Stripe - Strategy, Culture & Hiring

Blitzscaling 11: Patrick Collison on Hiring at Stripe and the Role of a Product-Focused CEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrDZhAxpKrQ

Choose where you want to innovate and where to go with inertia.

What do pithy quotes actually mean in practice? Eg. “Work really hard to hire good people”.

The first person you hire influences 50 people that your company will hire.

Working with the credit card companies was solved by a “business development” guy.

It’s important for the CEO to by integrally involved in the micro-product decisions. What’s optimal on a 1-year horizon is drastially different from what’s optimal on a 5-year horizion.

70% of Stripe’s decisons was being led by it’s customers and users.

Stripe has a “product engineering manager” which seems to be the secret sauce to their success.

Covers how it’s possible for a company to become big and maintain it’s rate of innovation.

Stripe has a complicated versioning system that let’s one version of the API be converted to another version.

You should generally shift from speaking to writing.

Speaking can only happen once. Writing persists throught time. It can be updated an revisited.

Writing is easier to dissect than anecdotes.

Three things the CEO should focus on:

1. Strategy
2. Culture
3. Selecting senior management
4. (optional) Product

How to Start a Startup 11 : Hiring and Culture with Patrick and John Collison and Ben Silbermann (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTS7OIAMunM

BS: If you are aligned with the mission and have access to information which gives you an idea about the current state of the company, it helps build a productive culture.

BS: As you become big (50+ people), you can’t be involved with every aspect of the product. Culture is the invariant which helps you in this regard.

BS: People think that culture is like architecture, however it’s a lot like gardening. You have to maintain it and pull out the weeds.

JC: The first 10 people you’re hiring are going to be top quality. So they’ll probably have their peers vehemently discouraging them.

JC: If they’re already at Facebook or Google, it’s difficult to hire them. Hire the 18 y/o undiscovered talent instead.

PC: Advice is very limited experience, wildly over-extrapolated.

PC: Your first hires should be genuine and straight. Trustworth and have intellectual honesty. Excited about getting things finished.

PC: They should care a great deal. Something being even slightly off is offensive to them.

PC: Three traits:

1. Genuine
2. Caring a great deal
3. Completing thing

BS: The really good people are generally doing something else. So you’ll have to seek them out. They won’t seek you out.

JC: Have an elevator pitch for potential recruits.

JC: When interviewing for positions outside of you’re expertise, ask them to do a project related to you’re company. That way you have a reference point in an area you have no idea aboout.

PC: It’s pretty hard to fake it for a week.

JC: When asking for references, ask the referrer “Where would you rank this person amongst the people you’ve worked with in this role?”

JC: Get people working on real problems on the very first day. Quickly give them feedback to help them adapt to the culture.

PC: Stripe has 3 meals everyday on long tables where everyone can sit together. This increases the net human interactions.

PC: In a startup, you can afford to have complete transparency. This is a luxury you lose when you become big. You’re subject to the scrutiy of the entire organization. This is the tradeoff to the advantage that everyone is much more informed.

JC: You have to create norms to when employees can jump in to conversations that are taking place on IRC or Slack between other employees.

Every single leader of a project gives a 30 minute talk on what their project is doing and how you can contribute if you’re interested.

BS: As the CEO of Pinterest, looking at what people have hand-picked has had a tremendous influence on the overall vision of the company. This is extremely valuable data.