Congratulations on what has by all available accounts been an extremely well executed tenure as engineering leadership for one of the most significant new tech companies in the world. Will be avidly watching whatever your next move is!
The general advice is - "Don't force it! It won't get you anywhere." However, I feel, smart ambitious people, can't avoid the anxiety to do their own thing. Leaving a high-paying job on a vital position might not make a lot of sense but I believe, when you are surrounded by people making multi-million dollar enterprises with almost-similar skill-set (maybe, with a better business sense), you can't avoid that feel of not finding a single reason to not to replicate the same level of success.
Starting a company because "everyone else is doing it" sounds like a bad idea. For me, it's been something I've wanted to do since my first side project got 1500 uniques via StumbleUpon, and suddenly I realized how much fun it is creating something new that has real users.
Well, building a billion dollar business requires a different skill set than running a billion dollar business. Often when a business is in transition from "explosive growth" to "organic growth", the guys who got you there are no longer the right fit.
If you're financially secure, why force it to stay in a position you don't enjoy? Besides, having a C-level title from a successful startup makes it a whole lot easier to get funding for the next thing you want to build...
I don't think that looking at people making "multi-million dollar enterprises" is necessarily going to cause much envy or anything. Brockman presumably has equity worth quite a lot and was key to the level of success Stripe has seen so far.
Gdb had a critical role to play in popularizing Stripe's CTFs and making them interesting as they are. I really hope that his departure from Stripe this doesn't change the CTF.
This is said Siddarth Chandrasekaran. :) I proposed the first Stripe CTF, inspired by SmashTheStack (http://smashthestack.org/), but the resulting Stripe CTFs are the result of many, many hours of several folks' work (Andy Brody, Carl Jackson, Christian Anderson, gdb, Jonas Schneider, Jorge Ortiz, Ludwig Petterson, Nelson Elhage, Philipp Antoni, Steve Woodrow, and myself).
And yes, it's certainly a tradition that we hope to keep up!
Siddarth, any word on when the 2015 edition of CTF will be out? I check the stripe blog every week or so hoping for some mention of timeline. I loved CTF3. You guys do a fantastic job on these. THANK YOU.
Not the op, but it had great docs including links to interesting papers, referenced real world problems (git, cryptocurrencies, consensus), had a set of levels organised around the theme of consensus nicely graded from easy to quite hard, and was doable in about a day of solid effort. Even if you didn't complete it probably felt like a learning experience for most people. Also, it was fun. Finally, the meetup afterward run by Greg explaining their architecture and issues encountered was interesting.
Their api is truly a piece of art and one of my favorite software projects to look at. I always find myself taking example from it when building an api.
Reading the preceding post to the one mentioned here, his decision suddenly seems not so surprising. Like his role in the sprint of building a company is done now and not all people make the transition once the company grows up to the next level
Congrats to Greg on everything he's accomplished! Stripe has always chosen to think different about culture and organization, and as a result have built one of the most interesting companies around. Greg is a huge part of what makes that work.
Ever since I've participated in the first Stripe CTF, I've had a massive respect for Greg. It has been great to read his blog posts and insights over the years, and see the great work he has been a part of at Stripe.
A few days back, I actually realized that I had never seen a talk by Greg, and actually googled for one, and found one about hiring at Stripe[0].
Best of luck to Greg. I find this poignant but not surprising. His previous blog post was very thoughtful, if somewhat existential. I was actually watching for updates to see if he had successfully evolved his role into something meaningful and productive. In the end, and no offense to him, it seems like some variant of the Peter Principle just played out here.
Please fix the payments industry by building something that just plugs into a site without having to care if it's Stripe/Datacash/Paypal/Sagepay et al.
The costs of switching are too high in this industry and a "nicer API" isn't a good enough feature for any of my clients to want to switch. A product which lets customer failover and chase competitive pricing is what's needed.
Well put. Greg and the Collison's have built an amazing product, helping to pave the way for innovation in the space. However, we agree that there's a larger fundamental issue that can't be addressed by the processors themselves. That's why we're building http://accepton.com I'd love to hear the challenges your clients are facing: jonathan <AT> accepton DOT com
Stripe was the first API I ever hooked into and it was a breeze. I've since tapped into a dozen other APIs and I've yet to find one as simple as Stripe. Kudos and good luck in the future. Would love to tag a long whenever you start hiring!
I'd be curious to learn more about this mentioned S-Curve and possible institutional inertia. Stripe is an inspiring company - but ultimately a kind of mixed company in that it bridges the Internet to Credit card companies.
What does it say about the question "Why do you want to work on this company for the next 10 years of your life?" when it turns out even the founders of the most successful startups in the world don't want to?
Larry and Sergey have been working on Google for 17 years. Mark has been working on Facebook for 11. Drew and Arash have now been working on Dropbox for 8 years. Brian, Nate, and Joe have been working on Airbnb for 7 years.
Things change, of course, and you shouldn't work on a company that isn't working for 10 years. But I think it's a reasonable question to ask.
If you go into something with a plan to do it for only a couple of years, you are unlikely to create anything important.
I don't buy public or private equities I don't want to hold for 10 years (I have held some Apple shares 17 years now!), and I don't do jobs I can't see myself doing for 10 years (I ran my company, which was an ok but certainly not huge success, for 7+ years).
I think more people would benefit from taking a long-term view on where they decide to spend their time and money--it's a really useful way to think about opportunity.
You're brave - talking long term on HN! But so right, in my view.
One of the benefits of the long term view is that it forces you to address sustainability, so you focus on real revenue.
Our startup is now 6 years old. We decided early on that chasing funding meant focussing on the wrong thing, and that we would suck up the pain of little income and slower growth. Being able to focus on the product instead of investors was great, but that slower growth also turned out to be healthy. It meant a better relationship with our first customers, which lead to more useful feedback, a better product, and organic growth that this year will give me 4 times the best salary I ever earned before.
And it's still fun - as well as the financial compensation, we still control 100% of the company so we can do things our own way. We employed one of our support people in a city hit by a devastating earthquake; we carried an agent for a few months while she escaped an abusive marriage; we make a sizeable donation to a kids' charity in lieu of sending out Christmas cards.
I recently saw Carl Malamud [1] speak, and he said straight out that for his projects it has generally taken a decade to get somewhere. From his descriptions, it sounded like the first years were mainly him being ignored, but that eventually his continued presence meant people with power started paying more attention. His advice to the crowd was definitely to pick projects they'd be happy to spend 10 years working on.
Exactly how I felt. I had heard the Gandhi quote, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But knowing what Malamud has accomplished, and knowing how obvious some of his stuff seems in retrospect, it was really heartening to know that the first stage for him took years.
Not only is this a solid framework when it comes to choosing what one wants to do, in addition to being the reality of building a business, it is an increasingly important guardrail when the entire bay area buzzes with "rocketship" "unicorns" that get to $1B in ~2-3 years.
One way to counter this would be startup founders tweeting & sharing more but I know how little time you have for anything when you're building a business.
Personally I think founders should plan to do it for at least 5 or 10 years.
If a founder doesn't think a company will be worth running in 5 or 10 years what does it say about their long term plans for it? Are there many examples of successful start-ups where the founders left within the first few years?
Although I agree with you, I'd like to add a caveat: Pivots.
The idea you end up implementing is rarely the idea you started with. Almost every startup pivots several times during its lifetime. Usually they are small pivots, small tweaks to the business plan, a market that you hadn't though of opening, a market not being as good as you thought... But big ones also happen.
But even with very small pivots, the process might leave you somewhere you didn't expect. And sometimes this is good, too! You might end up with a much more solid business and doing work you love. Sometimes, this leaves you somewhere you no longer find exciting.
That's exactly my case: I started a company 3 years ago with some friends, we pivoted a few times, found what we think is a nice product-market fit and the business is growing nicely. However, I find myself in a similar position to Greg: I'm not in a critical position (all the critical work is handled by my team, I only oversee it and guide it) and the role is not something that would interest me if it was offered to me. Basically, I'm here because I founded the company, I love the ideas it was founded on and I like my coworkers.
I've talked long and hard about this with my co-founders, I've found a replacement and, if it works out, I'll leave the day to day running of company in the next few months.
I don't see how the question is informative, especially since the reframing is essentially "If you had a 250 billion dollar company would you run it for 10 years? And if you had a mediocre company would you dump it and do something else?". It's like saying that you will do whatever is in your best interest at any given time.
And in any case I don't think it would change much if an investor knew with perfect foresight that AirBnB would be a $10 billion dollar company but one of the founders was planning on leaving after 7 years (or even 4). The same is true if it was a $100 million dollar company or a $0 company.
It seems to me what really matters is whether the founders will stick with it for the first 1-3 years when things are toughest.
(edit: And Larry and Sergei tried to cash out immediately).
As a founder, that question has merits. As a potential employee, if someone asks me that question, my answer frankly is "I don't know. It is hard to predict the future. I can tell you that whatever time I am with the company, you will see 100% commitment but 10 years is too far out". I have actually used this in a real interview. It is ridiculous to even ask this question to anyone who is worth the money.
I generally reply openly about my ten-year plan, I promise that it's going to change, and I restate how large a challenge it is to maintain excitement and interest at their company for the next ten years of my life.
I feel that either you misunderstood me or I misunderstand you. I'm leaning towards the first option.
By which I mean - There's a distinction between the kind of interview that happens between a founder and an investor and the one that happens between an employee and an employer. I wouldn't be surprised if an investor asked that kind of question, but if an employer did, I would think it was rather arrogant.
There are ambitious people and people who enjoy steady income.
I feel like the ambitious people (the kind that start these sort of companies) do not feel comfortable working on the same thing for more than a couple of years. They get that itch, understandably.
"I haven’t yet placed myself in a new critical role, and I’m confident that Stripe is being left in great hands" i.e., I was fired or quit, and, things are bad. Any other questions?
