David Singleton: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. What are our operating principles at all. So at Stripe we have operating principles and they're kind of like corporate values, but they're not just values, they're much less abstract than that. So actually, we were just talking about the early Stripe team. I think one of the best things that they did, I mean they did a bunch of great stuff, finding early product market fit, but one of the most foresighted things that they did was to kind of take a little detour and think about what is it about how we've been working so far that we think has made us successful and is going to be important as we continue to scale. And we capture those as a set of operating principles so... Continue to scale and we capture those as a set of operating principles. So their behavior is distilled from the most effective Stripes and we really care about them. So we talk about our operating principles a lot internally. I'll often see individual Stripes kind of celebrating each other's work in terms of which operating principle is kind of best represented. We frame a lot of our feedback processes and so forth around them, although not exclusively. The very first operating principle we have by the way, is users first. So we've already on this call, touched a bunch on how we put our users at the center of understanding what we should be doing at all. And that idea that we've formed these deep personal relationships with our users to guide everything really comes from and is captured by that operating principle. We also have operating principles. They're kind of segmented into how we work, who we are, and then a bunch that leaders must execute. So I mean another example of one of how we work ones is move with urgency and focus. We really believe that even though we're building infrastructure that will persist for decades, it is important that we solve the needs our users just have right now, relatively rapidly so that it actually makes sense, is delivering value for them. So anyway, there there's a range of them. You asked about being meticulous in our craft. So this is another highway work principle and it is very important at Stripe and you also call it Lenny, a challenge of being meticulous, which is, well, there's so much to get done. So where can I be meticulous? Because well, if you do it across everything, maybe a lot of progress would grind to a halt. Well first of all, let me tell a couple of stories. So before I joined Stripe, I spent some time and it's a big part of deciding to join, playing with the product. And something that really delighted me was that when I started integrating the product, there were parts of the experience where I was stuck. So I made a mistake with how it integrated API. I was getting an error message back, but I wasn't stuck for very long because something that the team at Stripe had done was we made the error messages coming out of our API link to the piece of the docs that told you how to solve the problem. Genius.…

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