think of this as microsoft and sony taking a hit for every console they sell. It's anti-competitive because other console manufacturers can't do that.
in the end, you end up with a result like in politics. Whoever has more money wins the whole market.
The market pretty much exchanged short term benefits (cheaper console, better phone plans) for worse longer term problems (lame games because you have no choice, more expensive phone plans because you have no choice)
Ah, it was always my understanding that Microsoft and Sony did take a hit selling their console, and made the money back in things like controllers and games. Do they make a profit on the console itself now?
I think it's relevant to point out the former CTO explicitly stated earlier today in the thread that the founder wasn't kicked out:
"I'm the former CTO of Braintree and one of the founding employees. I was there when Bryan Johnson hired Bill Ready as CEO and decided to move to Chairman. The authors of the TechCrunch article were either misinformed or speculating when they said that Bryan "lost his position" and that Bill joining was a "decision made by Accel." Bryan made the decision to hire Bill and move into the Chairman role without pressure from anyone."
That may very well be true - if he wants the company sold, why not, especially if he wants to avoid getting tied into working for an acquiring company for years.
That said, I've also been involved in a company (as co-founder) where finding C-level execs to parade around to state that the CEO (one of my co-founders) left voluntarily would be easy enough.
Most of them wouldn't know differently either, not having been privy to the conference calls where the investors made it clear they'd find an excuse to fire him for cause and tie him up in court over his shares for the next few years if he didn't "volunteer" to take 6 months pay, put on a brave face and leave. What most of them saw was the show my co-founder put on to get the best deal possible and leave gracefully.
I'll hasten to add that I don't know this guy, so for what I know he was in the room for every conversation Bryan Johnson had with the investors at Braintree or otherwise actually did have the inside track. Just pointing out that it's also easy to think you have the inside track on these types of things without having a clue about what actually went on.
Second this. There can be many layers of understanding to things like this and it is all too easy to think you were an eyewitness to a real life event when in fact you were just watching a well-choreographed ballet.
Balanced, Stripe, Braintree, and a host of other companies are trying to build a great payments platform. What makes Balanced any different from the others in this case? Isn't Balanced also based on the premise that "well paypal sucks"?
Balanced's mission is to increase the global economy by enabling new commerce. Our current mechanism to do that is with payments [1].
So we don't actually want to build a processing company, per se, but we're finding that's the best way to accomplish our mission right now.
At some point, it's likely that we'll have to make changes to our mechanism, but until then we feel building the world's first open source payments infrastructure company [2] is a great way to accomplish our goal.
