Thread by @patio11

Stripe is hiring. stripe.com/jobs

I've got some thoughts:

Why join Stripe? It's plausibly among the most leveraged opportunities anywhere to contribute to your core goals over the next N years, by growing the GDP of the Internet.

This company covers a sprawling remit of human behavior: everywhere the Internet touches commerce. There's a fractal nature to both the problem and our operations. We abstract so much that our users probably don't realize how much work is being done.

Today, approximately a squazillion dollars will move between our users and their customers. Every financial rail, every web page, every cron job, every customer-facing email, every regulatory filing, and every planning document that did that: written by someone like you.

When I was a customer of Stripe, I loved how it looks like magic.

As an employee, I love how there is... no magic.

We get the same blank screen everyone starts with. Then we fill it.

There is an expectation, messaged early and often, that no part of our operations are "not your job." One gets to both see how the sausage is made everywhere and (often) contribute to it.

Stripe's internal mailing lists may be a better repository of knowledge about the world than the university I attended. (Virtually all strategic work of the company ends up on mailing lists visible to all employees.)

I love shipped emails, which go out to the whole company when a team completes a discrete unit of work. Topics covered include test performance, credit card decline rates, and Things Which Ruby Technically Allows But Which We Won't Anymore, For Good Reasons.

I love our internal systems, annoyingly for the purpose of this tweet including Trade Secret Internal App (TM) which I retroactively wish I had had at every company in my career and will certainly implement at every future one, because every software company should have it.

I like that we both have a healthy core business and can make big bets about what the future looks like, including e.g. Stripe Atlas. We care about quarter-to-quarter numbers, mostly to keep ourselves honest, but expect to hear a lot about "What does X look like in 5 years?"

I think you'd be surprised by how much Stripe trusts its people and how much they trust each other. This is not the default mode of financial institutions or professionally-managed companies; we have it and zealously defend it.

Trust mostly manifests as a lack of barriers-for-the-sake-of-barriers around doing interesting things, maximizing for the return on process in places where process is required, and similar.

When I think of things I'm dissatisfied of here, it's that we're moving too slow relative to the opportunity and that sometimes we find it difficult to say things like that.

Also, Stripe spells Internet with a lowercase i and this is *wrong*, darn it.

I’ll probably write up more considered thoughts at some point, particularly on how I think about the tradeoff of being a founder at my own thing versus being a leaf-node employee here.