David Singleton: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, yeah, I'd love to tell you more about how we find and hire people. I think it makes sense to kind of zoom out for a second because it's material here. So think about what Stripe is doing. Our core thesis is that the internet economy is going to be much bigger and more important in the future than it is today. And that's certainly played out over the last 10 years. And so we are really a business full of product minded builders who are seeking to make it easier for businesses to get started and to operate against that backdrop. And so we got started building a credit card payments API. Before Stripe came along, accepting credit card payments online was way too hard. You had to go talk to your bank, you had to maybe sign a contract with Visa, MasterCard. You then had to kind of string together all this very complicated infrastructure and it then put a bunch of kind of restrictions and requirements on the business. And John and Patrick are our co-founders at a previous business and they tell this funny story actually, which is while they were building that company, they assumed, it was an internet company, they assumed the hardest thing was going to be putting together hardware in a data center. But it turned out because there were services like AWS around by then, that that was actually quite easy. However, when it came to accepting payments in that business, it was just as hard as they had expected building hardware to be. They had to actually deploy some physical hardware, they had to do a whole bunch of these partnerships and it was very difficult, especially as an upstart, folks that didn't have any reputation yet to kind of be taken seriously and be able to correct into that. And so that's kind of the inspiration behind Stripe. So we started out solving a really kind of important and profound problem for these businesses getting started and scaling and obviously taking a very developer-centric approach to that in the early days. I think what's exciting to know about and important to know about next is as we've scaled, we really kind of figure out what to do based on paying really close attention to our users. Those are the businesses building on Stripe. What are they getting out of the products as they are today and what are the problems adjacent to the ones that we're already solving that they have to put a lot of their own energy into but really feel like they shouldn't and they'd like us to help. And when we find that confluence of kind of need and then adjacency to what we're already doing, that's usually our invitation to go and build the next layer of our economic infrastructure. So we think about what we do today is building economic infrastructure for the internet and beyond. So to bring this back to how do we attract the right talent and why does this matter? First of all, a lot of people, most people I think come to Stripe because they see that there is this great opportunity to help businesses at scale. attract the right talent and why does this matter? First of all, a lot of people, most people I think come to Stripe because they see that there is this great opportunity to help businesses at scale. So it really is about taking part in a mission that matters and are really motivated by that idea that we spend a lot of time with our users, the folks that actually need our help and are guided by them. And that mindset I think attracts a certain kind of person who wants to take a lot of agency, wants to understand the problems deeply and come up with their own ideas about how to solve for them. Because we're building infrastructure, it's also our approach that we really do think that we can do the best work kind of behind the scenes. We don't have to be out having the splashy launch, but hopefully all of our users can and we are quietly working behind the scenes to make their businesses better and more effective over time. And I think that attracts folks with a certain kind of mindset, which is the interest and kind of tenacity to dig into difficult problems that may not be obvious and obviously kind of attractive to everyone in the world then really plug away at them until we've made a tremendous amount of progress. And so it attracts folks that are long-term thinkers, that care about building and also actually want to work very collaboratively together. So when I think about what makes Stripe different to other companies, it really is this singularity of purpose. Our mission is increasing the GDP of the internet and building this financial infrastructure to do that and a tremendous amount of teamwork and collaboration to get that done. And so that attracts a certain kind of person. When we think about finding those people, we don't hide any of that. You have to care about that in order to, I think be excited about working at Stripe. And so we work very hard to make it very clearer as we're bringing people in that that's what this is about. And to that end, we're often very patient when we're hiring. So especially for critical roles, leadership hiring in particular, we're happy to take our time and meet tens or hundreds of people. And then in particular, sometimes we'll meet someone that we think is a really good fit for a given role, but they're not available right now. And then we'll be patient. We'll keep building the personal relationship with them and oftentimes the moment in time comes when it makes sense for them to join. And in order to pull that off, it's also the case that hiring at Stripe is a very personal activity. So look, there are lots of other companies where recruiting is kind of like this machine. And by the way, we have an awesome recruiting team, but folks across the rest of the company partner very closely with our recruiting team. So it's not like it's a machine that delivers new hires, then you're like, oh, well maybe this person is here and I can put them to use on that thing. ny partner very closely with our recruiting team. So it's not like it's a machine that delivers new hires, then you're like, oh, well maybe this person is here and I can put them to use on that thing. Our managers spend a lot of time identifying exactly what they need for the various roles that we have and then getting to know the potential candidates, the people out there in the world that could do these jobs actually really go quite deep with them on why it might make sense for them to feel like number one, they can feel very personally fulfilled against that mission here. And then also why it represents a bigger opportunity for them than maybe anything else they can spend their time and attention on. And to that end, another thing that I think Stripe has definitely delivered for many, many people who join here is just, and I care about preserving this in the culture, is just tremendous learning opportunities. Very, very many people at Stripe today are doing a quite different job to the one that they join for. In order to do that they've often had to learn a lot and stretch themselves into new areas. It's also the case that when you think about that financial infrastructure we're building, the space really rewards people who want to go and learn a ton of detail in how these systems that are not that popular or well understood in the broader world, how they actually work and assimilate just a lot of context. And then in particular, you can build better stuff. Right. You're sharing that context with each other and helping other people learn. And so I think that all ladders up to this kind of group of folks that you mentioned. And all the folks you mentioned are wonderful Stripes or former Stripes that come together in service of our users.…

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