Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/146221103/648d9ac006481dd7db9543eb1745d8fa.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 01:20:26

Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just breaking this wall between the PM and the customer. The moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem. That's an unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them. If your text message friendly with five or ten of those, you are going to have so much direct signal that is infectious. Many people told me I need to ask you about picking metrics. Well, what was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective? And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Sharks that showcase things are going up into the right on one hand and then tweets on the other. You started at Stripe, something called Steady Groups. We show up for to eat people total for 10 to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work as Stripe. And rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer. Today my guest is Jeff Weinstein. Over the course of his six plus years at Stripe, Jeff was the product lead for Stripe's payment infrastructure teams. We upscale stripe payments to hundreds of billions of dollars in volume a year. He also let pms and teams on a number of zero to one bets at Stripe. And most recently took on the scaling of Stripe Atlas, which, as of the day this podcast launches, allows you to incorporate a new company in a single day, including handling 83B elections, incorporation documents, getting your EIN, share purchases and all the things that used to take weeks or months before a company could be an operating. At this point one in six new Delaware corporations are started on Stripe Atlas, which blows my mind. This episode ended up being the longest in my podcast history. Because I wanted to basically do an archaeology of an incredibly effective and admired product leader. We spent the entire conversation digging deep into the many skills that Jeff has built, that enable him to consistently build successful and beloved products. We get into his go-go-go, plus optimism, long-term compounding philosophy of building products, had to think about and operationalize product craft and quality. He shares a popular program that he started at Stripe called Stripe Study Groups that I think you should steal. We also talked about how to effectively talk to customers, how to know if you have product market fit for your new product, how to pick great metrics for your team, what he's learned about getting shit done at a big company, also advice that he's gotten from the founders of Stripe, and so much more. This episode is for anyone who's looking to level up their product building chops in every way. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you Jeff Weinstein. Jeff, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny, of Lenny's podcast. I wasn't, I knew what to expect, but it is fun to see you. The first name and the podcast I'll line up. I really appreciate you asking. So I wanted to start with a quote that I found for me that I think gives a little perspective into how you think and how you approach the world. So here's the quote. Very frequently I would do poorly on test in school, and then the professor would say, very reasonably, hey, I think you should bump down a level to the previous semester's pace. And you said, I actually know that that's why I'm in this class. I want to be in the class that I'm potentially the worst at. This isn't how most people think this is how most people operate. Usually people want to get good grades. They want to be at the top of their class. Clearly you have a different approach and a different mindset. Where did this come from for you? And how did this shape the way you think about product and the work that you do? That was some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to rationalize it for myself in some form. In retrospect, that sounds kind of high for gluten. But at the time, I just wasn't particularly good at the class that I was in. But I think it comes from growing up. I went to a pretty hippy-dippy, k-12 school in Baltimore, Maryland, where we were really asked to think about why we were in school. And to pick any of the courses that were of interest to us outside of AP programs or grades. Any particular requirements, you really got to choose your own path. And I recall one particular class in high school, which was somewhat a science class. But it was called the History of Science. And we actually walk through and study all of the at the time best understood ways the world worked in science. But then later we're turned out to be wrong. In the 1500s, we believe x, y, and z in the 1600s, we've A, B, and c, just very confidently in 1500s. We thought something, and then the 1600s, they thought something very different. And so this class was quite impactful on me, where we spent an entire year studying things that are not true. And it was fascinating. And that particular teacher employed another trick on us during that class, which was, it took the tuition fee of our school and divided it by the number of hours and wrote the cost on a ticket. And then handed us in the beginning of the year tickets for every single one of the classes and he would stand at the door and you would have to give him a ticket at the end of the class that he thought it was worth it. And just like that practice of deep intellectual understanding of how people evaluated something at the time and choosing for yourself to spend the time on it. But I've just like the physical act of handing that ticket to the teacher. They've really clicked for me. And so when I got to college and real college, university, the people are coming from often quite more rigorous backgrounds things that were true. I was a bit unprepared. And I remember actually taking a micro-economic class that was quite advanced and had a close friend and we studied exactly the same information. We sat, looked at the same cheat sheets, we practiced the same quizzes, we read the same books, and he got the top grade of the class and I got the bottom. And that's from where that quote came from, where the professor said, I think you should potentially bump down. I was like, I already know that stuff. Like, I'm interested in this topic. I'm going to try to improve, but look, just because I'm significantly worse than the other kids in the class that has like little to do with if I should leave. And he was particularly cool with it. This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application. Tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product. With all the tools you need, in one simple to use platform, Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product, and then turn those insights into action. Also, you can get your users to do what you actually want them to do. First, Pendo is built around product analytics. Sing what your users are actually doing in your apps so that you can optimize their experience. Next, Pendo lets you deploy in-app guides that lead users through the actions that matter most. 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It's really interesting that you went to this liberal arts CPPD, which a lot of people bash on like why spend all this college money and time on a liberal artsy kind of education. And you end up being really successful in a very technical, highly analytical data-driven company. And it's interesting that that experience still helped you succeed in this other path. It did take a change though, because I started in English was my selected major in school, but then I kept playing with computers and I kept liking math. And I looked at the roles of the the backgrounds of the people who were running, the types of companies I loved at the time Facebook was getting super phenomenally successful Apple was already on their, on their, up and up again, and everyone who's leading this place has had technical backgrounds. And I like computers. So I added computer science as an engineering degree midway through school. So, and I'm having to take the real science classes with the premed kids and the rest of it. And I did similarly poorly, but I did end up with a computer science degree at a liberal arts degree. So it was it was a journey that I had to make a pretty big switch in the middle to like get on that path. Asked you if there was one thing that you'd love to get across in this podcast, asked you, what would it be? And here's what you said, here's the first item on this list that you sent me. Quoting, go go go a set plus optimistic comma long term compounding approach. Can you just talk about what you mean by that? Yeah, there's two things going on here. So I seriously see the world as immediately we need, we have just such opportunity to take action in front of us. We can be optimistic and go go go as soon as possible. I think that a lot of life is, you know, you get as much furniture as you've room in the house. We will do the work the night before it's due. So let's just make it do tomorrow. Can we turn tomorrow into today? It's just optimisticly seeing if we can just inject energy to go go go has produced surprising results. I think it ignites in other people that same interest and then it kind of feeds off each other. And that's I think really in my bones from growing up. And then I added over time had to learn this longer term compounding more strategic mindset where some of the things we want to accomplish be at my startups in the past or at Stripe, they can't be solved in an afternoon. They're going to require layers of infrastructure and services and applications and UI and partnerships that really look like that kind of iceberg drawing you see where you just see the top of them is the whole thing underneath. And I've had to learn over time to pair my instinct of like let's get it done today. Let's move forward. Let's let's see what we can get done. Let's make some mistakes. Let's try it out. With where are we going? What needs to be true over time? Where can we always invest? What will we sort of never regret spending time? We'll never regret spending time making the latency of our payments APIs at Stripe faster. We'll never regret making it more reliable to send 83B election mail so the IRS. Like we will never regret those things. So let's just always compound those capabilities of our time. Then the trick is like how do you mix this GoGoGo attitude with a long term compounding and that's something I still struggle with but I try to purposefully balance it more than I used to. It's such a good way of summarizing just how to be successful and a lot of things GoGoGo, ASAP, stay optimistic, focus on long-term compounding growth. Is there an example that in action? I know we're going to talk about Atlas a bunch but I guess is there an example of that working for you as a product you worked on? I work at Stripe which is an infrastructure company. We build things that help businesses do online commerce and various forms and a few rules at Stripe. Our beautiful office here in South San Francisco. One of which was the product person that helped us decide how we were going to go global and how we're going to offer multiple ways for people to pay. It turns out there's more than just credit cards in the world. There's small hundreds of ways that people will naturally want to pay for things online and as a business you're going to of course just want to accept whatever it is people want to pay with. And for the first seven or eight years of Stripe, well prior to my being here, you know, the incremental country ads and the incremental new payment methods was relatively flat over time. And that was surprising to all of us who worked here because the world wanted it and we had a lot of people working on it and we were working very hard but it wasn't producing returns in the way that we wanted. And so actually the optimistic as soon as possible, GoGo attitude was not working. No matter how much energy we poured into building Thailand payment methods or UK bank transfers or in-person payment system in Latin America, we just like couldn't rack up points and get it done. So we had to step back and say, well, what is the world going to look like in 10 years? What was going to need to be true and how can we start to go there now? Which meant going a lot slower, building internal platforms, sending people around the world to sort of build these payment methods up, up through their lives, pay for their apartments, get them on airplanes, start using these payment methods actually in the world. And so it really like our line flat line for a while and we're like, okay, it's a strategy working, is it not working? But then over time, we start to see it switch to nonlinear again and go from whatever was 10 payment methods at the time and else Stripe accepts over 100s, so we got to like 50 really quickly and then kind of like skyrocket into 100. And I remember there being a meeting where we said, well, maybe we should just like lock everyone in the basement and see if we can get from 10 to 50. That would be, you know, the intensity start up GoGo attitude. But we looked at the individual components of what it meant to get this done and how long we wanted this to be true for and we had to go a lot slower. So that was like a very formative decision where you had to mix the GoGoGo with the long-term compounding. Awesome. Okay, so let's start to delve deeper into some of the specific seals that I hear you're incredible at and that I've seen you being incredible at on Twitter and and LinkedIn and things like that. So the first is craft, craft and quality. I'm told by many people that you have a very strong obsession with craft and user experience and quality. And even more so, I'm told that you teach people at stripe how to be obsessed with craft and quality and these are experience in a very systematic way. I feel like this is something a lot of people are starting to realize is really important and or are trying to get better at either personally or their company. So first of all, let me just ask why is why is this so important to you? Why do you think craft and experience and quality is so important? Why do you put so much emphasis on it yourself? I think I'm really working backwards from failures in the past. And avoiding them. And so maybe just a quick story. I started a company several years ago based on just a personal pet peeve of mine, which was I was a SQL analyst. Many you listening might have written SQL in the past. Maybe the robots write the SQL for you now, but still need to relope SQL yourself. And every single time I wrote a SQL query, I wanted to run the same subsequent analysis. I wanted great version control. I wanted all the cool stuff that GitHub had for code, but for writing data code. And so my friends and I built a little Python tool, which basically let you run our style queries. It lets you draw charts and pivot tables quickly and sharing all this modern SaaS applications stuff, but applied to SQL a few years ago. And we turned that into a company. We got some progress. But then there was this moment one day where we had maybe a couple hundred customers. And we had an error where we basically by accidentally shut down the service. And it was sort of brick for 10 or 20 minutes. And at the time, we were all kind of hustling in our little dinky office to get the application back online. And we were proud of ourselves about how reasonably quickly we did. And people went back to using it. It wasn't a super long outage. And we didn't lose any data, which is like kind of high five in each other. We went about our day. And about a year later, I realized that that was a, I missed a huge moment that I should have pounced on, which is that during those 20 minutes, our customers weren't furious. They weren't emailing us like crazy. They weren't texting us. They weren't trying to find us on Google Maps and knock on our door and say, hey, I need this thing back online immediately. We heard a couple comments from them. It was little murmurs. And I didn't realize at the time, like, that was the signal that I did not, like, we did not have a product market fit. And I ended up wasting many more years on that project. And wasting is a sort of big word. We built an amazing software. People like to, we're able to sell the company. It helped many of us learn how to really build software. But I'm really trying to avoid that situation again. And I think craft is kind of a dessert that you get after the meal of does your thing solve a real problem in the world. And our people clamoring, needing it badly. And that's really my obsession is in finding problems in which people will pause their entire day to solve. They will leap through the computer to be like, oh my god, I have that problem. Do you have a solution? And if you focus on that style of product development and we can get into just how do you kind of listen for that and then turn that into product, later you might get the opportunity to really provide craft and beauty and touches and moments and delight. But certainly there is no amount of craft. There is no amount of beauty. There is no amount to light or touches. You can add to a thing that will solve the problem we had at our startup, which is that people didn't really need this. And that's sort of like the biggest error is like picking something in which people don't really need it. And then going through these practices of trying to make it great when maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. I think a lot of people see all these tweets and messages about just like obsessed with the craft of what you're building and you can easily lose sight of nobody. Nobody even cares about what you're building. It could be the most incredible experience ever designed. But if it's not something anyone ever wants, it doesn't really matter. People don't really get out of bed for their second problem, right? They get out of bed for their first problem. And you have to carefully listen and not pitch your customer, your prospective customer as you're trying to figure this out. And I think this advice just style applies to small companies, big companies, anyone, which is, people don't want to be pitched. You know, sometimes on a UXR call with a very well-meaning person or a founder who has a new product that they want. Advice on or they want to find customers and the first thing that they start talking about when we get on the call is, hi, I'm the CEO of X, Y, and Z company. We do one, two, and three. I want to show you a demo. It's like, hold up. I'm, I'm a customer. I have, like, what a wasted opportunity. You've, you've, you've just done here. I have so many problems. You're sort of guessing ahead of time. What is my top problem? And now that you've anchored and limited to the pitch, you're, you're going to miss. You protect very likely going to miss the burning problem that they have on the top of their, on the, like, on the top of their mind. And they're, you know, not the customers job to interrupt you and say, hey, could you stop your pitch? Like, I want to tell you about my, my top problem. And you can sort of see this down the stream, which then companies who launch things, put craft, have a great launch, raise money, or then, like, later gone. Right? And it's because they built something that wasn't solving a burning need. And I think you can kind of stem it all the way back to they were just pitching rather than sitting in silence and just waiting for their customer to just open their hard out about what's the most burning thing. And sometimes I'll prompt our customers. I'll just, I'll say, hey, do you mind just opening up your email? Like, what's in there? Or if you weren't talking to me right now, what would you be working on? Or, hey, last week, what, what, what, what grind, what grind in your gears? What, like, what are you not looking forward to? Or magic one, like, what do you wish we could, you could just, like, have off your plate immediately forget it, forget it, forget stripe forget about, they weren't gone. Just in your whole life, like, what is it that you do not want to be doing? Or a massive opportunity you wish was just one doorway. And it's a little awkward, because they don't know why you're asking a kind of question. But then you just sit there in silence and for the most part, if you have amazing customers who are smart and ambitious and are trying to build their own business, they're going to want to offload their hardest thing to somebody else if you've earned trust along the way. And certainly not pitching is a great way of earning trust. You're just listening. We've, we've learned a lot at stripe from that. And that's where you can start to find a chase and see stripe. Well, hey, I don't know if stripe could, you know, really help me with this is, but it wouldn't be cool if, uh, we could identify if the person signing up on our site, like, wasn't fraudulent or is who they say they are or isn't a bot or is there are they really a dog on the internet? And like, huh, we keep hearing this as the major complaint from all of our customers. But like, we're not an identity company. It's like, well, I guess now we are because all of our customers who are trying to build their business, like, all have this problem. And so, via silence, you can just create your web. That pretty quickly and drop a lot of the long UXR, long survey, long build cycle, approach. So I love where we're going with this. This is where I was going to actually talk about next is just, uh, your ability to talk to customers in the user research. It feels very unique. Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just like, sharing your email constantly, getting on calls with people constantly. There's this, like, you're like, breaking this wall between that. A lot of people imagine there is between the PM and the lead of a team and the customer. Like, you're not relying on user research. You're not waiting for someone else to do this work for you. Talk about just why and how you do this, because I think there's so much to learn from just how you operate in finding opportunities, picking problems to solve by talking to customers. It's where the business comes from as customers. It's not a long shot hypothesis about why to talk to them. It's like, if they love your stuff, they will tell their friends and pay fair prices for the product. We're so fortunate through the internet that people kind of announce themselves as having as being interested in a topic. Sometimes they are interested in it by posting on Reddit, a long thread, or a screenshot of a customer service interaction that bugged them, or hopeful that from their dorm room in Country X, someone else in the world has solved this him problem. The internet has given us all this absolutely magical forum that you can just yell out the window and then billions of people could just like, could actually listen to what you said out the window. Now that's not all the time true for all people in all situations, but dramatically more true now than ever before in human history. And so the fact that people wouldn't be listening to their customers and really jumping through the computer to talk to them surprises me. It's like they have much like I'm always sometimes like, do they have some other strategy? Are they so confident in what they're building that they don't need to hear directly from the people who will be using it? And I think some of it is my own fear that I'm going to make the same mistake I've made in the past, which is build something that people like they're using, but isn't solving a burning enough problem such that they're going to stop their day. They're going to tell their friends. We're going to be able to sustain the company economically over a long period of time. And that really just comes from hearing people's most burning problems. And then the jumping through the just jumping through the computer and talking to them takes a little bit of nervous gumption, you know, kind of like walking up to a person at a bar cocktail party and saying hi, my name is Jeff. It can be a little awkward, but then you get it. It's kind of a rush once it starts to work. And once you get the iterative loop that they're excited to talk to you, they have problems. They see you as a trusted, not salesy, not pitching, not narrow-minded to just my product and my position. But I'm here to hear about your whole, all of your problems and see where we can help. Not promising. We can help solve everything. But let's listen. That is infectious, both between the customers and internally. And so I'm able to bring more people into that practice at Stripe. I'm able to quickly grab an engineer and hop on a call. I can forward a message over to a Slack group, and they know that because the customer's speaking directly, it's somewhat Trump's everything that's happening during the day. We could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what's going to the customer once or we could talk to them directly. And you have to use a little bit of art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to. But even at Stripe's scale, we're dealing with many millions of businesses and many hundreds of millions of consumers on the other end of those businesses, you can pattern match relatively quickly. What are the styles of customers that represent where the world is going, the most ambitious, the most technical, the fastest growing, the most detailed. And you don't need 10,000 to those people to talk to. If your text message friendly with five or 10 of those, you are going to have so much direct signal about where to go that you kind of forget how you did it in the past. I love these. So I'd love to learn more about these tactics that you've found helpful. So you've shared this idea of silence talking to someone and just being silent and I forget the phrase used, but just like ideas emerge like your whole roadmap can merge from that silence. Let me share a few things you shared to far enough curious what else to is tweeting just like, hey, I'm looking to improve Atlas right now what bugs do you have? Here's my email address. You talked about text messaging just like, hey, can I get your number? And I'm just text you and I have questions. If there's anything else to add to these, that'd be awesome. And then what else have you found just like ways to actually get to a customer and find opportunities that are important? Speed is an important one which is reducing the time between the moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem. They're busy. They're snacks to eat. They have families. They have other things to do. There's a lot going on in the world. A lot. You're done product. It's amazing that they would spend any of their time discussing it at all. I mean, most of the time, if you don't like something, you just move along. You just apathetically silently move forward in the world. And so the fact that someone took their finite time to succinctly with curiosity, communicate to the world or you about your product, that's a unbelievable gift that should be, you know, P0 alert level intensity. And so I will leave a meeting. I will change what I'm doing to just get one message back to them. Even if it's, hey, I got this, I'm about to go to dinner. Can I hit you up tomorrow? Oh, yeah, thank you. Awesome. I can't even believe you're responded. That puts us in the camp of on the right trajectory, where they're going to feel that they have a almost secret portal between this big brand of a company and another human who's just actually curious what's going on. That's night, night and day. And it's also like fun fact tip. When people are really hot on an issue and it could blow up on social or they're going to start becoming a detractor. We make mistakes. We have SLA breaches. We have errors. You're going to want to get on that stuff fast. And in those situations, my bar for how we respond to this folks is not to just sort of solve the problem, but is to turn them into a promoter. And most of the time we're able to, even if there was a pretty relevant issue. I remember one time in Atlas. We had this bug in which for a handful of our legal docs. They were handing out, let's say, 25 shares rather than 25 percent of the shares. We dropped the percentage sign. And thankfully, a founder noticed this in the docs and tweeted about it. I was like, like, paused. And I was like, oh no, this could be a really serious issue. We were able to fix it and regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone that was impacted. And I was thinking of myself, wow, we really let this person down. We have one job to do, which is to get their company right. And we didn't. And that person was incredibly gracious about the situation and said, any time we want me to read your docs, be happy to. I have a law degree. I care about this topic. I want to brainstorm with you about ways that Atlas could do more document creations. Like, wow, I can't believe I was in this sort of defense position. And now we've gained a friend in the world who can be eyes and ears and brainstorm with us. And we, the team maintains a really close relationship with that person as they do with many, many founders who use Atlas. And so just again, we were so quick to put the outside world in this other camp where we need to touch it with kid gloves and treat it as a big blob and a cohort and a statistic when it is a human with a problem who likes snacks, who is busy. And it's fun to do and it turns out to be an incredibly easy, fast way to figure out what to build. There's a bunch of stuff I want to follow up here. One is people who may be hearing this and like, oh my god, I'd be overwhelmed with feedback and people to fix problems for in bugs and texting of people. They're just like, there's so many people that potentially have to be interacting with. How do you, how do you try to narrow that down? Like, I know Atlas is a very highly adopted product. There's a ton of people. There's probably bugs often. People send you feedback. How do you pick the people to zero and on? I think there's two parts of this. One, what a problem to have. Of all the problems in the world. I'm overwhelmed by customer interest is on the, you know, the top list of problems I want to have. I think most entrepreneurs would purchase that problem as a state. And so if you're in it, I think take a deep breath and look at the sunrise or sunset. I just enjoy the fact that you've built something that is meaningful enough that people would spend their time. Again, there are amazing snacks that they could be spending the time on otherwise. So that's a, that's a huge deal. And then, too, you need the art, there's an art in science to picking where to go deep. You know, I will happily respond to folks with. I really appreciate that. Do you mind sending me a screenshot or a video and some of them don't? Okay, that's fine. You kind of get a sense of quickly looking at how they wrote about it or a pattern just pattern matching how detailed they were or how much they seem that they want to engage and kind of bounce it that way. Otherwise, you know, you can, you can tell folks, this is really awesome. Do you mind sending me an email with three to five bullet points about the details of how you got to this issue? And that's not a 30 minute meeting. Don't need to blow up your whole life to get on the phone with them. It's not a huge homework assignment to them, but it's enough structure that it will self-select those who want to go deep. And then from there, you really do owe it to them to follow up if they're going to be that detailed. And at that point, you really have a sort of product friend for life and you'll kind of continuously go back to them. So, you know, you have to kind of tune, tune it. I also will bound some of these efforts, so I'll just completely make up one day a program. So, hi, stripes doing a bug finder program. I made that up as I was driving to work one morning, tweeted it, was curious if anyone would send anything. We'll be taking videos for the next three days to go, you know, super deep. I be like, oh my goodness, I would love to be part of the striped bug finder program, like, may I apply? I'm like, ah, you know, it's very selective, you know, of course, but yes, of course for you. It's just, you know, you're giving people permission through a program, even if it is deeply arbitrary, I find hopes of that bounding it. And then later, I can follow up with a world, hey, we ran our first program, we got 65 videos, which we did, we found dozens of issues, which we did, um, it was an incredibly valuable use of our time, and it really came from just a single tweet. Something I saw you mentioned somewhere is that you only pay attention to feedback from people that are paying customers and ignore everything else, can you talk about that? People who build things for people tend to be empathetic and interested in curious folks who have friends, and then those friends want to use your stuff because they know you, and they like you, and they'll have good feedback. But you need to figure out, is that actually your customer or is that your friend trying it? Who is actually your target customer? Exactly, not a company or a segment, you know, not digital natives that are ex-baked. I'm talking about Sarah in this department who has these tabs open and just faced this problem and needs to solve it by 4 p.m., that level specificity. If that's your customer, and when I'm talking mostly about B2B, which is where I spend a lot of my time, social network, B2C stuff, I have less intuition on. They're very willing to exchange money for solving their problems. Incredibly so. Oftentimes, if you listen with enough silence, they might even say, I'll pay you money to solve blah! If you sit there long enough in silence, and so you could listen to your friendly friend who you got to play with your beta version, and they'll say they liked it and they will click around. But that is extremely different from Sarah who has the actual problem and is willing to pay. It is so tempting to go down the first path with the friend group that I sort of needed a rule, which is rather than, I was like, well, don't pay attention to that quite as much. Really pay attention to who is your target customer, and are you in a fast iteration cycle with for them, and are they telling their friends? But that wasn't enough because people are so drawn. Myself included drawn to the friendliness that I just said a rule, which is, we discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero. Like that is not of interest to us. It doesn't, we don't even write it down. It's not part, it's just not part of what we're talking about at all. We're only interested in Sarah, our target customer, and can we get her to solve whatever the problem is, as quickly as possible, as jankly as possible, and go from there. And it's a, and then the paying part is a forcing function because, again, even with Sarah, because you're paying attention to her and solving her problem a bit, she'll say, of course, oh, this is great. I want feature x, y, and z, can it do one, two, and three? Naturally, she would say that. But if you said, and by the way, this thing is $10,000, we'll happily refund your money, 100%, the second you don't like it. She might say, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Yeah, I like this thing, but not $10,000. For $10,000, it would need to solve x, and you're, oh, there it is, right? That was actually what the thing that was a value, and we were all kind of dancing around this. It's usefulness, it's useful, we're on the right track, and because I've fallen down that path myself, and so many times, I just set a rule. This was great. I was actually going to ask this technique of using silence to help people actually practice it. You just share this kind of quote of for you to pay $10,000, it would have to do x. That's a really cool line to use. Is there any other advice there of just how to practice this idea of creating silence to help the potential customer share what they actually need? I encourage people to take an impave training improv training class, or two, just to get people out of their skin a bit. By the way, this advice applies to big companies also, not just small ones, and we have issues, and I hear other larger companies have issues where a big company will say, hey, we're an enterprise, and we're going to pay this big contract. All you need to do is build features, 123, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and go through security steps, ABCD, FGA, and the siren song of the big three-year contract of your first enterprise buyer. Even when you're already big, there's always a 4,000, 4,500 to 4,10 to 4,000. There's always more, and there are so many stories in the run being pulled in the middle, and they never actually use it in a contract never lands, same in partnerships, and so I would say the same thing, which is like if we're super serious about this, send us a million dollars. Why are us a million dollars? We'll happily wire it back any time you need it, but let's actually put some stake in the ground about the value, and I find that in the cases in which they're like, whoa, wait a second, no, absolutely not, we can't commit here. That's really good signal, because you're about to spend a huge amount of time building, something that might not ever be used, and that's the majority case I hear, or you might get the opposite, which is sounds great. Let's make sure our teams are trained on it faster. How can we get you to our office to explain it? We need it to really work with this system. We haven't talked about yet, and now that we're paying, we want to even faster, and so I find that just it puts a fork in the road towards faster success, or avoiding the non-success case, and even at striped scale, I've heard our founders somewhat push this methodology on us, where you, one from the outside might think, wow, it's a 8,000-person company, surely they have just regular ways of building things for larger customers, and we too need these style of commitments if we're going to go off red map. So, a big lesson you're sharing here is essentially, make sure people are ready to pay for something that they're asking for. That is the ultimate sign that they actually ready to pay is different than paying, significantly different, significantly different. I've also thought them up of, well, there's long as they're ready to pay, and they said they would pay, and they look into the contract, we should feel good. That is not the same as paying. Paying is an independent group of people saying, my problem is burning enough that I'm willing to exchange something I have that has value for the promise of what you're going to do, and now it's a real commitment. That is extremely different than ready to. So, I will often be on the phone or video whatever with a founder, and I will have them practice paying, like, I have them practice charging me. I'll just say, hey, I'm just a friend, I'm trying to help you out. There's a little bit self-serving, because I work at Stripe, and I want to get feedback on our products. I'll say, feel free to sign up for any invoicing or payment service. I don't really care which one, you're welcome to choose Stripe. If it's easy enough for you, I'd love to hear your two cents, and send me an invoice or a payment link for a dollar right now. Right now. That way, you don't, when it comes time to actually charge your first customer, it won't be your first time. It won't feel weird. You have already done this. You already have a dollar in your account. It'll just, you've already have your logo on the top right of the invoice. It will feel great. And I probably could go through my email inbox and just see one dollar receipts to random people because I'm just so convinced that the difference between paying and, like, willing, ready, thought I thought they would pay is, you know, night and day different. Yeah, there's this term, willingness to pay, that I feel like it should change as you're saying to just cross that willingness to, and just, hey, paying. Exactly. Yeah, and we found the money. There's no, like, there's no issue at all. Other tricks on how to get people going is ask them about their regular life as a human. You know, what did you do yesterday? And they'll be like, oh, it worked. I'm like, it worked or not? Whatever. And people just start to spill. They'll just start to spill and eventually they'll get to their biggest problem pretty quickly. Let's talk about metric kind of going in different direction. Many people told me I need to ask you about picking metrics. And the importance of metrics and how you think about metrics. So let me just maybe start with a question. Just why do you think picking the right metric and why are metrics so important in building successful products? I somewhat walk around with the belief that the product manager's responsibility is to produce product market fit. And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Sharks that showcase things are going up into the right on one hand and then tweets on the other. So metrics, like, you know, quantitative and qualitative. And I really see them as deep, deep siblings and equals. You really need both. It's not okay ours versus something. Like, there are some things you want the texture of the person on video showing how complicated thing was. And then also we're trying to make an economically viable system that we can run at large scale and you can't keep all that stuff in your head and need to measure it. And so I think metrics at their best are a numerical representation of the value we're providing for the customer. One could measure anything. You can just like start counting events and log lines. We've made it incredibly cheap to count stuff. And so now we have this big privilege of choosing what to measure. And I really just try to map it all the way back to what was the actually the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective. Whereas I think it's natural both because when you work inside of a company, you're just thinking internally. But also the way that the metrics are collected inside your application to be more internal oriented. How many people logged in? Okay, that's a fine measure. But how many people accomplished what they were trying to do after they logged in is not just necessarily sitting there as a single event in your database. You have to think about it a bit. Another reason why it's spent a lot of time crafting a small number of these metrics is they forced tradeoffs and decisions. So we could all sit around all day and say, hey, I heard all these customer problems. We should build X, Y, and Z. Another person could absolutely reasonably say, well, I heard from these customers. We should build one, two, and three. And they're all true. We could have a lot of success in both. But the majority case is that we don't build either. And we sit around and argue and becker and we go slowly. What are we going to do to naturally organically every day orient a larger group of people in the right direction and see if our tactics, our generating progress over time for a customer from their perspective and metrics on the left and a series of tweets on the right is like a pretty great combo. So here's an example. A couple of years ago, I've been working in our payments group at Stripe for a bit. And then I started working on some of our banking and incorporation services. So in Atlas, when I started working on it, it had some success. It had already existed for four or five years prior to me spending time on it. But when I started to look at the support tickets, people were pretty unhappy frequently. They had a docusine stuck in their email box. They needed co-founders address, but they didn't know their co-founders address. They couldn't log into the dashboard to figure out their 83B manual filing instructions. And we saw this, basically, in the first week of spending time on Atlas, I was just like, just show me all the support tickets. Are they happy? Support tickets? People are writing in. They're like, oh, I love this service. It's absolutely fantastic. Can you just do ABC more of me or are they like sad support tickets? Oh my god, they're all sad support tickets. And so just kind of asking ourselves, well, why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend? I was like, well, it would have to accomplish ABC activities for them. You know, it would have to get their company, it would have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS, it would have to handle all the downstream administrativeia. But surely, if they had a bunch of support tickets at the end, they're not going to go tell their friends to use this thing. We could measure all of the intermediate parts. We could measure the success rate and the frequency of incorporation services. And we do all those things. But if you like looked at the support tickets, there's just no way if you had a support ticket, you would recommend it to a friend. And so we suggested this metric to ourselves, companies that have no support tickets through the incorporation service, the whole process. From the moment you start the application open, actually the first page load at the very beginning, all the way through the process, waiting for the government, waiting for the IRS, and we give you two more weeks to write into support. We give like an extra buffer two weeks. And if you get through that whole thing with no support tickets, that's a yes. If you have any numbers for tickets, that's a no. And we just looked at the percentage of founders that were going through the service with zero support tickets, which is very different than looking at the average. You could, you know, the average is 0.3, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're, you know, that getting to 0.2 is going to cause them to tell their friends more. And we looked, and only 15% of founders were getting through Atlas with zero support tickets through that metric. And I just thought, okay, well, let's just drive that number way up. And let's look at the support tickets decide what people are needing and we'll bake it into the product and presumably it'll fix it. People like that more and then tell their friends. And over about 18 months, we took that number from 15% to 85. We basically just flipped it. And you could look at the market share, plotted on the same time frame and it's like, go for the same shape. And I think you have to find a measure by which it speaks directly to what the customer wanted. And then if you by accidentally leaked your dashboard to them, your customer would be ecstatic to learn that that's what you were measuring the whole time. You know, we were to showcase the internal as metrics, which we often just screenshot and publish. I think they'd be pretty happy to hear that we were spending all of our time making sure that none of them had support tickets. And it was incredibly encouraging and motivating to the engineers on the team because we could just assign them a topic. Hey, here's, look at all these support tickets. Why don't you come up with the product spec, the scope, the solution? Oh, want to learn more? Just reply to the support ticket email, figure out what they need it, what they need. And so we kind of turned all of engineers on the team into pms to go and want, like, one issue at a time, figure out what needed to change and build products for it. And that's where we push forward on a3b elections, automating it, sending in the mail for folks. We built our own signing service, we turned everything into a click. We did sort of the obvious things we saw on the tickets, but as the pms, I was able to just sort of not on autopilot, but really sit back and have contentful conversations with engineers who were bringing solutions and ideas for product, rather than one person going through all of the potential ideas, scoping them and assigning them, and because it was base in what people were saying and wanted, it was very motivating for everyone on the team. So, somewhat long answer, but figuring out something in which every day we can wake up and look at the same metric and with some confidence, know what to do, is so much better than, let's figure out what to do each month and kind of, like, start it from scratch. I think this is amazing and important, by just the power of a single metric that everyone on the team can understand rally around and use to prioritize the work they're doing. I've seen exactly the same sort of impact. Funny enough, Airbnb, one of the teams actually had a metric sort of, like this, basically, reducing the people contacting Airbnb with support issues. But when they're happening, is their team started just making it harder to contact support because they're like, maybe they don't need to contact support all about all these trivial issues, so maybe let's not, let's encourage them to figure it up themselves. Is there anything you've learned about trying to avoid these kind of second order effects that are kind of perversing incentives of a metric? We look at multiple metrics, but we will optimize around one and you have to use your own judgment to look at some of these countermeasures and pick them. We would also, you know, that would sort of be our overarching metric for a year, but then we would pick specific tactical metrics about how we would accomplish it. So just an example that both is how we solved the problem, but also it's just like a style of metric that was useful to us. Of course, some of these support tickets included things like, I'm waiting to hear back from Atlas about if they're going to approve my application, because Stripe is required for very good reasons to evaluate certain business types or sanctions lists and sort of worldwide products. So there's some, you know, incredibly should be incredibly quick, but there is a bit of like a review process. And of course, if you were not hearing back from us, you would be upset to try to make your company immediately. So it's ridiculous. Let's get back to us quickly. And so we knew that one of the reasons that people were writing to support was like, hey, what's up with my review? What's going on? And we knew that our tactic was just to drive up how quickly we got to a final decision on folks and to reduce the number of overturned rejections where someone writes back in saying, hi, like, come on, I'm totally just making something reasonable. What's up? Why did you reject me? And so we would pick these overarching single metric, which was, which was the companies with zero support tickets, but then we would have a specific KR that was owned by an engineer, which is the tactic that we're going to do. And so we would not allow ourselves the perverse tactics to sort of just casually exist. We would choose which tactics we're going to do and then set a metric for it. And the other reason I love this metric is it's a cohort metric by which you're trying to drive something up into the left. I sometimes people are getting excited about a chart that goes up into the right. It's kind of a meme. Oh, it's going up to the right. I'm really excited about charts that go up into the left. So you have to figure out some optimization that you're trying to maximize. And so in this particular case of this risk review, we would look at, hey, for the cohort of customers that started last month, how quickly did we get them to their final risk review by a number of days since they submitted? And so you want a chart that looks a lot like, here we go, you know, right up to the top because you want a hundred percent of your customers to get their final decision as quickly as possible. And when you know it, when we looked at the chart, it was doing this. Right. And so each month, we would just make it a little better, a little better, a little up to the left, up into the left, and now basically a hundred-ish percent of people get their risk review within an hour from, you know, a long tail taking a long time. And so we would constrain the tactic through a metric and then kind of like watch it through an optimization function. And then when we got to a point where we were happy with the target, we could put down the tactic. That's not like really useful thing about metrics. You can decide when you just stop a tactic because you get to some level of success that you're comfortable with and you can always choose to pick it back up later. So there's some really cool lessons here of just how to pick a good metric just to kind of maybe summarize what I'm hearing is, you kind of work backwards from essentially NPS, like how many Warren people are recommending Atlas, you found, okay, well, people that are complaining and having issues with support and running into problems. Most likely you're going to be detractors, not going to want to recommend Atlas. So let's have this really ambitious goals. Eventually, nobody has a support ticket slash, let's just track how many people have zero issues. And then you identify, okay, what's driving a lot of these support tickets? Okay, it looks like this risk timeline to like get to the certain milestone. Let's make that our goal for the next quarter, whatever. And focus there and then make it impact, and then I mentioned and move on to other levers within this bucket of zero contact. You have to pick the right metric for your audience in a wouldn't like a wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone. Those aren't a terrible one to export. But in the founder founders choosing where to get started, mindset, again, this is just deeply spending time listening to your customers, they all ask their friends, hey, how did you start your company? They want to talk to an older sibling of sorts about how it went. And so we decided that our go to market strategy would be to delight our current customers such that they would tell their friends. And other businesses, I mean, that's always somewhat useful. But you can also reach people with billboards and Google ads and other types of upsells. That's very difficult in the moment that someone is starting a company that's sort of a natural geographic. Can you get the picture of the bird exactly the right time? How are you exposed to go find people or about to start companies? Thankfully, they have this practice of just asking their friends. And so if their friends loved it, they're going to just recommend it. And that that has that the metric and the tactic and the go to market all lined up rather than sometimes in cases, you might hear someone's like, well, let's make the product quality better. Well, we all make the product quality better. But why? Like, why is this actually going to move what our customers want and the business for it? And when you can line them all up, it can be quite quite beautiful, especially when you can see it month or month for a long period of time. One other metric I think is I thought I would exports to anybody is if you are unsure what to measure, we have this, I don't know if we stole it from somebody else or if we came up with internally, whatever is just users having a bad day where we will just emit a log line. Anytime we think that a user bumped into a problem. So maybe they hit a 404 or maybe their payout was one day after the ETA or they had more than 10 payment declines. You can kind of brainstorm again, or just listen to customers, what would cause you to personally have a bad day and then just emit an event when that occurs? And then you could just make a bar chart, a stack bar chart, of all the bad day reasons and the frequency by which they're happening and is eye opening to see those frequencies. And it's kind of a metric I hadn't thought about until striped scale in which you just don't know what's happening until you emit the log line and count it, like the frequencies could be kind of mind blowing. And I think for almost any scale business, if you were bored one day and you're not sure what to measure, just make a user's having a bad day chart, emit a log line and count it as a bar chart. And then anybody else can add their own bar chart on top of it. And so it's become a way for teams to scale their understanding of users through metrics by just saying, hey, look, anytime anybody has an idea about why a customer is having a bad day, just emit a log line, like put it on this chart. And then what we can choose over time, which bad day reasons we want to burn down and hopefully just like eradicate them, not just minimize them. But it gave us kind of a background noise counting system for where there are problems. And anytime there's an incident or some customer issue, the first thing I think is, ooh, like I wonder if we have a bad day, I wonder if we have a bad day reason for this. And if we do, I actually feel okay. I'm like, oh yeah, it is a bad day for this customer, I wish I didn't have it, but at least we're aware. And we can evaluate it against other bad days that we want to burn down. What does sometimes a little bit grimey gears or is an option? He's like, when we didn't know about that bad day, and it's a surprise to us too, that is like for me's immediate action. It's like, okay, cool, we have to figure out a way to count this bad day. We got to get it on the chart, that way we can make an informed decision about, you know, when to invest in improving it. I love this idea. I haven't heard this before. So the idea is just make list of what happens to a potential customer that would cause them to have a bad day. What are some examples for Striper Atlas that you guys have been? Are you a Striper customer, Lenny? I am. I check my, when my news letters, the payments go through Striper check my dashboard every day. Cool. So what would be a bad day? Oh, I see. I see some silence happening here. You know, it's not loading. The numbers taking a long time to show up. Something being completely off there. Not being able to log in. Silence. That's good. I just want to keep going. The question is how much, you know, to the audience is how much of a science will he edit out before it. But this is what I'm talking about, right? Is, is, is I could guess them, right? Yeah. But and I can, as you were saying those, I know the, like, I know that you are all of those charts, right? I, I, I, I know the log in one because I, I feel that too. So I'm playing with Striper all the time and then get it to a fade to frequently and, you know, come on. I had the same cookie. I was just interested today. So we can't all that stuff and try to make it better every time. But I'm so excited when someone brings me a new bad day. I hadn't thought about yet, because that's just, it's like product cabinet. I love it. And your advice here is this doesn't necessarily have to be your goal or metric. It's just start watching this thing because that could lead to a lot of interesting ways of operating. A couple of just like quick metrics. Thank you. This is a bit of a, I don't know, some people like cycling or something. I guess I like metrics. I, like, people people get a really nice bike. I got a really nice metric. Hicking metric titles that make you feel something. So we could have called that measure of companies, you know, a number of companies that do not send a support ticket over X period and Y period, you know, with men. You know, you see, sometimes see these charts where the metric itself, like named itself, this is just companies with zero support. That's it. And the brevity and the focus and the customer mindset built into the chart name can become currency inside a company. It's like, oh, I'm working on making the like this chart go up. And it feels good to just say the name out loud, rather than some complicated underscores and men's and maxes. And you know, the database field name is like still in the chart title. These, these are aesthetic choices, but I think make dramatic differences in the cultural willingness for people to buy in and get excited about it and reduce the need of a product person to just remind everyone every day why they're doing it. It's like the metric is motivating us because it's a motivating thing to talk about. And, and then lastly, on metrics is, this is good hygiene that people should bring to their measures. Percentages should have 41 bullet that, you know, significant digits if only two of the digits are relevant. You should keep all the measures of your dashboard on the same X axis. These are just stylistic things that increase the frequency that people want to just wake up every day and open the dashboard and look at it. And that is so powerful if your whole team is looking at the same set of information that has the heartbeat of the customer every single day. In fact, we can measure at stripe the usage of our dashboards by team. And so we can see which teams are themselves looking at their own metrics. And that is an incredibly useful predictor of how on the same page they are and how and how customer obsessed they are. So I just think it's, it's not an area that's sort of behind the scenes being counting reliability only is the machine hot. You can make metrics that mean something to the customer and you would be proud if they were to be screenshot and put on the internet to be like, wow, I feel like that company is taking their promise to me seriously and I can see myself on those metrics as a customer. That's where we're really shooting for. So to me or back with you just said there, which I think is a subtle point potentially is just making the dashboard look nice, like the hygiene of the naming conventions and the decimal points and the chart. You're in your experience. You find that really powerful and important. A couple years ago straight did internal work to make an internal metrics dashboard system. And we have a special place called Go metrics. Many people use a Go slash service where you can just quickly go to your URL. And again, I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy. My rule is if it's not on Go metrics, I'm not going to look at it. So if people can send me one off queries or charts or screenshots or presentations or emails of charts and data, but that is in the wind. You know, we can't interrogate the query metrics are almost always wrong for many weeks. We didn't quite get the definition correctly. You have to live in the metric for quite a while before you really believe in it. And so if you're always looking at some one-off version, it's just very difficult to for to rise up to the level of importance that is a thing we should trust to help us decide what to do. That's an incredibly high bar. And so I just find you have to look at it frequently enough. And if you're going to look at it frequently enough, it means it needs to be in a discoverable place. It's almost going through a couple stages of grief about it because we'll kind of put a metric up in a place and everyone initially is like, wow, this is great. I was so excited to finally see this. And then a couple of days later, like, quite understand it. What does that actually mean? I saw this other metric from this other angle that kind of makes it feel counterintuitive that it's like this and then you kind of look into it and wait a second. We've been counting it wrong the whole time. Oh no, and then you look at it the third week and it's a completely different version. And then you hope that we forget about it and maybe we'll go into something as a note. We're not going to forget about it. Week four comes around your way to second. Okay, this is like that in the team meeting starts. Hey, just a reminder, let's just bring up the metric again, not a screenshot of it, go over the URL and just that level of frequency and specificity and ritual around it is what brings it into the decision making culture. And again, we treated the exact same as we do tweets. It's a quantitative and qualitative right next to each other. And because you're putting that amount of attention to it, you can't have a thousand metrics. We just don't physically have time the day to bring that level of care and understanding to so many things. So then it forces you to window, so many things you could care about down to a small number of things that you really must care about. And again, that practice goes back to do you really understand what your customer wants. And so for all these tactics, it's about finding our customer wants and then different versions of how do we sort of know it's true over time and our tactics improve it. Sounds so simple when you describe it, though. 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They're using it's hopefully better than their alternatives and they're starting to use it and we have some real traction. You could still measure the success. You could still look at the tweets and then of course you go to pick it up yourself and you're like wait a second this thing is horrible. How did it get so bad? Anyone who's built a product that has gone over the horizon of it's actually in production and being used for some a year or more as you go to iterate on it. Especially when you're in a larger company there's multiple teams and products going on. There's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad. Actually the hard time naturally explaining it. You're kind of think yourself well it's code it just must be running the same every day. But somehow you do enough things in a row and what was once a smooth end to end flow for accomplishing a task or a customer as all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated broken mall that were all the doors are busted and you have to you know exactly the way to get through the dashboard to solve your problem. Wait a second we just I thought this was great just a second to go. So I mean many of us have experienced that. Now okay what are we going to do about it? Well one is it is really difficult to take time during the day to allow yourself to even know that this is true because if you're working on one particular team you're going to have some next thing you're shipping you're going to have your customers you're going to be doing great product work meanwhile your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world and decrease all the trust you've earned to build what you're building now it is actually difficult to decide well what hours during the week am I going to block like block off from my future progress to see it from the customer's perspective today and they're various techniques to try to incentivize or to structure a group of people to do that stripe has a thing called friction logs as well which is a single individual will pretend to be a customer and go through a product experience end to end and write it down and that has been quite successful at stripe for very motivated people who can block off the time and have the wide enough context to do a complicated thing and end and have a time to write it up and the position the company to send it out as a critique to potentially not just your own team but in a whole organization so that's actually a pretty high bar to crossover so I was kind of brainstorming what could we do to make this more fun and have the frequency that which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase and we kind of iterated through a through a through a through ideas and landed on this thing called study group which is basically a random group of people inside the company they might not work on any particular team they might not all be pms just like literally anyone who wants to sign up the support person sales person someone who's you know on our events team an engineer and our infrastructure stack anybody can sign up for a study group we show up maybe four to eight people total we pretend to be some company with some outcome problem maybe we want to accept money in person at an upcoming farmers market or we want to run a multi-country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business something quite complicated we could pick any motivating goal and there are two rules to study group rule one is you do no longer work at stripe you you're not you're not you do not work at stripe not pretend you work don't work at stripe not try to forget you do not work at stripe you've never worked at stripe you work at when we make up a name of the company you know dolphin aquarium industries and we will pick a CEO of the company from the from the group and amongst us and okay Jenny is the CEO hey Jenny like what what do you want to do today like well I want to sell in person tickets to the dolphin aquarium it's like cool where would you start all right so we actually in body the customer we will not break character it's a little bit of improv thing and as the kind of my stroke of study group I will firmly but kindly if I hear you use any internal stripe knowledge which is natural to do because you work on a team and you you know where that button really is and you know the docks length goes a little bit to the wrong place but if you click the other length you get to it if I can see you use any internal stripe knowledge I'll just pause and say hey let's redo the sentence or redo what we did with with no stripe knowledge as a reminder you don't work it's right and it takes us a couple times but people really get into it and all the sudden we'll start making up characters and you know the CEO will be like oh Tim you're a designer you know where are we going to get the color palette all the sudden this a person who's not a designer right in real life is now all of a sudden having to practice the empathy from to be in the customer position and because we're going to be doing it for an hour and a half in a time you start you actually start to believe that you don't work it's right and you work at dolphin aquarium industries and you start to really feel it that's real one you don't work it's right and rule two is we're not here to solve any problems we're not here to critique we're not here to solution or suggest we're not here to file bugs all of those things is recorded we can do that later whatever this is just about practicing empathy for the customer and going through the product and we have done more than 25 of these at striped thus far in the last just this year last few months of 2024 more than 250 people have gone like participate in a study group and it is deeply eye-opening for those involved the responses are you know sort of business emotional you know not not not not not super emotional but just wow i i i i sort of can't believe how hard it was to accomplish xy and z i thought we were amazing at blouse like well we actually are so pretty good but we need to get back towards amazing or wow that i didn't even know that internally people would know that our products did one two and three and this has become so internally popular that teens have adopted for themselves and so we've kind of franchise study group internally already where different teams will will run it but i think we're going to continue it because it i think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic people just want more group activities i think some of it is the slowness by which we do it we're not rushing through it um which others i appreciate your podcasts as well as like let's like really get into the details and not be rushed for time you you forget that you have a meeting at the end kind of the amount of time no one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all it's a random group of people we don't even introduce ourselves about what team we work on uh we're just all here as participants to embody the customer and then i think lastly and a reason why it's it's it's work and these are many of these just actually super surprising to me i wouldn't have been able to print the head of time is it is just fun it's just fun people want to make up the name of the company they're excited about what dolphin industries would sell a person who's not a cTO in real life gets to pretend to be a cTO and it's just it's a little theatrics to it but it has been different enough from our our other approaches to for a company like stripe which is already like pretty focused on this topic that we think that it's there's enough legs here that we're gonna keep it and and kind of invest in groups pretending to be a customer and going through it painstakingly slowly rather than only demos or only writing which has other benefits but this is the participation of a larger group and and more fresh eyes so it's been it's been fun and we named it study group i guess i named it study group because i wasn't sure what it would be initially so i just came up with something that sounded cutesy uh but uh gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time and this is where we've landed it's fascinating that something that there's so much the atrics and uh ceremony necessary for a product team and a company to find out these things about their product you would think people are like oh we know we know how a onboarding looks we know all these things but you're basically what you're saying is you don't and you need to do these sorts of things in order to really know what your product is like these days the customer does not live in our walls they aren't they're not they're not here you know they're they're not they don't know our lingo and it is just so natural for our internal mindset in lingo to flow into the application of our time and you need some counterbalance to get there and i think that's an uh has to be an unnatural counterbalance i used to frustrate me actually more like wow why are we all like why aren't we doing it's well we're actually doing great work to move something forward and we have our our local optimizations it would be difficult to get to this level specialization that multi product companies are trying to do without that level of focus on a per team basis but then you need something unnatural to help us bring it back and so i'm constantly looking for non punitive fun ways objectively to get more perspectives from the outside in if it's breaking the fourth wall to get on the phone on Twitter if it's looking at a metric of users having a bad day which is just like counting what's happening can't argue with that or a random group of people just kind of scratching their head trying to find a button those are truths those are truths in the world that we're trying to make sure are inputs to all of our teams and if you don't have those inputs i can totally naturally see where the entropy of the world like leads you to have Frankenstein bad products even when all the individual parts are like well-oiled and run by great people so you need something unnatural there's an interesting trend there and thread there are talks so far broadly there's just like an obsession with making something great and awesome and then a layer below is just an obsession with user experience being as great as possible and for a lot of pms there's not a direct line between make the experience as amazing as possible to growth and revenue and success and things like that and it feels like for you and first stripe broadly there's this innate implication if we're making the experience better and better and better we will grow you're not in your head of the sideways a little bit so i'd love to hear just your thoughts and just like the obsession with experience and user issues and okay but we all should have to go over the business what are the metrics are moving if someone else has a strategy for moving revenue that isn't getting it from customers i want to know about it because it is so hard to get it from customers if there's some faster path please tweet me and tell me about it because it's very hard a lot of work to do so if there's something else i want it on the table but i often find it's part of the product experience so maybe it's internal sales tools we can do a study group about our internal sales tools process and our deal desk and our margin structure we can do a friction log on our third party vendor process or a migration service or the way ecosystem partner helps deploy our services and into a big enterprise like nothing is sort of off limits from product in fact i was chatting with the friend who runs a company and they were small company on the verge of product market fit starting to starting to feel customers starting to pull and they're like oh but our self service funnel is it's so leaky and we have all this support coming through self service first of all congratulations unbelievable that they're going through your product even attempting self service and contacting you the majority case would be no one tries or they try and fail and don't contact you so again what a problem to have and two they wanted to minimize the support in that particular case it's like well what's actually in those support tickets what's in those sales context there's a really sales context they're like oh they want to learn more about how they get started they want to know the expertise about this is a particular company's a health care related company they wanted to know their health health care choices available they wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had to wait i was like that's the product that's the product like nothing you're talking about is the product turn those moments during your self service process into not self-serve and make the make the product experience be let's get you on the phone let when the and now when they when when they get on the phone they know the first name of the person they're talking to because they they have it from the onboarding for and all the sudden it feels like you are still in the product but it's not software now it's a person but it's a person backed by internal software which knows as much as as they can about the customer what they want and i was really inspired by fidelity which is a big financial institution where you know many people listening might have switched jobs and had to move their 401k or something like this from job A to job B you know maybe in some university it'll be three clicks but not today or certainly now when i tried a couple years ago you got a call and go to phone tree and all this shenanigans and then i got on on the line with someone from fidelity you know like high jeff they knew about the old company they confirmed my address there's a week by the way there's a not a digital process yet we're going to FedEx you an envelope and inside it is going to be the thing for you to sign here's going to be exactly where to sign here's like a picture we're going to sign we've put another envelope inside that envelope ready to go and so you just take the papers from envelope one sign them where it says and put them in envelope two like put it back to the fest like wow that is product that is a product experience where i think some people would say oh look the product experience has to only be in software so i feel when people think oh you know product quality and craft has some limit towards business value like there's some asymptote that you have to be like well kind of product plate time quality is over we need to talk about business it's like let's figure out exactly what is causing the business to happen and make it product even if it doesn't look naturally the same as our as our sort of SaaS software browser mobile whatever versions i think we can see the entire experience as it and from there i include the sales process i include this support process i include you know tools that help with compliance and everything else and again if people have a way to make all those things bad and lead to great increasing revenue over time is sustainable ways i i want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than the person that we're trying i love that and clearly it's a work for stripe just one last question i want to talk about atlas and dive into just like what is atlas and how is it doing and things like that i know there's some new stuff coming that you're going to share but one last question about study groups who how do you decide what product you're going to pick to do a study group on and then what is expectation with the result i imagine there's a PM sitting around like oh my god i just got this 10 page report on all the problems so initially i just made up a list of stuff that i thought we find a study group to kind of kick it off and now because it has a bit of an internal brand and it's exciting and people have gone to study group say nice things about study group there they actually proactively say hey we should study group blah or we're launching something next week we should study group before it goes out the door or now i actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group of based on what people want and then i now we're kind of again franchising at so we're going to have study group captains and people around their own study group since i can we can really scale this behavior but we did our first study group of an internal tool recently and said i think it's going to catch on just anything at all can be study group there just takes about an hour and a couple people and you open up the zoom and that's it and then for expectation wise look you can it is it is so tempting to put more regulation on something okay well everything coming out of this program needs to be scored and rubriced and have SLAs that is extremely reasonable as some of these next steps because we do notice things that are of serious issues and we you know we have some formal processes inside of stripe for elevating bugs to certain priority levels that get tagged and have SLAs for team to acknowledge and review and so we kind of funnel the outputs of a study group into our already existing formal processes rather than having some new special thing that's going to bother up particular team i will say though that it is difficult to watch one of these study groups and if you are the team you know involved in some piece of it and not want to act on it because seeing your fellow teammates struggle to use your thing in some way is more motivating than the customer because you can kind of always say the customer well it didn't really know or they have some special setup you know you probably shouldn't say those things but you can kind of rationalize whereas a group of people incentivize to have actually accomplished it who got together to do so painstakingly slowly not being able to do so if that's not what excites you as a product person to want to solve you know it's like the things that it not for you but then again you have your own organization system you have your own things you need to shift that's and and study group doesn't have a mandate that comes from it we have our own it's more of a cultural piece of information that is very high signal and then people tend to use that high signal for quick prioritization I will say that we have added SLS to certain bug levels that begin to match a bit of our incident process so you know an incident strike like in many companies you know like pencils down fix the problem severity levels non-negotiable slack rooms happen more rooms all that stuff you know you don't want to do that with every single bug but we have a rubric of craft-related tags for our bug system and if it is a sort of a p0 bug which is not an incident right it doesn't mean just put down your pencils you do need to acknowledge it at stripe within seven days and even if it doesn't mean to fix it it's like a person looks at it and says hey we're going to like do it or not do it that's still pretty strong bar for a non-incident related craft issue it feels just at stripe there's this cultural focus on we want to make the product great we want to make the experience as great as possible a lot of companies it's just teams we have this goal we're not going to do anything that is in driving this metric in goal that we have and I think for teams like that it's hard to hear just like oh someone's going to send you all of these problems with your experience you know there's like the negative version where the founders like go through the product like a CEO of a larger company just oh my god look at all these problems you need to fix these immediately and a lot of times those it's like completely distracting from the things they need to do the goals they're trying to drive things that actually really really mattered that the CEO may not be thinking about and it feels like you're trying to find this balance of like here's like problems that exist you don't need to fix them you probably should here's like the most important stuff but also there's often you find a correlation between make the experience better you're going to you're going to do better there's a huge amount of trust here involved in your colleagues which is we want to provide teams great information and the best teams welcome that information it doesn't mean that it comes with a all-ter opinion from the outside world that says you must do x we have a rubric on some of the craft related bugs but but again we also allow our we let the teams relapal them and so maybe it's actually not a p0 from their eyes and we like that's the trust we put in the teams I think that the failure mode is when you don't look and and so we need unnatural safe fun lore that gets us out of our chair and into the customers mindset best is if it's you and your your own customer okay second best would be sitting right next to the customer in the outside world and then like okay fine I'll take a third best which is pantomining the customer and with a zero with enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge if you have practices in those three categories I'm comfortable with the failure modes I love that this definitely gonna be the longest episode I've ever done with exactly what I expected and I'm happy that we're doing this well there's you everyone go 1.75 x or something I like when people are like oh this episode was really good I had to slow down to 1.75 or something like how are you even listening at that speed now it's one 1.0 speed that's what this episode needs to be there's two more areas I want to spend some time on one is Atlas we talked a lot about on the surface of Atlas I want to help people understand what the hell it is and the stuff that's happening there and two I want to talk about getting stuff done at a big company something that you've done at Stripe and I hear you have a lot of good advice on so first of all what is Atlas we've talked a bit about it with the best way to understand what Atlas is and who it's worth in 2016 a bunch of Stripes were traveling the world Stripes is what we call a teammates here and they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world and you would hear this unbelievable story from incredible entrepreneurs who are have a laptop which is that they'd have to fly to the United States on an airplane to make a US company in order to get access to use financial system to raise money from US or global investors often to take you know USD or to charge US customers and you know you could have sat around and said huh is that's illegal they don't live they don't live in the US you know can they have a US company absolutely the US loves this it is incredibly encouraged for people from around the world to make a US company and many people do now why did it require an airplane right and so you you start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst someone with a laptop who has access to the whole internet and that is a burning problem right that is not a tier 3 issue I am not able to run my business about getting on an airplane should be sending alerts off in your whole psyche that you have discovered something important and so wasn't that straight at the time and I'm very but I'm very thankful that I was running my own start at the time I was very thankful that the people at the stripe decided to try to tackle that problem and so Atlas is a way to start a company in a few clicks and we think that's an incredibly big deal because while there are smart humans across the whole planet the opportunity that they have is not uniform and it isn't but it's a little strange because it's all the same MacBooks and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and and smarts and so what can we do to dramatically lower the barrier to great people solving problems and we found over and over again that increasing the ease and simplicity and decreasing the cost and complexity tends to lead to just more of that thing and we have a fundamental belief that there should be more startups and they're not finite and that belief comes from both just a core hope because there are so many problems in the world that don't seem to be being solved fast enough by our current institutions and larger companies that we think will actually you know we need entrepreneurial energy to tackle them and then it also comes from experience of seeing it happen. Instacart signed up for stripe with a Gmail address and then COVID happened and they delivered critical food to everyone when people were reasonably not allowed to go to the grocery store easily so you just don't know what the next Gmail address is going to do and so in Atlas we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started and that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time and so over the last few years for those who have either used Atlas or started a company or maybe fall on Twitter a bit you might have seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist being automated and and so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83D election which is this absolutely Byzantine silliness system and by which you have 30 calendar days to send to one page document to the IRS that could radically the economics of how you are incentivizes a founder and this is not one of these you know greedy loophole situations the IRS in the 1980s made this this IRS rule in order to spur a more entrepreneurship they want this and the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to you have to send a snail mail in to an IRS address in a particular format in a particular way with no verification that happened at all and if you do it 31 calendar days there's no redo okay now again if you're a product person you hear this founders terrified all day long about the same issue just alarm bells in your head all the whole time and so I had experience it for myself as a founder several times and I also just heard story after story and I just put on my to do list for the team we are going to solve this A3B election thing and there are very good reasons not to do it because it comes with potential huge liability you don't want to screw it up it's snail mail you're really going to monetize this you know this is really what the kind of competitive advantage to do it you can kind of argue yourself not to do it in a million ways but again back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning into a single click it was obvious to us and we and we got started on it infrastructure only we've been automating these steps and when this podcast air as I guess today it will be true that when you go to start a company on Atlas it will just be a single click you go to type in your friends names how what the name of the company will be and it will tell you that's available automatically or not you can split the company up 50 50 or whatever you want to do build a few things and you click go and then like a burrito coming to you like a pizza tracker we will just handle all of the downstream activities that used to be hey remember to come back in and purchase your shares why am I purchasing my shares I'm just getting started I do why am I writing a check for 10 dollars and putting into a bank account that I can't even open yet and then I have to wait for that to be done to get the A3 option all of those steps are now just handled in the background so that we can get you ready for business in a day or two and so you can quit your you know this is our vision so you can quit your job on a Sunday night get the Sunday scary's I'm done with this thing and on Monday morning fill out this form and the next day be able to run a billion dollar business because we will have automatically handled getting you access to banking systems to payment systems to handling all the equity paperwork filing A3B election where you can just shift from having worrying about the company starting process to just building and shipping and you'll just get kind updates in the background cool the IRS is giving you a tax ID cool your A3B election is filed cool all the founders have their equity and you're ready ready to go on the cap table and we've done this by deeply integrating with the governments and deeply integrating with banking partners at where we can get you access to the financial system before the IRS and the other governments come back with with their sort of official yeses because we have we take care of the problem in the background by which we're vaccine phone calling filling out forms on your behalf and so we just want to take all that complexity and just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start that checklist that they go through we just have the robot to exactly the same thing and so in some ways is a really big deal in a big ship because it it completely automates the company starting process but in other ways it's an incredibly incremental step that it's taken us three years to get to where we had to systematically automate the internal steps each one and now we've done the work to wrap it all up into one button and you can just watch how your companies doing the dashboard well first of all congrats Jeff and the Atlas team on shipping this I know this a big milestone and it's been a long time coming yeah Atlas was actually a little reasonable before we decided to do all this work it's like why do why do this next step of completely automating it when it was actually like fairly straightforward before Atlas has above 80 NPS which is quite high Apple is in the low 60s AirPods is 75 I love my AirPods so Atlas in the 80s with almost 50% response rate is quite high and so we still chose to do another year of work to automate all of this work behind behind the scenes because we see that companies are charging their customers sooner when they go through this automated process versus waiting and it's you know a little strange you just started your company well what is it really matter to wait next or seven days or 20 days before you can get off you before you can really get going on business those are really fragile days which are building and to some of our conversation earlier that amazing feeling of getting your first customer and being in it with them and money actually exchanging hands and getting that if we can slide that forward in the world by a couple of days or weeks which we we're seeing like half the time it takes to get to your first customer just take like shave a whole week off of your company and you can kind of see GDP being like born like sooner and you you win my whole life knowing that okay GDP is not finite and it can grow but I've never really seen it and now I've actually seen it grow faster sooner and I think anything we could do to just move that forward is going to inspire and lower the bar for more people to be an entrepreneur because I'll see how satisfying that can be and another stat with which really was interesting to me recently is that we have seen since doing much of this automation work that more solo founders are using at less than ever before and I think it's because you can just do a lot more in the internet as a founder with no code tools and everything else and get going very cool to see that bringing the best to the internet and making it available worldwide can cause more people can be correlated with more people becoming entrepreneurs and I think we should just keep doing that there's incredibly inspiring and I think this is going to be a huge deal like it's hard to think about how many what sorts of changes in tech could transform how many companies are started and how many companies not just started but actually happen because to your point you may start in the like never mind a few days later if it's still stuck in some queue totally and then you don't know where these things are going to go we have the sort of cohort of 2024 startups and Atlas got to $50 million in revenue twice as quickly as the cohort in 2023 and so we kind of also think sometimes oh's the pandemic that pushed everything online that would those are our best years it's like we're seeing the earliest cohort charts of new startups just like crack cracking up into the right and that's very exciting because you also hear sometimes while the funding market is down and valuations and this and that and the other that is much more of a point in time capital analysis and much less of business that just help businesses are working day to day it's really in the revenue that that is representative of their of their futures and that looks amazingly bright and then of course these companies go off to do pretty wild things companies that have started through Atlas has been 55,000 of them to date are doing $5 billion a year in revenue I think it actually resets their expectations of what others tools will be in the future it's like well it was so easy for me to get my company started well why is it so hard to do banking well thankfully there are some great services for it but I think it's if we can if we can push people towards expectations higher then they will want to make their companies better and and which is all benefit from that how much of this is based on you guys doing like sending facts is and sending mail yourself like I don't know how much you can talk about the behind the scenes but is there a lot of through this ops element to automating some of this Atlas is in total 10 people which is I think a relatively small group for the role that it plays in the wider started ego system and we just don't pick up work we can't automate because we know that we need the leverage and so we're not going to tackle we're not going to put ourselves in situations in which we have to compete to be the best we're going to put ourselves in situations where we can automate it and be the only and and like that's a different mindset so in terms of you know why we picked up 83B election as a topic like when we made that decision you made a commitment that we're going to we're going to do this forever like work we're going to do this forever is a piece of infrastructure for the rest of the internet that is a very high bar to to set as the thing you're going to do and so we're happy to take our time this is part versus a go-go-go versus the long-term compounding go-go was when we assigned one engineer hey it's your job today to send one piece of paper to the office with this third-party mail service why doesn't matter today just send a single piece of paper to the office and incredible engineers and she went on to lead all the way through the election work she sent it and the proof of just receiving the piece of paper at the office that we had just sent yesterday is incredible proof right work well look I mean the history election is just sending this piece of paper to the IRS like we just did it right that that go-go goes as soon as possible was extremely useful because it's just like look this exists like we can do it come on on the long-term compounding part we were extremely serious about how we picked our third party vendors and backup vendors and what promises and SLAs and reporting systems and alerts and playbooks and backup processes like this in a very intense amount of internal structure we use and but again we have to look at where the value is the value is a making sure it happens does it need to be us sending the mail does it need to be us talking the government not necessarily and we have chosen to work with third parties and many backup their parties as well because one there's expertise in the world of physically printing and sending mail that the 10 of us are not going to today become experts in and two I think it also causes us to build better software in that we now need to evaluate if something's actually working because it's happening externally whereas when you build it yourself again you have this natural feeling what we've built it it must be working oh later we'll add alerts you know later when their problems will figure out playbooks will look when it's the third party building it you're like wait a second whims if they screw up like cool we better figure that out we better both CR all the results we better you know do all these check sums we better and it would be awesome if we could always treat our internal work that way but because it was external it forced us to be more rigid where we needed to be rigid and create interfaces and kind of commitments and again we work with a bunch of great third parties and backup third parties to execute this and each year we write a document called should we do this ourselves and we look at the other nine of us around the room ago of course we shouldn't let's go onto something else so again we're just we're just really stitching it together but ensuring that it happens awesome okay I was imagining back's machines just there are back machines occurring there are back machines occurring not in the straight lines there and there are phone calls being made and there are robots waiting on phones on hold as well there's so amazing there's quite a lot going on yeah yeah I here I saw stat that one in six new Delaware corporations are now started on stripe atlas that's absurd yep I'm very excited to tell you when it's one in five but I that is not today okay we're going to run our way sounds like we're close the other stat I have here is that the fastest during cities for startups uh here's what I have I don't know if you know this but Boulder, Shenzhen and Las Vegas they're everywhere and the part one of the it's not this is like stat we kind of came up with a little bit last year that I I've just personally deeply obsessed with is founding teams in which the co-founders are in multiple countries so like we kind of nicknamed this again it's like they're giving things a good title headlines cross border founders wow like more than 20% of multi multi-founder teams have at least one founder from another country that is astounding today that the internet could bring people together like that and I think that's going to provide more perspectives more solutions will be local and global just all perspectives are great and and again I think the Alice team itself represents this we were very intentional of how we built the Atlas team it's a majority women and we've more more diversity to to hire but we were just very intentional to make an a team that had diverse perspectives you've been on teams that don't have her diverse perspectives of any type they are so much worse there's no real science necessary here we just enforce that that we had the opportunity to build this team that way and it was really important to me that it represented the world we wanted things to look like and and to represent and you know we just had to be very intentional about it because I've made mistakes in my career previously where my startup was all men when we sold to box one of them and it on each higher was harder and harder and harder to hire some of a different background just naturally folks didn't want to join that type of team and that was the last time I've ever ever ever going to make that mistake which is that early the candidate pull must match where you want the team to go it's not a down final problem it is an up final problem and where you have to just make sure that for each role you're comfortable with the out like with the with the distribution of of people on backgrounds in your candidate pull and go from there and I think that is one of the reasons why that 10 person in group is so effective is it has just a lot of diversity and perspective another skill Jeff Weinstein is incredible at that I wasn't even aware of we're going to add them to the list and I actually saw a photo of the team and I noticed that and so great work is there anything else on Atlas that you wanted to share before I get into how you actually made Atlas happen at a company like Stripe that is a billion things to do we just want to hear about what's hard for you you know if you look back in your emails and and you remember if you started a company recently you're starting company right now the whole world is getting on you to pick a customer solve for problem 10 times better than their alternative get it to them charge for it become economically viable and build a great business that provides great services we are not counting on you to become experts at this silliness of administratively running your company this you know imagine life without Google docs and where you'd have to hire an IT person to run your IT back end on on employee three you'd have an IT person or imagine the world without AWS for EC2 or S3 or any of these cloud services and your rack and computers yourself you're just absolutely not going to try things we just like we just see the company structure the the structure bringing people together to be like that and we want to automate more and more and more of it and turn into software so we're we're looking for the next things to work on we have a couple ideas but we expect to turn more of groups of people working together that administration and just off where and I think I'm just going to unlock huge amount more people choosing to do it interesting I'm so curious with that ends up being like if you really think about what you're doing here if you believe that entrepreneurship and innovation and technology make the world better yours creating such an unlock to allow more of that and like I said I think it's hard to imagine and think of other examples that could be as transformative and impactful as just making this process it's funny because I go back to again I also hear from founders entrepreneurs like I can't think of an idea I need to I need to kind of need to start up idea and yet everything in the world is broken and I also recall my first startup early 2010 2012ish joined a friends company that was started at the same time that the striped founders started striped and that is I think about that a lot because with the same information knowing how hard it was to accept online payments I chose to work on something else where they didn't they work on making it easy in seven lines of code to accept payments online which turned out to be really useful so I I really encourage people to be very sensitive to the problems that they see and just not let any any little hiccup go unnoticed and I think Atlas is really a manifestation of that which is let's actually look at every single thing you went from hobby to economically successful operation and which of the any moment along the way you shouldn't have had to do and we think those things are fair game to play with in any topic I think that there are many more gigantic businesses and important things to be solved sitting in plain sight I can't see them always but when you hear if you sit enough silence and hear the same people complain about the problems you too might find something as big as online payments are hard which was sitting right in front of all of us and I think it's important to note it doesn't necessarily have to be a venture back venture scale company right there are many most businesses in the world are not venture back venture scale billion dollar companies you can build a profitable company it it's a kind of funny we've all put this badge of honor of giving away a lot of your company you know people really love owning a lot of their company and being successful so you just got to pick the right capital structure for your business and again the amount of money that has been generated of the companies that started through LS you said $5 billion basically that's the GDP of that list that Atlas and that's a revenue per year and that's growing year yeah and you know obviously some a lot of it would have happened anyway but still there's accelerated it's probably growing faster a lot of it probably never would happen though yeah we we ran a survey little bit ago we need to rerun this where we just ask people what they started their business about without Atlas and about 20% of people said they wouldn't have or wouldn't have had then and again these things are fragile right and it's not all it's not all Google employees leaving their job to build something it's people from every possible background every possible role every possible job every possible age group who see problems and can solve it so it's dramatically more fragile than people think well great work Jeff and team Atlas and Stripe in general fun let's talk about one of the last thing there's like so many more things I still want to talk about maybe we'll have a quick yeah we're doing fast let's make it too expedient so this LS is basically a zero to one product I know you didn't start initially it was there but you took it from I don't know maybe took it from point five or something to one 100 now and a lot of people struggle with starting things like this within larger companies like Stripe's a large company right they it's like a very innovative well run company but it's also a large company and clearly you you made you made shit happen you and your team what kind of things have you learned actually let me read a quote here's a quote that kind of describes you being good at this from one of your former colleagues who will go and named Jeff is really good at cutting through the BS you hear so much about frameworks and all this complicated stuff that people talk about in PM circles when the most straightforward obvious thing is probably right I get so annoyed after calls with Jeff sometimes because I know he's right about something I bang my head against the wall for months and so talk about just like what you've learned about getting stuff done at a large company but you need to do right not having things be your idea I think is really powerful like I just talked to 50 customers who all yell the same thing here they are in varieties of quotes and forums and the rest of it and you put some three bullet points of strategy around why it's important it's going to help you in more market share and the rest of it and how you can do it well cool I mean what else could we want to do maybe somebody has something we're 51 people have the same burning thing but the majority failure mode is we do nothing that's the majority failure mode and so one aligned people with deep customer stories story boarding some solution visually with a Sharpie and not a pencil not figma initially not higher low fidelity I can never remember which one is the detailed one but just like Sharpie what is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem and that's you know Pixar style story board you don't need to be a designer you can just draw like stick figures on a piece of paper or whimsical or everyone to do and with those things if you're not asking for you know this the sun in the moon on head count and team size to make some for progress like who could stop you you know let's get some first version working it was very motivating to get that single piece of paper in the mail with which was blank to kick us off on the 83 be election and again by the time as podcast errors we'll across 10,083 be elections filed and we have done them all 100.00% on time with the burning use case why customers are going to need it why we can do it cheaply effectively safely over a long period of time and here's the way to get tangible forward progress quickly against the stick figure vision but with something in the browser or want one version of it let's just get one thing working one time I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof rather than proof by theory or proof by debate just like look we did it one time hey I'm holding the piece of paper yeah pretty motivating you know we just we just printed out their information we'd be done okay actually there's a lot to do other than just that but it it really pushed us forward so I think cutting through a little bit of the red tape is about momentum and making each step not such a big deal and asking for less permission and then of course once you have a little bit of that under your belt you're going to naturally be trusted with taking more of those kinds of bets paired with some of the things we talked about earlier of everyone's looking at the same place about the metrics everyone can watch the success you we don't need to do big internal updates with long-winded PowerPoint presentations and scrambles the night before people just go to the metrics page and see how we're doing that that that brings so much trust to the group that people start going from hey why do we have this atlas thing that doesn't you know really produce so much money is like charging people companies when they don't have money like we're a big payment business how to even compare these things to wow look at the progress that they are making against the mission and look at it look at it's impact on the curves and you start to like root for it more I think that's how we got it there I will say one other thing which is that making something economically viable is extremely important and so when I I'm probably the fourth person to run atlas and it's quite a pantheon of people prior to me including the founder of Mozi which is a compliance startup water shed which is this amazing climate reporting tool also led atlas Patrick McKenzie patio 11 for many folks do wow what an alumni group this we are ourselves a dinner we are ourselves a man quite quite a group and now we have a new person who's so I you know I technically no longer lead atlas so we've hired up a whole team which is really exciting and herely Halverson who's joined us about a year or two ago she leads atlas now and you can find her into her she's fantastic and we just a we swap jobs over a course of a year just one month at a time the roles and so she worked for me and then I worked for her and then and she's gone up to hire some amazing people to run atlas so it's really quite a privilege to have these people we've never time so but it was really important for us to communicate why we're going to run this in an economically viable way and I think that applies to all products and all businesses it's just like look if you're a customer acquisition style product well show showcase why it's this is the best customer acquisition for the dollar for the company if you are margin generating note, note creating ecosystem growing portion of business though well then your metrics have to show it and so just you can't just have half the story of just the product quality and the tweets you have to have the economics who else is going to put this much energy into this style of product and that gives us confidence that we should invest in the long term because alternatives can come and go and we I'd like my super encouraged to be more atlas alternatives that'd be great for founders but I think over the long term will be difficult to do so just because of the business model yeah there actually wasn't alternate at one point angelist and then they're like no stripe is killing it let's just end everyone to to atlas so I had worked on striped payments for a while and I just started on atlas and I think that same month angelists announced that they were doing incorporation and banking and cap table altogether which was exactly what I wanted to do and I was like well shoot that I sat up for the wrong thing angelists a such a smart group of people so customer oriented great brand and I love many of the people who work there work with some of the best legal minds to and they have the RUV set up it's so much awesomeness here because I was like should we just should we really compete like what should we do here and we thought about it more and more like look in the very long term this company starting process is going to become a efficiency cost problem and there's so much long tail complexity with dealing with multiple financial institutions, multiple government processes all of this legal complexity that it will be and it's difficult to charge a lot of money for it because it's hard to charge people money when they haven't even started the business yet we looked at it and said look we're going to keep we're going to keep this long term compounding approach because we think that this is where it's going to go and it was as your interest rate environment at the time angelists built a phenomenal product I looked at it with nothing but admiration and happiness but it also kind of smarted and hurt and we just kept building kept building kept building and I got a phone call one night on my wife's birthday before we sat down for dinner and it was Dan at Angelist I hope we've come to tell you story who I love incredible product mind and he led product over Angelist for startups and he said hey we're going to get out of incorporation this is not going to be our focus going forward do you want the business as like a year and a half after after they had really gone out or two years after they gone out or something like this I was like wow and we had kept such an open relationship with them we had paired with them on legal constructs we had discussed 83 B election openly and a lot through like oh I can't believe we're talking to the competitor you know like look we all shared the same mission here you know yes we're competing but it's are we really all better off from treating each other at at Armstrong's distance we had a shared Slack channel we discussed when the Delaware was slow on on on on incorporation one time is because they were playing softball and they had to after and enough that's a real story and we've discussed it and so when and the Angelist was incredible in how they evaluated it we're like evaluating different partners but because of our working relationship and the quality of your product and we saw we were going with 83 B election and the intensity of that they just put up a webpage it said to get started with Angelist if you need a company you go right over to Atlas and that was a really amazing moment because I respected them so much and I looked up to them so much that they would mutually beneficially choose to do that and everybody was excited and happy and customers are happy and it's been an incredible relationship since in which you can start on Angelist go through Atlas and then all of your information is automatically populated and Angelist automatically and we've since rolled that out with several other partners, Mercury, Karta others but Angelist really let the way there and we just maintain a great relationship with team but it's just like such it it was it took a while but it really reprove to me that they're not competitors it's alternatives and if you care about your customer you care about their alternatives and if you care about the mission you you need to all work together and look there's some friendly competition of course we all want to win but in the long term I think all parties are like significantly better off. Wow that is an awesome story I don't know if you've shared that anywhere else there's so many lessons there that I could like spin off on just like not wearing a bar competition staying heads down just all the customer problems staying close to your competition I'm being afraid to talk to them sharing advice with each other just building the best possible product and there's a ton there that's super interesting I couldn't really draw it up any better and I just think the world is better off with more specialization and it's a pain in the butt it's a pain in the butt through these corporations like you really I think we can get yeah I think you want more specialization and more partnership and I think a lot of foundations are going to do that now. Okay so let me let me go back to the lessons you shared on how to build something new at a big company and then we can wrap up so I took a bunch of notes here and these are awesome and they actually resonate a lot with Mikka who came on the podcast who's all who's at Figma been the person building a lot of zero to one stuff and so it's nice that there's these trends that are coming up again and again so one tip is just storyboard the ideal like with a Sharpie draw out here's this exciting vision of what this could be if we were to pull it off without constraints unconstrained powerful vision two is solve a burning use case make it clear like this is a huge problem for a lot of people and there's probably stories you share their show tangible forward progress just like look at this we made this progress you made this progress center selves a piece of blank paper look at this huge milestone and have momentum and Mikka talked about this just like keep the fire alive keep the fire alive show momentum making progress this metrics moving up into the right and then and then there's like a milestone felt like you had like an early milestone like this we made we made progress and then also have the business case basically look how much we could make and look what this could be if we were to succeed anything you'd have there anything you'd like bringing the earliest customers into the room with your team as soon as humanly possible we would just invite a founder to the team meeting we would pipe all their feedback into a Slack channel automatically we have all the NPS scores going to a channel and anytime it's not a 10 for 10 we follow up directly just like constant engagement with a customer creates the momentum where it doesn't need to be the product person or some other leaders saying we need to do this follow me it's oh my gosh the world needs this let's figure out how to do it even faster and a tip that the team is tried and this is well since I've been involved day to day is literally inviting customers in to design the product which I'd actually never heard of hey we're thinking about what happens after incorporation now and what can we do to help founders after they've set up their company what would be magical there we just invite founders in into a whimsical which one of the piece of software I love edges are really easy learning curve to create visual diagrams and rather than sort of doing a UXR about it we just say hey what would what would you hope this dashboard would happen they grab a thing and they start typing and they start drawing what they want their dashboard to be like why are we guessing beforehand I kind of and now scratch my head I'm several years into you know decade plus building things and I was like I was doing this by myself why did I just assigned it to the people we're going to use in the first place that look that doesn't always work because not all of your customers are going to be product designers at heart but more of them than you think and I think it's it's giving your customers right access and not just read access to your company is incredibly powerful and I think I had not quite seen it so directly where you just actually designed what they want but I saw the diagram of something we're working on right now is like wow we haven't even had design look at it they're like no actually the customer drew it great why are we guessing I think you have an unfair advantage where your customers or founders and oftentimes have product skills and design skills but I love that it's a true but I will really push because you don't need a hundred of them and you're you'll find somebody somewhere who knows you just got to sit in a little more silence you'll some bell rings are hand there's a quote you shared somewhere that relates to what you just said that your dad once said you can't screw up a sentence if it begins with the customer that's true yeah my dad runs a an IT business in Baltimore it helped other businesses with their computer systems and my growing up I would literally physically clean the keyboards of his employees and you know dust dust the map dust the mice but yeah he's very very customer oriented where I get a lot of it from in my mom's painter so I think there's some combination of talent talents or interests there but yeah he he would take it one step further and he would sometimes physically bring a chair over in a meeting and say the customer is sitting here I need a floating pretend and then he would kind of fake talk to the invisible customer hey based on what you've seen today at the meeting I saw him do this one time like based on what you've seen today at the meeting are you more likely to pay your bill or less likely to pay your bill based on what you witnessed and that's a little intense on the pantomime but I think the point gets across you just if you begin again because it's so natural to think internal if you begin to send physically with the customer and then start your sentence you just have a much better shot at it that's an amazing story very a steady group it is like an early early prototype Jeff we've covered so much ground I have two hours more worth of questions but we need to with lock we need to take a get it off I think is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get there very exciting lightning around really excited about whatever you're building up there thinking of building my email address is incredibly easy to find my Twitter handles incredibly easy to find do not hesitate to send me cold emails my love language is loom videos of bugs but feel free to send anything you have off top your head I respond to good cold emails don't hesitate what's the email real quick for people oh if finding my email address is your issue okay I can't possibly be but it is my first initial I'm last name basically everything in the world though my handle on Twitter is Jeff underscore one sign but gosh if you if you can't find my email address then you had a bigger problem okay we'll link to it in the description as well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready here we go what are two three books you recommended most to other people I know a lot of people in the pockets recommend high output management but it should be you know swap the Bible out for it at all the hotels in the world and in the little drawer just like put it everywhere and you just can't go wrong though it is just an incredible clarity of how to spend your time as a leader manager of other people just like a very high bar for how evaluating your work as the sum of everyone around you that was very clarifying to me that it's just like not the individual effort it is the sum of of everything I'm involved in is how to measure it so that's definitely up there a nice pair to that book as a a mood like a moves bush afterwards is orbiting the giant hairball a corporate fools of a corporate fools guide to surviving with grace I think is the full exact title by Gordon McKenzie which is the story of a illustrator at hallmark the greeting card company and it turns out to be a again bureaucratic slow moving organization that over time just added rules and policies and rules and policies and kind of quelled creativity and innovation which is surprising at a greeting card company but it existed and so this is his incredibly well drawn book as you'd imagine with beautiful illustrations about how he orbited the hairball of the organization to inspire others keep himself engaged and to bring creativity and excitement and trying to like pull people off the hairball as as he orbited it and so I think it's just like a fun afternoon read with beautiful illustrations about just kind of how to stay sane at big companies and where to be a little goofy and take the the advantage and gravity of the hairball but not to be like succumb by it and to be able to orbit it this to are really fun I will say one other one I like just because we haven't talked about strategy here there's been more getting stuff done and some other tactical things but seven powers and I know you had the author recently on which is awesome I ran in so I want to explain the books just go you just watch the podcast of it but just walks it walks through many of the business powers and sort of boats a company can have I ran into the author Hamilton Hamilton Helmer yes thank you but a cool name very cool name a literative at the box lunchroom one time where I worked at box they acquired one of our companies and I was like hey any luck finding the eighth power he's like I'm looking I'm looking I was like ran off of the sandwich another one of the funny someone embarrassing moment about that book is when I was applying to work at stripe I was in some email conversation with our CEO Patrick Colson who's quite well read and joys books and I was you know trying to showcase I like books a little bit though not at any level and I just had mentioned like I just finished reading seven powers and I kind of recommended it to him but jokes on me because he's quoted in the forward that I had skipped so he was very kind to let me know that he had read it and he is quoted in it so I was like oh shoot maybe I won't get the job but I got through that part at least so those those books have spoken to me you have a paper part by the way I think you have a fair power yeah well his favor powers counter positioning I also like that power lot because I think it's the one you can they're really changes everything about how you build your company so that's the one that we stands at I like I like counter positioning also and at least what's going cheap in that audience is kind of positioning but I really enjoy process the process power because just like I think it is very difficult to as a organization get good at anything and if you could do that over a long period of time as sustainable way you have a power this is the nerdy's chat I've ever had which is your favorite seven power I love it but on that power he I asked him about it he he makes a really strong point there that that's rarely is it actually powerful people they think like the way we execute it's going to be our advantage and rarely is it actually a power usually people can kind of copy it but when you nail it that's even better because then if your competition thinks they have it yeah they won't invest in the other ones so I like it even more for that reason I love it but I was going to say with Patrick Colson being quoted in the book not only was he just like wrote part of the forward or was it code he basically credited seven powers of helping build and strike no big deal toy yeah okay this lighting around is going great this is like a very microcosm of our whole chat so far uh second question do you ever favorite recent movie or tv show how to with John Wilson that's on HBO it's okay so for those who haven't seen it not really giving away anything because it's just wild when you watch it you can't give it away that this videographer has found footage you're just like walking through Manhattan other other other parts of the country but mostly New York with just like a camera for 10 years just filming intensely weird things and if you spent any time in New York you know there's plenty to film and then as put together this narrative afterwards about certain topics like how to make risotto or how to take out the trash or how to and it's a way of seeing life through the eyes of these vignettes like diving down really understanding people and he does it through this incredibly dry humor of of stitching together this this this video footage to tell a different narrative and I think some of this I we used to live in New York and I love a love living in California but I miss that frequency of strangeness and you can see that through that tv show fantastic movie I recently watched the quiet girl which is a film about a young Irish girl who is sort of from a dysfunctional home and has this opportunity to live with a family friend who is with the family's more have more opportunity for her more empathetic to her and just just showcases it again like how fragile things are it's a very intense film but I just there's something beautiful in how how much opportunity was in front of this young girl so it's a it's a tier darker but a great one you a favorite product you have recently discovered that you love I love my computer I'm fast at my computer being fast at my computer helps me just go from intention to just out in the world I fall in back in love with raycast which is an automation tool for those who have watched the journey of spotlight and quick silver and Alfred and all these automator services raycast seems to have cracked the nut on automation nerd complexity but also UI ease and some nice touches and just like loads quickly does the pay six is fully programmable sensible just like a huge fan of raycast and then I think for product people you if you don't have clean shot installed for screen shots you're just behind the curve I'm just so it being able to take a screenshot and blur particular things are point at stuff or have arrows and lines and just like have that be second nature fast instantaneous is so useful to be able to communicate what you're seeing so when I get new laptop it's raycast first and clean shot second wow I'm going to download clean shot immediately yes it's exciting I've been I've been using sketch as dark my blurings and so as as much as I appreciate the sketch folks clean shot is is an incredible software amazing I'm going to do that all right two more questions do your favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends your family find useful and work are in life I don't even realize I say go go go a lot but I do I actually say it and write it so people I I hear that the later say go go back to me and like huh don't I say that sometimes like yes you say it a lot so apparently go go go is one of them I also I love that say like let's make some mistakes just when we're like brainstorming something or saying a sushi restaurant with and talk guy or gal just just to like showcase like hey let's be creative do whatever you want I'm no pretence I'm out of value anything like let's make some mistakes it's like a weird thing they're so good I'm going to use that for my podcast gift let's just make some mistakes like let's make some really bad I mean at that point I was like well okay fine sure at the whole I like the combo this too go go go go let's just make some sense you have to you have to use it in certain circumstances and not for the five nines of reliability on our API but right it does have its place final question you worked with Patrick Olson and John Colson for many years curious what the most useful feedback or advice you have heard from them or learned from them on my first month working here which I guess is six or seven years ago now I was they put me in charge of our payments infrastructure services so that's all the back end systems that communicate with the financial system and all the internal APIs where we build the external APIs and products on top I was like quite a lot of stuff I knew nothing about finance I knew nothing about the scale that we're talking about they entrusted me someone in sayingly with that responsibility and so on the first month we had our quarterly business review where you know just the normal quarterly process and they I was like okay cool I'll do the next one I'll write the next one I've been here one month and I'm like no like you know you you write it like it'll be even better that you write it like oh my god like it's just like the forcing me to have to in the fourth week have that catalyst to understand the whole business and like with the permission because I was going to have to write this doc about how we're doing I'm company been in existence for like seven years before I got years already it's a reasonable scale I didn't it was just an intense it was just an intense operation and I remember writing the first draft and sending it to him because it was I didn't want to send it he kind of pushed me to do it a bit and I figured I'd give him an early draft and he wrote back this doesn't sound like you yet the willingness to entrust a new person to provide their own perspective and bring it into a very formalized document like that was an impressive and like that's that really spoke to me and I completely and I made it sound like me and I've tried to make things sound like me since John's is more of a gut punch I'll say so I've heard it to John the co-founder he maybe nine months into reporting to him he I would run around with a clipboard I was a little bit manic of getting a lot done the walk on on it straight by the time and I would we have a one hour one on one I'd be listing all of the things that we had accomplished and the problems we have and where we need escalation help and where we're stuck and all this on the other just lots of stuff I had you know checklists and physical paper flipping it over a little bit frantically and he said you are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through a hundred but I need you stuck on problems one and two oh man that like hurt I was like oh shoot I am I've said I'm productive on the non-hardest problems and I was trying to mask not on purpose mask but just who wants to be stuck on something so hard when there's so much else to do and from then on I would show up to him with problems one and two and not talk about problems three through a hundred even if we're working on them we would just not talk about them and we would get stuck on problems one and two and that was phenomenal advice which I you know I was like oh shoot I'm being fired but it was like it was really a deeply impactful sense wow would a powerful great helpful like that's that's great advice he really little like it right there and yeah I love this you know cut out my spider style or something but it's your point very impactful and helpful yeah Jeff we did it cool the archaeology is complete I appreciate the time learning it it was fun and I don't do too many of these so curious people's feedback and really appreciate the questions amazing Jeff thank you so much for being here appreciate learning bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com see you in the next episode