years answering questions about Cloudflare. So, I think the story of our success on HN is a combination of content and commitment to the community (and a slap on the wrist from @dang for being overly aggressive posting blog.cloudflare.com links).
That you can write well outside of blogs is evident from your posts. You obviously put in a lot of time sweating how to write before you joined Cloudflare, and that makes your blog posts a joy to read.
The Geek Atlas is one of my favorite books by anybody, BTW.
Well, in case if this matters at all. I truly enjoy how you ‘eastdakota and ‘Kentonv engage with this forum - whether things are going well or not, I’ve come to expect a level of honest, direct and transparent dialog from you all. Oh and you are a really good author - truly enjoyed your book.
Would add Bolt's unique fundraising strategy to the equation. They raised at $500mm post in July 2020, $850mm that December, $4.8bn in September 2021 and $11bn just now. If WeWork was the smoke signal for an overhyped pre-pandemic IPO market and Clover Health for SPACs, Bolt Financial is the post child for the runaway valuations of 2021. Blaming Stripe for its fundraising difficulties is absurd.
I really want to read those notes you've written (I've sent you an email).
Paul Graham, Patrick Collison and Vitalik Buterin all have this ability to express ideas in an extremely deep yet clear and concie way.
It's one thing to do this individually, but what amazes me is their ability to scale out this communication sty;e to their entire organization. If you read any of the blog posts by YC, Stripe and the Ethereum Foundation you'll understand what I mean. You can also see how it stands so far ahead of most other companies.
A recent example that comes to mind for anyone interested: Ethereum Foundation's blog post explaining why they're moving away from calling their upgrades "Eth2"and just calling it "Eth" instead.
I'd love to read more on this topic - how companies learn to do this, and then go about establishing it internally, so that it becomes part of their brand and culture.
Could a competitor have its employees flag a submission? Does HN have automatic vote manipulation detection? Does HN have automatic flag manipulation detection?
Yes, we've worked a lot on detecting such manipulation.
I looked into whether it was employees doing the flagging, but I didn't include that in the GP because I can't tell for sure who was or wasn't an employee. What I did find is that of the flaggers, most haven't ever voted for a stripe.com submission (before or since). There were two flaggers who have voted for quite a few stripe.com submissions, but not enough to trigger any manipulation detectors. They both had voted for many thousands of submissions over many years, so I didn't find any evidence of abuse. In the case of one of those two users, there is a bio in the profile which makes it seem unlikely that they worked for Stripe. In the case of the other one, I don't have any info.
FWIW, looking at the flagging data on that post pattern-matched to 'normal' in my brain, not to 'suspicious'. I realize that won't (and shouldn't) carry any weight for users who aren't already inclined to trust what I'm saying, but (a) we do have a ton of experience looking at suspicious voting and flagging patterns, and (b) it's true, so I figure I might as well say it.
Edit: I just thought of another way to investigate this, which I overlooked earlier: I looked at everything else that those users had flagged. That was easy enough, because none of them has flagged more than a few dozen submissions over the years. There were no other cases of people flagging Stripe-related submissions, except for this one, which was a pro-Stripe story:
Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405? It wasn't flagged. (More precisely, it was, but the flags were dropped by HN's anti-abuse system, and wouldn't have affected the story's rank in any case because the upvotes were massively dominant.) The post spent 13 hours on HN's front page. This seems like things working the way they should—am I missing something?
It is just that I spend quite a lot of time on HN and I missed it until I checked /active.
So either I didn't notice it at first or I had a 13 hour break from HN ;-)
That said, doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days? Am I mistaken? (And if not - do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?)
You might be surprised how much stuff you miss on HN. At least I am, and there can't be many people who monitor it more than I do (at least I hope there aren't! as I'm paid to). If you look at the front page links on past days (https://news.ycombinator.com/front, linked as 'past' in the top bar), you'll see that there are a lot of significant front page stories in a day. You need to click "More" at the bottom at least once or twice to see them all.
It's actually kind of a shocking exercise to do, because it brings home how there is no "real" HN - we all think we're seeing "the" front page, but it's a Heraclitus (Heraclitian?) river.
> doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days?
That should be very rare. The software downweights any story that has been on the front page for more than 15 hours, unless we specifically tell it not to (which we might do if the community was particularly enjoying it). If the upvotes are massive enough, a story can linger on the front page despite that penalty, but then moderators will notice it and push it below the front page.
> do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?
There's no such thing as a "false flag", just as there's no such thing as a "false upvote". Fradulent? Abusive? Sure. But true/false implies these things are objective.
This is strange and sort of answer some of the question I have had about HN. Personally I dont flag stories much, ( I wish I could look back at the history of post I flagged LOL ) I just dont vote on it.
I am surprised so many people decided to flag a post just because it is Enterprisy. It may also be the case some people create account for submission, voting and flagging purposes. And only participate in minor discussions to gain / wash karma points.
That wasn't the case here - at least the flaggers looked legit to me, and they had long pre-histories as normal users. The thing to understand about flagging is that people mostly flag stuff when they see it on the front page and they don't feel it's good enough to be there. Different users have opposing opinions about what content counts as 'good' on HN—so some will upvote an article while others will indignantly flag it ("WTF is this doing on HN?") once they see it. The front page is a composite of this struggle between upvotes and flags, based on different tastes. It's actually a rather intense struggle because frontpage space is so scarce (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But it's mostly not manipulation—it's just that to most people, their own taste about what's 'good' is so obvious to them that for someone else to have a different taste feels impossible—it simply has to be disingenuous!
I have a theory which I didn't post yesterday because it's speculation—but it's speculation that fits my intuition about how HN works, so maybe I'll share it in case anyone's interested.
I speculate that some users upvoted Bolt's post because they thought it would be funny to see "How Bolt does fraud detection better" in a cage match with Stripe's "Improved fraud prevention" on the front page at the same time, as briefly happened—see #5 and #6 here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom.... In other words, classic internet drama.
The two titles are so similar that I wonder if Bolt had seen Stripe's post on the front page and rushed their article out to challenge it with that baity title. (If you look at https://web.archive.org/web/20180418211511/https://blog.bolt..., you'll see that the article itself had a completely different title.) That would certainly have been clever! Either that or it was just a coincidence, but either way, some users would have seen both, would have found the collision hilarious, and would have upvoted for that reason.
Since that has nothing to do with article quality, you would expect other users to then see the article on the front page, go "WTF is this doing on HN", and flag it. This is standard HN dynamics: baity title -> upvotes -> annoyed users -> flags. That's how the front page operates all day.
If this is what happened, then Bolt only made HN's front page in the first place because Stripe's article was already there—which would add considerable irony to yesterday's antics.
>I speculate that some users upvoted Bolt's post because....
I agree and speculate the same as well. Although I generally do upvote post that gives different opinion on the subject. In the hope that HN's view does not become monolithic.
Dang you should really write a book on how to moderate Internet discussion.
Out of curiosity, how often do you detect vote and flag manipulation events?
I assume the accounts in this flagging event were otherwise active and "healthy"? On Reddit, accounts are created years in advance so they seem legitimate when put to use for nefarious purposes later on.
Alas, I can't answer that because HN is under constant attack by people trying to game it and I can't satisfy your curiosity without satisfying them too.
Yes, it happened even a few years back. I have seen this first hand with a startup (not going to name). At the time, the startup asked its employees to flag comments against them on HN, and vote only what their founder said. Today, they're a big multi-million dollar business, the founder gives many useful pieces of advice and interviews and what not, but to me, ethics is everything and I stopped recommending them to people in my circle.
Some threads/subthreads seem to have a gravity for flagging and downvoting (and upvoting!) that's wildy off average and hard to pin down to a cause. Did you check other posts around yours to see if they were getting flagged too?
I get the feeling they got their publicity but unfortunately at the expense of your time. Thanks for the detailed work you do in supporting the community and addressing these allegations in such a detailed way.
Yes, that's one of three things that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. The other are job ads and Launch HN threads. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I can't speak for everyone but with the volume of investments YC makes, I find it hard to be biased toward a YC company.
I was told the reason for the orange username was so that we didn't start a fight with other YC alums, which would have been awkward back when the community was only a few hundred people.
Honestly the fact you felt the need to try to answer up the claims by throwing dirt at one single point that they made makes it clearer to me then ever that the claims are true.
Everyone knows that the best pr strategy when your being attacked by someone who's claims appear true to anyone who has their eyes open is to keep quiet and let it pass, instead you blew this up.
"Someone can disprove specific claims with hard evidence, but because they did so, the original claim must be accurate."
I don't think "everyone knows" that if a post making baseless claims about you is going viral, and you have concrete proof to dismiss some of the claims, that you should just "keep quiet."
Perhaps in some cases, perhaps not in others.
In this case, the integrity of this forum was called into question, and I think a transparent response is warranted and effective.
If someone says 12 things and I know 1 of them is true, I can only rebutt that single point. If I do so clearly then certainly you should use that to weight their other claims.
If I try to argue about 11 things I'm not an expert on, it should downweight _my_ arguments on the 1 thing I actually know about.
> and it fell in rank because users flagged it, not because moderators did anything
Moderators get involvedin flagged articles on their own initiative all the time. Inaction is a form of action.
> He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do.
You've admitted on multiple occasions that you intentionally choose to do specific things depending on the content, its authors, and the users. I'm not sure special treatment is even a concept that applies; everything mods do or don't do is special treatment because it's all based on instinct and whim, not some unbiased algorithm (and algorithms have bias too)
> Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status
And that status comes from being coached in how to become a community darling. And from YC loving on Stripe, which the "community" is naturally biased towards. If jgc takes a dump, it gets upvoted. So backing Stripe in any way buys them a part of the community.
Whatever you believe, at least recognize that you don't have to consciously choose to favor someone for it to influence your actions subconsciously. That's the entire idea behind bias in hiring and cultural stereotype. The effect is real and it effects everyone, even yourselves at HN. If you haven't observed it, you're not looking for it.
This feels like a spaghetti-at-the-wall sort of objection blob but let's see if I can disentangle some spaghetti.
When I said moderators didn't do anything, I meant we didn't penalize the post or override any of the software affecting its rank (or anything else). I was not talking about Sartrean inaction, which ontologically is also action.
Sometimes we do specific things, depending on...things? Who doesn't "admit" that? Everything the mods do is special treatment? Not following you. Instinct? Yes. Whim? No.
Stripe wasn't coached in how to achieve darling status. At least I never saw that. They were just really good at making products, writing, and interacting with the community. Is the community naturally biased towards YC? In some ways yes and in other ways biased against - it's complicated. jgc (assuming you mean jgrahamc of Cloudflare) is not part of a YC startup, so I assume that's actually a counterexample.
Unconscious bias? I strongly agree. But if you're making some specific point about it, I'd like to hear something specific—otherwise it seems kind of hand-wavey.
I think if you get over the drama here and implied "dirtiness", the main result is still a bit interesting.
Even if you exclude the implied carteling and take everything he said with a grain of salt, the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear: once SV (i.e. the YC centered VC machine) gets into a space and has a main horse, SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. It can also very likely become predatory to the potential innovators that SV is supposed to support.
At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade in the same way as everything else does because it won't be able to entertain a wave of innovators, and they will, as he did, seek and build the next SV.
If that's the main result of the post, then it's a reductio, because YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons—only because they thought it wouldn't be a good investment at that moment. Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles (https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/). Of course it still happens that YC turns down good companies which go on to innovate and succeed—but only by mistake.
Edit: by "principles" I don't mean some sort of moral edict, I mean YC's investment thesis, which is described at https://www.ycombinator.com/principles.
I find this comment surprising. I didn't say anything too controversial. Investors regularly refuse (and it's often the morally correct thing to do) investments in competitors. It's also often in their financial incentive too. To assume any investment organization in broad does differently because of their stated principles is absurd. Most investors would comfortably say this.
> YC funds competitors all the time and would never turn down an innovator for anti-competitive reasons
While I know your intentions weren't bad, it feels disingenuous to speak so confidently about the behavior of hundreds(?) of investors/employees, regardless of the take. Also getting a seed check from YC doesn't really disprove any of this. The forces of the business immune system he's describing probably wouldn't kick in until later anyway.
To be clear I don't think any of this is abnormal behavior (or reprehensible). Regardless I stand by my bet: the successor to Airbnb & Stripe probably wont be YC backed.
My comment wasn't about hundreds of investors -- it was strictly about Y Combinator, which is just one company. I've worked for YC for years and therefore know things about it. Since I don't work on the investment side of the business, there are a lot of details I miss out on, but on the macro level, such as the core patterns by which YC operates, I know quite a bit. Also, part of my job is to be a liaison between HN and YC, and an important part of that is to correct inaccuracies and misperceptions where possible.
But this poster is also a HN "moderator" and has a very biased perspective in this conversation. Moderators are in place to ensure fairness, to act as a referee and prevent spam. It's PR that does the sort of "correct inaccuracies and misperceptions where possible" stuff of effectively using outsized leverage to control the narrative. It's PR that tries to deny that beliefs that are deemed "incorrect."
I'm sure that line between PR and "forum mod" can get blurred over the years, but that's exactly the OP's point. The YC community, as it has scaled, is no unbiased marketplace, and it has not handling scaling responsibly. Look at the founders who were ousted from bookface, or even some of the non-public discussions there. The OP's Stripe commentary might be over the top, but YC has yet to produce a mature response to any of these friction points.
> The OP's Stripe commentary might be over the top, but YC has yet to produce a mature response to any of these friction points.
How could they produce the mature response you’re looking for when the accusations are full of holes. Lyft isn’t a YC company and didn’t use Stripe initially as he claims.
The only “Proof” (his words) posted is incorrect: Stripe posted their blog post before he posted his.
He has produced no real evidence for his claims. The evidence he has tried to produce is trivial to check and works against his claims.
VCs generally don't fund direct competitors to those in their portfolio, which I agree with you is a good thing -- conditional on there being a lot of VCs out there (which there are).
(Btw, in case any reader is not aware, dang is employed by YC to manage HN - and YC acts differently from VCs in many respects).
With all due respect there have been 2-3 HN posts in the last few months about YC and HN being biased towards Stripe. Surely it cannot be so much smoke without a fire.
That's bad logic in two ways. First, this is the internet. Smoke goes a lot further than that.
Second, to the extent that the claims involve HN, (I'm being careful only to comment on facts I personally know about), they're definitely false [1]. So yes, for sure there can be that much fireless smoke.
[1] I haven't had a chance to respond properly about those claims yet. Normally I'd have done it by now, but I'm on my phone with intermittent access at the moment, so am a lot slower and don't have my usual tools. Edit: I finally got it out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
Thank you . That was a fantastic and very detailed response. Obviously seeing a few of those posts made me think there was something to those insinuations so its good to get those clarified. Ball is now on Bolt founder's court to back up his claims otherwise its libel.
Sorry, but if someone makes statements about HN or YC that I know to be false, I believe it's my job to correct them—especially since we can't treat this kind of post in the way we normally moderate HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). What do you think I should do instead?
When you have a fixed mindset, have chosen a side in a debate, and actively participate in a story where you have a vested self-interest, you cease to become what this community loves about you -- the impartial gardener of HN. At this point, you've become a YC defender and have abandoned your post as someone who could serve as a balanced arbiter. Surely, there are other people at YC who could comment on such matters for stories like this. That would be far, far better for you and HN (and probably YC too).
I appreciate your comment! but I really don't think that's the right conclusion. I've been doing this for years—people know what to expect from me. I'd rather be up front about the fact that I care about HN and YC, and don't like to let false accusations go unanswered. To some extent it's a temperament thing. Past experiences (long before HN) have conditioned me to be a bit passionate in this department, and with a community like this one, which is extremely sensitive to the truth, I think it would be a bigger mistake to pretend otherwise. Probably a hugely bigger mistake, because what works best for me on HN is relating to people, and I can only do that by being myself.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment and the links. Very helpful! Three thoughts in response:
- The appearance of unfairness is arguably at least as important as actual fairness from a community perspective. If you're being fair, but no one thinks believes it, the community suffers as though it were true. During this story, people were openly questioning your motives (even though the original story was apparently not factual) because they perceived unfairness.
- Choosing not to engage on certain topics and leaving that to other people in no way prevents you from connecting and engaging with the community naturally. Not engaging throws cold water doubt (unfounded though they may be) before it has an opportunity to smolder.
- There are lots of new community members, who could easily get the wrong idea. They don't know you like many (like myself) who have seen how you interact with the community, and in whom you've built up a large reservoir of trust.
The role you play in this community is very special and incredibly important to me and many others. Thank you so much!
I can see someone who isn't convinced you're a fair operator taking the volume and detail of response as defensiveness, and that can look suspicious in a context like this.
They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective.
> They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective.
How? I'm curious. If someone makes accusations that you know to be false, wouldn't your best defense be a comprehensive refutation?
What alternative do you see that would be more compelling?
I, for one, really appreciate this level of detail, because the most common alternative is to attack back mercilessly without evidence. This tactic being commonly employed by politicians the world over.
I get it too. But when things get to that stage, literally anything you do will be taken as proof of the same nefariousness, whether you sink or you float.
I think it makes more sense to focus on the much larger audience that's sincerely making up their mind, and give them good information with which to do it. Could I do that less defensively though? Absolutely. Not there yet.
I think people have already made their mind but if you want to share more information, I would suggest being 100% transparent and releasing any internal communication (emails/text/slack) about Bolt.
I don't understand what sort of communication you're talking about. If you mean internal communication at the time (back in 2018), there wasn't any. If you mean internal communication yesterday - there was a bit (e.g. someone pointed me to the thread), but what value would there be in releasing it?
I think the word 'principles' is leading to a bit of confusion here. I used that word because I was referencing https://www.ycombinator.com/principles, but I don't mean moral precepts, I mean YC's investment theses. These, for example:
"Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them."
"YC’s value is the number of startups we help times how much we help them."
The point is that funding new startups in the same markets as previous startups it funded is a consequence of YC's model. Not to do it would be self-contradictory.
>Anything else would both be bad for YC's business and against its principles
Well, "bad for business" is arguable, but it's not like "against its principles" has been any big detterent in Google, Apple, Microsoft, and generally coporate behavior...
YC is orders of magnitude smaller. So far, from what I've seen, those principles still carry some weight.
Edit: I think I might have confused things by using the word 'principles'. I'm talking about YC's investment thesis, as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070101.
The Twitter thread and OP didn't say anything about YC investing in companies who do similar things. The "accusation" is that YC discourages other VCs from investing into competitors that YC isn't part of (for whatever reason).
Curious about the funding competitors part. What enables YC to do this, why aren't other VCs able to fund competitors? Has this ever resulted in conflicts or lawsuits between companies? Lots of questions appreciate any insights.
Turning down good deals is bad for a startup investment business, yes. In fact it's the worst mistake such a business can make. This observation is so commonplace that it's long been a cliché.
Every member of a cartel is motivated to defect, yes. The hiring cartel Facebook broke wasn't for business reasons, it was because Steve Jobs was mad about recruiters calling his people.
> the outcomes of this incentive structure are clear
Yes, I think the incentive argument is certainly the more interesting piece than the notion that there is any sort of coordinated conspiracy, which seems far-fetched.
> At a more macro scale, this means that YC will fade
I'm not sure that this follows. This argument doesn't really apply to new approaches, it only applies to direct competitors of market-dominant darlings, not fresh approaches within a vertical.
Wait, I forgot which payment processor silicon valley liked? CyberCash, PayPal, Venmo (whoops), BrainTree or something, does Toast (but they're east coast, maybe not SV darlings) count? I like the name, clearly and they do process payments... Etc.
There's a ton of companies in this space, and a lot of them got funding from somewhere.
Then why did Lyft and Uber, Dropbox and Box, come from SV, from the same time period? I just pulled these from my brain with little recall, which tells me your argument probably has a lot of contradictory examples.
The answer to this is probably FOMO (and it does work against GP's argument) — the VCs who missed out on the hot new startup will want to get on the second best rocket.
I know of at least one instance in which direct competitors were accepted to YC in the same batch. So your implication that SV can no longer incubate new innovation/competition in the space. is untrue.
Public fights can occasionally be net positive for one of the participants, but your arguments will be publicly scrutinized and they better be watertight. If the logic you presented is your best work, then I can easily see why you've experienced some trouble in getting people to support you.
Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion.
Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley.
I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move.
I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.
You started with the weakest argument, that was based all hearsay and had no smoking gun. It was first only because the Twitter thread told the story in chronological order. And then.. you stopped there?
For me the strongest argument is that hours after they reached #1 on HN, Stripe posted, got #1 themselves, then Bolt's own post somehow disappeared, suggesting foul play. Twice, in two separate occasions, this is alleged to have happened. This is both pretty damning for HN itself (and in this case, @dang has some explaining to do), and pretty easy to confirm or refute with Wayback machine and such.
edit: but it appears.. Stripe post was earlier than Bolt's own post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068406 Were Bolt posts even removed? And if they were removed, for which reason, each of them?
All of what he said about those HN posts is false. I'm going to post something soon with all the details. It just takes a long time to put together with all the correct links.
"a person who opposes or rejects popular opinion." [1]
That meaning is exactly that I was looking for. Many people, myself included, believe he's wrong. But what the hell do we know? It feels odd to be giving business advice to a self-made billionaire.
Seemed like you were focusing less on "contradicting popular opinion" and more on "offending powerful people" which is a related but different concept.
I agree that was a strong opening, and if turns out that this whole ordeal was a net positive event for Bolt, then it will have been entirely due to that one sentence. I imagine quite a few people on HN had never heard of Bolt before, and that's now changed for about 100k people at least (likely many more if you take other platforms into account).
Even so, I still think the closing could have been better. His last words are an accusation, and he portrays a landscape where it's hard for Stripe competitors to win. There actually was an opportunity to say something like: "And yet, if there's anything I've learned, it's that in the end a great product can overcome all adversity. That's what enabled us to become the first unicorn startup in the world to have introduced a 4-day work week for all of our 600 employees."
To be honest, this feels like a PR stunt since we all know if you add "YC is bad" and share it on HN, people will look and react. I haven't heard of Bolt, I'm not familiar with the space at all. I use Stripe because the product just works and I can trust my business with it. Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product.
On a related note - I helped review a little over 100+ YC applications since getting in myself in S20 as a way to give back. There were a lot of bad applications or just ideas that seemed over saturated (a social media for some niche as an example). Literally tens of thousands of people apply for YC every batch. I personally recommended around 20 with around 15 getting interviews and around 10 getting in. I only recommend companies that I personally would want to invest in if I had the capital. YC has funded a handful of competitors in my space (PaaS) and I actually had calls with them to exchange notes and see where we could help each other.
I have to agree, it's suspicious coming a couple weeks after another negative Stripe post that got a lot of attention.
And the timestamps on the HN posts he linked to are pretty damning as well. What's more likely: an established startup scrambling to launch a new product a couple hours after a small startup's blog post, or the smaller startup piggybacking off the more established startup's announcement?
> Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product.
Really? That turns you off? What a lame argument. Your criteria for using Stripe is that "the product works" but not using Bolt is "CEO who complains".
A CEO spouting a contrived storyline where they are fighting against nefarious SV forces makes me question their rationality. Which, you know, is an attribute I care about if they're running a payments processer
> Seeing a CEO who publicly complains turns me away from even wanting to try the product.
I see comments like this all the time. I'm pretty sure these companies are happy they drive people away who seem to be high maintenance. Companies hate high maintenance customers. Yes, they want customers but they want good customers and not high maintenance customers.
It’s not an issue of high maintenance (which we and many other companies are not), but more of an issue of accusations and trying to frame a “David vs. Goliath” story. I’m all for a good underdog story, but publicly ranting with untrue statements about a huge conspiracy out to ensure they don’t succeed is borderline unhinged.
I guess there are two camps. The people who see a story like this and go "hell yeah the underdog strikes back!" dispute how true any evidence may be, and the people who see this story and go, "Stop whining."
If this tweet thread gets massive amounts of traffic, which it looks like it has, and a whole slew of people in the first camp discover Bolt and become potential future customers... Mission accomplished.
I had never heard of Bolt before today that I can remember but since I'm woking on a project that needs CC processing (it has Stripe currently, I'm moving to another provider) I was interested. I looked at their website and immediately felt like it wasn't aimed at me. I don't care about 1-click anything, I want to know about how to use this, api calls, how to capture an auth, etc. I see the developer menu item and I click on "Get Started". Immediately I'm shown a list of plugins for CRM/e-commerce-type tools which, and maybe this is elitist, but that's turn off for me. Don't get me wrong I cut my chops on WP/Drupal and the like but it been a long time and I want docs with an API call to charge a card or similar. I see the "API" and "SDK" in the sidebar and check both out. API docs are swagger, that's fine, but it's not clear at all and the "workflow" to charge a card is. I go look at "SDK" and they only have an iOS SDK, is this a joke? Not to mention that it looks like you need to bring your own payment processor [0] and "The processor implementation timelines average 2-4 weeks.", at this point you are better off talking directly to someone like First Data. Let's not get started on the apparent "contact us for pricing".
Bottom line: Bolt is completely uninteresting to me as a developer and the creator sounds like sour grapes in his twitter tirade. I'm glad to be moving off Stripe for way cheaper processing but I love their docs, dashboard, etc and I'll miss it. Bolt would have been discarded as not a serious competitor almost immediately had I seen it back when I first integrated with Stripe. In fact, they seem to provide something 100% different to Stripe and even have Stripe as a payment processor.
Pricing and pricing only. The flat fee is one of the biggest killers. $0.30/per makes it near impossible to offer certain features and 2.9% is decently high (and that's before you turn on any other services). Instead I'm able to get ~2% (varies by card, some are higher, some are lower, but I'm just paying the interchange fee + a small percent to the processor) and zero flat fee on the transaction.
EDIT: Just to expand on what I'm doing, it's software for food festivals where people pre-load their accounts with money and then spend it at the vendors. It means we only need in-person CC terminals in a few places and vendors can use their smart phones to charge someone's account. It also means all transactions go though our software and the festival can take it's cut. Without this vendors would provide.... creative records of how much they sold (festival takes X% so if the vendor can hide some sales it can keep 100% of those sales). Because of this there isn't a ton of room for more percentages/flat-fees to be taken out. If someone wants to buy something and needs 1 more dollar in their account then we give up over 30% to Stripe. Even on a $5 charge we give up close to 9%. If I can get rid of the flat fee we could do a number of things like just linking a card and charging it on the fly with every purchase instead of first loading money onto your account. I'd be killed with fees if I did that with Stripe since we are talking about $2/3/5 items (it's a food festival, the portions/prices are small so you can try a bunch of things). Also things like "auto-reload if your account dips below $X", with Stripe I'd need to make the reload amount minimum decently high to avoid taking a bath in fees.
Haha, when I first saw "Bolt" I thought "Hey that's a CardConnect thing!" because I've integrated with it before and will be using Card Connect's Bolt again for this project. I scoured the Card Connect website to make sure it wasn't some kind of partnership and it's not the same thing (not saying you said it was or thought it was, I thought it might be at first).
I can say that Bolt is pretty easy to work with from my experience. I have a wired Bolt reader (IPP320) sitting next to me as I type this (I've worked with it through my employer) and a wireless/BT VP3300 in my bag (which is what I'm going to use for my food festival stuff).
Nothing beats Stripe's docs and the community around it (both in info/SO-answers and in things like SDKs) but CardConnect and Bolt are easy enough. That said I wish their onboarding was streamlined. I had to be in 4-5 meetings with them before I got credentials to start coding and I'll have to be in a few more before I go live. I think you can use their UAT or similar without an account but I wanted to make sure they'd accept me before I started working on it. Super nice people, it just doesn't compare to a few clicks with Stripe and boom, you are off to the races.
At first https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 seemed pretty damning but if you hover over the dates of the HN posts, the title attribute shows the timestamp, and it would appear Stripe's came in a couple hours before Bolt's. Add in Lyft and the "facts" around this story really seem to fall apart.
Yes, Lyft not being YC is is mostly it but also from an early Stripe employee [1]: "Lyft was also not originally on Stripe. They were on Braintree and switched over to Stripe after both Stripe and Balanced (another YC-funded payments company) competed for their business." Balanced was definitely a payments company also backed by YC. I cannot verify the switching from Braintree as I'm mostly an observer in all this but the other details are easily verifiable.
What is an example of a direct Stripe competitor that has been recently funded?
I think the gist of the argument is correct though - there are a few main horses like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart that get funded by a swarm of SV insiders including YC and marquee VCs and then those same insiders have a strong incentive to block investment in direct competitors to those companies.
Competitors that do end up popping up are usually being funded by outsiders or smaller firms as mentioned.
just because a startup is doing something payment related does not mean “direct competitor to Stripe”
and one of the two I saw hooks into Stripe as part of the service. the other was doing something internationally and also was not directly competitive.
> Swipe: A billing and payments solution for Indian small and medium-sized businesses. [...] As my colleague Alex Wilhelm put it, Swipe is Stripe, with a W.
Stripe's messaging seems focused on infra for the "internet".
I think Swipe is more niche ie: focused on Indian SMBs who may have a very different workflow. Swipe is focusing on WhatsApp powered payments. (See: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/swipe-2).
Though, you'd think they would compete for the same customers over time.
Also: Steal is Steel with an A, Rob is Rub with an O, and ShopLyft is Shoplift with a Y.
Why PayPal for it when you can just Swipe it?
In the same vein, BooKing.com is BooQueen.com with a penis. That kind of majestic insubordination can get you a €400 fine and a few weeks of jail time in the Netherlands where their headquarters are located, but I wonder what problems they had with the harsher Lèse-majesté laws in Thailand because of their name.
>With penalties ranging from three to fifteen years imprisonment for each count, it has been described as the "world's harshest lèse majesté law" and "possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere"; its enforcement "has been in the interest of the palace". [...] Even attempting to commit lèse-majesté, making sarcastic comments about the King's pet, and failure to rebuke an offense have been prosecuted as lèse-majesté. [...] The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. [...] The longest recorded sentence was in 2021: 87 years imprisonment, reduced to 43 years because the defendant pleaded guilty.
Not sure which rounds you are talking about but both Airbnb and Coinbase had hard time getting funding after YC. Airbnb because it was a crazy idea and with Coinbase lot of VCs didn’t understand or avoided crypto back in in 2012.
Only later, after they got their first investors and became more successful, lot of other firms flocked to them.
Very few of those companies seem to be truly competing with Stripe. Most of them are specific to a non-US country, or target a very specific demographic.
I was at Stripe a few years back and I don't remember Bolt coming up as a competitor, ever. Stripe was more worried about Paypal and Adyen.
One thing to keep in mind - all companies at this size have a corp dev function. Over the past decade, they've likely spoken to several hundred companies and patrick has probably personally spoken to over 100 about an acquisition and looked at some of their data. Anyone who looks seriously at 100 potential acquisitions, while trying to run a company, will drop the ball somewhere on maybe 10 and screw a few up kinda badly. It happens even if you have good intent and try to do the right thing. A number of people on the team will be working on the deal and interacting with the target founders/execs etc and things slip. It happens everywhere, it's a messy process.
Many/most VCs have a policy of not funding competitors. If I had an investor fund a competitor I'd be wary - are they going to share private data? I doubt anyone ever sat on the board of both pepsi and coke simultaneously etc.I get that not all investors are on the board - but they will all get information that isn't in the public domain.
Not related to your actual point, but I researched corporate boards a few years back and found many instances of people on boards of two direct competitors. In fact, I found a couple of companies with CEOs who also served on the board of a competitor. This was going through maybe a few hundred large corporations, so I’d have to assume it’s incredibly common.
I haven't studied this in depth but I recall that there's a book out there that sort of blasts the management consulting industry. How a lot of corporates will hire the same consulting company such as McKinsey to learn what their competitors are planning/how they are performing. IIRC
This is absolutely incorrect. Consulting companies, at least the major ones, will never let any consultant work for more than one competitor throughout their career. They also strictly forbid sharing any info learnt about a company with anyone else, talk less of with competitors.
Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board while running Google, but left in 2009 when they became competitors in the smart phone business. Before that, Apple & Google weren't competitors.
This is notoriously playing out in the ETF space. Large institutions own vast quantities in stock in competitors and competition decreases as a result. See Rise of Institutional Investors Raises Questions of Collusion.
Regardless, seriously, I don't think anybody paid any attention to them ever. I'm not even convinced they are a competitor from looking at what they do. Payments is a big space, lots of players fit into different parts of the value chain and/or target different customers. I'm speculating, but I'd guess their issues raising money came from bad messaging. They aren't clear about what they do. I'd guess VCs were confused about what they did and/or explicitly misunderstood it.
Considering this is the only thing he claimed to have "proof" on, and it turns out not only to be false but to be the actual opposite, this is really damning for the rest of his claims. If that was such a traumatizing event, how can one not think of checking the timestamp once in 4 years to at least know if you have a reason to be mad.
And anyway Stripe's release was announcing the release of the product on that day, it wasn't just a random marketing filler. There is a just no way a company the size of Stripe is going to put something as sensitive as a new fraud detection system in production, on a 1h notice just to steal some views from a competitor's blog post if it's not 100% ready.
I don't trust for 1 second that the CEO of a company in the same space can believe that either.
From memory, I think if you go to the user who submitted the posts “submissions” list it will show you the original time rather than the “second chance time”.
That's true. Only the front page and the /item page show the second chance time.
Edit: also, the timestamp that pops up when you hover over "X days/months/years ago" is always the original submission time, never the second-chance time.
Could it be about who hit the front page first, and not exact timestamps? (i.e., he meant the Stripe post hit the front page an hour after their post did?) That makes sense, since some posts quickly hit the front page and then disappear. Just as an alternative explanation.
No, the Stripe post was on the front page for at least an hour and half before the Bolt post was submitted. I covered this in (mind-numbing) detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287
It’s also seems to me that anything Stripe related gets a ton of upvotes. Probably not unusual due to their YC connection, HN presence, and generally being a long time darling of devs that frequent HN. It doesn’t mean it’s rigged, they’re just a competitor with a good tailwind from this site.
His entire rant is filled with Pizzagate-level reasoning and accusations. I doubt Stripe gave two craps about Bolt, and that its founders and YC probably spent more time talking about the weather.
I suppose it's more exciting to paint yourself as the underdog incumbents are actively working against, rather than a mediocre investment opportunity offering easily replicable services.
> The reality… if you stand in their way, they will do more than compete with you head on. Flushed face They will use every power move imaginable. Blocking you from capital, media, talent. And funding competitors just to get back at you.
Pretty sure this is how business is done. I don't really get people getting into business and then complaining when it gets real. You think Stripe got to be a billion-dollar company by the power of rainbows and unicorns?
The idea that you need to reach top of HN to be relevant in SV is also a bit silly. Hell, my blog has reached top-10 a handful of times and I've never seen these "millions of views."
I've only ever heard of tens of thousands of views. Maybe it breaks 100k sometimes. I mean, we don't track who clicks on what links, but we do track HN page views and you can't click on what you don't see.
So, millions of views from an HN post is off by two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately! (or maybe fortunately)
Wow, I would have assumed it's significantly higher than tens of thousands of views, given how often websites get hugged to death. I guess people really skimp out on hosting plans.
Or have an unfortunate habit of hosting their sites on mind-numbingly inefficient architectures. E.g. vanilla Wordpress seems to run 500-1000ms TTFB on a standard shared hosting plan.
I think for a lot of posts, people just comment and upvote based on the title, and never click through to register an actual view. For products this is still valuable because of brand recognition. That being said, I really doubt YC has the bandwidth to target all the competitors of their top companies.
Same here. My blog posts that hit #1 and stayed up for a while never generated over 10k views. Now, a product like Bolt or Stripe might attrack more views, but I doubt that HN even has a million views on an average day.
> Companies are allowed to create and be at a monopoly but not kick others trying to break it.
Claiming that Stripe is a monopoly is pure fiction. Breslow himself admits there are competitors. We're also conveniently forgetting that Bolt just raised $355M at an $11B valuation, who am I supposed to feel sorry for again?
Excellent execution in the payments space and expanding beyond that to support business infrastructure and development through things like Treasury and Atlas etc.
Not sure that qualifies as a monopoly, but in general Stripe is an example of one (so far).
That made me think, how come I've never heard of bolt up until this moment? Is their marketing so bad? They managed however to get to a poont of a "successful company with 600 employees, billions in GMV, and growing rapidly", right?
I visit HN at least 10 times per week. So I decided to check how many posts have they posted on this site since founding the company. I currently see 4 posts. Only 4.
So perhps, not posting in HN makes it harder if you wish to make it to front page.
Their marketing isn't great. It's quite unclear exactly what they do. "One click checkout" means they do what exactly? I know what it means for me as an e-commerce company, but what does bolt do?
This might not add much to this discussion in particular, but I find it interesting how much I want the big billion dollar company to be evil. This guys post and the other Stripe hate really draw me in and then of course lots of the arguments fall apart on further inspection. Is that a natural thing? Maybe a sort of robin hood feeling, like we're sticking it to the big bad rich guys?
I do still have some negative feelings towards wealth in general from growing up so poor, even as I pull in a comfy "HN reader" level salary, so that probably doesn't help.
1. Most of the top valued tech companies have some degree of unethical behavior, almost all of them are successful by leveraging market monopolies in industries that are too new to have faced regulation.
2. If you become large enough, you will end up doing some shady shit. The question then becomes, is most of the company shady? Is it the CEO who is shady and the culture permeates from that? And so on.
So its not surprising to have a neutral/negative attitude w.r.t to these companies.
None of this is hyperbole, btw. A lot has been uncovered about what actually happened within the companies v/s what they like to promote themselves as; mostly from lawsuits but also by some excellent, professional journalists examining these companies more closely than they would let on.
This is because it's far easier to blame your lack of success on your positive moral qualities rather than your competence or luck. One way to do this is to ascribe the other party's success to their lack of ethics rather than their competence.
It's crucial to retrain your brain not to have negative feelings toward those who have a lot of money. Otherwise you will subconsciously undermine yourself to ensure you never get a lot of money.
The strange thing is how quickly peoples' perception of a company can flip flop. 5 years ago Stripe was the underdog startup, now they're the big evil corporation?
YC invited Ryan to apply again and he declined? If the establishment was so anti-Bolt that they were colluding against him, why would they want him to apply again? Regardless, why wouldn't he? It seems like he's had a chip on his shoulder ever since the initial rejection, and he deliberately made it more difficult for himself and his team by passing up another opportunity to get into YC. If YC is as powerful and as big of an advantage as he says, why wouldn't he apply again?
HN #1 don't generate millions of views. You don't need manipulation to get #1 often, OCaml posts do it often even if the language is not used by anybody. Anyone can be rejected from YC. Anyone can struggle to raise funds. There are two
many vc to raise from all of them. How could stripe launch and post about a feature in a few hours? Sequoia is not the most powerful vc in the world, it actually doesn't mean anything. Same for YC.
> Stripe and YC effectively co-run the most important media asset in Silicon Valley: Hacker News.
A few of my articles [1] have made the front page so I can weigh in on this a (tiny) bit.
> The readers know: any time Stripe comes out with a new product, it’s #1 on the site
I do believe that "the mods" have the ability to boost articles at their discretion so I would not be surprised if YC companies frequently get a boost. This is a separate admin feature from the open role posts that YC companies post (which cannot be commented on and which drop from page #1 over a fixed timeframe I think). I will have to dig for the source on that but I believe dang has publicly commented on it here. That does indeed feel somewhat shady IMO if correct (and let me be very clear that I could be incorrect here).
Edit: let me elaborate on this because I'm sure dang will see it and possibly take it the wrong way. dang, isn't there a feature where you can boost "interesting" articles? I believe it was described as "articles that are probably interesting to the HN community but have not gotten enough attention" (bad timing, etc.) Are you the only one with the permissions to do that? That feature is never used to boost YC company posts? I.e. it's only used for intellectually stimulating content where no YC-related conflict of interests is possible?
But on the other hand, if you have a huge name like Stripe (or Chrome DevTools) it really isn't as hard to make it to page #1 as the Bolt person is making it out to be. The hardest part IMO is crafting a title that succinctly summarizes how new feature X is a big deal.
> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.
Millions of views sounds like a stretch. 250K to 1M sounds more accurate to me.
[1] I wrote the Chrome DevTools docs for 3 years. DevTools docs made the front page probably 10-15 times. I also was content lead for https://web.dev for a couple years. Those docs made the front page another 10-15 times. I've also had 2 or 3 personal articles make page #1.
Dan has said repeatedly that YC companies do not get artificial boosts. He's said that on this thread, as well. Ranking is definitely not a strict function of votes; HN does a bunch of stuff to groom the front page. But, according to Dan, none of that involves giving preference to YC companies.
I have no knowledge except what I read here, but this is obviously false. Or perhaps not obviously but at least suspiciously. As apparent by the "_YC_STARTUP_ is hiring" posts, that don't even take comments, as well as the "work at a startup" (YC's hiring portal) posts, that are commonly on the front page. Without publication of the ranking algorithm, I would be _very_ hard pressed to believe these are organic. I mean even if all YC alums mass voted for those topics, vs the total number of users voting that has to be a small fraction.
So there are at least a couple classes of topics that seem to be artificially promoted, in preference of YC companies.
The specific types of posts that are treated specially are well documented, including in this thread. It's 'suspicious' mostly because you (seemingly) haven't had a chance to look into it.
I didn't mean 'suspicious' with a negative connotation, just to be clear. Indeed, I didn't care enough to look it up, ie I could care less how posts are ranked. That's YC and HN's business. I have nothing at stake.
Given this well documented information, and my basic belief that the principals here aren't sociopaths, I see no reason to believe Stripe posts would be artificially promoted, well normal SEO (done right) aside.
But, even though I don't really "care", I do think it's great that HN has so many defenders of their impartiality. I can't really tell how many are insiders but it feels like most (all but 1 or 2) are just regular users. It speaks highly of HN and is worth defending. HN ain't perfect, that's for sure, but I know I couldn't make it better. [well i would get rid of the newish prev and next links -- they make the byline a bit long on mobile. i prefer folding, so when i free scroll i can see better where i was. that's not the kind of better i am referring to. just a throwaway complaint]
Yes, the YC startup is hiring posts work differently than other posts on the front page, they're also explained in the FAQ ("Can I post a job ad?" and "What's the relationship between YC and HN?").
The grandparent comment of your comment also called this out, so I'm assuming the post you replied to assumed that those weren't worth calling out in their statement.
One thing that I suspect is true, but sort of hard to avoid and not really anyone's fault (although, potentially part of the "deliberate" value of HN) is that HN dwellers tend to be pre-disposed look up to YC companies, implicitly favor them, etc.
Ie, "brand halo" as it relates to ease of getting to #1 on HN is by its nature based on "brand halo in the eyes of HN dwellers", not "general tech brand halo."
I'm not saying that makes HN dwellers think that Stripe can do-no-wrong or whatnot. Just that their prior on how interesting an eng blog post on $topic will be is probably higher for a well-known YC co than it would be for a generically equivalently well-known non-YC co.
This such a bad take, too many things comment on but one thing to note is that I’m not even sure how much Stripe competes with Bolt. Bolt marketing pages mostly talk about e-commerce checkout. It’s probably something Stripe does as well but the reason Stripe became a SV darling because it was easiest way to integrate payments for your software startup. Probably 95% of YC startups are not e-commerce sites, and have no use what Bolt offers. He mentions Lyft who I don’t think could be their customer either. So SV software companies “collude” by using the platform that offers what they need.
There are dozens of e-commerce payment platforms, often integrated already on the product like Shopify, so probably the investors just weren’t excited about the market and likely though Shopify/PayPal/Stripe will eventually eat that market.
Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?
p.s. I'm in the middle of traveling somewhere but I'll try to come back to this thread soon and respond to the more specific claims in the OP. The claims in there that I personally have direct knowledge about (at least the ones I've had time to read so far) are false, and I agree with you that forthcomingness would be helpful. Edit: more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this.
You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcoming about it!
Sure, I also, still, feel some of the kinetics need to be explained to avoid confusion.
Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.
The specific answer (about this post) is that moderators haven't touched it in any way. Twitter.com links have a mild downweight, along with many other domains that produce a lot of sensational/offtopic content (relative to HN). That includes nearly all major media, forums like reddit, etc. Other than that, all you're seeing is the regular HN algorithm at work. It's more complex than just points + time—we've tweaked it over the years to (try to) do a better job of selecting for intellectual curiosity, dampening flamewars, and so on.
While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.
I didn't say HN operates on an "unmoderated scoring function"; it most certainly doesn't, as Dan has (again) repeatedly said. I said that YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC votes don't count differently.
You are arguing the specifics of my comment and not the spirit of it. It’s not clear all the ways posts are modified and it isn’t clear who all knows all the ways posts are identified.
It's clear enough, if you pay attention. Follow Dan's comments over time; they're an informal moderation log of the site. You'll see what stuff does and doesn't happen to posts.
My comment was more about what are all the different ways post can be ranked higher/lower. I trust Dan that the two things I mentioned they don’t do, but is there anything else like keywords/hosts that if yc members knew would give them an edge.
There is no reason to believe anything like that is happening. We do well enough on HN that Dan called us out downthread, and certainly there are no secret tricks we're using --- short of "not having our friends vote us up when stuff of ours gets submitted". I think this is pretty much just conspiracy theories.
The discussion here is pretty unproductive. You're free to simply disbelieve Dan; that's a coherent perspective to have, even if I think it's deeply wrongheaded. But I assume we both know enough about the dynamics of message board "debate" to know that there's an unbounded set of un-falsifiable arguments you can throw up to support the idea that Stripe is unfairly gaming HN. Maybe they've found a wrinkle in the way the second-chance pool is handled!
You are quite defensive and I’ve never said I didn’t trust Dan but you keep saying it.
Because you knew enough about HN that this conversation is “unproductive” doesn’t mean it is unproductive to others. My comment got a lot of upvotes. Maybe that means the knowledge you have isn’t as wide spread as you think it is.
Also I recommend you compare Dan’s responses in this thread to your own. A very different tone—one that is “more productive” than how you’ve chosen to respond.
My entire point was more information could a. Prevent these posts in the future and b. Help to others understand the dynamics when a post like this is made. What is wrong with this? Jeez... was my initial comment that offensive to you?
pc is probably one of the most recognizable and respected folks in tech, the vast majority of people view him in a positive light and generally like the tone in which he comments on HN (forthcoming and open), so it's entirely possible he just gets upvoted up by a lot of readers for any of those reasons (i.e. there's a simpler explanation besides a a full-blown HN / YC conspiracy on his post rankings...)
Ok so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388310 is Ryan (and probably the other copycat temp accounts). I’m having a hard time believing him when he gets basic facts like Lyft not being in YC wrong…
I guess it’s like Grove said, “only the paranoid survive.”
Let's be careful here. I don't know of any reason to believe that those are the same person, and somebody getting a marginal fact wrong is a bad reason to dismiss everything they're saying. Humans are far too error prone for that to be much of a signal.
Of course I'm not 'siding' with that poster, or this one. I just say these things out of habit.
You have to understand Twitter is itself not meant to be that serious. (FWIW US media reporting in general is primarily advertising nowadays, I never see any reporting that is without a clear goal for certain ideas, reporting facts are simply not the primary goal) This Twitter thread is of course a combination of business promotion (bolt is for start-up, bolt standard up against stripe, bolt founder stands up against bullies). I am not questioning his intention. I am saying promotion is simply a unconscious drive in US business man. When they talk they always put the business interest at the center, intentionally or unconsciously.
I’m curious: you ask for receipts but are sure stuff gets shady. What does that look like “without the receipts”?
The extremes are likely too wild to be true, and I think it’s highly unlikely this activity transpires on the YC Slack or BookFace, but I could absolutely believe calls and messaging takes place between what are now startup power brokers, whether that’s founders, VCs, or PR folks, to shape the narrative and drive towards specific objectives.
I'm just saying that human nature is, unfortunately, somewhat inclined to do shady things when a lot of money and power is on the line. Silicon Valley is definitely not immune to this reality. That's all I mean.
Given the amount of publicized cases where high-profile companies had unethical behavior at the founding level (Facebook, Apple, Twitter), I think it's naive to assume any company makes it to that level while maintaining 100% ethical decision making.
Be careful with this sort of reasoning for the sake of false negatives. Under this lens only 0.001% of all actual incidences of what he's describing would be deemed as enough proof (your bar effectively requires testimony under oath and document subpoena).
Obviously, I'm not saying the case is made in the other direction. Given this is all the information that we'll get we have to take into consideration our intuition, his incentives, his reputation, etc. I'm personally not so comfy dismissing it with a "need more proof" stamp.
I'm not trying to dismiss it, merely trying to open the door for more evidence. Such as emails with redacted identifying info where VCs are saying what's going on and why they won't fund him.
I agree there's a risk of raising the bar too high, but it's also a scenario where he has a financial incentive to paint Stripe in a bad light and he's also trying to make character accusations about actual people. The bar *should* be quite high imo.
I don't see anything in there that would actually reflect badly on YC itself. What is interesting though is the fact that Stripe raised money from all the major VC funds, either intentionally or unintentionally blocking investments by these firms into competitors. Kind of like the startup equivalent of consulting with every good divorce attorney in the town so your spouse can't hire them.
Stripe doesn't expose post times and the Bolt announcement appears to be dead. So, Stripe posted before Bolt - at least on HN.
> 1/ Stripe had deliberately taken checks from nearly all the top-tier Silicon Valley investors in order to block new companies
> IN FACT, many of their investors had told me as much, and commented on it as a great strategy!
> The pro-startup payment processor was on a mission to make sure no other payments company would ever be built in Silicon Valley.
I really doubt the investors know the fundraising strategy Stripe was using internally. I doubt this strategy is even legal and is doubly against any good judgement that YC could exercise - profiting off of competitors as an incubator would be fantastic. This statement is as good as speculation and is on the reader to determine Ryan's investors credibility.
> Getting a #1 ranking is INCREDIBLY difficult and generates millions of views.
Millions of views sounds falsey. The most upvoted comment I've ever had here was on a thread about Amazon's relationship with FOSS and still only garnered 500 votes.
Possible this is just a marketing piece to generate discussion?
Bolt the david vs Stripe/YC the goliath of SV, reconciling traditional startup pains to a monopoly but they made it anyway...
Some interesting points though, particularly the one where stripe took investment from many vcs in order to block other companies... that could've been to get access to existing networks and sell to those companies too. But I could see how that could be a blocker too.
Seems like the person had been mulling on this for a while and for whatever reason decided today was the time to share his thoughts publicly. If it was a deliberate strategy I suspect it would have been better argued (there’s a few factual errors that undermine most of the argument which any competent PR person would have thought to verify).
I guess I’ve been out of YC a long time but I have a really hard time believing they are torpedoing investments in any company that competes with one of theirs, both because they wouldn’t want to and because they couldn’t. It’d make a lot more sense for them to just invest in potential disruptors, and in fact they do that all the time.
This sounds like all the same shit I (and most founders) went through even when there was little to no competition.
I can totally see that somebody could easily misinterpret the craziness that is raising money, an endeavor I can only liken to online dating. I’d need some pretty compelling evidence of this sort of collusion and there’s nothing given.
Also I haven’t talked to Patrick in a long time but he always seemed like a really good dude and I can’t imagine he’s doing that either.
A good example is popular discourse on 'elites'. You could perceive this as a shadowy cabal consciously acting, or as systemic flaws in society which perpetuate inequality.
Ryan's account leans towards the former, shadowy Cabal. VCs have systemic flaws in perception and they're subject to a herd mentality (e.g. startups are bimodally hot or not).
The systemic theory can explain Ryan's fundraising experiences more simply than the 'Mob Bosses of Stripe and YC' theory.
The longer version is going to involve a tedious barrage of links, but I want this to be something that people can check for themselves if they care to.
Quoting from https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784877060349953 and https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680:
> Both had organically made it up to #1 on Hacker News with 100s of upvotes
Their first post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092, made it to #2 (http://hnrankings.info/16215092/) and got 171 upvotes. The second, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692, made it to #4 (http://hnrankings.info/16870692/) and got 70 upvotes.
> On April 18, 2018, we posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692 [...] An ~hour later, this showed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290. Ours disappeared.
Stripe's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869290) was submitted at 17:41 UTC, and Bolt's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16870692) was submitted over 2 hours later, at 20:08 UTC. If you want external evidence for that, look at the hnrankings.info pages for the two posts (Stripe: http://hnrankings.info/16869290/, Bolt: http://hnrankings.info/16870692/). You'll see that they first pick up Stripe's post on the front page at 17:45 and Bolt's at 20:30. You'll also see that Stripe's post made it to #2, not #1 as he claims.
Here's the HN front page at 19:09 that day: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418190904/https://news.ycom.... Stripe's post is already at #2. Bolt's hasn't been submitted yet. The first snapshot with Bolt on the front page is at 20:35: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418203508/https://news.ycom.... By 21:21, Bolt's briefly makes it higher than Stripe's: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom....
> Ours disappeared
Bolt's post fell in rank because it was flagged by users—that is the drop you can see in http://hnrankings.info/16870692/ and in this snapshot by 21:21: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418222105/https://news.ycom....
I don't know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That's standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.)
None of the flags came from YC founders or staff. (Edit: I looked into whether it might have been Stripe people doing the flagging here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070445.) HN moderators did not make the post fall in rank, or moderate the post at all. I don't think I'd ever heard of Bolt before today.
The article no longer exists on bolt.com, but if you want to compare it to the stripe.com article, the articles are here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180418171628/https://stripe.co...
His insinuations about HN are false too. He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do.
Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status on HN. It's true that this is incredibly hard to do. Another startup that managed it, around the same time, was Cloudflare (not a YC startup). Startups achieve this by doing three things: producing products that the community considers good, producing articles that the community finds interesting, and mastering the art of interacting with the community. You need all three.
I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).
All 4 of the startups I've mentioned have the advantage that they were|are targeting programmers, which gives them a fast track to rapport with this community—sort of a ladder in the snakes-and-ladders game. However, that's not a sufficient condition for getting a satisfying click with the community, and it isn't a necessary one either. The real problem is that so much of the content that startups produce to try to interest this community just isn't interesting enough (to this community), and often gives off inadvertent signals of being uninteresting—things like seeming too enterprisey, or too slick in the marketing department.
If the bolt.com people had asked us for help, I would have been just as happy to help them as anybody else. I would have told them that the opening of their article (https://web.archive.org/web/20180418201841/https://blog.bolt...) was too enterprisey to appeal to HN. The language is drawn from ecommerce retailing, which makes sense given the little bit we've all learned about Bolt today, but is the kind of thing that comes across as boring on HN. The references to Gartner and Experian feel like reading an enterprise whitepaper, which detracts from credibility with the HN audience.
This is the sort of thing I've told countless startups over the years. It's dismayingly difficult to express this information in a way that people can actually absorb, but I have a set of notes that I've sent to many startups in this position, which I plan to turn into an essay about how to write for HN. if anyone wants a copy, email hn@ycombinator.com and I'll be happy to send it to you.
I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say here, but mercifully, I've forgotten them.