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What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

kalzumeus.com

31–40 of 189 posts

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#31

This may seem petty but as a former designer, Stripes logo not really having a stripe in it has always really bothered me. Like... how could they not try harder to make that a focus of their branding?

Amazon doesn't have a river in their logo.

They did when they started.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#32
I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining.

That feeling you get when you finish a challenging project, write a great shipped email, and get a bunch of feedback from folks throughout the company is pretty amazing. Once I was invited to convert one of my shipped emails into a presentation for a company all-hands meeting. I had a less than a week to get it done, which was pretty hectic, but in the end it turned out great and it was perhaps my favorite memory of my time at Stripe.

I enjoy my current job, and those little dopamine hits I get from checking things off my list as well as the bigger ones from finishing projects, but now only my boss and some teammates notice when I finish something. One thing I learned about myself, is that I really do care about what other people think about my work.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#33
post #32

I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertain…

> These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertaining.

Neat! I understand that you can't share them, but do you happen to know of any public examples?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#34
> It also felt like it was constraining the absolute amount of impact I had for the world.

It's refreshing to see people thinking like this. Maximizing impact is undervalued. For instance a lot of companies restrict themselves to one country thus dramatically reducing the maximum impact.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that would have been a little too "on the nose"? I always thought that "stripe" refers to the magnetic stripe on the back of a credit card.

I listened to Tim Ferriss podcast with Patrick Collison. They chose stripe as stripe.com was either available or cheap...

Yeah, that's true. Look at this quora answer for more info - https://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/a...

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#37

> One of the things I enjoy most about Stripe’s work culture is the notion that “nothing is Not My Job.” I’m very eager to know: If you want to be successful in such a culture, what mental habits/skills can you develop which let you know with confidence where to direct your attention? How did patio11 develop these? ——— EDIT: How do you know that what you are working on is not a distraction?

If everything is your job, how can you be measured by what is your job fairly?

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#38
post #16

> (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, forev…

I’ve had Apple Pay payments get rejected due to internet issues — make sure you’ve a solid LTE signal, not on dodgy wifi, and perhaps flip back to airplane mode temporarily next time it happens.

Thanks, was on LTE. Had no trouble interacting with either app, adding payment method, using the Internet, etc. It was just the payment being rejected. I think this had to be a common payment provider issue, and who knows what fraud detection flags I was triggering for whatever reason.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#39
post #32

I left Stripe a little over 6 months ago to join an exciting startup with a number of my friends. What I miss most about working there is the culture of shipping. There are a number of 'shipped' email lists at Stripe where people can tout their accomplishments large and small. These lists are widely read and commented on, and folks put in a fair amount of effort making their "shipped" emails informative and entertain…

I agree that release notes and credits are really important. My prior company's product manager made these herself for every release, and while other parts of the company weren't great, I (and others) really liked getting the recognition from the rest of the company.

It helps make a fuller product, since people have less pressure to always work on the flashier things, and can devote time/energy to things like developer tools that are also extremely important.

Re: What Working at Stripe Has Been Like

#40
post #16

> (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, forev…

I'm fairly certain that, unless they changed in the last couple years, Uber is using Braintree as their payments provider.

I think they use both according to some Googling I did at the tome. A common payment provider seems like the most likely explanation to me so unless Uber also uses Braintree that would rule it out. It's possible something about this purchase was triggering fraud detection on two completely independent systems, which would be dismaying since this was a legitimate charge.
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