I mean this in the most constructive way possible.
As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period.
Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out.
They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs.
Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet.
Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.
This is another phrasing of what jackdeansmith says, but this is not right:
> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free.
Payments is taking on a short term risk that the (slow) transaction between a customer's bank and a vendor's bank will not settle, because of (a) fraud, (b) chargeback-like issues, (c) insolvency. This isn't exactly right, but overally its not quite 0 risk without crypto, which people don't trust (from a UX perspective).
And all kinds of risk-taking charges for it: loans, mortgages, etc. If you want to shoulder the risk yourself and save the fees, pay with a debit card.
As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more.
Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.
Just a few examples Stripe could handle:
- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.
- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.
- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.
Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.
[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.
> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free
Payments are also about establishing trust, which goes wrong a lot. You can in practice make payments very cheap with some cryptocurrency schemes, but don't get fraud protection, chargebacks, and customer service that credit cards provide (unless you introduce another party in the middle taking a cut).
It seems to me the innovation required to actually reduce costs would replace the credit card system, not build on top of it.
I worked on a project where the client wanted to switch to Authorize.net from Stripe midway through because of Stripe’s cost. From a developer perspective, it was a lot more miserable to work with than Stripe. Other projects I’ve worked on have had a similar motivation for not using Stripe.
Annoyingly, the cost of implementing the replacement and getting it working with React Native (which involved creating native modules for iOS and Android) ended up costing them as much as several years of fees. Also the client was a startup that went bust, so they never really got the value out of it that they hoped.
Could it also be you only care about transaction cost because everything else works so well? The time I spent on customer support with paypal/visa/plaid, ridiculous documentation from other payment processors and payouts snags make me appreciate Stripe even more.
EDIT: As in I haven't touch my stripe code for 2 years. They still work.
Here in The Netherlands, we have a platform called iDeal. All dutch banks are connected and all webshops accept it (it's hard to find a place to use your creditcard here). Transactions are instant and non-refundable. Costs are around 0.35 per transaction and NO % fees. Just a fixed amount per transaction. For big volumes, that per-transaction amount can be lower. It's amazing and I wished they'd just roll that out worldwide. No risk for merchants at all.
Transferring those bits with just the right logic for each transaction scenario is what still costs something. I'm sure the margin is massively excessive today. But I don't think it can be quite 'effectively free'.
To that end at least allow payouts in USD to the non-US banks.
We charge in USD and we pay for our infrastructure in USD, so the hit we get on the double currency conversion is really unpleasant... as it is completely avoidable.
This has been asked of Stripe for AGES and they did nothing. The only explanation is that this is by design, which means that they have no problem bleeding merchants with unnecessary fees just like all other payment companies. It's just that these fees are disguised differently.
>>Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.
I agree with the could and should. Payment costs could be a tiny fraction of current. It is a tax. I'm dubious of the who. Stripe is now a big player. They're have no interest in turning their $X00bn sector into a $Xbn sector.
Incidentally, I think the current economy harbours a lot of sectors that could be orders of magnitude smaller. This has always been a debate in the financial sectors. Today though, there are some (IMO) less ambiguous sectors/companies.
Does facebook actually need $70bn in revenue to operate facebook. Could it be done on $7bn? To me, it seems like an obvious yes. Quite a glaring inefficiency, IMO.
It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd.
I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.
You barking wrong tree here, what USA needs is new competitors to credit card giants if you go about anywhere world there is already pretty good competitors with superior user experience to credit cards eg Mobilepay(Denmark and Finland),Swish(Sweden) and of course Alipay(chnina) etc.
The best thing I read was Australian regulator capped cc interchange fees at 0.5% and allowed merchants to charge as an extra fee over the price. I guess it'll never happen in the US but maybe Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_...
What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. The impact of long-form well-written essays like this is huge, and fits perfectly with the theme of the essay itself about helping others succeed at scale.
I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview".
Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.
> What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe.
Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt.
By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.
Indeed, the part about choosing peers to form one’s worldview really struck home for me. Probably also applies to who you follow on Twitter or which sites you read (like this one).
This is one of the few blogs where I'll always read the entire article, consistently great writing and thought-provoking ideas.
I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me!
Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has.
Small improvement in this paragraph:
> “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to...
Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.
It is likely they don't really have many open positions no matter how good the applicants are. Seems they have some outside of the USA specific positions open.
Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application.
Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".
I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.
Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening.
The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".
"pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview." is something I have found to be difficult but required. Very nice friends of mine have simplistic views on issues I am interested in or lack the ambition I would like to have. We still close but we chat about personal problems, not work.
"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation.
This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).
Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture.
But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.
BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!
> Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.
One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.
To be fair, this can apply to a lot of young companies.
Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger.
I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
Does anyone know enough about Stripe's product lines to comment on what the following paragraph means?
"My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies."
The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect?
And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)
I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe.
Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does.
It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.
I don't doubt this is true. However, given that the author put his name on it, it's impossible that this blog post could be anything but glowingly positive (unless he wanted to complain on his way out).
> My sleep schedule has ranged from atypical to disastrous, but that has been true for almost all of my adult life.
This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner).
It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.
I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software?
How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?
I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?
I work at Stripe. From a quick browse through my inbox and Chrome tabs, I see multi-thousand word documents in: Google Docs, Dropbox, markdown in Git, internal wiki, _other_ internal wiki, email to mailing lists, custom software, and internal wiki pages generated from markdown in Git.
All of these tools have weird superpowers and limitations that prevent them from becoming a unified catalog. Google Docs can do live concurrent editing between 40 people but can't relax width limits (e.g. for code listings), and ${WIKI_SOFTWARE} can embed every document format in the world but can't require certain pages to be changed via code review.
There's another internal meta-tool that acts like a search engine across the various vendor platforms, so I can search for [network egress policy] and be assured of somewhat reasonable results.
I am also very curious about this. I've been keeping track of knowledge mgmt tooling (esp. plain text) and approaches (e.g. ADR) for a couple years. Grand Unified Theory forthcoming :)
I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)?
The article really does make you want to apply. However, all remote jobs are Americas-only. Remote was supposed to be Stripe's next engineering hub even before the pandemic, so I'm curious if that will include Europe any time soon.
Does anyone know if Patrick has talked somewhere about why he decided to take a job at Stripe instead of continuing his consulting business or starting a new venture?
Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.
> A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal.
AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.
I interviewed at Stripe a few years back and they were extremely rude in the interview. I was still early in my career and I’ve never forgotten it. Even still, I’ve applied a few times and never heard back. Definitely seems like a company that’s going places but also has a bit of an ego.
The second-order effects that are described here around the "capture of upside" may be a little exaggerated. Credit cards and Stripe are common payment mechanisms for consumer, prosumer, and self-serve SAAS. I'm not denying there is a lot of money here, but I imagine the majority of B2B SaaS companies by revenue handle payment through annual contracts through checks and wire transfer.
I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably
human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.
[+] [-] mchusma|5 years ago|reply
As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period.
Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out.
They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs.
Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet.
Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.
[+] [-] singhrac|5 years ago|reply
> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free.
Payments is taking on a short term risk that the (slow) transaction between a customer's bank and a vendor's bank will not settle, because of (a) fraud, (b) chargeback-like issues, (c) insolvency. This isn't exactly right, but overally its not quite 0 risk without crypto, which people don't trust (from a UX perspective).
And all kinds of risk-taking charges for it: loans, mortgages, etc. If you want to shoulder the risk yourself and save the fees, pay with a debit card.
[+] [-] philfreo|5 years ago|reply
Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it.
Just a few examples Stripe could handle:
- Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app.
- Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features.
- Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated.
Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so.
[1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.
[+] [-] jackdeansmith|5 years ago|reply
Payments are also about establishing trust, which goes wrong a lot. You can in practice make payments very cheap with some cryptocurrency schemes, but don't get fraud protection, chargebacks, and customer service that credit cards provide (unless you introduce another party in the middle taking a cut).
It seems to me the innovation required to actually reduce costs would replace the credit card system, not build on top of it.
[+] [-] NateThePirate|5 years ago|reply
Annoyingly, the cost of implementing the replacement and getting it working with React Native (which involved creating native modules for iOS and Android) ended up costing them as much as several years of fees. Also the client was a startup that went bust, so they never really got the value out of it that they hoped.
[+] [-] puppymaster|5 years ago|reply
EDIT: As in I haven't touch my stripe code for 2 years. They still work.
[+] [-] NKCSS|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abstractbarista|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|5 years ago|reply
They are an ISO, payment processor, merchant bank, payfac and gateway all rolled into one.
Add all of those up and you can see why its actually, generally speaking, cheaper.
[+] [-] eps|5 years ago|reply
We charge in USD and we pay for our infrastructure in USD, so the hit we get on the double currency conversion is really unpleasant... as it is completely avoidable.
This has been asked of Stripe for AGES and they did nothing. The only explanation is that this is by design, which means that they have no problem bleeding merchants with unnecessary fees just like all other payment companies. It's just that these fees are disguised differently.
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
I agree with the could and should. Payment costs could be a tiny fraction of current. It is a tax. I'm dubious of the who. Stripe is now a big player. They're have no interest in turning their $X00bn sector into a $Xbn sector.
Incidentally, I think the current economy harbours a lot of sectors that could be orders of magnitude smaller. This has always been a debate in the financial sectors. Today though, there are some (IMO) less ambiguous sectors/companies.
Does facebook actually need $70bn in revenue to operate facebook. Could it be done on $7bn? To me, it seems like an obvious yes. Quite a glaring inefficiency, IMO.
[+] [-] arrel|5 years ago|reply
I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.
[+] [-] antupis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|5 years ago|reply
However the biggest slice of the pie is Visa and MasterCard.
Stripe could release no new features in a year, if they could lower my rate by .1% I would be far happier.
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manmal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ve55|5 years ago|reply
I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview".
Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt.
By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.
[+] [-] manmal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fernandotakai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iooi|5 years ago|reply
I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me!
Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has.
Small improvement in this paragraph:
> “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to...
Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.
[+] [-] novok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _corym|5 years ago|reply
Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".
I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.
[+] [-] ryanSrich|5 years ago|reply
The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".
[+] [-] arthurjj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] absherwin|5 years ago|reply
This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).
[+] [-] dmazin|5 years ago|reply
But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks.
BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!
[+] [-] martinrlzd|5 years ago|reply
> Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.
[+] [-] ping_pong|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] room500|5 years ago|reply
Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger.
I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
[+] [-] biztos|5 years ago|reply
How can someone be "OG" (Original Gangster, i.e. really old school) in a very well-funded company founded ten years ago?
Am I misunderstanding something?
[+] [-] timerol|5 years ago|reply
"My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies."
The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect?
And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)
[+] [-] Chris_Newton|5 years ago|reply
I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe.
Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does.
It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.
[+] [-] TedShiller|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlchemistCamp|5 years ago|reply
This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner).
It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.
[+] [-] ihnorton|5 years ago|reply
How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time?
I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive?
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
[+] [-] jmillikin|5 years ago|reply
All of these tools have weird superpowers and limitations that prevent them from becoming a unified catalog. Google Docs can do live concurrent editing between 40 people but can't relax width limits (e.g. for code listings), and ${WIKI_SOFTWARE} can embed every document format in the world but can't require certain pages to be changed via code review.
There's another internal meta-tool that acts like a search engine across the various vendor platforms, so I can search for [network egress policy] and be assured of somewhat reasonable results.
[+] [-] zJayv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debunn|5 years ago|reply
https://press.stripe.com/
[+] [-] zuhayeer|5 years ago|reply
Basically the exact work of Stripe Atlas
[+] [-] ppllpp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benawad|5 years ago|reply
Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.
[+] [-] ignoramous|5 years ago|reply
> A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal.
AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.
[+] [-] diogenescynic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mastermojo|5 years ago|reply
I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.