Stripe was the first API I ever hooked into and it was a breeze. I've since tapped into a dozen other APIs and I've yet to find one as simple as Stripe. Kudos and good luck in the future. Would love to tag a long whenever you start hiring!
Leaving Stripe
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Leaving Stripe
#62A no-name executive leaving a failing startup. He knows well that the blood sea of insolvency is his responsibility.
He's trying to escape his failure. DO NOT TRUST
Re: Leaving Stripe
#63A no-name executive leaving a failing startup. He knows well that the blood sea of insolvency is his responsibility. He's trying to escape his failure. DO NOT TRUST
What are you on about?
Re: Leaving Stripe
#64A no-name executive leaving a failing startup. He knows well that the blood sea of insolvency is his responsibility. He's trying to escape his failure. DO NOT TRUST
What are you on about?
"I haven’t yet placed myself in a new critical role, and I’m confident that Stripe is being left in great hands" i.e., I was fired or quit, and, things are bad. Any other questions?
Re: Leaving Stripe
#65I'd be curious to learn more about this mentioned S-Curve and possible institutional inertia. Stripe is an inspiring company - but ultimately a kind of mixed company in that it bridges the Internet to Credit card companies.
Re: Leaving Stripe
#66Dear Greg,
Please fix the payments industry by building something that just plugs into a site without having to care if it's Stripe/Datacash/Paypal/Sagepay et al.
The costs of switching are too high in this industry and a "nicer API" isn't a good enough feature for any of my clients to want to switch. A product which lets customer failover and chase competitive pricing is what's needed.
Re: Leaving Stripe
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Greg isn't a founder of stripe. Larry and Sergey have been working on Google for 17 years. Mark has been working on Facebook for 11. Drew and Arash have now been working on Dropbox for 8 years. Brian, Nate, and Joe have been working on Airbnb for 7 years. Things change, of course, and you shouldn't work on a company that isn't working for 10 years. But I think it's a reasonable question to ask. If you go into somethi…
Personally I think founders should plan to do it for at least 5 or 10 years. If a founder doesn't think a company will be worth running in 5 or 10 years what does it say about their long term plans for it? Are there many examples of successful start-ups where the founders left within the first few years?
Although I agree with you, I'd like to add a caveat: Pivots.
The idea you end up implementing is rarely the idea you started with. Almost every startup pivots several times during its lifetime. Usually they are small pivots, small tweaks to the business plan, a market that you hadn't though of opening, a market not being as good as you thought... But big ones also happen.
But even with very small pivots, the process might leave you somewhere you didn't expect. And sometimes this is good, too! You might end up with a much more solid business and doing work you love. Sometimes, this leaves you somewhere you no longer find exciting.
That's exactly my case: I started a company 3 years ago with some friends, we pivoted a few times, found what we think is a nice product-market fit and the business is growing nicely. However, I find myself in a similar position to Greg: I'm not in a critical position (all the critical work is handled by my team, I only oversee it and guide it) and the role is not something that would interest me if it was offered to me. Basically, I'm here because I founded the company, I love the ideas it was founded on and I like my coworkers.
I've talked long and hard about this with my co-founders, I've found a replacement and, if it works out, I'll leave the day to day running of company in the next few months.
Re: Leaving Stripe
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
the startup ideas i've been most committed to are the ones i'm passionate enough to invest a decade in.
Ok, so what are you working on that you're planning to invest a decade in?
well, it was this, but it seems splice.com has beaten me to the punch. so now i'm working on a new idea, but it's also very fun to work on.
http://te.xel.io/posts/2015-04-01-oh-i-have-this-stellar-sta...
Re: Leaving Stripe
#69Dear Greg, Please fix the payments industry by building something that just plugs into a site without having to care if it's Stripe/Datacash/Paypal/Sagepay et al. The costs of switching are too high in this industry and a "nicer API" isn't a good enough feature for any of my clients to want to switch. A product which lets customer failover and chase competitive pricing is what's needed.
Well put. Greg and the Collison's have built an amazing product, helping to pave the way for innovation in the space. However, we agree that there's a larger fundamental issue that can't be addressed by the processors themselves. That's why we're building http://accepton.com I'd love to hear the challenges your clients are facing: jonathan accepton DOT com
Re: Leaving Stripe
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently saw Carl Malamud [1] speak, and he said straight out that for his projects it has generally taken a decade to get somewhere. From his descriptions, it sounded like the first years were mainly him being ignored, but that eventually his continued presence meant people with power started paying more attention. His advice to the crowd was definitely to pick projects they'd be happy to spend 10 years working on…
So being ignored is the norm.. that gives me hope.
Exactly how I felt. I had heard the Gandhi quote, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But knowing what Malamud has accomplished, and knowing how obvious some of his stuff seems in retrospect, it was really heartening to know that the first stage for him took years.