21 ms·

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

439 points by yarapavan 6y ago

zuhayeer 6y ago
"You minimize (and regret) nuisances like incorporation, setting up payroll, and the gigantic productivity tarpit that is fundraising" Basically the exact work of Stripe Atlas
- biztos 6y ago
  I find Atlas really interesting and may yet use it, but how does it reduce the need for fundraising?
  - zuhayeer 6y ago
    Mainly the former things, but also from the article: "Sometimes this involves scalable writing such as the Stripe Atlas guides. Sometimes I work with a single founder to get their B round accomplished."
ve55 6y ago
What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. The impact of long-form well-written essays like this is huge, and fits perfectly with the theme of the essay itself about helping others succeed at scale. I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview". Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.
- fernandotakai 6y ago
  i gotta say, it was such a strong article that i thought about applying (specially after i saw that they have openings in LATAM).
  - jlhonora 6y ago
    Drop me an email if you'd like to know more about Stripe @ LATAM! jlh at stripe dot com . Spanish / Portuguese friendly, too.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt. By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.
  - cm2012 6y ago
    The author, Patio11, is such a trusted and long term member of the HN community that it counts for a lot more than usual for an advert.
    - polote 6y ago
      it just reinforces even more the fact that it is somewhat an ad ...
    - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
      I think most of us here are well aware of that. However, it's important to keep in mind that patio11's popularity among developer communities is one of the reasons they hired him in the first place. He's paid to be a spokesperson for the company, among other things. He doesn't even try to hide that fact in the article: > When I was hired, there was a fiction for my business cards but the job rounded to “Do anything required to make Stripe Atlas successful.” ... For about a year I was formally in the Marketing department
martinrlzd 6y ago
Paul Graham just recommended this article on twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1314260316134531075 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1314260316134531075 > Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.
sheikheddy 6y ago
The link to Twitter in the article (https://stripe.com/patio11 https://stripe.com/patio11) appears to be broken.
- patio11 6y ago
  Thanks, fixed.
timerol 6y ago
Does anyone know enough about Stripe's product lines to comment on what the following paragraph means? "My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies." The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect? And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)
- rhizome 6y ago
  I think it's the kind of mix of inside-baseball and jargon that makes it pretty much impossible to decode for those not involved in creating annual reports and executive summaries.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Which is not at all surprising if you're familiar with Patrick's other writing.
- agustif 6y ago
  https://stripe.com/es/marketplaces https://stripe.com/es/marketplaces Is the most NFX' Sigma is sold separately but built with everyones data too
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  If you follow Patrick on Twitter you get used to this - even to the point where I didn’t realize this was from his blog but intuited it was a quote from him just by the style of writing. I believe what he’s getting at here is close to the following: Stripe isn’t just providing payment (Reliable capture on success, aka Stripe gets money on revenue generation), but is also trying to provide tools to make the B2B model easier to deploy, based on their experience with these business models. Stripe Atlas or Sigma are probably a good example of those types of services - they’re trying to use their payments play to also push for selling you Business Intelligence or Legal. Indexing is just taking knowledge and deploying it to make something faster, like a database index (I know I want to join on this column, so I index it).
_corym 6y ago
Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application. Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending". I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.
- pc 6y ago
  I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.
  - ditonal 6y ago
    Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.
    - ss3000 6y ago
      Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.
TedShiller 6y ago
I don't doubt this is true. However, given that the author put his name on it, it's impossible that this blog post could be anything but glowingly positive (unless he wanted to complain on his way out).
- patio11 6y ago
  I asked for, and got, total editorial control of my voice in my spaces when I joined. Though in any universe where my experience at Stripe wasn't positive, I would be unlikely to have stayed for four years or to have written the post, right? I tried to be honest about my frustrations, too, but there's a possibility my salaryman indirectness made them not leap off the page.
  - TedShiller 6y ago
    Sure, but you can't say too many bad things about the company. Of course you would never write "I don't like working here", as long as your real name is on the post.
arthurjj 6y ago
"pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview." is something I have found to be difficult but required. Very nice friends of mine have simplistic views on issues I am interested in or lack the ambition I would like to have. We still close but we chat about personal problems, not work.
iooi 6y ago
This is one of the few blogs where I'll always read the entire article, consistently great writing and thought-provoking ideas. I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me! Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has. Small improvement in this paragraph: > “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to... Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.
- novok 6y ago
  It's such a basic thing too for a recruiting process. As soon as you get a no, send an automated email at least!
  - o_class_star 6y ago
    The theory is that it's better not to respond at that point, because if they change their mind in 3 months, they'd rather not have rejected you so they can say "sorry we were slow".
    - kevinmchugh 6y ago
      I don't think I've ever heard of someone changing their mind 3 months down the line. Maybe it happens. I know I'm less likely to interview somewhere if my friends tell me they got ghosted.
- gscott 6y ago
  It is likely they don't really have many open positions no matter how good the applicants are. Seems they have some outside of the USA specific positions open.
ydlr 6y ago
I have never seen the word "hypergrowth" before this week, now I have seen it three or four times in just a few days. Is this the newest jargon from the California swindler class?
- patio11 6y ago
  It's sufficiently a term of art in Silicon Valley that HN had threads about it 13 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042 Note comment from Drew Houston, who had just launched Dropbox here a month before. You can use HN search to pull up a few thousand other instances.
ffggvv 6y ago
why would you work at a company that may never go public and even if it does, already has such an oversized valuation you’ll likely not make much from it? it seems predatory and abusive to employees to stay private this long
- dbbk 6y ago
  Public companies are a pain in the arse. I'd prefer not answering to shareholders.
- patio11 6y ago
  A quirk of Silicon Valley culture is that senior employees on the inside of it tend to be rather sophisticated about how they think about equity, and they also tend to be rather reticent about talking about that externally, because of factors such as legal and PR risk. This is immensely frustrating to me, because thinking lucidly about equity is incredibly important for career planning for engineers who are startup-adjacent, work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, or who are in markets where those firms' offers set market terms. I think this sets us up for a continuance of the class system, where people who talked about this subject around the dinner table or have a frat brother who was in Google in 2004 know the score, and people who grew up in Chicago and didn't know what Google was in 2003 do not, even when they're evaluating career options which are heavily dependent on correctly valuing equity. I did not always think lucidly about equity, and overly trusted the representations of folks on Internet watering holes who said that equity was likely to be nearly worthless. I would like to think I've learned a bit over the years. I apologize for being indirect here; feel free to ask me about equity in some place where it will not be reasonably read as a comment on a firm I owe various duties to. (Offer broadly open to HNers.)
  - ffggvv 6y ago
    I don't think the equity is worthless. I just think an engineer can work at Facebook with a monthly vest and their equity is as good as cash. An engineer at stripe has illiquid shares that they hope they can convert to cash in 3+ years. Usually the hope of a large return would offset that (time value of money) but thats cancelled by the fact that stripe's private valuation is 30B+.
lowiqengineer 6y ago
Why the hell does Stripe keep doing things outside of their payments wheelhouse? It makes no sense, especially with regard to publishing a magazine (???). Is this the whole “Hoover up talent and pay them absurd amounts” applied to an extreme?
deleted 6y ago
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dmazin 6y ago
Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture. But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks. BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!
- patio11 6y ago
  You're welcome!
- titanomachy 6y ago
  Can you explain what stood out to you as conservative about the "progress studies" article? Wikipedia defines conservatism as "a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization". Patrick Collison's article [1] to me seems to be saying "we should be a lot more systematic and scientific in figuring out the drivers of societal progress, and aggressively invest in those things." That seems in direct opposition to conservatism, since it advocates a dramatic overhaul of ineffective institutions. Collison's definition of progress does seem narrowly focused on measurable economic metrics. Is that the source of your grievance? I think that developments like women's suffrage and racial desegration should be included in discussions of "progress studies", whether or not they led to improvements in measurable metrics. Collison neglects to include examples of this type in his article, but it's not clear to me that he considers them unworthy of study. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...
  - Riverheart 6y ago
    He's not saying its conservative, he dislikes business leaders using their influence to pursue ideological change in society.
- exolymph 6y ago
ignoramous 6y ago
What a good blog post this is. > A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal. AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.
mastermojo 6y ago
The second-order effects that are described here around the "capture of upside" may be a little exaggerated. Credit cards and Stripe are common payment mechanisms for consumer, prosumer, and self-serve SAAS. I'm not denying there is a lot of money here, but I imagine the majority of B2B SaaS companies by revenue handle payment through annual contracts through checks and wire transfer. I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.
benawad 6y ago
Does anyone know if Patrick has talked somewhere about why he decided to take a job at Stripe instead of continuing his consulting business or starting a new venture? Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.
- heipei 6y ago
  Yeah, not knowing about him at all when I watched a talk by him and then realised that he is somewhat of an icon for indie/solo founders, I was very surprised to find out he had starting working as an employee in the meantime. I know he's doing well, but since I had just started out solo myself it felt a little like he had thrown in the towel ;)
- Zanni 6y ago
  He talks about it here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-work-on-atlas/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...
neilparikh 6y ago
OT question: > AppAmaGooBookSoft have individual products with more engineers than our company has people total. Which products would have more than 3000 engineers?
- patio11 6y ago
  Amazon has publicly said is has 10k+ on Alexa/Echo, and you're welcome to get other examples from chatting with folks.
Chris_Newton 6y ago
An interesting read as usual from Patrick. I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe. Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does. It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.
divbzero 6y ago
I really like long form idea packed essays like this. One of the many ideas that jumped out at me: > A huge portion of the value creation of Silicon Valley is through directly intervening on the ambition of impressionable people. This seems especially applicable for software-only or software-heavy businesses that scale very efficiently. Increasing ambition by a little can result in large increase in impact on the other end. Another idea that caught my attention: > Silicon Valley was a place. It has become a metonymy for a community of practice. You can find outposts of Silicon Valley in Tokyo cafes, in WeWorks in Bangalore, and on the coast of Cape Town. If we can inspire ambition all around the world that bodes well for our future.
ppllpp 6y ago
The article really does make you want to apply. However, all remote jobs are Americas-only. Remote was supposed to be Stripe's next engineering hub even before the pandemic, so I'm curious if that will include Europe any time soon.
absherwin 6y ago
"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation. This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).
- busterarm 6y ago
  Most important comment of the whole thread right here.
- daltonlp 6y ago
  Those sound like perfectly legal words. A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices". I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Ultimately consumers foot the bill. It's why antitrust legislation gets pursued in the first place. It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat". It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent). It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.
ping_pong 6y ago
One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.
- room500 6y ago
  To be fair, this can apply to a lot of young companies. Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger. I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
  - holoduke 6y ago
    Although sometimes they are right as well. It's often layers of people with many different lines between them slowing down the overal pace of development. I don't buy the argument that ensuring scalability equals long processes. But I do believe that when the product grows in terms features, components etc, the pace also decreases. Even in the perfect multilithic software solution.
- biztos 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but isn't "young OG" a contradiction? How can someone be "OG" (Original Gangster, i.e. really old school) in a very well-funded company founded ten years ago? Am I misunderstanding something?
  - cyral 6y ago
ihnorton 6y ago
I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software? How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time? I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive? [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
- debunn 6y ago
  I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)? https://press.stripe.com/ https://press.stripe.com/
  - zJayv 6y ago
    Believe they're referring to: "Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company." - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
    - patio11 6y ago
      Yes, that.
- zJayv 6y ago
  I am also very curious about this. I've been keeping track of knowledge mgmt tooling (esp. plain text) and approaches (e.g. ADR) for a couple years. Grand Unified Theory forthcoming :)
- 6y ago
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> My sleep schedule has ranged from atypical to disastrous, but that has been true for almost all of my adult life. This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner). It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  Yup, same here. It takes a ton of discipline to keep a 24-hour cycle.
  - shalmanese 6y ago
    It's not a lack of discipline, it's a recognized medical condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake...
mchusma 6y ago
I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out. They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs. Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet. Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.
- nimish 6y ago
  Turns out private taxes aren't good!
- abstractbarista 6y ago
  Transferring those bits with just the right logic for each transaction scenario is what still costs something. I'm sure the margin is massively excessive today. But I don't think it can be quite 'effectively free'.
  - Waterluvian 6y ago
    Debit e-transfers in Canada are free (and have been around a long time). It makes the Venmo thing a real head scratcher.
    - mcpherrinm 6y ago
      They're only free in certain circumstances: personal transfers, and only for some bank accounts. It wasn't that long ago that all e-transfers cost $1, which makes them pretty impractical for giving a few bucks to a friend to split a pizza or whatever. Venmo's been around longer than free e-transfers.
amelius 6y ago
Either the post is missing something, or this particular job didn't involve a lot of "high-tech". Which is ok, but perhaps not particularly interesting for most "hackers". At least, that's the feeling I was left with.
diogenescynic 6y ago
I interviewed at Stripe a few years back and they were extremely rude in the interview. I was still early in my career and I’ve never forgotten it. Even still, I’ve applied a few times and never heard back. Definitely seems like a company that’s going places but also has a bit of an ego.
charliebrownau 6y ago
I would expect Stripe to be the same sort of people that work in Apple, Mozzila, Microsoft, Ebay and the sort Global LEFT, Anti White, Anti Freedom, Anti Invidauls , relying on the state, mainstream and what they are told without the ablity to rational think for themself
_where 6y ago
This is a great read, but for the feedback, I stopped here: “I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.” I’ve heard this, but here there’s an ulterior motive, which may not benefit. Stripe benefits from startups, and if you hangout with successful professionals and mentors and people that don’t bring you down, that will probably make the startup community successful and that in turn will help Stripe grow. But would you ignore your family member that needs your time and attention? How about your friend that seems to be tanking? If Warren Buffett were to have serious health problems, I seriously doubt Bill Gates would be like “whatever- I don’t have time for that.” He’s going to be there. Because that’s what you do. Sure, there are times when you need your space, and friends change, or tend to abuse. Maybe you need to withdraw some, get off of social media. But, being a fair weather friend or family member just because someone else is not on their A game or never was is B.S. I’m not discounting the advice; if you’re only goal is to have what is generally perceived to be worldly success, having only peers that boost you is a way to do it. But the greatest person that ever lived had a bad friend that got him killed. He wasn’t like, “sorry, I have dinner plans.”
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  > But the greatest person that ever lived had a bad friend that got him killed. He wasn’t like, “sorry, I have dinner plans.” Is this a reference to a well known figure? I'm trying to think about who this might be and I'm drawing a blank. Who was the greatest person that ever lived?
  - vbsd 6y ago
    Probably a reference to Jesus.
- sobani 6y ago
  I don't see anything in the article close to implying that you should drop people who are down on their luck. All I read is: If you talk a lot with finance oriented people, don't be surprised if you start thinking in finance oriented ways. To give a different example from me personally: For a while I read red pill material, because I thought I could take lessons from it, while dismissing all the women hating parts as I had no reason to be angry with women. Guess what: if you read about a lot of anger towards women, you become angry towards women yourself as well! So the lesson I took from that was: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.
sourcesmith 6y ago
I have never had a payment on a site using Stripe go through (having tried a number of cards). How are they still in business?
deleted 6y ago
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RikNieu 6y ago
I just wish Stripe was available in my small country as a small indie developer who can't spend mountains of cash on Atlas.
jgalt212 6y ago
>Stripe is, qualitatively and quantitatively, about as different counting from my start date to today as it was counting from launch to my start date. We've been using Stripe to accept payments for longer than Pat has been there. From the customer perspective, Stripe is largely unchanged from when we first started using it. i.e. easy to use and no complaints (other than the high fees which are probably in line with other processors given our low volume). We tried to use Atlas to set up an Ireland sub, but had no success. I was not involved, only my COO, so don't have much to add on this.

439 points by yarapavan 6y ago

"You minimize (and regret) nuisances like incorporation, setting up payroll, and the gigantic productivity tarpit that is fundraising" Basically the exact work of Stripe Atlas

biztos 6y ago
I find Atlas really interesting and may yet use it, but how does it reduce the need for fundraising?
- zuhayeer 6y ago
  Mainly the former things, but also from the article: "Sometimes this involves scalable writing such as the Stripe Atlas guides. Sometimes I work with a single founder to get their B round accomplished."

ve55 6y ago

What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. The impact of long-form well-written essays like this is huge, and fits perfectly with the theme of the essay itself about helping others succeed at scale. I like the personal notes included a ton, e.g. mentioning that he has struggled with depression personally, which I wouldn't have guessed, even if naively so. Being open and helpful with those topics helps a lot of people out in a serious way. Also love quotes like "I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview". Just reading this post makes it tempting for me to apply at Stripe (They apparently have 530 roles open, wow! https://stripe.com/jobs/search https://stripe.com/jobs/search), especially given all the other positive comments I've seen about the company.

fernandotakai 6y ago
i gotta say, it was such a strong article that i thought about applying (specially after i saw that they have openings in LATAM).
- jlhonora 6y ago
  Drop me an email if you'd like to know more about Stripe @ LATAM! jlh at stripe dot com . Spanish / Portuguese friendly, too.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> What a wonderful advertisement for working at Stripe. Exactly, which is why some of this should be taken with a grain of salt. By all accounts, Stripe really is a good place to work and their success speaks for itself. Yet, it's important to remember that this article is at least one part advertisement. I'm not suggesting anyone dismiss the contents, but keep the context in mind. The article goes to great lengths to speak about the positives of working at Stripe, but the section about terrible work/life balance is written vaguely enough for the reader to dismiss it as a personal quirk, for example.
- cm2012 6y ago
  The author, Patio11, is such a trusted and long term member of the HN community that it counts for a lot more than usual for an advert.
  - polote 6y ago
    it just reinforces even more the fact that it is somewhat an ad ...
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    I think most of us here are well aware of that. However, it's important to keep in mind that patio11's popularity among developer communities is one of the reasons they hired him in the first place. He's paid to be a spokesperson for the company, among other things. He doesn't even try to hide that fact in the article: > When I was hired, there was a fiction for my business cards but the job rounded to “Do anything required to make Stripe Atlas successful.” ... For about a year I was formally in the Marketing department

martinrlzd 6y ago

Paul Graham just recommended this article on twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1314260316134531075 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1314260316134531075 > Incidentally, invoking such questions ritualistically is a fairly accurate description of the job of a YC partner. If you start asking questions like "what's preventing you from launching today?" the answer, to the founders' own surprise, quite often turns out to be nothing.

sheikheddy 6y ago

The link to Twitter in the article (https://stripe.com/patio11 https://stripe.com/patio11) appears to be broken.

patio11 6y ago
Thanks, fixed.

timerol 6y ago

Does anyone know enough about Stripe's product lines to comment on what the following paragraph means? "My view on Stripe’s business prior to joining was “Stripe is basically a B2B SaaS company with extremely reliable capture of upside when users succeed.” I believe that substantially underappreciates the actual business. Large portions of Stripe’s business add another loop on top of the B2B SaaS loop, where Stripe is effectively indexing on its ability to grow the count and success of customers who are themselves structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies." The "reliable capture of upside when users succeed" seems to be referring to the fees charged by Stripe. More revenue for the user means more revenue for Stripe as well. I don't know what the "effectively indexing" sentence refers to. Is there a network effect at play here, where being on Stripe encourages a user's customers and suppliers to also be on Stripe? Or is there a product offering that somehow creates that effect? And then there's another loop mentioned later, which is presumably a product in development, and not something anyone involved with can comment on. (But I would love to hear about it if you could.)

rhizome 6y ago
I think it's the kind of mix of inside-baseball and jargon that makes it pretty much impossible to decode for those not involved in creating annual reports and executive summaries.
- pc86 6y ago
  Which is not at all surprising if you're familiar with Patrick's other writing.
agustif 6y ago
https://stripe.com/es/marketplaces https://stripe.com/es/marketplaces Is the most NFX' Sigma is sold separately but built with everyones data too
alextheparrot 6y ago
If you follow Patrick on Twitter you get used to this - even to the point where I didn’t realize this was from his blog but intuited it was a quote from him just by the style of writing. I believe what he’s getting at here is close to the following: Stripe isn’t just providing payment (Reliable capture on success, aka Stripe gets money on revenue generation), but is also trying to provide tools to make the B2B model easier to deploy, based on their experience with these business models. Stripe Atlas or Sigma are probably a good example of those types of services - they’re trying to use their payments play to also push for selling you Business Intelligence or Legal. Indexing is just taking knowledge and deploying it to make something faster, like a database index (I know I want to join on this column, so I index it).

_corym 6y ago

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application. Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending". I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.

saagarjha 6y ago
At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.
pc 6y ago
I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.
- ditonal 6y ago
  Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.
  - ss3000 6y ago
    Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.

TedShiller 6y ago

I don't doubt this is true. However, given that the author put his name on it, it's impossible that this blog post could be anything but glowingly positive (unless he wanted to complain on his way out).

patio11 6y ago
I asked for, and got, total editorial control of my voice in my spaces when I joined. Though in any universe where my experience at Stripe wasn't positive, I would be unlikely to have stayed for four years or to have written the post, right? I tried to be honest about my frustrations, too, but there's a possibility my salaryman indirectness made them not leap off the page.
- TedShiller 6y ago
  Sure, but you can't say too many bad things about the company. Of course you would never write "I don't like working here", as long as your real name is on the post.

arthurjj 6y ago

"pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview." is something I have found to be difficult but required. Very nice friends of mine have simplistic views on issues I am interested in or lack the ambition I would like to have. We still close but we chat about personal problems, not work.

iooi 6y ago

This is one of the few blogs where I'll always read the entire article, consistently great writing and thought-provoking ideas. I agree with the other commenter regarding the Stripe application process. I've applied 2-3 times starting in 2015 and as recently as early 2020 and have never heard back, it's been the only company that never gets back to me! Everything worked out, since I've landed some great positions at promising startups in the meantime, but I would have loved to experience the growth from ~500 to ~3000 employees like Patrick has. Small improvement in this paragraph: > “If you sell to doctors you prefer futures in which more money goes to doctors. Those are much better futures for you than futures with less money going to... Since the article was just talking about call options, my first thought went to futures contracts instead of possible timelines. I think using "timelines" instead of futures would make this a bit more readable.

novok 6y ago
It's such a basic thing too for a recruiting process. As soon as you get a no, send an automated email at least!
- o_class_star 6y ago
  The theory is that it's better not to respond at that point, because if they change their mind in 3 months, they'd rather not have rejected you so they can say "sorry we were slow".
  - kevinmchugh 6y ago
    I don't think I've ever heard of someone changing their mind 3 months down the line. Maybe it happens. I know I'm less likely to interview somewhere if my friends tell me they got ghosted.
gscott 6y ago
It is likely they don't really have many open positions no matter how good the applicants are. Seems they have some outside of the USA specific positions open.

ydlr 6y ago

I have never seen the word "hypergrowth" before this week, now I have seen it three or four times in just a few days. Is this the newest jargon from the California swindler class?

patio11 6y ago
It's sufficiently a term of art in Silicon Valley that HN had threads about it 13 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042 Note comment from Drew Houston, who had just launched Dropbox here a month before. You can use HN search to pull up a few thousand other instances.

ffggvv 6y ago

why would you work at a company that may never go public and even if it does, already has such an oversized valuation you’ll likely not make much from it? it seems predatory and abusive to employees to stay private this long

dbbk 6y ago
Public companies are a pain in the arse. I'd prefer not answering to shareholders.
patio11 6y ago
A quirk of Silicon Valley culture is that senior employees on the inside of it tend to be rather sophisticated about how they think about equity, and they also tend to be rather reticent about talking about that externally, because of factors such as legal and PR risk. This is immensely frustrating to me, because thinking lucidly about equity is incredibly important for career planning for engineers who are startup-adjacent, work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, or who are in markets where those firms' offers set market terms. I think this sets us up for a continuance of the class system, where people who talked about this subject around the dinner table or have a frat brother who was in Google in 2004 know the score, and people who grew up in Chicago and didn't know what Google was in 2003 do not, even when they're evaluating career options which are heavily dependent on correctly valuing equity. I did not always think lucidly about equity, and overly trusted the representations of folks on Internet watering holes who said that equity was likely to be nearly worthless. I would like to think I've learned a bit over the years. I apologize for being indirect here; feel free to ask me about equity in some place where it will not be reasonably read as a comment on a firm I owe various duties to. (Offer broadly open to HNers.)
- ffggvv 6y ago
  I don't think the equity is worthless. I just think an engineer can work at Facebook with a monthly vest and their equity is as good as cash. An engineer at stripe has illiquid shares that they hope they can convert to cash in 3+ years. Usually the hope of a large return would offset that (time value of money) but thats cancelled by the fact that stripe's private valuation is 30B+.

lowiqengineer 6y ago

Why the hell does Stripe keep doing things outside of their payments wheelhouse? It makes no sense, especially with regard to publishing a magazine (???). Is this the whole “Hoover up talent and pay them absurd amounts” applied to an extreme?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dmazin 6y ago

Every time I read about Stripe, it seems that the most interesting people work/have worked there (Julia Evans, Aditya Mukerjee, Mudge, Brandur, Greg Brockman). And it seems like a great culture. But the CEO's "progress studies" thing repels me because it reeks of the Kochs' efforts to implant conservatism into education. I don't want to enable that. It sucks. BTW, I am one of the people who had their YC app reviewed by patio11 and it was a great experience. It's amazing how much time he's able to dedicate to individual Stripe Atlas participants -- thanks!

patio11 6y ago
You're welcome!
titanomachy 6y ago
Can you explain what stood out to you as conservative about the "progress studies" article? Wikipedia defines conservatism as "a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization". Patrick Collison's article [1] to me seems to be saying "we should be a lot more systematic and scientific in figuring out the drivers of societal progress, and aggressively invest in those things." That seems in direct opposition to conservatism, since it advocates a dramatic overhaul of ineffective institutions. Collison's definition of progress does seem narrowly focused on measurable economic metrics. Is that the source of your grievance? I think that developments like women's suffrage and racial desegration should be included in discussions of "progress studies", whether or not they led to improvements in measurable metrics. Collison neglects to include examples of this type in his article, but it's not clear to me that he considers them unworthy of study. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-...
- Riverheart 6y ago
  He's not saying its conservative, he dislikes business leaders using their influence to pursue ideological change in society.
exolymph 6y ago

ignoramous 6y ago

What a good blog post this is. > A portion of my job is helping folks communicate that we're serious, reliable infrastructure for the largest participants in the global economy while also keenly appreciating that the user might be on a small team trying to sell bingo cards or politically-themed breakfast cereal. AWS and Cloudflare are two other examples of XaaS companies that benefit from this mode of operation. They're both workable for a one-person team as much as they're for global enterprises.

mastermojo 6y ago

The second-order effects that are described here around the "capture of upside" may be a little exaggerated. Credit cards and Stripe are common payment mechanisms for consumer, prosumer, and self-serve SAAS. I'm not denying there is a lot of money here, but I imagine the majority of B2B SaaS companies by revenue handle payment through annual contracts through checks and wire transfer. I don't have any data here, but I'm thinking EHR, ERP, office building rent ("a SaaS company plus some glass and concrete") etc. If the service provided is annually worth 100k USD, theres probably human-human interaction which facilitates the exchange of legal documents and money. Think Oracle, SAP, ADP, ServiceNow, Workday etc.

benawad 6y ago

Does anyone know if Patrick has talked somewhere about why he decided to take a job at Stripe instead of continuing his consulting business or starting a new venture? Patrick didn't strike me as someone interested in working at a "regular" job.

heipei 6y ago
Yeah, not knowing about him at all when I watched a talk by him and then realised that he is somewhat of an icon for indie/solo founders, I was very surprised to find out he had starting working as an employee in the meantime. I know he's doing well, but since I had just started out solo myself it felt a little like he had thrown in the towel ;)
Zanni 6y ago
He talks about it here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-work-on-atlas/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

neilparikh 6y ago

OT question: > AppAmaGooBookSoft have individual products with more engineers than our company has people total. Which products would have more than 3000 engineers?

patio11 6y ago
Amazon has publicly said is has 10k+ on Alexa/Echo, and you're welcome to get other examples from chatting with folks.

Chris_Newton 6y ago

An interesting read as usual from Patrick. I picked up on a few points others here have mentioned already, but the most striking thing for me, particularly from the first half of the piece, is the huge emphasis on growth, recruitment and looking to do new things in the internal culture at Stripe. Of course, this is reasonable and understandable for a business in Stripe’s position. However, the corollary seems to be a lack of focus on the core service that got many of our businesses using Stripe in the first place. In a nutshell, we use a payment processor like Stripe because we want to easily and reliably collect payments from our customers, so we can get on with what our business actually does. It would be interesting to know how much is going on at Stripe, presumably involving people other than patio11, in that area. I have a business that was an early adopter back when Stripe launched in the UK, but our perception is that the challenges we face with online payments today aren’t necessarily the areas that recent developments at Stripe are addressing.

divbzero 6y ago

I really like long form idea packed essays like this. One of the many ideas that jumped out at me: > A huge portion of the value creation of Silicon Valley is through directly intervening on the ambition of impressionable people. This seems especially applicable for software-only or software-heavy businesses that scale very efficiently. Increasing ambition by a little can result in large increase in impact on the other end. Another idea that caught my attention: > Silicon Valley was a place. It has become a metonymy for a community of practice. You can find outposts of Silicon Valley in Tokyo cafes, in WeWorks in Bangalore, and on the coast of Cape Town. If we can inspire ambition all around the world that bodes well for our future.

ppllpp 6y ago

The article really does make you want to apply. However, all remote jobs are Americas-only. Remote was supposed to be Stripe's next engineering hub even before the pandemic, so I'm curious if that will include Europe any time soon.

absherwin 6y ago

"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation. This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).

busterarm 6y ago
Most important comment of the whole thread right here.
daltonlp 6y ago
Those sound like perfectly legal words. A stripe customer is free to tell Stripe "Your fees are too high, and I'd prefer switching processors than raising prices". I could be wrong. Is there an example of an illegal cartel, trying to persuade customers from whom it makes transaction fees, to raise prices? Surely this isn't a new thing under the sun.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Ultimately consumers foot the bill. It's why antitrust legislation gets pursued in the first place. It's the raising of prices in the absence of market forces that gives room for the payment processor to increase fees. Theoretically all payment processors benefit from advocating that their clients raise prices. If some companies raise their prices, no issue, but the coordinated effort to do it is where you "smell a rat". It's then up to the litigating party to try to find collusion between companies to do this. This is like how the anti-competitive hiring practices of Google/Apple/Facebook/etc were surfaced. They all had a set of practices that stood out as anomalous and during the subsequent investigation it was found that they colluded with each other to set the market (rate for hiring talent). It's probably not the case here...and also patio11 has little risk saying so while living in Japan where industries are highly vertically-integrated/monopolistic.

ping_pong 6y ago

One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.

room500 6y ago
To be fair, this can apply to a lot of young companies. Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger. I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
- holoduke 6y ago
  Although sometimes they are right as well. It's often layers of people with many different lines between them slowing down the overal pace of development. I don't buy the argument that ensuring scalability equals long processes. But I do believe that when the product grows in terms features, components etc, the pace also decreases. Even in the perfect multilithic software solution.
biztos 6y ago
I'm sorry, but isn't "young OG" a contradiction? How can someone be "OG" (Original Gangster, i.e. really old school) in a very well-funded company founded ten years ago? Am I misunderstanding something?
- cyral 6y ago

ihnorton 6y ago

I've heard several times about the Stripe "Library" and "written culture", both in previous patio11 posts [1] and elsewhere. I understand part of that comes from the top and screening for writers. But I'm also curious about the basic mechanics of the library; wordpress? big ol' mediawiki? git repo of markdown docs? custom software? How has the library process (if any) itself changed over time? I've worked at non-startup BigCo/healthcare with formalized procedural docs, (technical) writers, change management, etc., and often they were minimal, boring, impersonal, frequently outdated -- and rarely read. I'm imagining (for better or worse) this is something a little more like a shared internal blog archive? [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/

debunn 6y ago
I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)? https://press.stripe.com/ https://press.stripe.com/
- zJayv 6y ago
  Believe they're referring to: "Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware. We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company." - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe/
  - patio11 6y ago
    Yes, that.
zJayv 6y ago
I am also very curious about this. I've been keeping track of knowledge mgmt tooling (esp. plain text) and approaches (e.g. ADR) for a couple years. Grand Unified Theory forthcoming :)
6y ago

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

> My sleep schedule has ranged from atypical to disastrous, but that has been true for almost all of my adult life. This is been my life as well, with the exception of a few years when I was doing over an hour of cardio per day (first on a swim team and later as a hobbyist distance runner). It's so hard to shut down after just a 24 hour cycle but not doing so always catches up with you.

ahmedalsudani 6y ago
Yup, same here. It takes a ton of discipline to keep a 24-hour cycle.
- shalmanese 6y ago
  It's not a lack of discipline, it's a recognized medical condition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake...

mchusma 6y ago

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out. They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs. Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet. Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.

nimish 6y ago
Turns out private taxes aren't good!
abstractbarista 6y ago
Transferring those bits with just the right logic for each transaction scenario is what still costs something. I'm sure the margin is massively excessive today. But I don't think it can be quite 'effectively free'.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  Debit e-transfers in Canada are free (and have been around a long time). It makes the Venmo thing a real head scratcher.
  - mcpherrinm 6y ago
    They're only free in certain circumstances: personal transfers, and only for some bank accounts. It wasn't that long ago that all e-transfers cost $1, which makes them pretty impractical for giving a few bucks to a friend to split a pizza or whatever. Venmo's been around longer than free e-transfers.

amelius 6y ago

Either the post is missing something, or this particular job didn't involve a lot of "high-tech". Which is ok, but perhaps not particularly interesting for most "hackers". At least, that's the feeling I was left with.

diogenescynic 6y ago

I interviewed at Stripe a few years back and they were extremely rude in the interview. I was still early in my career and I’ve never forgotten it. Even still, I’ve applied a few times and never heard back. Definitely seems like a company that’s going places but also has a bit of an ego.

charliebrownau 6y ago

I would expect Stripe to be the same sort of people that work in Apple, Mozzila, Microsoft, Ebay and the sort Global LEFT, Anti White, Anti Freedom, Anti Invidauls , relying on the state, mainstream and what they are told without the ablity to rational think for themself

_where 6y ago

This is a great read, but for the feedback, I stopped here: “I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.” I’ve heard this, but here there’s an ulterior motive, which may not benefit. Stripe benefits from startups, and if you hangout with successful professionals and mentors and people that don’t bring you down, that will probably make the startup community successful and that in turn will help Stripe grow. But would you ignore your family member that needs your time and attention? How about your friend that seems to be tanking? If Warren Buffett were to have serious health problems, I seriously doubt Bill Gates would be like “whatever- I don’t have time for that.” He’s going to be there. Because that’s what you do. Sure, there are times when you need your space, and friends change, or tend to abuse. Maybe you need to withdraw some, get off of social media. But, being a fair weather friend or family member just because someone else is not on their A game or never was is B.S. I’m not discounting the advice; if you’re only goal is to have what is generally perceived to be worldly success, having only peers that boost you is a way to do it. But the greatest person that ever lived had a bad friend that got him killed. He wasn’t like, “sorry, I have dinner plans.”

names_are_hard 6y ago
> But the greatest person that ever lived had a bad friend that got him killed. He wasn’t like, “sorry, I have dinner plans.” Is this a reference to a well known figure? I'm trying to think about who this might be and I'm drawing a blank. Who was the greatest person that ever lived?
- vbsd 6y ago
  Probably a reference to Jesus.
sobani 6y ago
I don't see anything in the article close to implying that you should drop people who are down on their luck. All I read is: If you talk a lot with finance oriented people, don't be surprised if you start thinking in finance oriented ways. To give a different example from me personally: For a while I read red pill material, because I thought I could take lessons from it, while dismissing all the women hating parts as I had no reason to be angry with women. Guess what: if you read about a lot of anger towards women, you become angry towards women yourself as well! So the lesson I took from that was: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.

sourcesmith 6y ago

I have never had a payment on a site using Stripe go through (having tried a number of cards). How are they still in business?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RikNieu 6y ago

I just wish Stripe was available in my small country as a small indie developer who can't spend mountains of cash on Atlas.

jgalt212 6y ago

>Stripe is, qualitatively and quantitatively, about as different counting from my start date to today as it was counting from launch to my start date. We've been using Stripe to accept payments for longer than Pat has been there. From the customer perspective, Stripe is largely unchanged from when we first started using it. i.e. easy to use and no complaints (other than the high fees which are probably in line with other processors given our low volume). We tried to use Atlas to set up an Ireland sub, but had no success. I was not involved, only my COO, so don't have much to add on this.