This Week in Startups
00:36:42 · Lon Harris, Alex Wilhelm
[00:36:42] S0: Yeah. We said that on the show. There was, like, a... There was a clip going around that we put on social about Jason. I think it was with me talking about this. And people got so mad. They were like, it obviously makes sense that Amazon would like, why would you guys even expect Amazon to, like, play along? Like, they want you to use their own agent. And it's like, it doesn't... It it doesn't... The moment you try to do it and then you can't buy something off of Amazon with your agent and you get frustrated, that's the moment it becomes a mistake. Like, it's... They should be facilitating any way you wanna buy things. They're Amazon. That's what they do. They sell you things in an easy direct fashion. That's like the whole big They should [00:37:17] S3: have the world's biggest hook outside for my agents to hook onto. They should accept any possible type of payment that I want. Yeah. They should have an intelligent way to handle my permissions. And you know what company would support that? Stripe. Stripe. [00:37:28] S0: Who had... [00:37:28] S3: Who was working on agenda payment. I think it is. Exactly. So it's it's it's fun to see people that were right stay right, and I'm I'm really glad that they didn't buy PayBucks. I think that deal looked really dumb from the outside. I'm sure there was more logic to it, but I'd rather have Stripe unencumbered than Stripe dragging PayPal behind it like the alien in, Independence Day.
00:37:28 · Alex Wilhelm, Lon Harris
[00:37:28] S3: Who was working on agenda payment. I think it is. Exactly. So it's it's it's fun to see people that were right stay right, and I'm I'm really glad that they didn't buy PayBucks. I think that deal looked really dumb from the outside. I'm sure there was more logic to it, but I'd rather have Stripe unencumbered than Stripe dragging PayPal behind it like the alien in, Independence Day. [00:37:49] S0: Okay. There you go. Took a second, but I got there. Let's move on to our next clip. This is we promised up top. I don't like to promise things at the top of YouTube videos that we're not gonna deliver, folks. So we are about to deliver. This is, I think, a really good piece of tactical and practical advice for founders coming from arguably one of the great founders of the modern technology era. Hard to make that argument. Let's take a look, Zach, at this next clip about how good ideas don't always seem intuitively great when you first have them.
00:38:21 · Patrick Collison
[00:38:21] S4: Over the course of that summer, basically... And and again, I think there's kind of maybe a lesson here where, you know, I think a lot of really good ideas really don't seem particularly great or big upfront. Again, certainly speaking from personal Stripe did not. But over the course of working on it that summer, sort of thinking about it and so on, we kind of came to shift from sort of thinking about it merely as this nice little tool for developers that kind of makes their lives easier initially, which is kind of what we started out with, to kind of realizing that, well, when you sort of survey the broader landscape, it's not just that it sort of sucks for developers to have to sort of integrate payments initially into their website or service or whatever, but that like the whole edifice is broken, right? I mean, 2% at the time, 2% of all consumer spending took place on the internet, and it's like, why is it so low? Why is it so insanely difficult for any company to do anything that touches online transactions? When we went, we talked to a mid sized company or a large company. It's like, what's your experience of just dealing with business and the internet? And they would, you know, they would spend half an hour telling us about sort of the markets they couldn't serve and their fraud challenges and the things they couldn't integrate in, and just, you know, we came to appreciate that sort of what we thought was kind of a, know, this little pond was actually kind of this much larger ocean. And so we see that summer we kind of made two decisions, to drop out of school, or you know, as our mom used to, prefer we call it, to take a leave of absence. And then secondly, we had to go raise some initial money from Sam Altman, and and Peter Thiel and and Sequoia and a couple of others.
00:39:51 · Lon Harris
[00:39:51] S0: Yes. I mean, I... This is... I'm writing these daily Substack tactical and practical posts. You could check them out, twistartups.substack.com if you're curious. And and this variations on this topic have come up so frequently throughout not just this week in start ups history, but any other tech founder start up podcast that you watch. The idea that a lot of people think that when you come up with an idea for a business, the very first thing you do is make a product. Like, I've figured out a product that people need, and I'm going to build it. And today, this is so especially true because you can literally just tell your agent or Claude, like, here's the tool I have an idea for. Let's build it together. And and what this and so many other founders, come back to is really when you come up with a with a business idea, you've figured out there's a problem. Like, here is a problem people have. It needs solving. I wanna be the person that can facilitate the solution to this. But without getting your hands dirty, building things, talking to your future customers, learning everything you can, you probably don't know the exact right solution. You... It's probably going to take iterations and education and research to really crack how do you solve the problem in the way that the people who are gonna use your solution are going to come back to and repeat use over and over again. So, like, I think that's kind of what a lot of this gets to is that you're you're not ready to build your finish like, let's build Stripe today because I figured out there's a need for Stripe. It's like, okay, now you've got to do a lot of what Patrick talks about in this clip. Now you've got to, like, talk to all of the people who run banks and financial institutions who understand what's missing now. And then in the future, you will know what you need to build that actually solves the real contextual problems that exist.
00:41:45 · Alex Wilhelm
[00:41:45] S3: Yeah. Whenever I hear a story like this from a founder, I'm always, one, impressed at their ability to just work on things that are nonobvious, nonconsensus, and and difficult because that's kinda like you're out in the field by yourself digging a hole. Like, it's not exactly a fun place to be. Yeah. But, also, the willingness to have patience. I mean, if you think about the current startup world today, Lawn, every time you see one of those revenue charts, everyone's trying to be the fastest to a 100,000,000 ARR, the fastest to a billion in recurring revenue, whatever, whatever, whatever. Everyone's obsessed with what have you done in the last thirty days how can I measure it, and how can I instrument, and how can I put that against other things to benchmark it? This seems like a slower process, a bigger problem. Yes. It did take a while, but think about the result they got out of this. I mean, this is a billion dollar company now, but they had to go out there and ask questions. I I I just... I I hope that there's still room for founders like the Collisons who do things that take time to get launched, get rolling, and become unstoppable to build up that inertia versus the companies today that are just kinda going from zero to hero overnight, and I worry that they're gonna go back from hero to zero in the same time frame in some cases.
00:42:50 · Lon Harris, Alex Wilhelm
[00:42:50] S0: Yeah. I feel like it's it's probably like a pendulum swing. Like, right now, things are just in this incredibly... Like, we figured out what a few of the key AI bottlenecks are, and everybody is just pouring into those niches. Like, okay, we need, like, faster, more efficient inference. Like, everybody try to do that. We know that's a problem. You know? So I think we'll probably wait a little while, and then we'll get back to, like, we have to do a little bit more legwork to figure out exactly what these bottlenecks and obstacles are to the next iteration of our AI agents because I'm assuming it's all gonna be AI from now on. [00:43:25] S3: I do just wanna add a caveat, though. I'm not trying to say that today's companies that are growing quickly are not valuable, aren't doing something cool. Of course. I just appreciate that there was a time when you could do the equivalent of messing about in the garage longer. And I think that's something that that we don't want to lose in the broader startup conversation.