Saturday assorted links
1. Review of the new Richard Posner biography.
3. The blind astronomer of Nova Scotia.
And this:
A couple of months ago, Patrick Collison came to me with another crazy idea. He said Stripe wanted to make “simple incorporation as a service”, so that any entrepreneur worldwide could have a corporate entity and a bank account spun up about as easily as they could get an EC2 server.
This idea is crazy. I’ve incorporated four companies and opened business bank accounts for all of them. The most recent required over a hundred pages of documentation and six weeks of negotiation to assuage a risk department’s concerns about foreign tech entrepreneurs. (Thanks, Bitcoin.) You’re not supposed to be able to do this.
Stripe did it. With crazy speed: the project was in beta within 11 weeks of conception. It can take that long to form a single company in much of the world. Stripe solved the problem like an engineer: establishing one company requires an annoying amount of form-filling so instead of buckling down and doing it you just make a company-establishing web application and abstract away form-filling for all time.
And they’re crazily ambitious about where it ends up: not simply incorporating companies, but eating all of the crufty back office work which distracts Internet businesses from getting more real products into the hands of real customers. Payments, contracts, invoices, bookkeeping, incorporation, taxes, etc etc, all things you have to do even if what you’re actually doing is selling bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers.
Crazy! But stay tuned…