<story><title>Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle</title><url>https://twitter.com/collision/status/1522541067777753090</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eins1234</author><text>A lot of comments here saying that this is the death knell for Plaid, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be so sure. Stripe has launched competitors to existing fintech products and failed to gain traction plenty of times before.&lt;p&gt;Example: Remember the Stripe Corporate Card? It was &amp;quot;launched&amp;quot; as invite-only 3 years ago and is still invite only today, with little signs of traction. Meanwhile both Brex and Ramp have become decacorns through crazy revenue growth.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not really just a Stripe thing either. I think people are way under-estimating how hard it is for a large company to launch and succeed with a product outside of their core offering, especially when the competition is a small nimble startup with a singlular focus on that one product.&lt;p&gt;Startups die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but &amp;quot;large company started competing with it&amp;quot; is a rather rare one.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stripe responds to the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle</title><url>https://twitter.com/collision/status/1522541067777753090</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kbos87</author><text>I don’t know all the specifics of the interaction that happened here, but the hard truth is that if you aren’t eventually expecting this to happen to your business - regardless of the space you are in - you aren’t being realistic about the nature of competition in SaaS.&lt;p&gt;Plaid has enjoyed years of life without much direct competition. My hunch is that few other businesses were interested in the space because it feels inherently fragile, and Plaid has had the benefit from having spent years doing a lot of  sausage making.&lt;p&gt;The inevitable dynamics of competition are finally catching up to them. In established corners of SaaS a vendor with a unique idea barely gets 6 months before their competitors have replicated anything that shows signs of product market fit. Not saying it doesn’t sting, but that’s reality.</text></comment>