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We're trying to outline how the restrictions and limitations that exist can affect different businesses. With the right approvals (and often with substantially

We're trying to outline how the restrictions and limitations that exist can affect different businesses. With the right approvals (and often with substantially increased fees), some of these businesses can certainly operate. And we hope to be able to work with as many as possible in the future. By our nature, we are on the side of people building things. We have been through many of these kinds of struggles ourselves. (Stripe's first application for a corporate bank account was rejected!) So we wanted to make that clear and describe where we're falling short of our aspirations today.

pdeuchler 10y ago
I think a lot of this is coming down to how you're framing it. Most people, some of the commenters on this thread aside, would think you're being generally reasonable given the current environment of the financial services industry. However you're really just asking to get yelled at when you say things like: "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses built on Stripe." This statement is absurd, all businesses make these decisions whether they want to or not, and being the errand boy for The Powers That Be does not absolve you of these decisions. The continual framing going down that post is something of "We always do the right thing, except when we can't or we don't want to." Which isn't a great way to win people over. If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would blame you for that. Most reasonable people who will be doing actual business with Stripe have dealt with processors/merchants before and know what goes on with these deals, it's all about hedging risk. But when you phrase it like you're trying to do the right thing and CYA is just an incidental inconvenience pressed on you by some big corp who's really the bad guy here... well, that's just disingenuous and people know it. Beyond that people are aware that Stripe is growing, and growing fast. Large companies have inconsistencies with this sort of stuff, PayPal is a prime example. And while I've had amazing experiences as a lone developer with my own projects I've also had some not-so-great experiences with Stripe in my professional life (obviously I don't speak for my employer or any prior ones). Again, this makes sense, a lone developer is a lot less risky than someone who's already funneling funny looking money through your system, but trying to whitewash this clear fact as if you were in fact "doing the right thing" the whole time makes people frustrated and reduces people's ability to predict Stripe's actions. And nobody wants to deal with an unpredictable payment provider. I realize that a decent amount of the article here talks about risk and how it's hedged, but you continually phrase things like the OMGYes case study as if your hands were tied in some non-moralistic decision, which again rings disingenuous. Same with the "Businesses that pose a brand risk" bullet point. Last but not least, you guys squirreled away the most important piece of information in this article to a small paragraph. "Contact us first if you're at all worried" should be bolded in 60pt font at the very top. Asking people to do that and being very explicit and upfront about your CYA policy before trying to explain the nuances would go very far with how people interpret the message, even if there's nothing explicitly wrong with how it's done now.
- collision 10y ago
  > "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses built on Stripe." This really is true. All companies will have to apply some criteria -- there are businesses that AWS or mail companies reject. In our case, we would like to avoid editorial and moral stances as much as we can. And as the post hopefully makes clear, we still have a ways to go. > If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would blame you for that. We would actually like to be a bit more progressive than that -- rather than supinely CYAing all the time, we want to (and frequently do) take risks and push back on behalf of businesses we believe in. The latter half of the post was intended to lay out some examples of that. But the distinction you're drawing makes sense and I'll look at editing the post with it in mind. Thanks for the feedback. Separately, I would be very interested to hear about your suboptimal experiences if you'd be willing to share them over email or the phone.
  - pdeuchler 10y ago
    Not quite sure I'd be allowed to talk about that stuff anymore, although depending on the records you guys keep my name will probably pop up in some calls/emails if you searched for it. And look, I entirely get what you're saying, and I know you guys probably mean it, but again, you're missing the perspective of people who have a distinct impression of the financial services industry and who _know_ what happens when you go down this road with PayPal, Braintree, et. al. They don't necessarily care if you guys are making a best effort on a case by case basis if you're still hampered by contractual obligations to play by someone else's game. And when you try to make these moral stands but almost immediately point out where you were contractually obligated to compromise said stands it doesn't give people confidence in the moral stands and makes it look like grandstanding (holy run on batman). This is where the disconnect and (seeming) disingenuousness arises. This is also why I emphasized that you guys should really just tell people to contact support first, because that clears all confusion and miscommunication without having to make moral pronouncements and before you guys are put in a position that forces you to compromise these bright lines. Anyway, I really support what you guys are doing and don't want to seem overly critical but I wanted to communicate a disconnect that seemed to get lost in translation.
throwaway991199 10y ago
Sorry, but this is flat out wrong. I had a protracted exchange with your support and unfortunately I could not get past your first level support who and I do mean this harshly, sounded like they didn't pass first year business school. I tried to speak to a manager who actually had a clue with business and was denied. In fact, I was pushed from pillar to post and spoke with 6 different people from the first tier support team. It was at this point, I thought stripe was some fly by night operation, not garnering the level of praise that technical people here on hackernews were giving. Definitely not. I think in future, should someone present you with a case that falls outside your remit. But is willing to do whatever it takes to work with you. You give them the benefit of the doubt and at least try to help them. In my case, you did not and that's not really great. In fact, you turned me into an enemy who went out to his community and turned a lot of people off you and onto your competitors.
- collision 10y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that. I'm guessing it's now too late, but if not I'd be happy to take a look at your case and escalate it. My email is john@stripe.com.
  - jdc0589 10y ago
    its really nice when people like you offer to do this, its a really great sign of good faith. But, reality is that a lot of people don't want to have to rely on special treatment to get something done. The fact is that the lowest level gatekeeper in your customer service organization is the biggest factor in how good a company's customer service is perceived to be. If I have a shit experience with the first person I contact in customer service, fight to speak to a manager, and then successfully resolve my issue, I'm still pissed and have a bad taste in my mouth. Its the exact same reason everyone hates "contact sales for pricing" statements on product/pricing pages. Its a bunch or red-tape that does nothing but take up too much of someone's time to figure out if they can successfully use a service or not. As awesome as it is when people like you offer to do this, it means your customer service group has critically failed just based on the fact that this has happened. Rants aside, Stripe has the best technical/developer support of any company I have every worked with. The constant presence of real technical resources in public IRC channels is phenomenal. I've been able to fire up irc, ask a question, and get an answer in under 5 minutes many times. Well done. I have not worked with support on production issues with charges though; I can't speak to that.
misterbowfinger 10y ago
> "So we wanted to make that clear and describe where we're falling short of our aspirations today." Just a PR tip - it's probably best to solve those issues first, then publish a post about how you solved it. Apologizing for not solving the problem doesn't seem worth it unless you've made promise to fix it and then failed. In which case, a "Post Mortem" is perfectly defensible, IMHO
- pc 10y ago
  We're never going to definitively solve them; it'll always be a process. But we did try to lay out some examples in the post of cases where we've been able to make progress.

pdeuchler 10y ago

I think a lot of this is coming down to how you're framing it. Most people, some of the commenters on this thread aside, would think you're being generally reasonable given the current environment of the financial services industry. However you're really just asking to get yelled at when you say things like: "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses built on Stripe." This statement is absurd, all businesses make these decisions whether they want to or not, and being the errand boy for The Powers That Be does not absolve you of these decisions. The continual framing going down that post is something of "We always do the right thing, except when we can't or we don't want to." Which isn't a great way to win people over. If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would blame you for that. Most reasonable people who will be doing actual business with Stripe have dealt with processors/merchants before and know what goes on with these deals, it's all about hedging risk. But when you phrase it like you're trying to do the right thing and CYA is just an incidental inconvenience pressed on you by some big corp who's really the bad guy here... well, that's just disingenuous and people know it. Beyond that people are aware that Stripe is growing, and growing fast. Large companies have inconsistencies with this sort of stuff, PayPal is a prime example. And while I've had amazing experiences as a lone developer with my own projects I've also had some not-so-great experiences with Stripe in my professional life (obviously I don't speak for my employer or any prior ones). Again, this makes sense, a lone developer is a lot less risky than someone who's already funneling funny looking money through your system, but trying to whitewash this clear fact as if you were in fact "doing the right thing" the whole time makes people frustrated and reduces people's ability to predict Stripe's actions. And nobody wants to deal with an unpredictable payment provider. I realize that a decent amount of the article here talks about risk and how it's hedged, but you continually phrase things like the OMGYes case study as if your hands were tied in some non-moralistic decision, which again rings disingenuous. Same with the "Businesses that pose a brand risk" bullet point. Last but not least, you guys squirreled away the most important piece of information in this article to a small paragraph. "Contact us first if you're at all worried" should be bolded in 60pt font at the very top. Asking people to do that and being very explicit and upfront about your CYA policy before trying to explain the nuances would go very far with how people interpret the message, even if there's nothing explicitly wrong with how it's done now.

collision 10y ago
> "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses built on Stripe." This really is true. All companies will have to apply some criteria -- there are businesses that AWS or mail companies reject. In our case, we would like to avoid editorial and moral stances as much as we can. And as the post hopefully makes clear, we still have a ways to go. > If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would blame you for that. We would actually like to be a bit more progressive than that -- rather than supinely CYAing all the time, we want to (and frequently do) take risks and push back on behalf of businesses we believe in. The latter half of the post was intended to lay out some examples of that. But the distinction you're drawing makes sense and I'll look at editing the post with it in mind. Thanks for the feedback. Separately, I would be very interested to hear about your suboptimal experiences if you'd be willing to share them over email or the phone.
- pdeuchler 10y ago
  Not quite sure I'd be allowed to talk about that stuff anymore, although depending on the records you guys keep my name will probably pop up in some calls/emails if you searched for it. And look, I entirely get what you're saying, and I know you guys probably mean it, but again, you're missing the perspective of people who have a distinct impression of the financial services industry and who _know_ what happens when you go down this road with PayPal, Braintree, et. al. They don't necessarily care if you guys are making a best effort on a case by case basis if you're still hampered by contractual obligations to play by someone else's game. And when you try to make these moral stands but almost immediately point out where you were contractually obligated to compromise said stands it doesn't give people confidence in the moral stands and makes it look like grandstanding (holy run on batman). This is where the disconnect and (seeming) disingenuousness arises. This is also why I emphasized that you guys should really just tell people to contact support first, because that clears all confusion and miscommunication without having to make moral pronouncements and before you guys are put in a position that forces you to compromise these bright lines. Anyway, I really support what you guys are doing and don't want to seem overly critical but I wanted to communicate a disconnect that seemed to get lost in translation.

throwaway991199 10y ago

Sorry, but this is flat out wrong. I had a protracted exchange with your support and unfortunately I could not get past your first level support who and I do mean this harshly, sounded like they didn't pass first year business school. I tried to speak to a manager who actually had a clue with business and was denied. In fact, I was pushed from pillar to post and spoke with 6 different people from the first tier support team. It was at this point, I thought stripe was some fly by night operation, not garnering the level of praise that technical people here on hackernews were giving. Definitely not. I think in future, should someone present you with a case that falls outside your remit. But is willing to do whatever it takes to work with you. You give them the benefit of the doubt and at least try to help them. In my case, you did not and that's not really great. In fact, you turned me into an enemy who went out to his community and turned a lot of people off you and onto your competitors.

collision 10y ago
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm guessing it's now too late, but if not I'd be happy to take a look at your case and escalate it. My email is john@stripe.com.
- jdc0589 10y ago
  its really nice when people like you offer to do this, its a really great sign of good faith. But, reality is that a lot of people don't want to have to rely on special treatment to get something done. The fact is that the lowest level gatekeeper in your customer service organization is the biggest factor in how good a company's customer service is perceived to be. If I have a shit experience with the first person I contact in customer service, fight to speak to a manager, and then successfully resolve my issue, I'm still pissed and have a bad taste in my mouth. Its the exact same reason everyone hates "contact sales for pricing" statements on product/pricing pages. Its a bunch or red-tape that does nothing but take up too much of someone's time to figure out if they can successfully use a service or not. As awesome as it is when people like you offer to do this, it means your customer service group has critically failed just based on the fact that this has happened. Rants aside, Stripe has the best technical/developer support of any company I have every worked with. The constant presence of real technical resources in public IRC channels is phenomenal. I've been able to fire up irc, ask a question, and get an answer in under 5 minutes many times. Well done. I have not worked with support on production issues with charges though; I can't speak to that.

misterbowfinger 10y ago

> "So we wanted to make that clear and describe where we're falling short of our aspirations today." Just a PR tip - it's probably best to solve those issues first, then publish a post about how you solved it. Apologizing for not solving the problem doesn't seem worth it unless you've made promise to fix it and then failed. In which case, a "Post Mortem" is perfectly defensible, IMHO

pc 10y ago
We're never going to definitively solve them; it'll always be a process. But we did try to lay out some examples in the post of cases where we've been able to make progress.