Bear with me…this will be a long, but I think very interesting, post. I read the article that came out today from Google talking about Google Pay and how it’s already available on Airbnb, so I went down a rabbit hole for about 8 hours and dug a hole to China. Literally. And it basically was facts that I’ve read before, but never connected them all together. Take a look:
The craziest thing to me is how everything is connected in terms of companies, investors, you name it. And I should start by saying that I’m assuming the investors I mention (big name investors) probably have some power behind them and obviously they want a great return on their investment.
So we start with Founder’s Fund. Founder’s Fund (owned by Peter Thiel) is an early investor in Ripple, and also Airbnb. Founder’s Fund and CapitalG (Google) are early investors in Lyft. Lyft uses Cross River Bank to pay their driver’s, and Cross River Bank has implemented Ripple’s software. Lyft uses Stripe as their payment processor, and CapitalG and Founder’s Fund are early investors in Stripe, which also had an early investment from American Express Business Travel – this was acquired by Standard Chartered Bank who also invested in Ripple. So right there you can see how using Ripple links a ton of people, and has the potential to save companies money, which makes the big investors in those companies happy.
Then we go a little deeper. A vc firm, 500 Startups, founded by ex Google and PayPal employees invested in WePay, which is considered a market leader among payment providers for crowdfunding site and small business tools. WePay already partnered with Apple Pay and Android Pay (now Google Play), and they were acquired by JP Morgan at the end of 2017. At the end of 2017 there were also 15 JP Morgan executives in Ripple’s office one day.
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