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What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

685 points by troydavis 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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tedivm 8y ago
Just a reminder that Stripe's CEO is Jack Dorsey (aka the CEO of Twitter). For people who take ethics into account when choosing where to work this may be something you want to factor in. EDIT: Oops, got my fintech CEOs mixed up. Sorry about that :-)
- tjshipe 8y ago
  You're thinking of Square. Stripe's CEO is Patrick Collison.
- jeeyoungk 8y ago
  Jack Dorsey is Square's CEO.
  - daniel-cussen 8y ago
    Funnily enough these days that's not enough to answer the question. Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Square and Twitter but not of Stripe.
- dymk 8y ago
  Stripes CEO is Patrick Collison
- zachruss92 8y ago
  Stripe's CEO is not Jack Dorsey it's Patrick Collison[1] I think you're referring to square[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey
- wpasc 8y ago
  Out of curiosity what is your issue with Jack/Twitter ethics? Too much censoring or not enough?
  - tom_ 8y ago
    I'm not sure it really matters - and not just because Dorsey isn't CEO of Stripe. Whatever you think of him, whether you'd agree with them or not, the advice is good: you may want to bear your thoughts in mind, whatever they are, before applying to work at a company for which he is CEO. (Of course, if you're careful to frame it equivocally, as hopefully I've managed to do, it does come out sounding a bit, well... obvious. But that's fine. Sometimes good advice is obvious.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
afarrell 8y ago
> One of the things I enjoy most about Stripe’s work culture is the notion that “nothing is Not My Job.” I’m very eager to know: If you want to be successful in such a culture, what mental habits/skills can you develop which let you know with confidence where to direct your attention? How did patio11 develop these? ——— EDIT: How do you know that what you are working on is not a distraction?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Not patio11 but if he would be so kind as to allow me to hazard a guess I’d say intellectual curiosity and tenacity. Don’t stop asking why and keep digging. You’ll want to mix in emotional intelligence so when you communicate with stakeholders, you do so in a way that they feel a desire to assist you in your endeavor, perhaps finding ways to align everyone’s incentives for success. I could be entirely wrong though.
  - JoblessWonder 8y ago
    I think you are spot on. I think a specific amount of hubris to go along with the intellectual curiosity and tenacity is important. It is the amount of confidence to say, "Hey, I can take this on. I'm not familiar with it directly but I understand enough of the context to help." You do have to be careful to not have too much confidence because then you will alienate your peers/management and be viewed as a know-it-all. It is a fine line that depends a lot on company culture. It sounds like Stripe really welcomes it, where other corporations are very "stay in your lane." I wear an insane amount of hats at my company because 1) I'm confident/stupid enough to believe I can handle it [see the part above about hubris] and 2) I actually have a track record of being able to tackle whatever has been thrown at me. My curiosity helps me from getting bored because I'm fine jumping from researching DC EV chargers to file permissions issues to tax law to.... anything.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - arandr0x 8y ago
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
This may seem petty but as a former designer, Stripes logo not really having a stripe in it has always really bothered me. Like... how could they not try harder to make that a focus of their branding?
- tylerrobinson 8y ago
  Maybe that would have been a little too "on the nose"? I always thought that "stripe" refers to the magnetic stripe on the back of a credit card.
  - mountainentity 8y ago
    I listened to Tim Ferriss podcast with Patrick Collison. They chose stripe as stripe.com was either available or cheap...
    - alphagrep12345 8y ago
      Yeah, that's true. Look at this quora answer for more info - https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/answer/Greg-Brockman https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/a...
- mac01021 8y ago
  The dot over the "i" doesn't count?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- travisjungroth 8y ago
  Amazon doesn't have a river in their logo.
  - lstamour 8y ago
    Well actually... https://www.freelogodesign.org/blog/2018/09/10/the-amazon-logo-story https://www.freelogodesign.org/blog/2018/09/10/the-amazon-lo...
chair6 8y ago
For more insight re. Stripe, https://fs.blog/2018/05/patrick-collison/ https://fs.blog/2018/05/patrick-collison/ was an excellent Knowledge Project episode talking to CEO & co-founder Patrick Collison.
- misiti3780 8y ago
  i just discovered the knowledge project this weekend, seems pretty awesome.
xrd 8y ago
The most fascinating part of this article is the idea that Stripe is spending time thinking about unlocking potential in Internet businesses in Japan. A tough nut to crack. The revolution is happening in all these countries, but if Stripe can move the needle in Brazil and Japan and other places where entrepreneurship currently requires more grease/graft, that'll really be interesting.
- alexcnwy 8y ago
  I’m in Tokyo right now for work (my startup NumberBoost won an innovation competition with NTT Japan) and it’s so wild how simultaneously forward and backward things are here. On the one hand, there are so many things they do here that make me feel like they’re in the future. On the other hand, every fifth person has a flip phone, the WiFi sucks, you can’t buy a travel SIM card at the mall, and there are CD/DVD stores everywhere. I can’t help but feel part of their problem is how unwilling most local Japanese people I’ve met here are to break the rules.
  - opportune 8y ago
    I noticed this too, a lot of Japanese society feels like it's stuck in the 90's. Even the little things like the graphics made for ads. Probably has something to do with having a conservative culture and the demographics/economic issues that began becoming a problem around then
    - jsemrau 8y ago
      After living more than 7 years in Japan, I think it's that a lot of Tokyo's tech infrastructure is build around the persona of a 45 year old male office worker and his specific needs. For example, Pasmo cards can be used to buy drinks (and other things) at the train station in addition to paying for the tickets.
  - alexcnwy 8y ago
    For example good luck getting mayonnaise with your fries at any of the fast food chains here. They have mayonnaise and they put it on burgers but they “CANNOT” give (or sell) it to you in a separate container for your fries.
js2 8y ago
> (An example which is just a boggling fact about the world: what’s your finger-to-a-wind guesstimate about what percentage of credit card payments fail with error code I Don’t Know Sometimes Things Fail In Credit Card Land? Hint: it’s higher than you think. Those failed payments cost conversions at the margin. When Stripe fights that number down by a basis point, that creates value across our entire portfolio, forever.) I have no idea what the percentage is but I recently had a decline I think may have been from Stripe itself. A few months back I’d dropped my car off at the shop and tried to Lyft home. I’m a very infrequent Lyft/Uber user. Lyft refused to accept my payment. Tried with two different cards (Chase, AmEx) both directly, via Apple Pay and via PayPal. Couldn’t hail a car. So then I try with Uber. Same thing! Payment rejected, no car for you. I wrote to both Lyft and Uber customer support. Never heard back from Uber. Lyft claimed my card was denied (“It appears that the card is not working due to a decline from your bank. Because the information we receive about bank declines is very limited, you’ll need to reach out to your bank directly for more information as to why the transaction was denied.”) I contact both my card companies - they tell me there are no blocks on my card nor anything that would cause the payment to be rejected. The only thing I could find Lyft/Uber had in common was they both used Stripe. (But that doesn’t explain not being able to pay via Apple Pay/PayPal unless those somehow route through Stripe.) Never did figure out what it was (“Jay, I had checked and verified that the last four of the card that you have provided is already added on this account. There shouldn't be any issues in requesting for a ride. If you had any issues with your Lyft request. Please kindly send a screen shot so that we will be able to see and rectify the issue.”) and haven’t had cause to use Lyft/Uber since. This incident is the only time I can recall payments being rejected like that. I think Chase once temporarily blocked an Internet payment, sent me a notification immediately, I indicated the charge was legitimate, tried again and it went through. Oh well. (I ended up getting a ride home in the shop’s customer service van.)
- d_v 8y ago
  Not sure about their Paypal integration but worth noting that with ApplePay, they're likely still using stripe as the processor (ApplePay generates an authorized payment token which is then passed to Stripe for processing). So if there was a Stripe problem, ApplePay being busted too makes sense.
onion2k 8y ago
This is a great post. I already thought highly of Stripe, but knowing a little more about the way people work there makes me all the more impressed.
gringoDan 8y ago
Reading this post made me think that while many companies advertise an entrepreneurial environment and the ability to do impactful work, the true test of this culture is 1) the ability to hire former founders and 2) those former founders loving their work. Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong company endorsement.
- yingw787 8y ago
  I've never thought of this, yet it's quite true! Thanks for mentioning this.
- aboutruby 8y ago
  AngelList actually does this, they mostly recruit previous founders.
  - amitm 8y ago
    We do! Here's a bit on how we work: https://angel.co/blog/product-engineering-at-angellist-talent https://angel.co/blog/product-engineering-at-angellist-talen... https://angel.co/blog/we-hire-folks-who-work-like-founders https://angel.co/blog/we-hire-folks-who-work-like-founders
- ztratar 8y ago
  As a former founder who now works at Stripe... I am glad to see we are now explicitly mentioning the aspects of Stripe culture that make it founder friendly. - Huge transparency - Management optimizes for autonomy & distributed decision-making - Upwards review processes > downwards decision-making - Level obfuscation - Shipping culture - People who are of the quality you'd normally only find by hiring them yourself (and frequently better) My 3rd week at Stripe (around 7 months ago) Patrick just sat down next to me at lunch, knew my name, and started talking about what my team was working on in great detail. Asked me many direct, important questions and really listened. As a former CEO of a VC-backed company, I knew he was 100% on his game -- and around you at work you can see that pretty much everyone trusts the execs to be insanely competent, because they are. My only wish is that they don't take as many solo plane rides, haha. :)
spudlyo 8y ago
I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining. That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe. I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think about my work.
- singhrac 8y ago
  I really enjoyed that aspect too. I was an intern a few years ago, and at the end of my internship I sent out a 'shipped' email, with lots of positive feedback. It's easy to feel ignored as an intern, but Stripe at the time felt very cohesive. In reply to foldr's comment, yes, they were totally optional (I can't imagine it's changed).
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining. Neat! I understand that you can't share them, but do you happen to know of any public examples?
  - otherdave 8y ago
    I'd love to see some (even contrived) examples of these. Sounds like it could fit into the culture at my current job.
aboutruby 8y ago
> It also felt like it was constraining the absolute amount of impact I had for the world. It's refreshing to see people thinking like this. Maximizing impact is undervalued. For instance a lot of companies restrict themselves to one country thus dramatically reducing the maximum impact.
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  Due to differences in regulation I would expect there to be instances where focusing on one country would have more of an impact than spreading your resources over multiple jurisdictions. I would even guess that this is true for most companies below a certain scale. Reduction/standardisation of regulation should reduce the value of scale for which this is true, though other factors such as geography would still play a role.
Uhhrrr 8y ago
> I also wrote a non-trivial amount of code because, fun fact, stripe.com spells CMS e-r-b, which didn’t optimize for writers’ ability to ship new words Could someone explain the "CMS e-r-b" joke to me?
- karanke 8y ago
  Their CMS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system) is a set of flat ERB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby) files, no WordPress etc.
gurusblogger1 8y ago
https://www.gurusblogger.com/how-to-install-kali-linux-and-windows-10-os-on-the-same-hdd/ https://www.gurusblogger.com/how-to-install-kali-linux-and-w...
gurusblogger1 8y ago
hi
dandigangi 8y ago
This was such a good read. I am going to try that Remote Coffee tomorrow.
benatkin 8y ago
I like the remote coffee at the end. I'm remote and I want it to feel more like I'm having coffee when I'm talking to people I work with. Any suggestions on how to make remote conversations more like getting a cup of coffee?
- martin_ 8y ago
  At Twilio we use Donut. The TLDR is with our configuration every third Monday members of a slack channel (#soc-donut in our case) get randomly paired via DM. I've met people from offices around the world which I wouldn't have done otherwise, which has definitely been of personal and professional benefit to me [0] https://www.donut.com/ https://www.donut.com/
devmunchies 8y ago
Are there a lot of remote workers at Stripe or is Patrick an exception to the rule?
- patio11 8y ago
  There are many (tens of percent of engineering, etc); we are taking steps to materially increase the number.
  - insomniacity 8y ago
    I was surprised to see most (all?) remote roles are US-only. Are you working to change that, at least for countries where you otherwise have a legal+employment presence?
  - retromario 8y ago
    I checked out the list of remote engineering jobs after reading your (fascinating) article but unfortunately they all seem to be restricted to North America. Is this a time zone issue or a legal issue? Are there plans to expand remote jobs to other regions (like Europe)?
    - aboutruby 8y ago
      > Stripe is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Dublin, London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, and more That's probably the countries where they can hire remotely. It would seems in my experience with other companies that even if they don't advertise non-US remote roles (probably to prevent a large influx of applications from all over the world, most of which invalid due to no-offices there) they will accept candidates that are better than the US counterparts (but still US-based workers have an advantage). Would love an answer from Stripe/patio11 though. Also in the case of Stripe, it seems like they are making an engineering hub in Singapore: https://stripe.com/blog/singapore-eng-office https://stripe.com/blog/singapore-eng-office
    - patio11 8y ago
      As time goes to infinity we plan on having Stripes building products very close to as many of our customers as possible, which is (much) more widely distributed than the status quo, which is (much) more widely distributed than open recs on any given Monday. There will be more on this subject coming later.
dvduval 8y ago
Definitely not my favorite credit card processor. For starters, I will not earn any money if I refer my customers to stripe. It's already a non-starter at that point.
- ztratar 8y ago
  I'm a Stripe employee & would like to know more about your POV here. What other processors pay you for referring your customers, and whom are your customers? Very curious. Since processing is a low-margin business, it's really rare to see referral bonuses, especially the type you're describing. If we do have room to open up a program like this, I could mention it internally.
- sophiebits 8y ago
  Not gonna lie, that’s an odd reason to choose a credit card processor.
bgentry 8y ago
@patio11 could you elaborate on the internal communications structure at Stripe? I’m curious how employees these days balance the use of different communication tools, especially as Stripe has grown and begun embracing distributed work. I heard [0] for a long time it was all about long form posts to a massive number of Google Groups mailing lists with custom tooling to manage subscriptions (bc the Groups UI is poor). I understand these lists range from general to hyper specific. But then I’ve also heard much of the communication has shifted to Slack or other tools. Slack tends to degrade into chaos at a certain size, and at Stripe’s scale I’m curious if this is a big pain point or how you mitigate it. https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency
- rattray 8y ago
  I am not patio11, but I do work at Stripe. Both are true; we use a lot of email, typically with lists, and a lot of Slack. Other tools, like a wiki, an issue tracker, Home[0], and a culture of "run" rotations (like on-call but for helping folks on other teams) help keep chaos manageable. It might be interesting for us to write up another update on this, since many folks are curious... [0] https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home
cyberferret 8y ago
> The parts of the job which I enjoyed the most were not my actual job (writing and selling software, filing taxes in a timely fashion, etc) but helping other software entrepreneurs optimize their businesses or engineers navigate career challenges. This bit in the post about the author having previously been a founder of a business intrigued me. As a founder myself, I know that there are bits of the business that don't fit into my natural skillset but have to be done. That is accepted as part and parcel of running a business. The second point intrigues me though. In my decades of running my own software business, I have had a lot of staff come through as employees, get skilled up, then leave to start their own businesses using the skills they learned while at my company. This actually gives me a great deal of pleasure and pride. I LOVE seeing people's career pathways take off, and I love it more if I had contributed in some way.
deleted 8y ago
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OliverJones 8y ago
As a Stripe customer processing about USD600K a year through them, I have to say they're an excellent outfit. Their documentation is very clear. Their email and irc support is smart and responsive, with nary a "I can help you with that today" script recited by an agent to waste my time. They set and meet expectations about the financial stuff, like how long it takes for transactions to hit the bank, and what happens with disputes and chargebacks and other parts of the world of serving real paying people. It's not hard to guess that the things in this article are all true.
- icelancer 8y ago
  I like a lot of things about Stripe but this is by far the best part: > Their documentation is very clear. In a world where no one gives a shit about cleanly documenting processes - especially ones that are versioned or change - I really appreciate Stripe's dedication to this.
mychael 8y ago
File this blog post under "Humble Brag"
branchless 8y ago
> Form your new company as either an LLC or C Corporation in Delaware. Isn't this just tax dodging?
triangleman 8y ago
So, are you ever going to open source stockfighter?
fulafel 8y ago
For anyone else wondering what Stripe Atlas is, > Stripe Atlas, a seamless way to start your company in the U.S. Apparently it's a filing-paperwork-etc-as-a-service
blizkreeg 8y ago
Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly. Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe in fees has to be pulled from a shudder export of all transactions), handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes on unfortunately. I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies (specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us. Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about the front-end, metaphorically speaking. I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's too catered to the devs. Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of feedback if someone wants to listen.
- countryqt30 8y ago
  I 100% agree with this. Stripe is fun for startups with <100'000 / year revenue, but then it gets ugly. The reporting can't be configured at all and is highly cumbersome, especially if you need something slightly different than they offer for comparability (e.g. last 7 days, last 28 vs last 30 days), and Stripe is not transparent about their fees at all in the back-end.
  - icelancer 8y ago
    I'll add my 2c and say I disagree entirely. We ship mid-seven figures through Stripe yearly and I enjoy the back-end still to this day - have been using it right after it was /dev/payments and still kicking all these years on my main small business and small projects alike. I don't see the need for "reporting" from the Stripe website as I think most businesses should be doing it on their own in their own tooling, but in the cases I want to quickly look things up, Stripe's back-end has been just fine as well.
pololee 8y ago
I was in a small company working on payments team as fullstack engineer. Given the big volume, stripe would be too expensive for us. So we built our own credit card processing service. We integrated with FirstData directly. While I was working on payments, I kept following news about stripe. I love their design and appreciate the deep care they put in their product, even the documentation. I like Patrick and John's inspiring stories and love watching their interviews. After 3 years, I was looking for a new opportunity. Stripe is my dream company. I was lucky to get a phone interview. The conversation went fine. The coding problem was easy. But I could tell the interviewer was not impressed. I couldn't figure out what and why. I was depressed when I got the rejection email. I'll definitely want to try again. Anyone advice or suggestions Stripe folks could offer would be greatly appreciated!
- rajasimon 8y ago
  Same here. Done coding challenge and got the interview call but finally, they turned me down.
- yitchelle 8y ago
  Did they give a plausible reason for their rejection? I am just interested if the trend for job rejection reasons is moving towards a more transparent model. In the past and present, it is extremely difficult/frustrating to get the real answers for being rejected.
  - pololee 8y ago
    They didn't give me any specific reasons. The recruiter called me one day after my video interview. She only told me they didn't think I was a good fit. In the interview, I finished the coding questions in 30 mins. Then I just had a chat with the interviewer. The conversation went fine. He told me he was full-stack eng and worked on frontend. I asked him whether he worked with Benjamin De Cock, a stripe designer I admire and if he could share some stories. He said yes but didn't want to share stories.
fyfy18 8y ago
After reading all of that and thinking "Stripe sounds like a really cool place to work", I'm a bit disappointed that they don't have an office in my country and "remote" means "remote in North America". Oh well, I'll keep working with them to build cool stuff for my clients :-)
- sieabahlpark 8y ago
  They probably have laws restricting access to their credit card says. Possibly hiring or contractual with Enterprise

685 points by troydavis 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Just a reminder that Stripe's CEO is Jack Dorsey (aka the CEO of Twitter). For people who take ethics into account when choosing where to work this may be something you want to factor in. EDIT: Oops, got my fintech CEOs mixed up. Sorry about that :-)

tjshipe 8y ago
You're thinking of Square. Stripe's CEO is Patrick Collison.
jeeyoungk 8y ago
Jack Dorsey is Square's CEO.
- daniel-cussen 8y ago
  Funnily enough these days that's not enough to answer the question. Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Square and Twitter but not of Stripe.
dymk 8y ago
Stripes CEO is Patrick Collison
zachruss92 8y ago
Stripe's CEO is not Jack Dorsey it's Patrick Collison[1] I think you're referring to square[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey
wpasc 8y ago
Out of curiosity what is your issue with Jack/Twitter ethics? Too much censoring or not enough?
- tom_ 8y ago
  I'm not sure it really matters - and not just because Dorsey isn't CEO of Stripe. Whatever you think of him, whether you'd agree with them or not, the advice is good: you may want to bear your thoughts in mind, whatever they are, before applying to work at a company for which he is CEO. (Of course, if you're careful to frame it equivocally, as hopefully I've managed to do, it does come out sounding a bit, well... obvious. But that's fine. Sometimes good advice is obvious.)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

afarrell 8y ago

> One of the things I enjoy most about Stripe’s work culture is the notion that “nothing is Not My Job.” I’m very eager to know: If you want to be successful in such a culture, what mental habits/skills can you develop which let you know with confidence where to direct your attention? How did patio11 develop these? ——— EDIT: How do you know that what you are working on is not a distraction?

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Not patio11 but if he would be so kind as to allow me to hazard a guess I’d say intellectual curiosity and tenacity. Don’t stop asking why and keep digging. You’ll want to mix in emotional intelligence so when you communicate with stakeholders, you do so in a way that they feel a desire to assist you in your endeavor, perhaps finding ways to align everyone’s incentives for success. I could be entirely wrong though.
- JoblessWonder 8y ago
  I think you are spot on. I think a specific amount of hubris to go along with the intellectual curiosity and tenacity is important. It is the amount of confidence to say, "Hey, I can take this on. I'm not familiar with it directly but I understand enough of the context to help." You do have to be careful to not have too much confidence because then you will alienate your peers/management and be viewed as a know-it-all. It is a fine line that depends a lot on company culture. It sounds like Stripe really welcomes it, where other corporations are very "stay in your lane." I wear an insane amount of hats at my company because 1) I'm confident/stupid enough to believe I can handle it [see the part above about hubris] and 2) I actually have a track record of being able to tackle whatever has been thrown at me. My curiosity helps me from getting bored because I'm fine jumping from researching DC EV chargers to file permissions issues to tax law to.... anything.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - arandr0x 8y ago

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

This may seem petty but as a former designer, Stripes logo not really having a stripe in it has always really bothered me. Like... how could they not try harder to make that a focus of their branding?

tylerrobinson 8y ago
Maybe that would have been a little too "on the nose"? I always thought that "stripe" refers to the magnetic stripe on the back of a credit card.
- mountainentity 8y ago
  I listened to Tim Ferriss podcast with Patrick Collison. They chose stripe as stripe.com was either available or cheap...
  - alphagrep12345 8y ago
    Yeah, that's true. Look at this quora answer for more info - https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/answer/Greg-Brockman https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/a...
mac01021 8y ago
The dot over the "i" doesn't count?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
travisjungroth 8y ago
Amazon doesn't have a river in their logo.
- lstamour 8y ago
  Well actually... https://www.freelogodesign.org/blog/2018/09/10/the-amazon-logo-story https://www.freelogodesign.org/blog/2018/09/10/the-amazon-lo...

chair6 8y ago

For more insight re. Stripe, https://fs.blog/2018/05/patrick-collison/ https://fs.blog/2018/05/patrick-collison/ was an excellent Knowledge Project episode talking to CEO & co-founder Patrick Collison.

misiti3780 8y ago
i just discovered the knowledge project this weekend, seems pretty awesome.

xrd 8y ago

The most fascinating part of this article is the idea that Stripe is spending time thinking about unlocking potential in Internet businesses in Japan. A tough nut to crack. The revolution is happening in all these countries, but if Stripe can move the needle in Brazil and Japan and other places where entrepreneurship currently requires more grease/graft, that'll really be interesting.

alexcnwy 8y ago
I’m in Tokyo right now for work (my startup NumberBoost won an innovation competition with NTT Japan) and it’s so wild how simultaneously forward and backward things are here. On the one hand, there are so many things they do here that make me feel like they’re in the future. On the other hand, every fifth person has a flip phone, the WiFi sucks, you can’t buy a travel SIM card at the mall, and there are CD/DVD stores everywhere. I can’t help but feel part of their problem is how unwilling most local Japanese people I’ve met here are to break the rules.
- opportune 8y ago
  I noticed this too, a lot of Japanese society feels like it's stuck in the 90's. Even the little things like the graphics made for ads. Probably has something to do with having a conservative culture and the demographics/economic issues that began becoming a problem around then
  - jsemrau 8y ago
    After living more than 7 years in Japan, I think it's that a lot of Tokyo's tech infrastructure is build around the persona of a 45 year old male office worker and his specific needs. For example, Pasmo cards can be used to buy drinks (and other things) at the train station in addition to paying for the tickets.
- alexcnwy 8y ago
  For example good luck getting mayonnaise with your fries at any of the fast food chains here. They have mayonnaise and they put it on burgers but they “CANNOT” give (or sell) it to you in a separate container for your fries.

js2 8y ago

> (An example which is just a boggling fact about the world: what’s your finger-to-a-wind guesstimate about what percentage of credit card payments fail with error code I Don’t Know Sometimes Things Fail In Credit Card Land? Hint: it’s higher than you think. Those failed payments cost conversions at the margin. When Stripe fights that number down by a basis point, that creates value across our entire portfolio, forever.) I have no idea what the percentage is but I recently had a decline I think may have been from Stripe itself. A few months back I’d dropped my car off at the shop and tried to Lyft home. I’m a very infrequent Lyft/Uber user. Lyft refused to accept my payment. Tried with two different cards (Chase, AmEx) both directly, via Apple Pay and via PayPal. Couldn’t hail a car. So then I try with Uber. Same thing! Payment rejected, no car for you. I wrote to both Lyft and Uber customer support. Never heard back from Uber. Lyft claimed my card was denied (“It appears that the card is not working due to a decline from your bank. Because the information we receive about bank declines is very limited, you’ll need to reach out to your bank directly for more information as to why the transaction was denied.”) I contact both my card companies - they tell me there are no blocks on my card nor anything that would cause the payment to be rejected. The only thing I could find Lyft/Uber had in common was they both used Stripe. (But that doesn’t explain not being able to pay via Apple Pay/PayPal unless those somehow route through Stripe.) Never did figure out what it was (“Jay, I had checked and verified that the last four of the card that you have provided is already added on this account. There shouldn't be any issues in requesting for a ride. If you had any issues with your Lyft request. Please kindly send a screen shot so that we will be able to see and rectify the issue.”) and haven’t had cause to use Lyft/Uber since. This incident is the only time I can recall payments being rejected like that. I think Chase once temporarily blocked an Internet payment, sent me a notification immediately, I indicated the charge was legitimate, tried again and it went through. Oh well. (I ended up getting a ride home in the shop’s customer service van.)

d_v 8y ago
Not sure about their Paypal integration but worth noting that with ApplePay, they're likely still using stripe as the processor (ApplePay generates an authorized payment token which is then passed to Stripe for processing). So if there was a Stripe problem, ApplePay being busted too makes sense.

onion2k 8y ago

This is a great post. I already thought highly of Stripe, but knowing a little more about the way people work there makes me all the more impressed.

gringoDan 8y ago

Reading this post made me think that while many companies advertise an entrepreneurial environment and the ability to do impactful work, the true test of this culture is 1) the ability to hire former founders and 2) those former founders loving their work. Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong company endorsement.

yingw787 8y ago
I've never thought of this, yet it's quite true! Thanks for mentioning this.
aboutruby 8y ago
AngelList actually does this, they mostly recruit previous founders.
- amitm 8y ago
  We do! Here's a bit on how we work: https://angel.co/blog/product-engineering-at-angellist-talent https://angel.co/blog/product-engineering-at-angellist-talen... https://angel.co/blog/we-hire-folks-who-work-like-founders https://angel.co/blog/we-hire-folks-who-work-like-founders
ztratar 8y ago
As a former founder who now works at Stripe... I am glad to see we are now explicitly mentioning the aspects of Stripe culture that make it founder friendly. - Huge transparency - Management optimizes for autonomy & distributed decision-making - Upwards review processes > downwards decision-making - Level obfuscation - Shipping culture - People who are of the quality you'd normally only find by hiring them yourself (and frequently better) My 3rd week at Stripe (around 7 months ago) Patrick just sat down next to me at lunch, knew my name, and started talking about what my team was working on in great detail. Asked me many direct, important questions and really listened. As a former CEO of a VC-backed company, I knew he was 100% on his game -- and around you at work you can see that pretty much everyone trusts the execs to be insanely competent, because they are. My only wish is that they don't take as many solo plane rides, haha. :)

spudlyo 8y ago

I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining. That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe. I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think about my work.

singhrac 8y ago
I really enjoyed that aspect too. I was an intern a few years ago, and at the end of my internship I sent out a 'shipped' email, with lots of positive feedback. It's easy to feel ignored as an intern, but Stripe at the time felt very cohesive. In reply to foldr's comment, yes, they were totally optional (I can't imagine it's changed).
CharlesW 8y ago
> These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining. Neat! I understand that you can't share them, but do you happen to know of any public examples?
- otherdave 8y ago
  I'd love to see some (even contrived) examples of these. Sounds like it could fit into the culture at my current job.

aboutruby 8y ago

> It also felt like it was constraining the absolute amount of impact I had for the world. It's refreshing to see people thinking like this. Maximizing impact is undervalued. For instance a lot of companies restrict themselves to one country thus dramatically reducing the maximum impact.

blotter_paper 8y ago
Due to differences in regulation I would expect there to be instances where focusing on one country would have more of an impact than spreading your resources over multiple jurisdictions. I would even guess that this is true for most companies below a certain scale. Reduction/standardisation of regulation should reduce the value of scale for which this is true, though other factors such as geography would still play a role.

Uhhrrr 8y ago

> I also wrote a non-trivial amount of code because, fun fact, stripe.com spells CMS e-r-b, which didn’t optimize for writers’ ability to ship new words Could someone explain the "CMS e-r-b" joke to me?

karanke 8y ago
Their CMS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system) is a set of flat ERB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERuby) files, no WordPress etc.

gurusblogger1 8y ago

https://www.gurusblogger.com/how-to-install-kali-linux-and-windows-10-os-on-the-same-hdd/ https://www.gurusblogger.com/how-to-install-kali-linux-and-w...

gurusblogger1 8y ago

dandigangi 8y ago

This was such a good read. I am going to try that Remote Coffee tomorrow.

benatkin 8y ago

I like the remote coffee at the end. I'm remote and I want it to feel more like I'm having coffee when I'm talking to people I work with. Any suggestions on how to make remote conversations more like getting a cup of coffee?

martin_ 8y ago
At Twilio we use Donut. The TLDR is with our configuration every third Monday members of a slack channel (#soc-donut in our case) get randomly paired via DM. I've met people from offices around the world which I wouldn't have done otherwise, which has definitely been of personal and professional benefit to me [0] https://www.donut.com/ https://www.donut.com/

devmunchies 8y ago

Are there a lot of remote workers at Stripe or is Patrick an exception to the rule?

patio11 8y ago
There are many (tens of percent of engineering, etc); we are taking steps to materially increase the number.
- insomniacity 8y ago
  I was surprised to see most (all?) remote roles are US-only. Are you working to change that, at least for countries where you otherwise have a legal+employment presence?
- retromario 8y ago
  I checked out the list of remote engineering jobs after reading your (fascinating) article but unfortunately they all seem to be restricted to North America. Is this a time zone issue or a legal issue? Are there plans to expand remote jobs to other regions (like Europe)?
  - aboutruby 8y ago
    > Stripe is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Dublin, London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, and more That's probably the countries where they can hire remotely. It would seems in my experience with other companies that even if they don't advertise non-US remote roles (probably to prevent a large influx of applications from all over the world, most of which invalid due to no-offices there) they will accept candidates that are better than the US counterparts (but still US-based workers have an advantage). Would love an answer from Stripe/patio11 though. Also in the case of Stripe, it seems like they are making an engineering hub in Singapore: https://stripe.com/blog/singapore-eng-office https://stripe.com/blog/singapore-eng-office
  - patio11 8y ago
    As time goes to infinity we plan on having Stripes building products very close to as many of our customers as possible, which is (much) more widely distributed than the status quo, which is (much) more widely distributed than open recs on any given Monday. There will be more on this subject coming later.

dvduval 8y ago

Definitely not my favorite credit card processor. For starters, I will not earn any money if I refer my customers to stripe. It's already a non-starter at that point.

ztratar 8y ago
I'm a Stripe employee & would like to know more about your POV here. What other processors pay you for referring your customers, and whom are your customers? Very curious. Since processing is a low-margin business, it's really rare to see referral bonuses, especially the type you're describing. If we do have room to open up a program like this, I could mention it internally.
sophiebits 8y ago
Not gonna lie, that’s an odd reason to choose a credit card processor.

bgentry 8y ago

@patio11 could you elaborate on the internal communications structure at Stripe? I’m curious how employees these days balance the use of different communication tools, especially as Stripe has grown and begun embracing distributed work. I heard [0] for a long time it was all about long form posts to a massive number of Google Groups mailing lists with custom tooling to manage subscriptions (bc the Groups UI is poor). I understand these lists range from general to hyper specific. But then I’ve also heard much of the communication has shifted to Slack or other tools. Slack tends to degrade into chaos at a certain size, and at Stripe’s scale I’m curious if this is a big pain point or how you mitigate it. https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency

rattray 8y ago
I am not patio11, but I do work at Stripe. Both are true; we use a lot of email, typically with lists, and a lot of Slack. Other tools, like a wiki, an issue tracker, Home[0], and a culture of "run" rotations (like on-call but for helping folks on other teams) help keep chaos manageable. It might be interesting for us to write up another update on this, since many folks are curious... [0] https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home

cyberferret 8y ago

> The parts of the job which I enjoyed the most were not my actual job (writing and selling software, filing taxes in a timely fashion, etc) but helping other software entrepreneurs optimize their businesses or engineers navigate career challenges. This bit in the post about the author having previously been a founder of a business intrigued me. As a founder myself, I know that there are bits of the business that don't fit into my natural skillset but have to be done. That is accepted as part and parcel of running a business. The second point intrigues me though. In my decades of running my own software business, I have had a lot of staff come through as employees, get skilled up, then leave to start their own businesses using the skills they learned while at my company. This actually gives me a great deal of pleasure and pride. I LOVE seeing people's career pathways take off, and I love it more if I had contributed in some way.

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OliverJones 8y ago

As a Stripe customer processing about USD600K a year through them, I have to say they're an excellent outfit. Their documentation is very clear. Their email and irc support is smart and responsive, with nary a "I can help you with that today" script recited by an agent to waste my time. They set and meet expectations about the financial stuff, like how long it takes for transactions to hit the bank, and what happens with disputes and chargebacks and other parts of the world of serving real paying people. It's not hard to guess that the things in this article are all true.

icelancer 8y ago
I like a lot of things about Stripe but this is by far the best part: > Their documentation is very clear. In a world where no one gives a shit about cleanly documenting processes - especially ones that are versioned or change - I really appreciate Stripe's dedication to this.

mychael 8y ago

File this blog post under "Humble Brag"

branchless 8y ago

> Form your new company as either an LLC or C Corporation in Delaware. Isn't this just tax dodging?

triangleman 8y ago

So, are you ever going to open source stockfighter?

fulafel 8y ago

For anyone else wondering what Stripe Atlas is, > Stripe Atlas, a seamless way to start your company in the U.S. Apparently it's a filing-paperwork-etc-as-a-service

blizkreeg 8y ago

Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly. Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe in fees has to be pulled from a shudder export of all transactions), handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes on unfortunately. I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies (specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us. Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about the front-end, metaphorically speaking. I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's too catered to the devs. Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of feedback if someone wants to listen.

countryqt30 8y ago
I 100% agree with this. Stripe is fun for startups with <100'000 / year revenue, but then it gets ugly. The reporting can't be configured at all and is highly cumbersome, especially if you need something slightly different than they offer for comparability (e.g. last 7 days, last 28 vs last 30 days), and Stripe is not transparent about their fees at all in the back-end.
- icelancer 8y ago
  I'll add my 2c and say I disagree entirely. We ship mid-seven figures through Stripe yearly and I enjoy the back-end still to this day - have been using it right after it was /dev/payments and still kicking all these years on my main small business and small projects alike. I don't see the need for "reporting" from the Stripe website as I think most businesses should be doing it on their own in their own tooling, but in the cases I want to quickly look things up, Stripe's back-end has been just fine as well.

pololee 8y ago

I was in a small company working on payments team as fullstack engineer. Given the big volume, stripe would be too expensive for us. So we built our own credit card processing service. We integrated with FirstData directly. While I was working on payments, I kept following news about stripe. I love their design and appreciate the deep care they put in their product, even the documentation. I like Patrick and John's inspiring stories and love watching their interviews. After 3 years, I was looking for a new opportunity. Stripe is my dream company. I was lucky to get a phone interview. The conversation went fine. The coding problem was easy. But I could tell the interviewer was not impressed. I couldn't figure out what and why. I was depressed when I got the rejection email. I'll definitely want to try again. Anyone advice or suggestions Stripe folks could offer would be greatly appreciated!

rajasimon 8y ago
Same here. Done coding challenge and got the interview call but finally, they turned me down.
yitchelle 8y ago
Did they give a plausible reason for their rejection? I am just interested if the trend for job rejection reasons is moving towards a more transparent model. In the past and present, it is extremely difficult/frustrating to get the real answers for being rejected.
- pololee 8y ago
  They didn't give me any specific reasons. The recruiter called me one day after my video interview. She only told me they didn't think I was a good fit. In the interview, I finished the coding questions in 30 mins. Then I just had a chat with the interviewer. The conversation went fine. He told me he was full-stack eng and worked on frontend. I asked him whether he worked with Benjamin De Cock, a stripe designer I admire and if he could share some stories. He said yes but didn't want to share stories.

fyfy18 8y ago

After reading all of that and thinking "Stripe sounds like a really cool place to work", I'm a bit disappointed that they don't have an office in my country and "remote" means "remote in North America". Oh well, I'll keep working with them to build cool stuff for my clients :-)

sieabahlpark 8y ago
They probably have laws restricting access to their credit card says. Possibly hiring or contractual with Enterprise