John Collison on why internal transparency is valuable for scaling a startup

We've placed a large emphasis on as Stripe has grown and probably more than other companies, is transparency internally. And I think it's something that's been really valuable for Stripe and also a little bit misunderstood. All the things people talk about like hiring really great people or giving them a huge amount of leverage, transparency for us plays into that. We think that if you are aligned at a high level about what Stripe is doing, if everyone really believes in the mission, and then if everyone has really good access to information and has a good picture of the current state of Stripe, then that gets you a huge amount of the way there in terms of working productively together. And it kind of forgives a lot of the other things that tend to break as you grow a startup. And so we've, as we've grown, we started off two people. We're now over 170 people. We've put a lot of thought into the tooling that goes around transparency because at 170 people, there is so much information being produced that you can't just consume it all as a fire hose. And so how we use Slack, how we use email, things like that, we can go into it more later, but I think that's one of the core things that's helped us work well.