Build, Break, Stretch, Repeat Lessons from Scaling Google & Stripe

All right. Thanks for coming.

Great to be here.

So there's a lot I want to chat about, but we were having a discussion backstage. Raise your hand if you've not heard of Stripe, just so I know how we can do the first 5 minutes. Anyone not heard of— okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Jason said it would be 6 people.

What's that?

You said 6.

6 people. Okay. So I just— we just wanted to make sure we framed the audience right, because there's a lot of stuff I want to chat about. But let's chat about— tell us about Stripe. What do you do and where you're at today? And then we'll dig into some interesting stuff.

Great. Great. First of all, thanks for having me here. And great to see everybody. And if you're not from San Francisco, welcome. Stripe is really a set of developer tools for building and operating an online business. We work with hundreds of thousands of companies around the world on accepting payments, expanding globally, and increasingly on innovating their business models for the internet and for mobile. Uh, and I think it's really relevant to the SaaS audience because it's easy to underestimate how complicated a SaaS model gets with the number of billing plans, the number of custom sort of fees and prices you want to add in. And we've increasingly worked to build solutions that you can just integrate with us and spend your time building the rest of your product.

Yeah.

And so that's what we do.

And what— okay, let's chat about a few things. So Stripe's what, 500, 600 people today? Something like that?

We're a little bit over 600 people today.

Okay. And you joined as COO how long ago? 18 months?

2 and a half years ago.

2 and a half. How big was Stripe then?

We were about 170.

170. Okay. So everyone in the room wants to hire a COO. I can guarantee you there's almost no one here that's pre-revenue. It's everyone's dream. So a couple things, let's dig in. So how did, why did you join? What got you to join? How did they convince you to join?

You know, I think this is a good thing to think about because there's a set of things which are personal to me, right? My criteria, my career ambitions, and then there's a set of things that Stripe brought to the table that were so compelling that I couldn't really in the end walk away from it. On the personal side, it was incredibly important to me that my next step up be a company whose product and mission I really believed in. And a lot of the time I spent with John and Patrick in the interview process was understanding their vision for the company. Uh, the fact that I think this is a developer tools company, but it's also about economic access. It's about building economic infrastructure for the internet. Still less than 5% of consumers' purchasing is happening online, which seems shocking, right? And if you want to build a company in certain countries in the world, it is It is so hard just to accept payments. And then it is so hard to get into multiple markets, right? I mean, even Google, when I was there, this was one of the biggest struggles we had. The billing and payments team was a roadblock to launching our products in markets. And so I thought there's an opportunity for an impact. Yes, there's a mission there. Frankly, the founding team, the people you're going to work with all day long. And when you're building a company, you are working hard, right? And you've got to be really aligned. And I think the third part for me was the people I met in the company, the culture that was being built, the DNA, and then the product market fit. Just starting to see the numbers and seeing, hey, I could have an impact here, and I could have a chance to be part of building something.

And so that was— so remind me, that was 26 months ago, you said something like that?

Yeah, that was about 2 and a half years ago.

So what's— how crazy different is Stripe today versus then?

Um, you know, I think in some ways it's not so different. Absolutely. And I think some employees might disagree with me, but I actually think one of my philosophies on scale is there are things you're building which are like an organizational system. And organizational systems tend to vacillate between chaos and bureaucracy. And early systems tend to be more chaotic. Yes. And then I think— but the reality is if you build the axis, a strong axis on which that turns and evolves, yeah, every new person you add to your company is changing your organizational system. And you're changing the way you do things. How we communicate things at Stripe is different than it was when there was a couple hundred people. But the operating principles, the reasons we exist, the way we make decisions and what's important to us hasn't changed. That's our axis.

Yeah.

And I think that's what you want to make strong.

And where— how was sort of the company infrastructure when you joined? Was it a startup crazy mess or was it fairly well organized? What are the things— what kind of rigor were you able to bring to the company in the beginning that helped it help fuel hypergrowth?

Yeah, I think what actually surprised me the most was how complicated the business was already, given it was only about 170 people. But if you think about the work we do on the developer side, the engineering innovation, the industry, all the payments partnerships around the world to build our stack, it actually kind of amazed me how many teams had started to grow and evolve already. There were some things that— needed more. And actually, a lot of scaling I don't think is hiring per se. But when you're looking at your user base numbers and they're going like this, and hopefully your revenue numbers are going like that, you have an obligation to that user base to build the right infrastructure for them. And so a lot of where I focused my energy was on the go-to-market piece, right, and the sales organization, and also the internal recruiting piece. How are we going to really assess what things we did need to build, and then find the right people and be able to add the numbers without upsetting that culture.

Well, let's, let's talk about those two things.

Yeah.

If we had infinite time, we could fill it all up just with those topics. So, so you joined Stripe at 100 and some, 100 and some odd employees. Yeah. What does go, what did go-to-market mean when you joined and what changed? Like, uh, did Stripe, I view Stripe as having a huge brand today, but, but maybe, maybe you think it is a 600-person company with 5% penetration, but, Did it— how strong was the brand then? What did go-to-market mean then versus now?

Yeah, I think that there's sort of a classic way to think about building the funnel. And I actually had a lot to learn joining Stripe about the developer-out model. So a lot of how the brand was built and what was important to the company and is still important to us today is staying true to the developer audience. And a lot of the virality of that was developer-to-developer communication. And occasionally Stripe folks participate in IRC and Hacker News and some of those forums. But we actually have an expression internally, which is the Collison installation, which is one of the founders would often go in and sit in with our users and really understand how the product was working for them and evolve from there. So I think a lot of the early branding was just about staying really true to the user base.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yes.

[Speaker:JENNA BILOTTI] When I came in, we had a ton— so you may or may not know, but Stripe has a ton of self-service, right? You're just going in, we've got great documentation, you integrate the API with a couple lines of code, you're in 25 countries, right? That is pretty easy, and actually a lot of people do it and start testing our product without us ever talking to them. But we did increasingly have a lot of inbound demand. So the first go-to-market step—

Inbound contact me, or what is it?

Inbound, we want to use your product, but we've got some questions.

Please call me.

We've got some questions. Please call me, please answer my questions. And we didn't at that point then need marketing, right? Because we already had— we had to get on top of that inbound demand. It's a good problem to have. I think one of the reasons we had that is because payments is so critical in the early stage when you're getting ready to do that, that people were coming to us. And we're lucky to have that reputation. I think our technical excellence is what built that reputation. So the first thing I did was get on top of the inbound demand, which is, you know, what are the kinds of people we need? We needed a really technical sales type of person who was super agile, able to adapt with a really rapidly changing product. And I was lucky enough to start to bring in the right folks who could build that.

Let's break that down a minute. So when you, so you come in and that's already some change. Do you, in the early days, are these quota-carrying folks? Or are you still on this loosey-goosey happiness officer, do your best? I mean, it's especially, a lot of, I mean, I've invested and worked with a lot of developer-centric companies. You don't wanna break that culture.

You don't, absolutely not.

You break it and it's gone. As soon as you break that, the trust is gone. Sales has gone forever anywhere, right? Yeah. But I sometimes wonder whether happiness officers are the perfect solution either.

Yeah, I definitely have never called myself the happiness officer, so please don't let me do that.

That is a very teal term that's caught around a lot, at least. So what are these? So I get they're developer-centric sales folks.

Yeah, so initially, to your question about quota carrying, I think that that wouldn't have been culturally appropriate. Tough pick, Jason. I think it didn't make sense. And quite frankly, when you're in that kind of hypergrowth, your ability to predict and forecast and set reasonable targets is not actually that easy. And it's unfair to the company and the sales force to be guessing at what reasonable targets are. And then you get these externalities of bad behavior that aren't really what you're looking for at that stage. So we do— we have— actually, we did something that I think was kind of clever, and you can decide, which is we did start to hire people on a sales compensation plan, but we've been paying them mostly on target. And so, and they understood that, and they understood there was a long timeline to get to the position when the variable comp would start to kick in. But you also have a problem if you build a big sales force and then try to switch them over to a more variable compensation. You're kind of clawing back expectations. It is about their cash flow. So we do pay our sales folks quarterly. Yeah. So they're used to that, and they're ready for it.

And so I get— so in the early days, do you today, as you're scaling— I mean, you're still relatively small, certainly by Google scale. Do these folks still need to be as technical to do sales? Because this is always a challenge. You watch what GitHub went through and other folks. Like, at some point, every sales rep can't be a hacker or a wannabe engineer, right? So have you reached that phase, or it's not important yet?

So one of the most important things to me in building any function that's not an engineering function in the company is if you don't know the product inside and out, you're not doing your job. Absolutely right. So I think there's an element of technical ability and knowledge that will always be in our sales force, or else I'm not doing my job. To your point, if you think about Stripe's user base, it's really diversified, right? We've got developers, regular people, we've got early-stage folks, we've got bigger companies. We have companies that are scaling like Slack, Lyft, Kickstarter. They're our users, and then you've got, you know, we've got partnerships with Macy's, we've done work with Twitter and Facebook. Like, you've got this huge range.

Yeah.

And so the thing that we have started to look at is a team that I call field engineering, which is sort of a technical asset. We have very few of them. We're not gonna throw them, like, I don't like that model of the salesperson comes in, with the sales engineer, and they don't know the product.

Linda, what's the answer to that question?

Yeah, that's just not great. And they're asking this person to demo. Like, the person comes in, and the person who's demoing the product is the one who actually knows the product. So why is the salesperson sitting there? So that's not what we're going for. But we found that some of the larger, more enterprise-type users that we started to talk to expect more in the onboarding, right? They want a contact that's helping them do the work. And so we're starting to satisfy that. And you even go on site?

Have you gone to that level? You'll go?

We'll visit with them.

Yeah. And how much— because that's another transition for developer-focused companies, right? You can start off and never meet a customer if you don't want to, right? Even if Patrick and John did meetups and stuff like that, you literally— so do you want to meet all your bigger customers, or how do you think about that at this stage? Let me put it differently. How has your relationship with the customers changed since you started?

Yeah. That's actually back to the point about the developer audience, but it's really in the DNA of the company to know the user base. So our initial engineers all did customer support.

That was part of their job. I love it.

Yeah.

They made fun of me for it.

And a few of them actually moved over to help start that team, which was amazing. And then Patrick and John have always— How long does that last?

How long does that last? Do you make engineers do customer support forever?

What we do today is we give them all an account so they can go in. And we have company events where we ask people to go in and handle user issues. And it's actually pretty popular. But they do like to have someone from our user operations team with them, because it gets complicated.

It doesn't scale forever.

It's actually really good learning for an engineer. You'd be surprised at what users need, and that explaining the product to them is a different kind of challenge. But back to your point, I think that Patrick and John have always spent time with our users. Actually, everyone on the leadership team does. And one of the things we do periodically is look across our user base and talk about the relationships we have with increasingly our top users. But frankly, it's really encouraged— Patrick and John go in and do the user cases. They're still in there, which is an example to everyone. And I think it's the kind of company I want to be at. Because you wouldn't exist without those users. So if you're not talking to them, you're not in good shape. We have built more dedicated teams to the larger users. To your question, how has it changed? Yeah, that was another change that we put in place when I came in, which is you start to respect that those, those users are at really different stages, and there are certain stages we're seeing where we need to provide more dedicated sort of account management, basically.

So let me— on the go-to-market, before we move on the next topic, I want to I wanna pick up on one thing you said. So you come in and you join, and it's a lead-rich environment, right? Yeah, yeah. And so first thing you do is you build sort of a technical sales organization that can, you pick someone up, they can answer the phone, they can talk to the customer.

Yeah, yep.

So, and then when you're in a lead-rich environment like that, and you have an evolving brand, how did you think about marketing? Like what is marketing's job over those 25 months?

So again, I think we're really lucky that we have founders who go out and talk to the market a lot, which is sort of—

No lack of the founder PR.

No, there's a lot of good communication that comes from that, and that helps with the lead volume.

Yes.

The way we started to think about marketing was in two ways. So one was being aware of markets where we might not be as well known and working, you know, initially with agencies and working through our PR team on how do we develop more of that understanding. And the best way to do it for us back to the beginning of this story, was working through the startup ecosystem. Right? So spending time with developers, spending time with incubators, VCs, what have you.

Go there.

Go there. Well, we're in those markets. We're in 25 countries now, and we've got teams around the world, which is something I've been working on building out. So we go back to our roots to build that market knowledge. I think the other thing on marketing is understanding where it's all coming from. Right? You just gotta start to build more sophisticated site analytics. We can use some of our users' products like Tableau and Mixpanel and what have you. Those are SaaS Stripe users, and they're also products that we like to use so we can track where the lead's coming from, how are they converting, get a better awareness before you start throwing marketing at it. What's working today is a good place to start.

It is a good point. All right, let's— there's a couple things I want to make sure we hit, but let's, let's talk about the second one on your list, which was sort of recruiting and team building.

Yeah.

So What, what did you, what, what are the learnings? What have you done? What have you changed at Stripe and how have you helped? I mean, it's Level Up Day, right? What are the learnings for Level Up? Like, what are your, what are your tips and tricks for folks here for building the team?

So early on, you've probably got your founders and engineers doing your recruiting, right? That's your core team. Do it yourself. You do it yourself.

The rest of your job.

And you actually come up, I think, with very true to your company ways of doing that. Our engineering interview process was built by our engineers. And that's exactly how it should be done, right?

Yes, I read it on Quora.

You're not gonna have someone who comes in and tells you how to find great engineering talent that's not your own engineering talent. So the key to me was to take those assets and start to build internal understanding that you actually do need a recruiting organization. We had a couple of recruiters, but we needed to get much more intentional about where we wanted to grow the company, and what we could do to augment the assets we already have. And a lot of how we do it today is still very all-company driven. So people know they have a role in it. They know that they're part of the hiring process, but they do have recruiters they can lean on who help them through. It's like program management for recruiting, but you got to build it because there's a point when you're looking— talk about level up. There's a step function in your hiring that you can't go from like 1Z to 2Z. Up to, you know, if you're gonna double your company in a year, you're going to need people who focus on that full-time.

You do, right?

You do. I believe.

And every company, so today if I'm, I don't know, I don't even know if we, are there a lot of layered titles at Stripe or is that not Stripe? No. My guess is there's not a lot of them. No. But there's still team leads, there have to be, right? That are in charge of recruiting, right?

We have a head of recruiting.

Yeah.

And we have some managers.

Yes, and so the managers, so just 'cause it's a learning for a lot of folks here, so you've gotta double next year headcount or some crazy number, right?

I think more about how's the business growing.

Sure, sure.

Right, and then I think, okay, why do we need it? Well, let me start, not to get into— So we're trying not to double.

How do you coach folks to build these teams? So you have, you bring in, teach 'em how to bring in recruiters, and a lot of founders find recruiters frustrating learning in terms of what do I expect of an internal recruiter, how much work, How will they source candidates? How much does my team have to do it? What's the balance? Is there any sort of help you've brought in there, or what are the learnings?

I think the main learning is back to this partnership. So we actually, and our recruiters learn this as they come in, and some of them have been in other companies that have the factory recruiting model, is what I call it, where it's like—

Google had a real machine there, didn't it?

Google over time built a very big machine. But actually, I would say there was a point when It flipped into, we'll just take care of that for you. If you're a leader—

Yeah, we'll take care of that for you.

Yeah.

Right?

I'm not a believer in that model. I understand though, I think you have to, the empathetic part of me would tell you if you're trying to grow to 60,000 people in that short amount of time, you do have to build a machine. But I think the right model is, what we do is we do a meeting when we're creating a new role. The hiring manager, which could be a manager or a people manager or not actually. The hiring manager helps write the job description. They help write the interview framework. They help meet with the group that's gonna be interviewing the candidate. We come up with the rubric, the assessment together, and they are part of the whole process. And so the recruiter is much more than informed. And they even look at profiles, like, does this profile look right? Like, you gotta get honed in on what you're looking for, because if you don't, you're gonna burn a lot of candidates through—

Burn a lot of candidates.

Trying to figure out what you want.

And you find that when you have a brand like Stripe, it actually in some ways can be a detriment because you get so many tire kickers that they'll always take an interview, won't they? Or maybe it's not a non-issue.

We're very lucky that we have a lot of inbound job applicants.

A lot of inbound. A lot of inbound.

And it is a lot of work. This is something the recruiting team does very well, which is they're going through making sure those applicants have a good experience, screening them, and helping us find the folks that we think should come in and meet us. But I'm actually going to go with it's a good problem to have. And it is a good problem to have. I feel lucky that people want to work at Stripe.

Yeah. And what's just one— in the market today, what are any tips you've thought through on retention? Because it's some— especially in engineering, it can be fatty, right? There are a handful of folks that occasionally leave after their cliff, like besides Culture, any, any learnings you've done? Because I'm sure you think about retention a lot. That's the flip side of— there's no point in recruiting if you don't have high retention, right?

Yeah. No, we do think about it. Um, I, I feel like retention is one of these things where you look at two buckets, right? One is extrinsically, are people feeling compensated fairly? Are you competitive with the market? Um, I think that's less important for the true retention. I'm just going to argue, which is, are you hiring people who are intrinsically motivated? I mean, look back at the first answer I gave you.

Yeah.

I joined this company because I believe we're doing something very important.

You did.

And you will find a lot of the engineers and people in the company, yeah, sure, they care about the product we're building, but they care about the global impact of what we're building. And so I think part of our recruiting process actually tests for excitement and motivation to be part of that mission. And so then our job, once they're in the door, is to keep them involved. And keep employees on the same page about why are we doing this, what is their role in it. I always say to people, I run a spin-up, so when new Stripes join us, we have an onboarding program, which I really recommend. You want to, if you're a founder, you want to be part of that onboarding program. If you're a leader in the company, you should be part of it. It's your chance to talk and imprint, like, this is what's important to us as a company. So I do one where I say to the folks in the room, if any of you at any moment doesn't know how the work you do every day directly connects to what we're trying to do in terms of mission, then I want you to come talk to me because then you're not in the right job or we're not doing our job. So I think there's a lot about engagement when you're there and why people are there and keeping them included.

Yeah.

Right? I think that's when companies go through this weird thing where there's some exogenous force that is somehow the executive team No, you're all in it together.

That's one of the biggest risks of scaling.

I think it's one of the biggest risks.

As soon as they become the other guys, the other folks.

Yeah, you're in it together. Any issue we have internally, and we're very transparent, we do an employee engagement survey, which I did bring into the company. We share all the results and we talk about what can we do differently if there are things where people aren't happy.

Yeah.

And it's all of our problem.

That's good. That is super important. So before, there's a couple of things I wanna hit before we leave it, some of the stuff you talked about on internationalization and going global. Yeah. So first of all, even with 500 employees, how do you handle all these countries?

I love it.

You love it?

Yeah, I do. I love it. Actually, I think one of the things I said to people is scaling the US at the same time that you're scaling around the world, first of all, is part of our proposition.

—like, it's part of the proposition.

That is what we're offering to all of you as users. Part of the secret sauce, too.

Part of the secret sauce.

We can bring you to any country. 25 today, increasingly more every month. And I think one of the reasons that Kickstarter moved over to Stripe after they'd already started scaling was because with a few lines of code, they were in 18 markets that they couldn't get into in their old configuration. So it's part of why we do this.

It's a different solution.

It's a different kind of solution. It's a different solution. How do you handle it? You hire— really, really well. Because these folks on the ground building the country team are your company in that country. And you're country by country? Yeah. Well, we basically have clusters of markets. And so we have folks we've hired in some key locations like London, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne. And they're building around them teams that can handle that. Increasingly, it'll become a region. But right now, it's sort of clusters of markets. But I spend a ton of time with them. So that is one part of what I think is the most important part of my job is to be them connecting to what's happening here and me transmitting back what they're experiencing and what their needs are. And they actually do— some of those leaders come to San Francisco once a quarter and we do like a lot of time together, both with product, engineering, with me, what's our strategy, how are we scaling? Because I think the other thing that happens to companies is they start to, like, you're not actually being consistent with your go-to-market. It is very hard. Yeah. It's very hard. So you gotta keep those people close. What are the things we're gonna do that are similar? What are the metrics that matter? Uh, and that's how you're gonna be measured. And then where can you experiment? 'Cause they also wanna have autonomy. And I spend a lot of time on that.

What do you do in an API-centric company? What, what is their job? Uh, what, what, what, what are their goals or KPIs? Yeah. Uh, you could serve them from here, all speaking native languages. It has been done before. There are companies that speak every language on the planet, but they decide to get together in one time zone. It sounds crazy, but there's examples. No, no, there are examples of that.

I think that, again, we think of ourselves as a global company, and we believe having an on-the-ground presence is pretty critical. I would go back to my comment about the developer community, the startup ecosystem in that market needing someone they know at Stripe. Yeah, so the folks who are leading those countries are spending a certain amount of time on that work, which is sort of market building work, I think, for us. A certain amount of time on the media, the government, the policy piece starts to get more important as you scale. And then they have a sales responsibility. They have a revenue responsibility. So their key metrics are on— so for us, it's, it's our payment volume and our margin. And they— we look at it together every quarter. I'm very transparent. Yeah. Like, you know your numbers, you show them in front of your colleagues, and you talk about what's working and what's not working. Yeah.

All right, so that is, they do have a revenue commit in each of these regions. They do.

Yeah. They do. And they take it very seriously, because really to them it's just an indicator of we're building the market, right?

No, but some, when you go international, my limited experience is there's rough, you know, there's, to make it overly binary, you can have folks that own a number, and you can have folks that basically own customer happiness, customer satisfaction, right? You can have, and they're—

Yep, and they do spend time with the physical users. That's right.

But if you have a revenue-focused team, they're gonna get you more revenue, and if you have a customer hap— a CSAT, NPS, whatever, they're gonna be more like customer support, and you get, you just get different outputs based on what you incent. Maybe you haven't experienced that, but they do have a revenue—

No, I do, I've definitely experienced that. It's kind of like the difference between recruiting and HR, right? Like they're sort of existing users and growing the user base. The way we've achieved that is more the teams under them. Yeah. And they have a responsibility to think across the entire revenue set, which for us is we have a lot of users that are just staying with Stripe and growing an existing user base. And if you don't add new on top of that, you're gonna hurt yourself 3 years down the line. You're gonna hurt yourself. So they really have to pay attention to the existing user base and the sales, but the people under them or in hubs, like in Dublin, their roles are divided between more of a customer success, we don't call it that, but, and then a new business role.

[Speaker] So one topic I wanna make sure we get to.

[Speaker] We're really in the nitty-gritty here. I hope this is helpful.

[Speaker] Well, it's faster. That's what we wanna learn how to scale, right? So when you talked about the Kickstarter example of why they switched from a homegrown solution or whatever because of the 21-country support, Yeah. So— 25. What's that? 25.

I don't— But it was 18 at the time.

It was 18 at a time. So in your tenure at Stripe, talk about how it's become a more important product, like a bigger— we talk about tools versus solutions. You're telling me of a more important— like, whatever they used before was fine. It might have been worse. But I assume it's a switch for Kickstarter. It's, listen, I got to be in 18 countries tomorrow, and I don't care if my tool, my existing payment gateway, which we hacked together, and was terrible, but it's 6 years old, and it sort of works. But all of a sudden you solve a problem for me. I want to be— Kickstarter's gotta be— so I'm sure that's one of a few examples of how you've become more of a, a bigger solution, even more enterprise.

I think there's two models of how, uh, we've evolved that way. One is, uh, the company in an earlier stage that is using our suite of tools, and increasingly that suite is more interesting to them, right? If you think about multi-plan subscriptions, which we just launched. That's really interesting if you're a SaaS business. You can use our subscription logic.

It's a problem everyone has here.

Right? Everyone here has that. It would be nice if someone gave me some out-of-the-box logic, right? And then you can play around with that as you scale. But I think we're building solutions for marketplace businesses too. If you think about businesses like Lyft, Instacart, they have like multi-party payments, which are actually very hard to do just from a logistical point of view, but also from a compliance point of view. and then you want the reporting back to your finance team to be very clean. So I think there's a set of businesses that have an internet new business model. Kickstarter is a good example. They are looking for a solution that meets them, not just on the payments front, but on the tools they're gonna need to actually scale that business and scale it internationally is one of them. The other is what you're getting at, which is the enterprise piece, and I have a lot of conversations with CFOs, right? Yeah. So usually we're talking to the engineering team at a company, but sometimes now we're talking to the CFO. That's a big evolution. And that's a big evolution. And the CFOs CFO, one of my favorite conversations was one I had late last year with a CFO who had acquired— they'd acquired a few companies, and the companies they acquired were on Stripe. And so he wanted to get on the phone with us. He's like, what are you, and why do I have this problem now where I've got these other companies in my orbit on Stripe? And then he said, and I've got this product manager who's telling me he can't launch our mobile product without using Stripe because they didn't— their internal billing and payments team was constraining this guy's new initiative, which was to sell their product on And I said, I explained Stripe, and he said, "Okay, I'm hearing two things from you. One is I have a business problem, which is I can't launch my mobile product with speed, and you can solve it." He goes, "The thing that hadn't occurred to me is I have a business opportunity, which is we're a much more agile solution for them than this legacy system where you've got..." I mean, my experience in the past is engineers who are at a company whose core product isn't working on billing and payment systems, don't want to work on them. And so he's like, I could free up those resources and move over to Stripe and also be able to play around through the API with the different business models, which they had been— they're like wrapped around the axle on one thing right now. And so we've had a continued conversation because that's a big switch, right? Which is to say, I'm going to take this legacy approach and I'm going to move through an API. To do that core piece of business functionality. But it's increasingly happening for the global reason and for the agility reason. Yeah. And those are—

I mean, you'll have a Lyft that all of a sudden becomes a huge customer like magic. I assume the example you're talking about, these more traditional companies require more traditional— I mean, you're talking with the CFO. Yep. How does that change the team or the dynamics in any particular way? Or is it the same? Same sales team, same everything team? Right now, it is. Do they have the same needs as Lyft?

No, they definitely don't have the same needs. Which is fun, it makes our job fun. It is fun. We increasingly have verticalized, right, the sales team. They've gotta know the users, sort of business models that they're talking to, the space that they operate in. We have hired more of a range of experience, I guess, in sales, right? Actually a lot of, and this kind of fits with our DNA, a lot of leaders, me included, and our sales managers are out talking. You're out there. To the larger users. And doing the work themselves. And I think that's an important example for everyone, but it keeps us very connected. Many of our best products— and we have evolved the product suite— have come from the user conversations. We built a product with Lyft, which they call Express Pay, right, which is that paying out to the driver's debit card so they don't have to wait for a payment. Unbelievably popular. It makes sense, right? I went and drove 5 hours. I want to get my money and spend it on a nice dinner tonight. You know, that's happening. And we came up with that idea with them. John Collison did. So we have many examples of that.

And so, and then so those, so those conversations over time evolved because the stakeholders in those customers change a lot. Yes. Right. And it may even be in some of those bigger accounts, the developers are told to use Stripe. Are we not there yet? Is the brand not so big?

I think that at some level, I mean, that I think I'm thinking of one example where that has happened. It has happened.

You're getting there, right? There's one example where that's happened.

But I think our power— I mean, a lot of our hypothesis— and you all must have that hypothesis. It depends on your business, I guess— which is the developer is increasingly a decision maker. Yes. And I think that we really believe that. And that's why our product is built. That's the audience we really pay attention to. And more often than not, they've been the person who chose us. And then the conversation with the rest of the stakeholders is why, and helping back them up. And they're our advocate. And I think that's the position we want to be in. And the good news is if it goes the other way, the simplicity of the product integration is in our favor. So I think we haven't had too much of an issue there. All right.

I want to keep going on this, but I know we're over. One last question. Just tell us one or two of the cool things you're working on this year, initiatives. Or over the next 24 months? What are some fun things you're working on that we're excited about at Stripe?

It's like a softball.

It is a softball, but I want to know what you're excited about. So we'll wrap up there.

You know, I'm really excited about—

This is a passion project for you when you joined, right? It is. So what has you excited over the next 18 months?

I think there's a combination of a couple of things. One is we're going to more markets. The other is, and in particular markets that we have a lot of demand, for example, in certain markets in APAC, and we want to be in Asia-Pacific region. And we've been working on that with our teams there. Yep. The other is we've built a new way of sort of planning our product that is sort of what are we going to release for our users and working our way back from it. And when a company is scaling, one of the hardest transitions you make is from— let's use an analogy of like driving— On a single road, you can launch like, hey, a big initiative, and we're going to all rally, and we're going to get this thing out the door. Over the past year, but this year will be the proof, we have to move to a multi-lane highway, which is can we, across multiple product areas, launch really strategic and important user-facing changes? And so what I'm most excited about is us— I'm an executioner. I was like, we got to execute on the plan that we made, and it's going to make such a difference for our users, and since we talk to so many of them, uh, will feel it, I think, very acutely.

Yeah, the multi-line highway transition is a challenging one, right?

It's a challenging one, but it's important and it's exciting.

All right, this was great, everybody. Let's put it up for Claire Hughes Johnson.

Thank you, thank you. This was super great.

Thanks, Jason. Yeah.