Best of This Week: Feb 4th

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
We had a great one for you today. We had some really great guests on this week. To start off with, we're hearing from Ryan Breslow. Ryan is the founder of a payments company called Bolt. He has been in the news for writing a Twitter thread where he called out Stripe and Y Combinator. And then we had him on the show the day that he resigned as CEO of his company, Bolt.
And here's what he had to say about the whole controversy.

**Shaan Puri** (0:50)
Cool, and so let's talk about this Twitter thing. So you came out the other day and you basically said, look, you're like Bolt, we've become successful now, but it wasn't without some challenges. And there's the normal business challenges. And then there's the challenges of the powers that be. And in Silicon Valley, there's two very powerful. And in most people's minds, I think you picked a fight with people that very few people have bad things to say about Y Combinator and Stripe. Stripe is probably the most beloved startup in Silicon Valley, respected, beloved, whatever.
And YC is also the most powerful sort of like a brand. It's like basically if you're gonna pick on a college, you pick on either Stanford or Harvard if you were going for the top.
And you basically told the story about them being the mafia. And so I want you to kind of quickly, can you quickly bullet point what your argument was for people who aren't nerding out on Twitter and aren't seeing it? Because the audience we have here is not gonna have seen it. So bullet point that and then I got some questions for you.

**Ryan Breslow** (1:56)
Yeah, so the point is my motivation here was to open people's eyes to what goes down in Silicon Valley where it's not all sunshine and rainbows. It is very fierce and there's fierce competition. And there's also games that are played with powerful institutions and groups of people who help each other out.
And so if you're starting a company, especially in payments, you've likely failed. There's, the only ones that have been successful have been internationally.
And we probably should have failed five times over with investors pulling out of term sheets when we were about to run out of money. And so we, I'd say Bolt almost didn't exist because of the powers that be, the powers that be. And, you know, I think there are a lot of other companies that would have existed today if it wasn't for the powers that be. And so, you know, now I don't blame these institutions.

**Sam Parr** (3:04)
But, I don't know if you're doing this on purpose to be kind, but you're kind of being vague. Is it possible that you, like, what does institution mean?
And are you able to, like, actually...

**Shaan Puri** (3:16)
Well, let's separate out, right? There's fair, you know, fair business and games, which is like, we're competing against somebody. That's fair. They can compete with us fiercely.
There's investors just deciding the space is too competitive or Stripe's gonna win. I'm just gonna back away, right? So a perception thing. That's kind of like, nobody would say that that's unfair.
Talk about the specifics of what you felt was unfair or where there was some heavy handedness to it.

**Ryan Breslow** (3:47)
Yeah, so when we would be pitching investors, they'd get interested, they'd say they want to invest, and then they would talk to somebody at Stripe, someone related to Stripe, and either be told they can't invest or they shouldn't invest, or somehow the conclusion was they were dissuaded from investing.

**Shaan Puri** (4:13)
But how do you know that that's what happened? They might just come to you and say, we're not just saying it.

**Ryan Breslow** (4:16)
Told me, Stripe would always come up somehow in that conversation.
So many of them pulled me directly. I don't know if that's to say directly, I got a call by Stripe and they told me I can't invest in you guys.

**Sam Parr** (4:30)
Is that bad though? I mean, what if they were already an investor of Stripe?
I understand that.

**Shaan Puri** (4:36)
I have a conflict of interest.

**Ryan Breslow** (4:37)
But Stripe has all the big names in Silicon Valley invested in them. So they've intentionally put every single tier one firm on their cap table and they even stuffed them with small checks. They're like, everybody's on their cap table. And so from...

**Shaan Puri** (4:57)
And then they say you're conflicted out. That's a competitor of ours. You're our shareholder.

**Ryan Breslow** (5:02)
Right, exactly. And I didn't even consider ourselves a direct competitor at the time.