> Look at their staff; all engineers, nobody there who has ever got anything past the FAA.
So what?
When the Collison brothers founded Stripe, they (1) were young, (2) had no experience at all in the domain, (3) weren’t even U.S. citizens, (4) were entering a highly regulated space, and (5) were about to compete with some very powerful institutions that have existed forever worth billions and billions of dollars. In the eyes of folks who just look at all of the ways you can fail, they were extremely unattractive and Stripe’s fate was obvious failure. Today, most Americans can’t avoid using Stripe (both directly and indirectly) even if they tried. They’ve overcome all of those hurdles to the point of making it easy for the average engineer to build products without even having to think about the hurdles, dealing with regulators, etc. I vividly remember how awful the process of implementing payments was prior to Stripe (the process took a very long time)—they changed the game.
Maybe Airhart fails or maybe they just manage to change the game.
Are you seriously comparing a payment processor to an airplane manufacturer? Are you aware that Stripe received VC funding from Musk, Thiel and Sequoia in order to keep it from competing with PayPal and to provide a second-source provider to protect PayPal from accusations of monopolization of online processing fees? Are you aware that the storyline you are promoting is in fact a specifically curated myth?
> Are you seriously comparing a payment processor to an airplane manufacturer?
Clearly, my comparison had more to do with the regulation aspect than actually comparing payments and airplanes. Did you read the comment I was responding to?
So what?
When the Collison brothers founded Stripe, they (1) were young, (2) had no experience at all in the domain, (3) weren’t even U.S. citizens, (4) were entering a highly regulated space, and (5) were about to compete with some very powerful institutions that have existed forever worth billions and billions of dollars. In the eyes of folks who just look at all of the ways you can fail, they were extremely unattractive and Stripe’s fate was obvious failure. Today, most Americans can’t avoid using Stripe (both directly and indirectly) even if they tried. They’ve overcome all of those hurdles to the point of making it easy for the average engineer to build products without even having to think about the hurdles, dealing with regulators, etc. I vividly remember how awful the process of implementing payments was prior to Stripe (the process took a very long time)—they changed the game.
Maybe Airhart fails or maybe they just manage to change the game.