We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best examples ever of simultaneously selling to the largest companies in the world while not giving up on a strong self-serve product. So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery.
Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development.
Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.
Congrats, Patrick. The VMware + AWS experience is certainly a big plus for a company like Stripe.
I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one.
In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB.
It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin.
In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine.
Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.
I learned about AWS and Stripe at around the same time, but while AWS's dashboard has become truly overwhelming, Stripe has until recently been very focused on your core product.
I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc.
Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons?
(I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))
The number of companies (big ones, public ones!) where I can't for the life of me figure out what they sell from their website is truly astonishing. I understand that 1) if I can't understand it I'm not in their market, and 2) they probably want to be vague so they can sell their prospects whatever they ask for [1] but I still feel that they could gain a lot in the long term through brand awareness and people like becoming or meeting their target customer (but not having had any idea what that company did) by making a clear articulation of what the hell they do.
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
Hi pc, huge fan of Stripe and its relentless focus on the "impatient developer", which so many enterprise companies miss the mark on. As a future co-founder interested in this space, do you have any talks or essays on how you built a developer centric company that has also a successful "enterprise" side to it?
Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing.
'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now.
I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not.
Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently.
There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction.
A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer.
I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.
This is sort of neat because the same problem seems to be mirrored for Stripe customers; for example, if my business caters to the impatient developer and I use Stripe for payments, I find myself having to explore outside the bounds of conveniently orchestrated payments, to more esoteric per-customer high-touch interactions for large enterprise customers. I wonder if there isn't room for Stripe to grow to help businesses deal with these... sort of business deals!
One thing that could help with acquiring both self serve and enterprise customers would be effective, B2B focused Facebook ads. I have a ton of experience with scaling these for other big B2B tech companies, email is in my profile if that sounds interesting.
Thanks for addressing this. Each of these points was an immediate worry as I was reading the post, nice to see you’ve already thought of them and addressed them.
Just me or does anyone else think there’s going to be a reckoning in interchange regulation in the US like Europe soon?
Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace.
The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi-partisan action sooner rather than later addressing this very question eg Durbin Amendment Part 2.
My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.
Visa/MasterCard/amex are a huge tax on society, and they won by anti-competitive processes. Society wins very little by a 2-3% tax on all transactions.
I think the problems with credit card for businesses in the US are almost solely cost. There are other minor issues, but until Stripe works to bust up the interchange, they really aren't working on the true problem with payments.
(Fraud is a distant #2 issue for most merchants and for most people I've chatted with Stripe's radar is more expensive than the fraud itself).
My co-founder and I started Imagine Financial to solve exactly this problem. We are coming out of stealth and addressing the problem of interchange head-on. We believe interchange is an unnecessary excessive tax, and we are offering an alternative to all US merchants.
This is an incredibly hard problem, we are learning and don't have all the answers, but it's about time someone tried to disrupt it. Businesses and consumers are suffering, and they should not be charged in this way. Our network is rolling out over the next few weeks and would love to gather feedback from those who want to get involved in changing this industry!
Very unlikely. They could if you go to MS or GCP or VMware. Note that some people might know stories about it, but most of these people wouldn't be able to talk about it.
We migrated from stripe to paddle in the last month due to stripe not having any built in tax functionality. They do have a separate provider to calculate taxes but then you need to work with multiple services and worry about all those working well. We went with paddle since it's all built in because technically they are the ones who get paid, take off a bit off the top, charge taxes and file them.
Is this just spam? The linked article is only tangentially related to stripe, and makes no clear argument against anything in specific. It’s a handy wavy “they took our rights!” but never presents an example. The whole thing almost reads like a scam ad you see on Craigslist or in your spam folder
[+] [-] pc|5 years ago|reply
Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development.
Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one.
In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB.
It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin.
In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine.
Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.
[+] [-] tylermenezes|5 years ago|reply
I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc.
Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons?
(I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))
[+] [-] ponker|5 years ago|reply
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
[+] [-] ultimoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing.
'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now.
I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not.
Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently.
There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction.
A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer.
I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.
[+] [-] QuinnyPig|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenmc77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudhirj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xoxoy|5 years ago|reply
Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace.
The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi-partisan action sooner rather than later addressing this very question eg Durbin Amendment Part 2.
[+] [-] thoraway1010|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchusma|5 years ago|reply
Visa/MasterCard/amex are a huge tax on society, and they won by anti-competitive processes. Society wins very little by a 2-3% tax on all transactions.
I think the problems with credit card for businesses in the US are almost solely cost. There are other minor issues, but until Stripe works to bust up the interchange, they really aren't working on the true problem with payments.
(Fraud is a distant #2 issue for most merchants and for most people I've chatted with Stripe's radar is more expensive than the fraud itself).
[+] [-] absb|5 years ago|reply
This is an incredibly hard problem, we are learning and don't have all the answers, but it's about time someone tried to disrupt it. Businesses and consumers are suffering, and they should not be charged in this way. Our network is rolling out over the next few weeks and would love to gather feedback from those who want to get involved in changing this industry!
http://www.gotimagine.com/merchants
Feel free to reach out to [email protected] to get involved.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fblp|5 years ago|reply
Thank you!
[+] [-] xoxoy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikVandeWater|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graton|5 years ago|reply
Since they did that earlier this year: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polishdude20|5 years ago|reply
Has anyone done this with stripe successfully?
[+] [-] swyx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catsarebetter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harmlessposter|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] andrewxdiamond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moneywoes|5 years ago|reply