Why the Second Founder Usually Builds the Durable Company (opens in new tab)

A friend of mine co-founded a payments startup around 2014. Brilliant guy, deep domain knowledge, raised a respectable seed round. Three years later he was winding it down, not because the market moved against him, but because he’d spent two of those three years building infrastructure that Stripe had already figured out. He was relitigating solved problems with investor capital. The company that eventually ate his lunch was started by someone who’d watched a handful of payments startups stru...