Stripe founder John Collison on the importance of transparency

All the things people talk about 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 forgives a lot of the other things that tend to break as you grow a startup. And so 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, I think that's one of the core things that's helped us work well.