It’s hard to overstate how important user experience is to the success of web and mobile applications. It’s why developers spend countless hours agonizing over small things like button placement, menu color and transition animations.
But that focus on user experience makes the terrible user experience around payments incredibly obvious. While most interactions in the app happen with a few clicks or swipes of a touch screen, as soon as it’s time to check out or link a merchant account...

Later today, Y Combinator will host its demo day for the summer 2014 batch. I know exactly what those founders are feeling, because I was in the exact same position five years ago, when my co-founder and I were part of YC’s 2009 class.
I remember nervousness and excitement, tempered by the difficulty of delivering a three minute pitch that does justice to many months filled with days where we didn’t stop working until we were literally too exhausted to go on.  Most distinctly, I remember...