How to Start a Startup: Building company culture, Part II

Sure. What are the what are the most important parts? Yeah. It's on. Oh, it's on. Yeah. Mean, think I think for us, like we think about it on a few dimensions. Like one is like who do we hire and what do those people value?

Two is what do we do every day? Like why do we do it? Three is what do we choose to communicate? And then I think the fourth is what we choose to celebrate. And I guess the converse of that is like what you choose to punish, but in general I think running a company based on what you celebrate is more more exciting than what you punish.

But I think those four things kind of make up the bulk of it for us.

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, you know, hiring really great people or giving them a huge amount of leverage, transparency for us plays into that.

We think that, you know, 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 kind of has a good picture of the current state of Stripe, then that gets you a huge amount of the of of the way there in terms of working productively together.

And it it kind of forgives a lot of the other things that tend to break as you as you grow a startup. And so we've, as we've grown, know, we we started off two people. We're now over a 70 people. We've put a lot of thought into the the tooling that goes around transparency because, know, at a 70 people, there is so much information being produced that you can't just consume it all as a fire hose.

And so how we, you know, 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.

I think culture to some degree is basically kind of the resolution to a bandwidth problem in the sense that, know, maybe when you start out working on something, you're sort of coding all the time, but you can't code all the things that you think the product might need or the company might need or whatever. And so you decided to work with with more coders. Right?

And so, you know, the the organization gets larger and maybe in some idealized world, I I don't think this is actually true, but kind of ideally, you could be involved in every single decision, in every single sort of moment of the company and everything that happens.

But obviously, you can't or maybe you can at two people, but you certainly can't at even like five or 10, kind of that that point comes very quickly. Then by the time you're 50, it's completely hopeless.

And so culture is kind of how you, like kind of what the the the strands are that you sort of want to have, the invariance that you want to kinda maintain, as you can get specifically involved in sort of fewer and fewer decisions over time. And I think when you think about it that way, you know, maybe it's kind of importance becomes sort of self evident. Right?

Because again, like, the fraction of things you can be involved in directly is like diminishing, I mean, almost exponentially sort of assuming your your your your head count growth is sort of on a curve that looks like, you know, one of the the great companies. And and yeah, that that's that's super important.

And and it kind of it manifests itself in a a, you know, bunch of, you know, different ways.

Like for example, in hiring, I think a large part of the reason why the maybe the first ten people you hire, what kind of those decisions are so important is because you're not just hiring those first ten people, you're actually kind of hiring a hundred people because you should think of kind of each one of those people as bringing along sort of another 10 people with them, and sort of figuring out exactly what sort of what 90 people, you would like those first ten people to bring along is obviously, it's gonna be quite consequential for your company.

But really briefly, think it's largely about sort of, abstraction.

So one thing that a lot of speakers in this class have touched on is how hiring those first ten employees, if you don't get that right, the company basically will never recover. But no one's talked about how to do that. So so what what have the three of you looked for when you've hired these initial employees to get the culture of the company right?

How how have you found them and what have you looked for?

Sure. So, I guess this answer is different for every company. And I'll say for for us it was very inductive. So I literally looked for people that I wanted to work with and that I thought were talented. I think I've read all these books about culture because when I don't know how to do something I first go read things. And everyone has all these frameworks.

And I think one big, big misconception that someone said once is that people think culture is like architecture when it's a lot more like gardening. You know, you plant some seeds and then you pull out weeds that aren't working and they sort of expand. So when we first hired people we hired people that were like ourselves.

And I often looked at like three or four different things that I I I really valued in people. You know, looked for people that worked hard and seemed high integrity and low ego. I looked for people that were creative and that usually meant they were really curious and they had all these different interests. Some of our first employees are probably some of the quirkiest people I've ever met.

They were engineers. But they also had all these crazy hobbies. Like one guy had made his own board game with his elaborate set of rules. Another guy was really into magic tricks. And he had coded not only like this magic trick on the iPhone. But he had shot the production video in the preview. And I think that that that quirkiness has actually been a little bit of a calling card.

And we find that really creative quirky people that are excited about many disciplines and are extraordinary at one. Tend to build really great products. They tend to be great at collaborating. And the last thing is you know, really look for people that wanted to, they just wanted to build something great. And they weren't arrogant about it.

But they just felt like it'd be really cool to take a risk and build something bigger than themselves. And that at the beginning is very, easy to select for. If you were in our situation we had this horrible office like nobody got paid. And so there was no external reason other than being excited about building something, to join. In fact, was every reason not to.

And that's something looking back I really, really value. Because we always knew people were joining for the purest reasons. And in fact, we're willing to forgo other great job opportunities, market salary, a clean office, you know, good equipment just for the chance to work. So, to this day, I think a lot of those traits have been seeded and are embedded in the folks that we look at now.

Yeah. The first ten hires are really hard. Because, you know, you're you're making these first ten hires at a point where no one's heard of this company, no one really wants to work for it. You're just these like two weird people working on this weird idea. Like like their friends are telling them not to join. For for for our second employee,.

he was like, I think maybe he'd accepted the offer, who he was just about to. And his best friends like took him out the night before. It was like a full on assault for, you know, why you should not join this company. Why this is like ruining your life basically. And and so anyway, the the guy subsequently, you know, or continued to join. And actually, one of those friends also now works at Stripe.

But but but this is what you're up against. Yeah.

And I mean, it's also hard because no batch of 10 people will have as great an influence on the the company as those first ten people. And I think everyone's impression of recruiting is, you know, you you open LinkedIn, it's sort of like ordering off the dollar menu. You just like, I want that one and that one and that one, and now you have some hires.

Whereas, at least for us, it was very much over very long time period talking people we knew or friends of friends into joining. We we didn't have huge networks. Patrick and I were both in college at the time, so there were no people that we'd, you know, we'd really worked with to draw on. And so a lot of those early stripes were people we had heard of, friends of friends.

And the other interesting thing they all had in common is that they were all sort of early in their career or undervalued in some way. Because when you think about it, if someone is a known spectacular quantity, then you know, they're probably working in a job and very happy with that.

And so we had to to try and find people who were in the case of our designer that we hired, he was 18 and in high school and in Sweden at the time. In the case of our our CTO, he was in was in college at the time. A lot of these people, were they were early on in their careers. And the only way we could, you know, you you can relax one constraint.

You can relax the fact that they're talented or relax, you know, that it's apparent that they're talented. And we, you know, not consciously, but we relax the latter.

Yeah. Think I think sort of finding kind of the people who are kind of I guess you just kind of think like a value investor. Right? You're you're looking for the for the the human capital that's significant value by the market. You know, you probably shouldn't look to hire your your brilliant friends at Facebook and Google or whatever because they're already discovered.

You know, if if they're willing to join, that's great, but they're probably harder to convince. John and I spent a little while yesterday afternoon sort of trying to figure out in retrospect, what kind of traits our first ten or so people had in common that we thought were significant.

And, you know, in general, sort of speaking about culture, you know, I sort of wanna caveat everything we say with, you know, I Paul Buckeye, I think said that sort of advice is, you know, very limited experience, wildly over extrapolated. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

But for for our particular first ten people, the the things we sort of figured out that seem to be important were, they're also very genuine and straight. And I think that actually matters quite a lot in that sort of, there are people that, that others want to work with, that they're people that others trust. They sort of have an intellectual honesty in how they approach problems and and so forth.

They were people who really liked getting things finished. There's a lot of people who are really excited about tons of things. Only a subset of those are actually excited about like completing things. You know, there's a lot of talk about, for example, hiring people, you know, off their GitHub resumes, whatever.

I actually think doesn't quite ring kind of correct to me in the sense that that that places a large premium on sort of lots of different things. I I think it's actually a priori sort of much more interesting to to, you know, work with someone who has spent two years sort of really investing in going deep in a particular area.

And then the third trait that they all seem to have in common is they just sort of cared a great deal. Like it was offensive to them when something was just a little bit off. And it kinda, again, in hindsight, there are all these like crazy things we used to do that, I mean, do in fact seem crazy, like we probably shouldn't have done them.

But I would, everyone was almost like, well, was borderline insane instead of how much they cared about tiny details like we used to. Like every single API request that ever generated an error went to all of our inboxes and phoned all of us. Because it seems terrible to like ever have an error that that, you know, didn't go and sort of get a resolution from the user standpoint.

Or we used to like copy everyone else on every outgoing email and we'd like point out, you know, slight grammar or spelling mistakes to each other because it'd be terrible to ever send an email with a spelling mistake. So anyway, those are the the three traits we got for anyway. Genuine, caring a great deal. And Sorry. What's my second one?

The other one. Yes.

Completing things. Sorry. I was saying, yes. Completing things like list of three items.

Yeah. I mean, the only thing can say, I I just don't think there's any wrong place to find people. So when I look back at our our first few folks that we hired, they came from all over the place. Like I put up ads on Craigslist. I went to random tech talks. You know, we met people at bar we used to throw weekly barbecues at the office.

It was like bring your own, like, bring your own food and drinks. And then we would just talk to folks. I think every time I ever went and got coffee in Palo Alto, like, one of you guys was, recruiting, at Coupa because their office was like strategically situated next to the best coffee shop. But I I think that the really good people generally, they're generally doing something else.

And so you have to go seek them out rather than expecting that they're gonna seek you out. Triple so, when no one's ever heard of or is using the product that you're working on.

Yeah. And it's probably really important to have a great elevator pitch, not even for investors, but just because everyone you, run into right now is, you know, maybe six months, a year down the road, a potential recruit.

And so the the right time to have gotten them excited about your company, the right time for them to have started following us and, know, be thinking about it as they think about what they're going to do next is, you know, as soon as you can start. It's going to take a a very long time to recruit people.

So being able to consistently get people excited about what they're what what you're doing will pay back dividends later.

Maybe this is a little bit tangential, John and I were also chatting with yesterday afternoon sort of like a bunch of our friends have sort of started companies right out of school. We're sort of thinking about, you know, what seems to go wrong in those companies.

And I think something that, that maybe the most common, failure mode seems to be sort of doing something kind of overly niche or overly sort of specific and bounded. I think maybe it comes from sort of, like, there's a major shift in time horizon, as you go from classes to building a startup. Right? A class kinda plays out on a quarter or a semester or whatever.

Whereas a startup is like a five or ten year thing. And I think this is really problematic because it's actually quite hard to hire people for niche things. And that if if you tell somebody, look, we're going to build a rocket that goes to Mars. Like, I mean, that sounds almost impossible, but also sounds fucking awesome. Right? And so it's actually pretty easy to convince people to work in it.

Whereas if it's well, you know, we're going to build this. I don't wanna single out any particular idea because probably sound like I'm picking some actual startups doing it. You know, if you pick something pretty narrow, something that maybe kind of inductively comes out of the kinds of problems you solve as part of a class project, that's actually much harder to hire for.

One specific question that has come up a lot, is how as a relatively inexperienced founder do you identify who the really great people are? So you know, you meet people at these barbecues or for your friends or whatever and maybe you've worked with them a little bit, but what specifically did you guys do in your processes to identify like, you know what, this person's gonna be really great.

Or, when did you really get it wrong? But what what have you learned about how to identify raw talent if you can't just say, well, they work at Google or Facebook they must be good?

Well, I mean, you'll never like 100% know, obviously, until you work with folks. Is why the flip side of it is, you know, if someone you hired just wasn't a good fit, you owe it to the company and to them to tell them how they can improve and if they're not working out to fire them. But I think that generally that question of talent falls into two big buckets.

Like one is you have some sense of what makes them good at their job. And there are some areas where you have taste in that area. And there's some where you don't. And the ones where you don't are actually much more difficult. So what we would do is is we would do a few things.

Like first, before talking to anyone, we try to get a sense for like what what is really world class in that discipline mean. And this becomes very, important leader when you're hiring things like head of finance and you don't know anything about finance except what was contained in like a library book you got about. Like an introduction to finance or head of marketing.

So I always made it a habit of like talking to people that I knew de facto or world class. And then asking them specifically what are the key traits or characteristics that you look for? What are the questions that you ask? And how do you and then how do you find them? And if you're looking for the next person that's as good as you, like where are, where is that person working right now?

And like what's what's her phone number? I think that like learning what good and bad is during the interview process is extremely expensive. It's an expensive use of your time and it's an expensive use of everyone else's time. So pre calibration of that really matters. And then once you have someone in sort of interview process, you'll build the process over time to both screen quality.

And so at Pinterest we have an evolving set of standard questions that we're always rotating through and we're always measuring are these good indicators or bad indicators of quality. But the other thing that the questions are meant to do is they're supposed to give a sense for is this the right place for that person to come and work.

And this is to the point you guys made about being very transparent about what's gonna be easy or hard. Really great people wanna do things that are hard. They wanna solve tough problems.

And so there was a certain brilliance in Google setting out these interview questions that were thought to be really difficult because then people who like solving really difficult problems they come out and seek those. I think it's really important even as companies get bigger that you don't whitewash the risks.

I heard that PayPal you'd go in and after interviewing with like Peter Thiel and Max Levchin then they would say, and by the way like Visa and MasterCard want to kill us and we might be doing something that's illegal. But if you succeed you'll redefine payments. Or when they were recruiting for iPhone they didn't even tell people what they were doing.

They were like you won't see your families for three years. But when you're done, when you're done your kids' kids will remember what you built. And I think that's a really good thing in recruiting as well. That you're very, very transparent about why you think it's an amazing opportunity. But you lay out in gory detail on why it's gonna be hard.

And then the right people select in or they select out, of that opportunity.

Evidence suggests it's worth allowing people to see their kids though.

I feel like one thing you have to do, as you try to identify talent is have the the confidence to to interview for it in a way that works for you. I think, you know, if you're say you're not the, you know, the world's best engineer and you you're you're trying to interview engineering candidates.

I think it's tempting to try to coggle cult what everyone else does and you know, get them to code on a whiteboard and do other engineering interviewee things.

You know, in the case of Stripe hiring our first engineer, we we flew the guy out spent a weekend coding with him and, you know, looked over his shoulder and kind of it was the only way we could really tell and get ourselves confident that that person was good. And I think you can actually extend that to to other roles where again, you're not an expert.

And that, you know, I'm no business development guru, but when we interview people for business development roles, we'll ask them to do a project, you know, where they talk about how they would improve an existing partnership that Stripe has, or which new partnerships they would go out and do.

And again, you know, even though it's not my domain area, I I am actually confident enough that I can I can judge those pretty well? And I think people often have this impostor syndrome when it comes to to interviewing for roles.

Yeah. I I think a pretty specific kind of just tactical thing, to to do for, again, the first ten people is to work with them as much as you can, before committing to hiring them. I mean, once you reach a certain scale, it's kind of impractical because it's a huge time commitment on their side and also, I mean, it just would be unscalably expensive from your side.

But it it's really worth it to get the first ten people right. And so for a majority, maybe even all of the first ten people, we we we work for them in some capacity usually for a week in advance. And it it's pretty hard to to fake it for for a week. It tend to be pretty clear quite quite quite quickly.

And another thing I thought of, know, to to the question of sort of how how do you know like who's great or who's good enough whatever. And people always talk out sort of this notion of the 10x person at sort of whatever the skill set is. I don't really know what 10x means.

I think maybe the the slightly more kind of helpful, or like intuitive version of that is, is this person probably, the best out of all of their friends at what they do? And so, you know, it's a little bit sensitive to how well they choose friends and how many they have. But, for for me at least, I find that kind of a a more helpful way to think about it like, is this the best engineer?

This engineer knows. And, and the other thing I think that's actually worth mentioning in all this kind of first ten people or even more generally on the culture and hiring topic. I think everyone sort of doesn't realize until they go through themselves how important it is. In large part because, like, in life and the media and everything, people focus way too much on founders.

And that like here we are and so kind of we're reinforcing the sort of structural narrative that like Stripe is about John and Patrick and Pinterest is about Ben and so forth. Whereas, I mean, obviously, sort of the vast majority of what our companies do, 99. 9% is being done by people who are not us. Right?

And I think, I mean, obviously that's kind of it's it's obvious when you say it, but it's it's sort of very much not just the the macro narrative and your companies are abstract. You kinda need to associate them with specific people.

But I think it's worth bearing in mind that like for, you know, Apple, you know, everything was was, you know, Steve Jobs was like a tiny, tiny detail at the end, right, or Google with Larry and so forth. So don't screw it up is what you're saying? Something like that.

I think, you know, only other thing I'll mention is that I think referencing people is really important. Referencing people is just what it sounds like. You're basically asking people who have real material working experience for their honest opinion. And we do that really aggressively and what we're trying to figure out is what's this person like to work with.

We're not trying to validate like whether they told the truth on their resume because we assume that they're telling the truth. So very standard questions I'll ask somebody is in an interview. I might say, hey, you know, we both know Jonathan in common. I'm gonna talk to him in a couple weeks because we're both social friends.

Like if I asked him what you're the best at or what you would be most proud of or what you were kind of working to improve, what would he or she say? Because it sort of tests the level of self awareness and creates a bit of social accountability.

And then I'll try to ask something that makes the question, which is typically very soft, feel a little bit more quantitative and then calibrate that over time. So, know, in evaluating this person in this dimension, do you think this is the top 1% of people you've ever worked with? The top 5% and the top 10%?

And it forces a scarcity that gives a materially different, reference, than if you just say, hey, like what's the best thing about John? He told me, you know, he's good at these things. Can you validate? They're like, yeah, sure. Because they don't get anything. So I think that's.

just a tool that people should should take seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Referencing isn't obviously easy to begin with, but it it does actually prove really useful over time. And you just have to people, I think, especially for named references, people really want to be nice.

So you have to do things like create an artificial scarcity by saying, know, where would you rank this person amongst the people you've worked with in this role, or you know, you just list out on the Internet of how to reference.

But, you should aim to spend, know, fifteen minutes on the on the phone with that person, not just let them say, yeah, this person is this person is awesome and then hang up. That's also a tremendous source of new recruits. Yeah. Those references are also a tremendous source of new recruits.

What what have each of you learned about once you hire these first people and they join, what have you done to make them effective quickly, to get them sort of, you know, to the right cultural place? You know, because sort of hiring is usually very difficult, but then not as difficult as making them happy and effective. So, do you do with these early employees to accomplish that?

Well, the answer that's changed when we've gone from really small to bigger. When we first started we were generally hiring because we needed that person like a long time ago. And so, whole onboarding was like, here's your computer. We already set up your environment. Don't worry about it. This is the problem that we have to solve together.

And then because of the, because of the nature of the start up. So, we were all in this like tiny two bedroom apartment. All of the other things like building personal relationships, spending time together, getting to know, it just all happened kind of automagically. Like you didn't have to do anything.

The one thing that I would add to that is though, we would always try to remind people of like where we wanted to go someday. It's really easy when you first join to drop someone into a problem and then they think the whole world is like this little problem in front of them. We'd always say, hey, someday we wanna do for discovery what Google did for search.

This is our plan for trying to get that done. Now as the company grows, I think that that process has to get a little bit more formalized. And so, we spend a lot of time thinking and honestly trying to constantly refine what does that person's experience look like from the day they came in to their very first interview through thirty days after they joined.

Like, do they have somebody whose name they know? Do they know who their manager is? Have they sat down with people on their team? Do they know what the general architecture of the company is and what the top priorities are? And we have a program and it's a week long and then there are sort of function specific programs that go in deeper. And that's something that's always been refined.

And the output metrics that we look on that is one we ask people like what did you think afterwards and then thirty days afterwards. And then we also ask their peers and their manager like hey, is this person kind of up to speed? Do you feel like we've done a good job making them productive?

And if we haven't that's a key A, that that team shouldn't be hiring any more people because they're not doing a good job bringing in new people. And B, that we need to retool that. And so I think those things are important. Just wouldn't discount just how important it is to get to know the person as a person. Like what are their aspirations? What's their working style?

How do they like to be recognized? Do they really prefer being in total silence? Do they Are they a morning person or night person? Like knowing those things, I think, it just demonstrates that you care about them individually as well as collectively like what your what your goals are.

I think there's two things that are important at any stage though the implementation will change. The first is to get them up and running doing real work quickly because that's only when you can find the problems. That's the only way they'll That's how progress is measured is how much real work they're doing. And when we have engineers start, we'll try to get them committing on the first day.

When we have people in business roles start, we will have them in real meetings on the first day on on what they're meant to be working on. But I think sometimes there's a tendency to to be tentative and help ease people in. We're much more of the push people off the cliff school.

And then I think the second is to try and start quickly giving people feedback and especially feedback on how to adapt to the culture. Because when you think about it, like, you know, if you have built a strong culture as you know, all all the companies up here, you know, are are trying to, then it's going to it's gonna take some adapting for the person.

It's not going to be necessarily easy, you know. One thing we had at Stripe was just the culture was was a lot more written. And so, you know, you would have people who are right next to each other, each with headphones on and just like IMing away to each other. And for, you know, a lot of people coming in who hadn't worked in an environment like that, it's it's sort of In normal places. Exactly.

Yeah. And so everything from kind of high level how you're doing at your job to to to kind of minor cultural pointers, the the the more feedback you can give them, the better they'll do. And it's unnatural. Right? Because it's unnatural to be constantly telling people that they're doing a good or bad job.

You don't do that, you know, hopefully in your, you know, in your normal life, you're more restrained. But when you have employees, that's kind of what you owe them for them to do well. So I think this is sort of a good transition to as your companies have scaled.

What are the biggest changes you've had to make to your hiring processes? And also how you sort of manage and run the teams as you've gone from two to 10 to 100 to 1,000 employees?

There are a lot of changes. I mean, think one thing that we try to do on the team side is the goal is to make the teams feel as autonomous and nimble as possible within the constraints of having a large organization.

And that means over time that we're always trying to make it feel like a startup of mini startups rather than this monolithic organization with a set of foreign processes that cut horizontally through it. And that's easier said than done. And I think that like we're not all the way there but, one of our goals is that each team has, control the resources that they need to to get things done.

They know what the most important thing is and how it's measured. And that way then the management problem becomes somewhat tractable. Otherwise it feels completely impossible if you can't decompose it into autonomous units. Like you just look at it and you're like, oh my gosh, like communication complexity is increasing geometrically. Management complexity like it's never gonna work.

And so you have to sort of create these abstracted units. Or that's at least what we're gonna try to do. And at Pinterest in particular, the real challenge of creating those abstracted units is we wanna actually have units that encompass a super strong designer. A super strong leader in engineering. Often a writer. Often sometimes like a community manager. We want them all to be soft contained.

And so that makes the problem really hard. But that's kind of core to our philosophy of how we build products. We try to put people together that have all of these different disciplines. They're curious about lots of things. And then we anchor them on a single project. And then we try to remove barriers to let them go fast.

And when we find new barriers we sit down and we think how do we speed that up. I think hiring is a little bit different. And I think the biggest change and the biggest asset that you get as you get more people is referrals become like more and more and more and more the lifeblood depending on sort of the network of all the people that you bring in.

So one of the really lucky and in hindsight great decisions that we made was our actual fourteenth or fifteenth person that we hired was a professional recruiter. And she had worked at startups. She had worked at big companies like Apple. But she sort of knew where that pipeline breaks down. Kind of knew the early indicators.

And taught everyone not just how to sort of screen for talent, but how scalably to identify the people that are gonna be culturally, like really good for the company. I I think looking back on that, it's something that I I personally really value.

You know, there's just like a huge amount of stuff here, right, in that sort of, I guess this is all under kind of the rubric of of managing growth and, you know, like either your company sort of fails very quickly or sort of all of your problems become in some way about managing growth.

One thing that I think tends to take people by surprise and certainly took me by surprise is kind of how quickly, just like the time horizons change. In that, sort of in your first month, you're largely thinking about things on maybe one month ahead, right? In that, maybe that's kind of what your development road map is is oriented around your, even in terms of who you're working with.

Maybe it's like really informal relationships where they haven't sort of fully committed to to remain full time or whatever, right? And that kind of, the the the more time goes by, I think that kind of has a reciprocal or or corresponding increase in the time horizons. After one year, you're kinda thinking one year ahead. After four years, you're thinking four years ahead.

And and kind of that increases very quickly, right? And so after, you know, it's after one month, it's again super short term. And then just eleven months later, you should now actually be thinking and planning, you know, a year ahead and and think about kind of human structures on that time horizon.

Thinking about, you know, stuff Ben talked about like, you know, where you want to be going long term and and things like that. I think that also plays into your hiring and the kinds of people you hire, right? In that, in the really early days, you kind of have to hire people who will be productive essentially immediately.

Like, you you you don't have the luxury of hiring people who are sort of really promising, but, you know, they're not quite gonna be up to speed for another year or two. They have to be able to contribute immediately. But after two or three years, now it sort of starts to get, you know, much more reasonable to to make those investments.

In fact, if you're not making those investments, you're probably being much too short term. And so I think that's, that's really important. And a lot of it also just comes from, sort of, like all these problems in some sense are easy. Like how do you build kind of good social bonds between people? I mean, we we all do it, you know, every day. Right?

It's kind of how do you how do you kinda make it systematic and sort of effective at scale? And it's always kind of a very, like severely imperfect approximation of what you would ideally do if you were small. And just kind of what what hacks can you pull to sort of make it work as well as you possibly can at at a larger scale.

Like a a rapidly growing company, say growing headcount, you know, two or three x a year. Just like it's a very unnatural thing. And so it's sort of, you know, what's what's the least bad way of sort of managing that period of growth? Human organizations aren't designed for it.

And I think it's worth being sort of like quite systematic about sort of thinking about ways to do that, but realizing that you probably can't do much better than, than sort of adequate. And, you know, for Stripe, it's things like we have three meals every day at sort of long tables for kind of everyone can sit together. Right?

And if you think of sort of net, how much more total human interaction happens as a result of having these kind of randomly mixed meals. I mean, it's vast. Right? And it's kind of a whole list of things like that. But I think that's kind of the general framework.

And one thing I'm really curious about, you guys value transparency. How do you scaled it over time? Because I know we think about figuring out all the time. I'm just curious.

So, you know, startups in some sense, I can't remember who it was. Sort of defined it as like, a startup is kind of an organization that's not yet stuck with all these kind of principal agent problems that at most sort of large companies, what is locally optimal for you is very frequently, you know, not what is globally optimal for the company.

And so, you know, there there as a consequence of that, probably a lot of ways in which a start up can work differently to a big company. At a big company, a lot of the, you know, things that are good for you Well, you you couldn't do them in a completely transparent environment, right? Because people would think less of you or, I mean, you're not You're doing things you're not supposed to.

But because everyone is kind of sailing in or rowing in the same direction at a start up, you can actually just make all the information transparent. And so, yeah, I mean, from a very early, I guess I mentioned earlier, Stripe used to BCC every other person at Stripe on basically every single outgoing email unless you opted out of it. Because we thought that would be sort of much more efficient.

You wouldn't wouldn't need to have as many meetings, if you could just kind of keep abreast of what's happening.

And over time, we've sort of built, an increasingly intricate sort of framework of mailing lists and we now have like a program for generating Gmail filters, and for like a pretty rocky patch where 50 people or so, to to to Ben's point of like asking people sort of how they're getting on after the first couple of days.

They all reported terribly because like they couldn't even, you know, find all the emails people were sending to them and they were missing things and everything. Gmail broke at one stage. Oh, right. At one point Gmail broke because they were just like sending too much email.

And I mean, it is hard to scale because it's I mean, you you you might sort of contact somebody outside of the company, with like some great idea and maybe like a person sitting across the way from you thinks that's like the stupidest idea they've ever heard. Right? And you're kind of subject to the scrutiny of the entire organization to some degree with all of your communication.

Like that's kind of the the challenging side of it and then, you know, the the good side is people are much more informed about what's happening. I guess, I I don't feel that I can give a much stronger endorsement of it than it has worked so far.

Yeah. I I I actually really curious how or whether it'll work when we're, you know, 5,000 people or something like that. If if wherever at that scale. I think the two things that have helped us scale it are one, change the tools and two, developing the culture around it.

And so on the tools front, you know, it used to be the case that, or kind of the infrastructure, it used to be the case that you can keep abreast by of what's happening in the company by re reading all the email. Now, have, know, weekly all hands sometimes with the deck.

And, you know, we actually have to go put all this work into developing a deck to to communicate to people what's going on in the company since there's so much more. And the second is on the cultural side, you know, so much information being available internally. You have to develop cultural norms around how it's treated.

Know, obvious things like, you know, the the fact that a lot of it is confidential to Stripe. But even less obvious things like, you know, when emailing someone or talking in in in Slack or IRC, when that is is viewed by now a 70 people.

It's actually, you know, it's pretty easy to get stage fright, you know, and it's it's pretty easy for, you know, what you thought was a reasonable proposal, know, you get this drive by criticism and you're you're, you know, now less likely to share in future.

And so, we've had to create norms around, you know, when it's reasonable to jump into discussions and how that interaction works because people are on stage so much more. I'm.

I'm pretty sure it's not good, but not to put her on the spot, but Emily interned at Stripe this summer. I'm curious like as an intern, what you thought of it?

I think overall it's great. I think like my first week I spent most of the time reading Hackpad and getting caught up on what the company was doing. It can often be quite distracting, from your own work as there are oftentimes other parts of the company you're really interested in. HiPad, by the way, is like Google Docs but with a news feed, and you can just like see all the documents. Yeah.

And you're encouraged to make everything public, everything you work on. But overall, it gets you spun up really quickly, and we also have things called spin ups where every single sort of leader of a team at the company, whether it's like SIS or its product, gives like a thirty minute talk on what their team is currently doing and sort of how you can contribute if you're interested.

Do you think email transparency was not good? Yes. I remember having a hard time understanding what I should and should not subscribe to and, like the first week having like 2,000 emails in my inbox, and then by the end, you know, there's like three or four teams you actually want, that information coming up from.

Alright. Audience questions.

Yes. So this question is for Patrick and John. Is it your experience that your early hires that you will support and evolve into leadership roles as the company skills? And a question for Ben, how is what PRS what PRS is today? How is it different in your initial vision of what the product and the audience.

would be? Alright. We'll go first on, have the people actually all three of you are welcome as this. Have the people that you've hired early been able to grow into leadership roles?

In the Stripe's case, yes, in that quite a number of the the first ten people are in are in leadership roles now.

I think that's one thing that organizations again, it's sort of an unnatural skill that they have to get good at is realizing that, you know, people don't necessarily come out of the womb being good at managing or, you know, being good at at leadership and being able to to develop that in people and being able to, you know, help people progress as they spend a number of years at the company.

It's it's a lot of it's a lot of work at a time when everyone is, you know, running around with their hair on fire, but it it's also sort of damaging if the company can't develop that skill.

Yeah. I think for us the answer is some yes and some no. I don't know. I think one of the big benefits of working at a startup is that you can be handed a challenge that no one else would crazy enough to give you the opportunity to to take on. And that could be managing people. It could be taking on a project.

But the implicit contract with that is that if you can ask someone to take a really big risk on that, it shouldn't be like one way through the door and if you don't succeed. Otherwise, it creates fright to to give it a shot.

So, know, we have some folks that are managing large teams that started as, kind of individual programmers where they were engineering and they said, hey, I'd love to try I'd love to try leading a project and then leading a group and then taking responsibility for management and taking a group.

And we have other folks that tried it and they were like, I'm really glad I tried it because I never wanna do that again. And we try to make sure that for those people like you can have just as much impact at a company, through your individual contributions as an engineer or designer. Don't have to manage. But, but it's really hard to predict until you give people a shot.

And so, my strong preference is that you give as many people a shot as possible. And in the few areas where you really feel like the, there's too much kind of learning curve relative to the business objective you're trying to achieve, that's when you look for somebody who might be able to walk in and really execute on that job.

Oh, so the question was, how has the vision changed since we initially started? Yes. Sure. Well I mean I think on vision when we first started, you know I think we started it like hiring very inductively. Were like, oh we're gonna build this really cool tool. People are gonna enjoy it. I love collecting things. Maybe other people like collecting things.

And what we didn't expect that kind of revealed itself early on was that looking at other people's collections turns out to be this really amazing way to discover things that you didn't know you were looking for. And it becomes a solution to a problem that a lot of other technologies don't have.

And so over the last couple years especially, we've poured enormous technical and design resources into building out recommendations products, search products, feed products. Leveraging kind of the unique data that we have which are these pins that were all hand picked by someone and hand categorized.

And then on the audience side, I mean I think the first big surprise was you know truthfully like when we first started we didn't really know if anyone would use it. And we were just happy that anybody that wasn't like related to us and obligated by like familiar relationship would use it.

And so one of the biggest surprises was has been how many people and how diverse those groups of people have been. And so I think that's been one of the things that's really exciting. And and the funny thing is that is often like the company goes farther along. Your aspirations therefore like get bigger. So so there's like this gap that always exists.

I tell my team between like where we are and where I think we should be. And even though objectively we're much farther along, I feel like the gap is widened even farther. But I think that's a really common trait amongst people who found companies. Yes.

You said that like while selling the vision of the company, you described in going detail that how hard it is going to be and like you won't see their families for three years, but then it would also be the thing that their grandchildren would be proud of.

But how do you really know, like both of you know that the second part is like, it's not it's not guaranteed, but the first part that they're not gonna see their family for the next year is gonna be just short. So like how can you be authentic like selling that within the company? Or is it like about giving high returns for the highest that they can give them a lot of accuracy? Great question.

What is that? So.

the question is most startups are not the iPhone. You can't guarantee that people's grandchildren remember this because most startups fail. How do you convince people to sort of make sacrifices to join a startup?

I think part of the way sort of in which it resonates with people is because it's not guaranteed. Right? If it were guaranteed, then it'd be boring. And so it's the sort of there is the prospect of sort of affecting this outcome, but but nothing sort of nothing more than that potential.

And, you know, to the sort of not seeing their their families or kids or whatever, I mean, startups often do involve sort of longer hours in the beginning. But, you know, I think well, I think that that particular story is probably somewhat overstated. I guess it was, I think Scott Forstall was trying to recruit these people.

But I mean, even though startups, especially in the earlier days tend to involve somewhat work longer working hours. I think there's kind of this tendency to to exaggerate it and sort of, I mean, it's it's like the startup version of phishing. Like, every startup thinks they worked even more insane hours than, you know, the the next one back in the early days.

Like, we we literally never sleeped or slept rather for two years. So I don't know. I I I think that realistically for most people, it's not that big a sacrifice. Right? You're maybe on average, real being really realistic about it, people work two hours more on average per day.

It it's it's certainly a sacrifice, but it is not forgoing all, you know, pleasure and enjoyment for for the next half decade.

Yeah. I mean, think even iPhone wasn't iPhone before it got done. Right? So, I mean, no no smart person you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future that only you have And that joining is a guaranteed thing.

And in fact if you're telling them that and they select in like they, like you probably shouldn't hire them because they didn't, they didn't pass like a basic intelligence test about uncertainty in the future. But I, but I think it's fair to say like, you know, what's exciting and where you think it can go. And where it's gonna be hard and chart your best plan.

And then tell them like why their role in it can be instrumental. Because it is. You know, really liked what, what you said. You know if you tell people like hey we're gonna go to Mars. It attracts the best people and then you're incrementally closer to getting to Mars. And they know that going in. What I would discourage doing is just whitewashing all of that.

And if people kind of are joining because they want sort of, oh I want all the certainty and guarantee of working at Google plus like the perk of working in a small startup with more email and transparency like that's a really, negative sign. And for example, when I interview people they'll often say, oh, I'm really passionate about what you're doing.

And then I'm like, well, where else are you interviewing? And then, and they'll just list like seven companies that have nothing to do with each other. Yeah. Except they're sort of at the same stage we're at. They're like, you know, love the problem of discovery so I'm interviewing Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber. Now, I'm also putting into my resume into Google X into that part of the division.

And that's a sign that they're probably not being authentic with what they care And those folks often when things get really hard, they won't stick it out and work through it. Because they were really signing up for an experience, not for achieving a goal.

I think the other thing that motivates people a great deal in addition to sort of the the prospect of sort of, you know, affecting some outcome It's just sort of the the personal development angle. And that a startup just because it's much kind of more likely staffed, it's kind of a it's it's much less forgiving, right?

And that like, even if you're the best person in the world, you're not gonna or or well, whether or not you're the best or the worst person in the world, you're probably not going to significantly alter Google's trajectory. Right? Whereas, if if you sort of really want to, you know, benchmark yourself and sort of see how much of a contribution and impact you can make.

And I think kind of that prospect is quite compelling to a lot of the best people than a startup is sort of a much better place to to go test that. Alright. Last one. Who'd you want?

Last question.

So this is a question for Ben, but you guys can all answer it. But how has your user base affected your hiring strategy? So Pinterest is a site that's used like 80% by women. So how did that affect your initial hiring decisions?

How has your user base affected your hiring strategy?

Yeah. So you know conventional wisdom is like you only hire people that religiously use your product every single day. And that probably works really well if you're making an API. It's probably amazing. For us like we screen for people that are ambitious and excited about the vision of cracking discovery online. And they have to know like exactly how our service works and have to have used it.

But they may not be a lifelong user. And that for us is this great opportunity because we can be like, what is the barrier that's preventing you from using it? Come join. Remove that barrier and help us get closer to kind of that vision.

I know there there's a lot of If you read any startup book there's all this startup wisdom that sounds like really reasonable, but it's only useful if it works in your particular circumstance. And so for us we've had to sort of broaden the lens a little bit, looking broadly about people that are ambitious about the mission. They care about the product and our approach to building products.

Even if from day one they weren't our earliest users.

Okay. The the one thing I'll just tack on to that is that when we talked about the fact that it's really hard to hire for those early employees and you have people who have other good options, you're very much at the ugly duckling stage.

Finding people who are passionate about your product can be a great way to find people because there you kind of have a an unnatural advantage over other companies. And so I know for sure in Stripe's case, we definitely, you know, we hired, I think it was four Stripe users in the in the very early days. And, you know, those are people who who we probably couldn't have gotten otherwise.

I'm sure it was the same in Pinterest case where like, you know, you'll you'll get all this benefit of working at Pinterest. And hey, it's Pinterest. You get to work where you pin. Yeah.

Thank you guys very much for coming in today. Thank you.