The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Seibel: Stripe deliberately launched as the most expensive payment product
“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”
Alströmer: Amplitude, Stripe, and Front Started With Founder-Led Outbound Emails
“Some of the early ones like Amplitude, Stripe, Front, they were doing up on sales emails, just like the one we described to get started. Those founders were doing those sales emails as they get started.”
Caldwell: YC's best startups often launch during economic downturns
“Some of the best companies we've ever funded happened when either there was a full downturn or at least a blip.”
Livingston: YC funded 632 startups valued at over $20B by 2014
“So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over twenty billion dollars, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.”
Dill: Over 78% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe
“Over 78% of the Forbes AI-fifty use Stripe, and they are using our products to help them scale”
Katie Dill: Stripe's economic scale is quantified in global GDP
“Another way is like, you know, the actual enormous impact that we have had the privilege and the responsibility of serving in that can actually be quantified in the GDP.”
Lyft partnered with Stripe early on to co-develop Stripe Connect
“These organizations that worked with us, one of them was Lyft for early days, for example. They, you know, came upon this need. They wanted to pay out drivers, and so they built the product with us.”
Stripe prototyped Workbench using near-weekly feedback from Slack and Notion
“We worked with Slack and Notion on, you know, how to make that product Better every day. And so we are doing prototyping and iterating and they are giving us feedback almost on a weekly basis.”
Koomen: Stripe Charged More Than Competitors in Its Early Days
“The Collison brothers famously charged more for Stripe in the beginning than their competition did. The fact that they were able to sell their product anyway was compelling evidence that they were onto something.”
Stripe founders manually processed payments and filled bank forms at launch
“The thing that did not scale, it was literally the founders processing every manual request and filling bank forms to process the payments at the beginning, and that was good enough to get them to launch sooner.”
Epstein: Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex are three top-10 YC companies
“It also turns out that three of the YC top 10 are transactional businesses too. So these are companies like Stripe, Coinbase, and Brex.”
Epstein: Stripe initially tested value by charging 5% per transaction
“So while most of their competitors were actually charging around three percent per transaction, Stripe decided to set their price at five percent per transaction, nearly double what their competitors were charging.”
Buchheit: Patrick Collison personally integrated Stripe code for early customers
“So, like, that was how, like, the very early Stripe installs, Patrick Collison would show up and integrate Stripe into your code.
Right?
He would just show up and do the work.”