I think it's kind of human nature to always want to see these things as a competitive dynamic, that either technology companies have to win or the banks have to win and one of them is going to lose. It's not as black and white.
One of the important lessons of the Internet is, how easy it is to get things done completely shapes what gets created. For that reason, technologies like Amazon's cloud service are very important. Even if they aren't technically impressive, they make things easy to do.
I think it'll take a while to adjust, but when you think about just the creativity of people and what they're capable of and the sort of aspirations and dreams that they have, the idea that they're not capable of anything more than sort of performing these automatable clerical tasks, I don't believe that for a second.
I think in general technology always sort of makes some jobs less relevant, or perhaps, even obsolete, but I will say that the idea that sort of workers will find nothing else to do seems like it's way too pessimistic on the capabilities of everyone as human beings, right?
Eventually, after a couple of years, Stripe strated to become an overnight success.
It's very possible that advertising business models will simply never do as well on mobile devices as those oriented around transactions.
The part of Stripe that I've always found most interesting is the idea of facilitating new commerce that wouldn't otherwise happen. Payouts is turning out to be a big part of that. These new networks are efficient, intelligent replacements for offline behemoths.
We don't always endorse what businesses sell through Stripe, but we do think it's critical that we and our peers don't act as gatekeepers for what is and isn't acceptable content.
Stripe makes it easy for anyone, be it an individual or a small business or a large business, to accept credit card payments on the Internet. We want to give control to the user or the business to define what the experience looks like. We work on a website or a mobile app, or whatever between that.
I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.
When Facebook famously moved out to Palo Alto there were people in the same house Facebook was based in working on different ideas. It is vital to remember that.