41–50 of 189 posts
Reading this post made me think that while many companies advertise an entrepreneurial environment and the ability to do impactful work, the true test of this culture is 1) the ability to hire former founders and 2) those former founders loving their work. Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong company e…
> 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?
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.
I wear an insane amount of hats at my company because 1) I'm confident/stupid enough to believe I can handle it [see the part above about hubris] and 2) I actually have a track record of being able to tackle whatever has been thrown at me. My curiosity helps me from getting bored because I'm fine jumping from researching DC EV chargers to file permissions issues to tax law to.... anything.
> 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.
Could someone explain the "CMS e-r-b" joke to me?
> I also wrote a non-trivial amount of code because, fun fact, stripe.com spells CMS e-r-b, which didn’t optimize for writers’ ability to ship new words Could someone explain the "CMS e-r-b" joke to me?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think you are spot on. I think a specific amount of hubris to go along with the intellectual curiosity and tenacity is important. It is the amount of confidence to say, "Hey, I can take this on. I'm not familiar with it directly but I understand enough of the context to help." You do have to be careful to not have too much confidence because then you will alienate your peers/management and be viewed as a know-it-al…
> 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?
So, you don't avoid doing something because it's "not your job", you move it to another team who is better positioned to address the issue. Or maybe you deprioritize it because it doesn't fit in with your team's current priorities, etc. Eppur si muove.
> (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'd guess half a percent? Can't imagine it being much higher?
The actual number is more than an order of magnitude higher, across the industry, for fifty years. Insert "this is fine" gif here.
If anyone thinks "Oh wow that isn't fine" I'd encourage you to join the team working on it.