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Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

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Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#41

Post by xoxoy »

stu2b50 wrote: post #38
xoxoy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just a reference to the company’s valuation - and how lack of regulation around interchange fees and payment processing fees has meant very high costs that would be a lot lower if the US were more like EU

I don't see how that's a problem? There's no lack of payment processors, as you have noted, many with lower fees. If you choose Stripe, you're doing so for the dev experience, their ML whatever, better testing suite, integrations, etc. And you're doing that consciously.

there’s a high floor due to interchange fees that are set by the networks that processors have no control over.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#42

Post by sudhirj »

pc wrote: post #2

We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best examples ever of simultaneously selling to the largest companies in the world while not giving up on a strong self-serve product. So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery. Stripe's grow…

Thanks for addressing this. Each of these points was an immediate worry as I was reading the post, nice to see you’ve already thought of them and addressed them.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#43

Post by csharpminor »

pc wrote: post #10
tylermenezes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned about AWS and Stripe at around the same time, but while AWS's dashboard has become truly overwhelming, Stripe has until recently been very focused on your core product. I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc. Stripe has alread…

I think that the infrastructure market naturally breeds a lot of products for pretty specific/narrow use cases, whereas our strategy is more about marrying financial capabilities with very broad/flexible APIs. Given that, we've always valued very cohesive and composable functionality between the different facets of Stripe, having a straightforward and tightly integrated Dashboard, and so on. (That's no criticism of A…

I think the answer to the trilemma is simply more people in the ecosystem. As products grow to become multi-billion dollar platforms, complexity becomes inevitable.

Some developer user stories may remain simple (e.g. making a charge, sending an SMS) but a lot of the value will be created by systems integrators / service partners who understand the platform's products deeply.

Having good self-service products and documentation for the impatient developer is a necessary (but not sufficient) step to create this integrator ecosystem. Much of the work is on the business side to convince integrator managers that there is a viable market opportunity on your platform. This comes with all sorts of other considerations, like certification, co-selling agreements, reseller pricing, etc.

For all of their faults in product, Salesforce, Microsoft, and AWS have achieved their dominance through successfully building the integrator ecosystem. Hoping Stripe's service partner program takes off in the same way as the platform grows.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#45

Post by katnegermis »

ultimoo wrote: post #13
pc wrote: post #2

We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best examples ever of simultaneously selling to the largest companies in the world while not giving up on a strong self-serve product. So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery. Stripe's grow…

Hi pc, huge fan of Stripe and its relentless focus on the "impatient developer", which so many enterprise companies miss the mark on. As a future co-founder interested in this space, do you have any talks or essays on how you built a developer centric company that has also a successful "enterprise" side to it?

Not pc, but they did an episode of "How I built this" that: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/06/812853591/stripe-patrick-and-...

I don't remember if they answered exactly what you are asking, but my memory of the episode is definitely positive!

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#47

Post by mbesto »

xoxoy wrote: post #21
jtsiskin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not a monopoly

i didn’t say that. but it’s among the most expensive.

It's really not when you consider what else you have to do to accept payments from other providers. Do you research.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#48

Post by simonebrunozzi »

pc wrote: post #7
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats, Patrick. The VMware + AWS experience is certainly a big plus for a company like Stripe. I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales want…

Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has , I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.

Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever).

One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful.

Think of your answer.

My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing).

Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#49

Post by simonebrunozzi »

graton wrote: post #44

I wonder if Amazon will sue based on a non-compete? Since they did that earlier this year: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...

Very unlikely. They could if you go to MS or GCP or VMware. Note that some people might know stories about it, but most of these people wouldn't be able to talk about it.

Re: Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer

#50

Post by throwawaysea »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #40
throwawaysea wrote: post #39

What are some good alternatives to Stripe that don't engage in censorship of speech ( https://reclaimthenet.org/andrew-torba-free-speech/ )? I find the notion that a payment utility service can block a customer based on their speech/thoughts/political views to be absolutely abhorrent. It is no different from when Visa and Mastercard blocked payments to Wikileaks ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07…

Is this just spam? The linked article is only tangentially related to stripe, and makes no clear argument against anything in specific. It’s a handy wavy “they took our rights!” but never presents an example. The whole thing almost reads like a scam ad you see on Craigslist or in your spam folder

No it’s not spam. Stripe stopped payments to Gab, which is mentioned in the article in the greater context of Silicon Valley companies having too much power in our society, controlling our speech/thoughts/politics/values. We should not put trust in Stripe and give them the same undue power given to Visa and MasterCard over payments in our society, unless they refuse to abuse that power.
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