At the time there was this company called Slicehost which was the first really good virtual hosting provider — it made getting a server very straightforward. Our original idea was why don’t we build Slicehost for payments.

In 2010, we built and released the first version of Stripe — actually, back then it was named /dev/payments

We launched it to a few friends to get enough of a sense for the basic experience of charging for credit cards. We just put up a wait list on our site and demand took off, over a couple months we had a huge wait list.

We got into YCombinator and built this payment API for developers — many of our friends were doing startups so we had a strong sense on what the community wanted.

All of our first 20–30 users came from YC companies or friends we knew. From there people talked to each other about it — payments were a big pain point.

It’s a common case with high growth startups where the co-founding team breaks up — generally it's hard to get the team to persist. It’s easy to stick with it when you have known the person for decades either as a friend or family.

It’s inevitable that tough situations will come up, but it’s how you react that is the challenge.

Sure we have solved all kinds of scaling issues, deployments, technology — but the core problems of helping people work together were thought about more back then

So much of software today is either about 1) basic utility or 2) entertainment vs. the enabling of people.

even Google has learned that there is no correlation between GPA and performance at the company. Algorithmic style coding interviews using whiteboards don’t work — and even then no one does anything different — this is crazy.

The biggest thing for us was being ok with taking a really long time to hire great people. It took us 6 months to hire the first 2 people at Stripe. The next 6 months after that we hired 3–4 people. We did week long trials with many people and many people didn’t want to join after that.

Find great people and then convert them to expressed interest.

The idea of taking 3+ years to hire someone is crazy, our biggest thing was being way more persistent than others and being ok with taking longer than any reasonable person would.

in the early days we were processing many of the payments by hand manually

Customers typically don’t know what they want and it’s difficult the find the answers through analysis.

We spend a lot of time getting to know which customers have good judgements about our product.

“What’s optional for a 1 year time horizon, might not be good for a 5 year time horizon.”

I’d say about 70% of our new product ideas comes from listening to customers with good judgement and 30% are doing things which ought to be big but aren’t being asked for.

When you are looking to scale and innovate — this requires hiring many people, training lots of people, having them learn in this emergent process, figuring out how to coordinate together, etc. The net effect is product advances slower

Past 150 has been a big change for us. The biggest is a need for formal explicit communication — specifically broadcast community.

I don't want the organization to do everything I want to do — I want them to do the right things.

Speaking can only happen once but writing can persist through time, be revised, be updated, and help in clarity.

written word was more concrete and rigid

Basically the CEO’s job can be reduced to three things

Strategy
Culture (No other person besides the founder/CEO can affect culture to the same degree)
Selecting senior management of the company (hard for anyone else to do this job) — these people will be the domain experts of their function who are better than you.
Optional is the product — the CEO can be the head of product or lead some specific function of the product.