WePay's (YC S09) next chapter

The enterprisiest announcement I&#x27;ve read in a long time. And I work at a big corp. Wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if many people who read this actually don&#x27;t even understand that it basically says &quot;hi guys, we got bought.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s also hard to figure out what WePay has actually been doing. Great enterprise speak again.<p>So, that&#x27;s what the banking world looks like? Even more enterprisy than the Enterprise despite being a start-up?

I had breakfast with Bill a few years ago in Palo Alto. It was clear pretty quickly that WePay wasn’t a good fit for us, but he still managed to navigate me through the competitive landscape and helped me figure out which product was right, pitfalls to avoid, regulations, etc. He even offered his help for the future, even though we were giving him zero business.<p>I’m writing all this because I left with the feeling that he was a genuinely great guy and that he deserved success. I’m glad it has finally come his way!<p>Best of luck!<p>PS: stay away from bitcoin.

This is a pretty authentic and fairly clear note from an acquisition.<p>It&#x27;s pretty clear it wasn&#x27;t the home run that so many set out for when founding a company. I do expect this is a good landing out of this for many, yet now there are new challenges to navigate.<p>Nine years is no short time to labor through, especially when you&#x27;re taking a giant risk and giving up things that software engineers could easily get in terms of work&#x2F;life balance at an AWS&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Microsoft. Yet, you set out to change something in a noticeable fashion.<p>I truly hope Chase gives you the chance to do that, yes it&#x27;s a big company. But, in the spectrum of big co&#x27;s in the financial space they seem more open to innovation than so many others so... best of luck with what&#x27;s next at Chase.

This is really interesting, because if I understood it correctly, WePay was basically a layer that sat on top of Vantiv&#x27;s PayFac and made it easier for businesses (SaaS) to take payments on behalf of many merchants. In other words, let&#x27;s say you setup a SaaS called &quot;GymSAAS&quot; that billed monthly fees (and took cut of each transaction) and your client was &quot;Globo Gym&quot; . GymSAAS could use WePay to collect the money for Globo Gym, take a cut and then pay Globo Gym every month the remaining amount. Using Vantiv&#x27;s PayFac, it means you skip the tedious process of assigning a new merchant account for Globo Gym as they get underwritten in the industry of &quot;gyms&quot;.<p>So what does this mean for Chase? Do they gut all of the plumbing out with Vantiv and move it over to Paymentec for processing? Does Paymentec even have a PayFac capability built into it?

Early WePay customer. Implementor of a Java WePay API.<p>Huge congrats to the team!<p>One feature that stood out for me was the ability to issue refunds without fees. It was not common a few years ago. This allowed me to build an event ticketing platform where promoters could sell tickets. If an event is cancelled and we had already paid out funds to the promoter, my business could have been &#x27;on the line&#x27; for the refunds.<p>Even though we were never a huge customer, the business didn&#x27;t succeed, they still always treated us like we were important. This was a stark contrast to PayPal, whom they were originally trying to take down.<p>I suspect this merger is also about their fraud detection system. I hope Chase can put it to good use, they need it.

Chase <i>just</i> finished switching their &quot;Quick Pay&quot; infrastructure over to &quot;Zelle&quot;, and now they&#x27;re buying WePay. I wonder what they intend to <i>do</i> with it?

Pumped for these guys. I had a few different interactions with them in very small capacities over the years and they were always humble, genuine and supportive of the different projects&#x2F;businesses.<p>Just nice, smart, unpretentious guys.<p>Congrats.

I met Bill and Rich a decade ago in the Andala Coffee House in Cambridge.<p>They were kind, warm, quick with a joke, and even quicker to offer support, insight, and help to the fledgling group of young entrepreneurs.<p>I&#x27;ve taken vicarious delight from watching their success!

Congrats Bill and Rich, and good luck at Chase.

More consolidation in the age of corporate monopoly... I&#x27;m sure a nice exit for the founders and their investors.

Congratulations to the WePay team! As a partner(At JotForm, we integrate forms with WePay), we are excited to hear that Chase is planning to grow WePay.

Congratulation to Bill, Rich, Mark and Tina! I&#x27;m sure everyone else involved deserved this success as well.

A bit of trivia: Chase was founded by Aaron Burr.

“WePay and its employees will operate as Chase&#x27;s payments innovation incubator in Silicon Valley&quot;<p>Uh, oh. Does such a thing ever work?

Congratulations on exiting.

Congrats, well deserved.

tl;dr - Their Incredible Journey (TM) ends at Chase