Stripe founder John Collison explains his product principle of “talking up to the user”

To be controversial here. I think it's very harmful to bring consumer product thinking to a space like Stripe, or I think kind of a B2B space. Generally you just have users by the wheelbarrow. You treat them in. I really agree with the point you talk about Mouse. Everything is statistical and everything is kind of like LinkedIn with the dark patterns. It's like, oh, complete your profile. Everything is kind of nudging you towards some business outcome. And what we really try, try to constantly clobber people over the head with at Stripe is these are people starting a business who are generally really talented. And you can just see it if you go kind of talk to any of them. And so we have another value of Stripe that we try to really inculcate is talking up to the user. Like when you're writing product marketing copy, you're not trying to bamboozle them with some whatever, highfalutin statements. You're trying to explain to a busy business owner who is kind of constantly switching between product and business and finance, all these kind of things, why this thing will solve some kind of specific need that they have. But it's not hucksterism, it's not sloganeering. We every week have a user at this kind of weekly fireside, we call it, where we'll just interview them about their business, how they started, how they got there, how they're using Stripe, what they'd like to see us do better, everything like that. I think that's important to stay connected to this because again, I think the classic technology product management domain is a bit. I would say it's not respectful enough of who the users actually are and how capable they are.