"Privileged" is an insult (in popular culture) and if you claim otherwise you are being disingenuous or you are very badly out of touch. (Or you're saying "well I didn't mean it to be an insult" and yeah sure you're very smart.)
At my last company I worked way more than 40 hours a week during the ~5 years until we sold. However, even when I was often working 10-12 hours a day, plus many hours on weekends, I would take advantage of the flexibility afforded me by being a partner in the business -- mostly by taking random mornings/afternoons/days off to pursue hobbies, etc.
It sounds like you are just buying the same class of preferred stock as series B investors did, so it's not "quasi stock" it's just "stock". What is the distinction you are making?
5 years ago the developer experience working with the Adyen API was significantly worse than Stripe's. Also, the initial in-person EMV implementation, and how it integrated with online payments, was inferior when compared to Stripe in my opinion.
Our rates were also significantly better with Stripe in the US, though we were doing into the billions in annual transactions, which likely has a lot to do with it (we wouldn't have moved all of those billions to Adyen right away).
Which is all to say, much of what you say is true, but it's not like Adyen is a clear winner.
I worked at a company for about four years with the payments processing in that time ranging from $300M to $3B.
The rate is the area to give the least concern to, but novices in the field always get hyper focused on.
Approval ratios, chargeback mitigation and other possible services are the bottom line real earners.
Today one of them could be break even but with 20000 customers could introduce a service that makes them incredibly profitable.
It is a bit of a jump, but Apples accessories department is currently accounting for 20% of Apples entire earnings. Not even the core product.
Payments example for either being discussed is they could just introduce the same services Ethoca was offering MasterCard acquired and they'd add on another $20-40M in EBITDA.
Totally agree with that dev experience 5 years ago. I did integrate their DropIn product about 2 years ago and that was much nicer to work with but I always found their docs a little confusing. Stripe is hands down the winner in dev ux.
The thing is there's no money in charging writers, really. There's just not enough of them, and they aren't going to pay you enough (certainly not to reach golden egg territory). You must monetize on a per reader basis if you want real revenue.
that seem like what somebody would pay. If you'd assume somebody spends 4 hours a week blogging and their time is worth $25 an hour you'd be putting $400 of hour of labor in a month and spending $40 for hosting is a fraction of that. That $25/hour would seem low to some people but high to others: some people are time-rich and cash-poor and others the other way around.
The horrific truth about the "Next Medium" is that it is going to appeal to people who are too lazy to write a successful blog by having GPT-4 write their blog posts for them.
