What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

Funnily enough these days that's not enough to answer the question.

Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Square and Twitter but not of Stripe.

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

> (An example which is just a boggling fact about the world: what’s your finger-to-a-wind guesstimate about what percentage of credit card payments fail with error code I Don’t Know Sometimes Things Fail In Credit Card Land? Hint: it’s higher than you think. Those failed payments cost conversions at the margin. When Stripe fights that number down by a basis point, that creates value across our entire portfolio, forever.)

I have no idea what the percentage is but I recently had a decline I think may have been from Stripe itself.

A few months back I’d dropped my car off at the shop and tried to Lyft home. I’m a very infrequent Lyft/Uber user. Lyft refused to accept my payment. Tried with two different cards (Chase, AmEx) both directly, via Apple Pay and via PayPal. Couldn’t hail a car.

So then I try with Uber. Same thing! Payment rejected, no car for you.

I wrote to both Lyft and Uber customer support. Never heard back from Uber. Lyft claimed my card was denied (“It appears that the card is not working due to a decline from your bank. Because the information we receive about bank declines is very limited, you’ll need to reach out to your bank directly for more information as to why the transaction was denied.”) I contact both my card companies - they tell me there are no blocks on my card nor anything that would cause the payment to be rejected.

The only thing I could find Lyft/Uber had in common was they both used Stripe.

(But that doesn’t explain not being able to pay via Apple Pay/PayPal unless those somehow route through Stripe.)

Never did figure out what it was (“Jay, I had checked and verified that the last four of the card that you have provided is already added on this account. There shouldn't be any issues in requesting for a ride. If you had any issues with your Lyft request. Please kindly send a screen shot so that we will be able to see and rectify the issue.”) and haven’t had cause to use Lyft/Uber since.

This incident is the only time I can recall payments being rejected like that. I think Chase once temporarily blocked an Internet payment, sent me a notification immediately, I indicated the charge was legitimate, tried again and it went through.

Oh well. (I ended up getting a ride home in the shop’s customer service van.)

Not patio11 but if he would be so kind as to allow me to hazard a guess I’d say intellectual curiosity and tenacity. Don’t stop asking why and keep digging. You’ll want to mix in emotional intelligence so when you communicate with stakeholders, you do so in a way that they feel a desire to assist you in your endeavor, perhaps finding ways to align everyone’s incentives for success.

I could be entirely wrong though.

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