[PragmaticPulp]

EDIT: The accused person has denied these allegations, claiming that Plaid reached out to Stripe (not the other way around) and that the RFPs were because Stripe invited Plaid to be part of the product: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FR8FjJ9VsAAMY_k?format=jpg&name=...

> Wow! Jay, you took interviews with Plaid & asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years, and your team sent repeated RFP's (under NDA!) to us asking for tons of detailed data. I wish y'all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods.

I don't know. Talking with a company shouldn't disqualify you from ever working on a competing product. Sending an RFP doesn't mean you can never build your own product.

The Plaid CEO is trying to anchor the conversation around malicious intent, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where this product-minded person legitimately explored working with Plaid, legitimately explored partnership opportunities at Stripe, and walked away believing it would be better for Strip and for himself to build a competing solution at Stripe.

Plaid's product isn't entirely novel. In my experience as a consumer it has failed at least 3/4 times I've tried to use it with my financial institutions. I'm frankly more surprised that it took this long for anyone to enter their space to compete against Plaid.

[mritchie712]

yeah, Stripe has a totally reasonable defense for this:

1. Obviously this is a product we'd want to build because our customers want it

2. We contacted Plaid to see if they wanted to be part of it

3. Plaids pricing didn't work for us so we built it ourselves / went with other providers

Not sure what you'd even get from talking to the team at Plaid that couldn't be learned in an afternoon or two using product that use Plaid and hacking on banking API's.

[lambda_lord]

They are not describing a job interview. They are describing a product interview between businesses for some sort of partnership.

[PragmaticPulp]

Right, but that doesn't imply malicious intent and it doesn't disqualify them from building their own.

Talking to companies about their product and then later deciding you'd rather build your own isn't really surprising. Plaid was definitely aware that Stripe was a potential competitor going into those meetings.

[ergocoder]

Jay confirmed it was a job interview 8y ago before he even joined stripe.

https://twitter.com/jay_ssh/status/1521973965098561536

Plaid CEO maliciously misled people.

[ergocoder]

Jay replied that it was a job interview 8 years ago before he joined stripe. Jay started building this product in 2020.

Jay met with people from Plaid a few times. All were at Plaid's requests...

RFP is about Plaid becoming the service partner for Stripe like how MX is currently a partner. Plaid decided not to become a partner.

Source: https://twitter.com/jay_ssh/status/1521973965098561536

And of course plaid CEO doesn't respond.

Plaid CEO mentioned "interview" but intentionally left out "8 fucking years ago, and it was a job interview".

Plaid CEO also got the RFP, so they have been aware that Stripe is building this because Stripe wanted to depend on MX, Plaid, and etc. But Plaid CEO acted surprised to this launch.

It sounds like Plaid CEO maliciously misled people. Does this guy have any ethics left?

[hitekker]

I'd wait for the emails to come out. One side is probably hoping that won't happen.

In my view, ethics go out the window when the mantra is to eat the world. The kind of ultra-fast, ultra-huge growth that Stripes pitches to investors and also to its employees comes at great cost. We've seen this with prior tech giants like Facebook, Microsoft and Google who also invested heavily into developer PR.