A lot of why people didn't build Stripe before was that to enter the payments space you needed connections to get the banks and payment processors to work with you. In comparison, you don't need anyone's permission to make uber for dry cleaners or something in line with other trends of the time. I doubt the Collison brothers would have been as successful getting Stripe off the ground if it had been their first company.
Working at a start-up now and seeing how many partnerships are solely due to connections of the CEO or a random board member is crushing. The tech side is an entirely and relatively easily solvable problem in comparison to the rest.
Has always been, there are a few cases where this wasn't true but odds are any industry you want to "enter" needs someone with connections to open the doors for you.
Tech is a problem that needs solving but it isn't the biggest problem to be solved, having a network and knowing people is more than half the job.
Those connections didn't materialize out of thin air, you know. Your CEO/random board member had to meet people, understand what they do, keep those connections alive, etc.
Why can't you do the same? Start now and in five years you'll be a lot more connected than you are at this moment. This is also an entirely solvable problem.
Banking is both deeply entrenched and well regulated. I suppose people could make a venmo/PayPal/cash app payment system but dealing with cards would be more difficult
Set a reminder for 10 years from now. Let's see how many incredible new tech products have been built. My guess is that ~any judge will decide that it turned out there were a lot of things still to be built
yeah. I worked on the internal banking connection at Square in the old days (~2011) and it was a _nightmare_. like, pre-TCP/IP connectivity that depended on dedicated copper to do teletype in COBOL-style fixed length fields in a cryptic format that was only specified in scans of paper documents. We had to write an adaptor that looked like, you know, REST on one end but then shoveled all of the traffic onto that single upstream connection, and then had to try to map responses that came back out of order to the right client. Miserable stuff and a threading nightmare.
