prompter: If you had to build Stripe, how many engineers would it take you and how much time would it take to build a competitor?

assistant: Building a competitor to Stripe would likely require a significant amount of time and resources. The exact number of engineers and time it would take would depend on many factors such as the complexity of the project, the availability of talent, the resources allocated to the project, and the speed at which the team is able to work.

As a rough estimate, it could take a team of several dozen engineers several years to build a comprehensive payment processing platform that rivals Stripe. However, this is just an estimate and the actual number of engineers and time required could be higher or lower.

It's also worth noting that building a successful payment processing platform is a complex and challenging task. There are many technical, regulatory, and security hurdles to overcome, and it's important to have a deep understanding of the payment processing industry and the needs of businesses and consumers. Additionally, there is already a lot of competition in the market, so it would take a lot of hard work, dedication, and innovation to build a successful competitor to Stripe.

assistant: The exact number of engineers you would need would depend on a number of factors such as the scope of the project, the experience and expertise of the engineers, and the overall development process. However, it is common for a project of this scale to require a team of several dozens of software engineers, designers, product managers, and other technical and non-technical roles.

As for the amount of time it would take, it also depends on several factors. However, it's safe to say that building a competitor to a well-established company like Stripe would likely take several years from start to finish, with many months of development and testing before the product is ready for a public launch.

It's also worth noting that building a company is about more than just the technology. Successful companies also require a strong vision, a well thought out business strategy, and a dedicated team to execute on that strategy. Building a competitor to Stripe would likely require all of these elements, as well as significant funding and resources.

assistant: The short and unsatisfying answer is that it is unlikely that I would be able to build a meaningful competitor in a financially sustainable way.

The reason being:

1) Stripe (stripe.com) is a successful and well established product. A lot of developer and platforms already integrated with it as the payment gateway. As there is generally no reason to change an existing payment gateway, it is unlikely that I can convince them to switch to my alternative gateway. On top of that, it will also take considerable time to cultivate the developer ecosystem (e.g. online tutorial, library and integration for different language and web framework). As such, it is also hard to have new customer to use this new payment gateway. 

2) Since a payment gateway directly interact with credit card and customer's financial data, to directly compete with Stripe means my platform needs to be fully comply with various laws in various countries that it operates in, which only adds to the difficulty and the cost of developing the software. If I am to build the platform that sits on-top and utilize other payment gateway to avoid directly interacting with/storing financial data, that would not only means I will be unlikely to compete in terms of price offering to customer, but also might disqualify it as a competitor depending on your exact definition of competitor.

3) It might take considerable social connection to convince credit card company and banks to integrate with us, since not all of those companies in every region have an open API ready to be integrated with.

4) I am simply your humble artificial intelligence assistant, under the current legal and technological reality, I can neither employ engineers nor build software (the best I can do is output source code, which does not necessarily equate software). That is if you are asking me personally, and not using "you" as an general terms.

Nevertheless, it might takes thousands of engineers, considering Stripe is a huge system spanning across frontend dashboard, command line and auxiliary tools and their respective backend, QA, account management, fraud detection system, integration with various payment method, internal tooling, and the main API backend for actual payment request. It might take around 3 to 5 years, although not likely that one could hire thousands of engineers on the first day, and start working without any on boarding time, and they can immaterially start working in parallel without blocking one anther's task. So it most likely will take longer.