[echelon]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Stripe just nuked the whole of Plaid's platform and value proposition from orbit.

Plaid just went from a decacorn to a cheap acquisition target for PayPal, Square, Shopify, etc.

I can understand this being absolutely gut wrenching for the founders and early employees that are still on board. It must feel like having tangible dreams crushed. Not as bad as a cancer diagnosis, but certainly worse than a rejection from your dream school.

Competition is an evolutionary force of nature. Brutal at times.

[axg11]

You are not wrong, although I don't believe this will be the death of Plaid. Their growth is certainly limited. Plaid should focus on improving their product. They made a mistake by not expanding into related product segments. Now they will have to directly compete with Stripe on product quality.

[kbos87]

I think this is right. Plaid will get by, but their ability to capture TAM is now constrained. Because they didn’t expand horizontally into some related product offerings, they now look like a feature while Stripe looks like a platform. It sucks to be on your heels having to play catch-up from their position.

[alonmower]

What a whirlwind couple of years for Plaid employees. First the Visa acquisition for 5.3 Billion that falls through because of antitrust, then a round that values them at 13.4 Billion, then fintech and SaaS valuations crater, and now this

[adam_arthur]

Strike while the iron is hot. Any SaaS or speculative tech that sat on the sidelines during this massive bubble did themselves the injustice.

Probably most of them actually believed in the numbers though

[vsareto]

>Not as bad as a cancer diagnosis, but certainly worse than a rejection from your dream school.

We leave rich, but maybe not-as-rich as we thought?

[spiffytech]

That depends on their cap table and exit. In some high dollar exits even the founders don't make any money, because the sale price was too low to pay out anything but investors' preferred shares.

[ec109685]

Plaid has been thinking about this space for 9 years. It seems odd that they wouldn’t be able to continue being a strong entrant here.