<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>pc</author><text>Stripe cofounder here. It&amp;#x27;s a very fair question.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I must admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that Stripe seems to be spreading themselves out into areas outside their core business&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of Stripe employees (and there are now more than 1,000) work on our core functionality today. But we see our core &lt;i&gt;business&lt;/i&gt; as building tools and infrastructure that help grow the online economy. (&amp;quot;Increase the GDP of the internet.&amp;quot;) When we think about that problem, we see that one of the main limits on Stripe&amp;#x27;s growth is the number of successful startups in the world. If we can cheaply help increase that number, it makes a lot of business sense for us to do so. (And, hopefully, doing so will create a ton of spillover value for others as well.)&lt;p&gt;As we grow, we have to get good at walking and chewing gum -- just as Google or Amazon have. However, while we go and tackle other problems, our aim is not only to continue to improve our core payments infrastructure, but do deliver improvements at an accelerating rate.</text><parent_chain><item><author>cyberferret</author><text>As someone whose SaaS uses Stripe for payment processing, I must admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that Stripe seems to be spreading themselves out into areas outside their core business.&lt;p&gt;I read the &amp;quot;22 Immutable Laws of Marketing&amp;quot; many many years ago, and it repeatedly spells out the folly of large companies who became huge on the back of just ONE product then thinking that they needed to have alternatives or provide more choice and broadened their range to the overall long term detriment of the main product or business that made them huge in the first place.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Just to clarify - it is not just Stripe Press.  I am including initiatives like acquiring the Indie Hackers site (which I enjoy BTW) a while back etc.  I can totally see that these are all related to Stripe&amp;#x27;s audience of tech startups, but it still has the ring of, say, a candy company who starts diversifying into a clothing line etc.&lt;p&gt;End of the day - every employee who is distracted by looking after the assets &amp;amp; numbers for these side projects is an employee who is not focused on their core payments system.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Stripe Press</title><url>https://press.stripe.com/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>sarreph</author><text>I would argue that some completely separate (sourced) books in a fancy web-giftshop doesn&amp;#x27;t constitute a product alternative or range-extension.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s almost akin to a successful tech company starting an annual conference — you wouldn&amp;#x27;t lambast them for &amp;#x27;losing product focus&amp;#x27; on spending a similar amount of productivity (as a book line) in a non-tech-stack branch, would you?&lt;p&gt;Now, if they doubled-down on Stripe Press to the detriment of Stripe the service, then they would indeed be making a silly mistake. :)</text><parent_chain><item><author>cyberferret</author><text>As someone whose SaaS uses Stripe for payment processing, I must admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that Stripe seems to be spreading themselves out into areas outside their core business.&lt;p&gt;I read the &amp;quot;22 Immutable Laws of Marketing&amp;quot; many many years ago, and it repeatedly spells out the folly of large companies who became huge on the back of just ONE product then thinking that they needed to have alternatives or provide more choice and broadened their range to the overall long term detriment of the main product or business that made them huge in the first place.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Just to clarify - it is not just Stripe Press.  I am including initiatives like acquiring the Indie Hackers site (which I enjoy BTW) a while back etc.  I can totally see that these are all related to Stripe&amp;#x27;s audience of tech startups, but it still has the ring of, say, a candy company who starts diversifying into a clothing line etc.&lt;p&gt;End of the day - every employee who is distracted by looking after the assets &amp;amp; numbers for these side projects is an employee who is not focused on their core payments system.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Stripe Press</title><url>https://press.stripe.com/</url></story>