8 ms·

We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best examples ever of simultaneously selling to the largest companies in the world while

by pc 6y ago

We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best examples ever of simultaneously selling to the largest companies in the world while not giving up on a strong self-serve product. So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery. Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development. Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.

QuinnyPig 6y ago
Hiring Mike Clayville to Stripe is a huge deal, and a loss for AWS. This is one of those deals where both Stripe and Mike come out better for it.
- stu2b50 6y ago
  >This is one of those deals where both Stripe and Mike come out better for it. ...is hiring not usually an event where employer and employee both benefit?
  - QuinnyPig 6y ago
    Often not, but it's considered rude to point out examples thereof.
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      Come on, stop making fun of Yahoo like that, it's been years now...
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Congrats, Patrick. The VMware + AWS experience is certainly a big plus for a company like Stripe. I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one. In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB. It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin. In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine. Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.
- pc 6y ago
  Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has, I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.
  - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing). Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.
ponker 6y ago
The number of companies (big ones, public ones!) where I can't for the life of me figure out what they sell from their website is truly astonishing. I understand that 1) if I can't understand it I'm not in their market, and 2) they probably want to be vague so they can sell their prospects whatever they ask for [1] but I still feel that they could gain a lot in the long term through brand awareness and people like becoming or meeting their target customer (but not having had any idea what that company did) by making a clear articulation of what the hell they do. [1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
- usernameanother 6y ago
  Your "funny story" is very fitting here... there's a lot of value hidden in just knowing how to interface with AWS. Lot of companies are actually the middleman between you and AWS (e.g. Heroku which provides managed databases, Redis instances, etc. which are all hosted in AWS.) Meaning that you are not the client of AWS; Heroku is.
- manquer 6y ago
  partly it is because in India you need licensing to sell fireworks , the demand is very very uneven, during Diwali season it is 10-30x compared to the rest of the year. the fire hazard and pollution issues and till a while back child labour concerns as well is why it is regulated The permanent year around sellers are few and serve as dealer than retailer . During the season they do both . It was more sourcing a dealer on the fly and pretty common for fireworks . Price is very fluctuating and there are huge markups due to the nature of demand . Discerning buyers go to largest shop/wholesaler to get best price. I knew a wholesaler/ early e-commerce player in this space (bigger players do not this due to regulatory challenges ). He will make his orders in January for delivery in august for season starting in sept/oct and typically paid 10%-15% list price at most.
tylermenezes 6y ago
I learned about AWS and Stripe at around the same time, but while AWS's dashboard has become truly overwhelming, Stripe has until recently been very focused on your core product. I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc. Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons? (I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))
- pc 6y ago
  I think that the infrastructure market naturally breeds a lot of products for pretty specific/narrow use cases, whereas our strategy is more about marrying financial capabilities with very broad/flexible APIs. Given that, we've always valued very cohesive and composable functionality between the different facets of Stripe, having a straightforward and tightly integrated Dashboard, and so on. (That's no criticism of AWS -- we haven't launched 100+ different products and we aren't going to have a product suite as extensive as theirs any time soon.) I do think that software complexity lifecycle management (and how that pertains to organizational considerations) is one of the tough problems in our industry. AWS has done an amazing job in terms of their pace of development and innovation, but, yes, it's also become a pretty complicated suite. I think we all currently face some kind of "fast development", "cohesive integration", "broad functionality" trilemma and how best to surmount it seems a big open question to me.
  - tylermenezes 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply (and the fun new word trilemma). Accessibility for new developers has been something that's been on my mind a lot recently. Glad that it's something you're mindful of!
  - csharpminor 6y ago
ultimoo 6y ago
Hi pc, huge fan of Stripe and its relentless focus on the "impatient developer", which so many enterprise companies miss the mark on. As a future co-founder interested in this space, do you have any talks or essays on how you built a developer centric company that has also a successful "enterprise" side to it?
- katnegermis 6y ago
  Not pc, but they did an episode of "How I built this" that: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812853591/stripe-patrick-and-john-collison-2018 https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812853591/stripe-patrick-and-... I don't remember if they answered exactly what you are asking, but my memory of the episode is definitely positive!
  - swyx 6y ago
    they most certainly don't discuss enterprise go to market in an NPR podcast haha
xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
This is sort of neat because the same problem seems to be mirrored for Stripe customers; for example, if my business caters to the impatient developer and I use Stripe for payments, I find myself having to explore outside the bounds of conveniently orchestrated payments, to more esoteric per-customer high-touch interactions for large enterprise customers. I wonder if there isn't room for Stripe to grow to help businesses deal with these... sort of business deals!
- pc 6y ago
  Hah. This is in fact a problem area that our Billing (https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing) team is actively thinking about. You should reach out to ark@stripe.com if you want to discuss -- he can connect you with the right folks.
  - twakefield 6y ago
    There is a pretty simple feature that would alleviate a lot of pain with Stripe’s billing service when invoicing enterprises - allow for attaching a pdf of the invoice in the automated email. Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.
    - athrun 6y ago
      It's not quite the same, but you can get the PDF from the Invoice object and send your own emails.
    - thoraway1010 6y ago
      It's not just enterprise - many small / mid size places are much much happier (myself included) with an invoice attached. AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.
cm2012 6y ago
One thing that could help with acquiring both self serve and enterprise customers would be effective, B2B focused Facebook ads. I have a ton of experience with scaling these for other big B2B tech companies, email is in my profile if that sounds interesting.
sudhirj 6y ago
Thanks for addressing this. Each of these points was an immediate worry as I was reading the post, nice to see you’ve already thought of them and addressed them.
jariel 6y ago
Yes Patrick great work. Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing. 'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now. I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not. Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently. There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction. A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer. I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.
stephenmc77 6y ago
I seriously love the way Patrick Collison just randomly browses HN and takes the time to respond to articles like this.
- alexpetralia 6y ago
  I hope you give him more credit than "random"!
  - draw_down 6y ago
    Yes, a lot more goes into it than that.
nikon 6y ago
Will you increase your rps limits? Surely they are a big blocker for larger organizations.
- pc 6y ago
  Hm, what issues are you running into? Our defaults (100 RPS) are pretty high but we can support higher if you reach out to us.

by pc 6y ago

QuinnyPig 6y ago

Hiring Mike Clayville to Stripe is a huge deal, and a loss for AWS. This is one of those deals where both Stripe and Mike come out better for it.

stu2b50 6y ago
>This is one of those deals where both Stripe and Mike come out better for it. ...is hiring not usually an event where employer and employee both benefit?
- QuinnyPig 6y ago
  Often not, but it's considered rude to point out examples thereof.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    Come on, stop making fun of Yahoo like that, it's been years now...

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Congrats, Patrick. The VMware + AWS experience is certainly a big plus for a company like Stripe. I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one. In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB. It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin. In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine. Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.

pc 6y ago
Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has, I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever). One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful. Think of your answer. My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing). Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.

ponker 6y ago

The number of companies (big ones, public ones!) where I can't for the life of me figure out what they sell from their website is truly astonishing. I understand that 1) if I can't understand it I'm not in their market, and 2) they probably want to be vague so they can sell their prospects whatever they ask for [1] but I still feel that they could gain a lot in the long term through brand awareness and people like becoming or meeting their target customer (but not having had any idea what that company did) by making a clear articulation of what the hell they do. [1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.

usernameanother 6y ago
Your "funny story" is very fitting here... there's a lot of value hidden in just knowing how to interface with AWS. Lot of companies are actually the middleman between you and AWS (e.g. Heroku which provides managed databases, Redis instances, etc. which are all hosted in AWS.) Meaning that you are not the client of AWS; Heroku is.
manquer 6y ago
partly it is because in India you need licensing to sell fireworks , the demand is very very uneven, during Diwali season it is 10-30x compared to the rest of the year. the fire hazard and pollution issues and till a while back child labour concerns as well is why it is regulated The permanent year around sellers are few and serve as dealer than retailer . During the season they do both . It was more sourcing a dealer on the fly and pretty common for fireworks . Price is very fluctuating and there are huge markups due to the nature of demand . Discerning buyers go to largest shop/wholesaler to get best price. I knew a wholesaler/ early e-commerce player in this space (bigger players do not this due to regulatory challenges ). He will make his orders in January for delivery in august for season starting in sept/oct and typically paid 10%-15% list price at most.

tylermenezes 6y ago

I learned about AWS and Stripe at around the same time, but while AWS's dashboard has become truly overwhelming, Stripe has until recently been very focused on your core product. I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc. Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons? (I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))

pc 6y ago
I think that the infrastructure market naturally breeds a lot of products for pretty specific/narrow use cases, whereas our strategy is more about marrying financial capabilities with very broad/flexible APIs. Given that, we've always valued very cohesive and composable functionality between the different facets of Stripe, having a straightforward and tightly integrated Dashboard, and so on. (That's no criticism of AWS -- we haven't launched 100+ different products and we aren't going to have a product suite as extensive as theirs any time soon.) I do think that software complexity lifecycle management (and how that pertains to organizational considerations) is one of the tough problems in our industry. AWS has done an amazing job in terms of their pace of development and innovation, but, yes, it's also become a pretty complicated suite. I think we all currently face some kind of "fast development", "cohesive integration", "broad functionality" trilemma and how best to surmount it seems a big open question to me.
- tylermenezes 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply (and the fun new word trilemma). Accessibility for new developers has been something that's been on my mind a lot recently. Glad that it's something you're mindful of!
- csharpminor 6y ago

ultimoo 6y ago

Hi pc, huge fan of Stripe and its relentless focus on the "impatient developer", which so many enterprise companies miss the mark on. As a future co-founder interested in this space, do you have any talks or essays on how you built a developer centric company that has also a successful "enterprise" side to it?

katnegermis 6y ago
Not pc, but they did an episode of "How I built this" that: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812853591/stripe-patrick-and-john-collison-2018 https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812853591/stripe-patrick-and-... I don't remember if they answered exactly what you are asking, but my memory of the episode is definitely positive!
- swyx 6y ago
  they most certainly don't discuss enterprise go to market in an NPR podcast haha

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago

This is sort of neat because the same problem seems to be mirrored for Stripe customers; for example, if my business caters to the impatient developer and I use Stripe for payments, I find myself having to explore outside the bounds of conveniently orchestrated payments, to more esoteric per-customer high-touch interactions for large enterprise customers. I wonder if there isn't room for Stripe to grow to help businesses deal with these... sort of business deals!

pc 6y ago
Hah. This is in fact a problem area that our Billing (https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing) team is actively thinking about. You should reach out to ark@stripe.com if you want to discuss -- he can connect you with the right folks.
- twakefield 6y ago
  There is a pretty simple feature that would alleviate a lot of pain with Stripe’s billing service when invoicing enterprises - allow for attaching a pdf of the invoice in the automated email. Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.
  - athrun 6y ago
    It's not quite the same, but you can get the PDF from the Invoice object and send your own emails.
  - thoraway1010 6y ago
    It's not just enterprise - many small / mid size places are much much happier (myself included) with an invoice attached. AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.

cm2012 6y ago

One thing that could help with acquiring both self serve and enterprise customers would be effective, B2B focused Facebook ads. I have a ton of experience with scaling these for other big B2B tech companies, email is in my profile if that sounds interesting.

sudhirj 6y ago

Thanks for addressing this. Each of these points was an immediate worry as I was reading the post, nice to see you’ve already thought of them and addressed them.

jariel 6y ago

Yes Patrick great work. Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing. 'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now. I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not. Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently. There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction. A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer. I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.

stephenmc77 6y ago

I seriously love the way Patrick Collison just randomly browses HN and takes the time to respond to articles like this.

alexpetralia 6y ago
I hope you give him more credit than "random"!
- draw_down 6y ago
  Yes, a lot more goes into it than that.

nikon 6y ago

Will you increase your rps limits? Surely they are a big blocker for larger organizations.

pc 6y ago
Hm, what issues are you running into? Our defaults (100 RPS) are pretty high but we can support higher if you reach out to us.