Eh, this is probably true. It was fun in the days when it was all about getting acquired by Google or Facebook, but I guess this spurred a lot of unsustainable businesses. If you were making revenue you were seen as dumb. "Lol, why would you charge money? Doesn't you know how to build a business?"
100% agree. I thought similarly with Plaid and Visa. It feels like it will stifle competition because it's now harder to get funding. Back when Facebook and Google were making so many acquisitions, it seemed like money was just flowing. Bad for competition. Good for incumbents.
We are building a real world payment platform where the ownership is distributed back to the participants. Think a Web3 version of Square.
We are starting with restaurants, specifically food trucks, and have spent the last year building a full featured point-of-sale and have replaced Square in a handful of businesses.
By distributing ownership of the payment network back to the participating restaurants we make for a virtuous growth cycle in an environment where the entire restaurant industry is frustrated that companies like Toast and DoorDash are worth billions while the restaurants that they were built on top of are still struggling.
Nick Evans previously co-founded Tile, the item locator startup. They were just acquired last year for $205M.
Shayan Guha previously was tech lead at Teleborder (YC S13), acquired by Trinet.
How do I sleep at night? For the last three weeks I've been waking up at about 2AM every night with anxiety running through my body. My life absolutely sucks right now and it will for a while. I absolutely would pay people back personally if I could. I'm working on a way to get refunds back to people.
Things were not going in the right direction and we started moving forward with a more graceful exit that would have gotten scooters to our current customers, but it fell through and then we reached the point of no return.
Basically my only job right now is to find a way to get returns back to people.
Thank you for sharing your side of the story. I was wrong to attack you so personally on a public forum and I apologize for that. It's too easy sometimes to forget I'm insulting a real person when I'm critical online.
I hope your work pays off and you find a solution.
