Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) | Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just breaking this wall between the PM and the customer.

The moment the customer felt impelled 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 you're 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?

Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand, and then tweets. on the other.

You started at Stripe something called study groups.

We show up four to eight people total. tend to be some company with some outcome problem.

Rule one is you do not work at 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 helped scale Stripe payments to hundreds of billions of dollars in volume a year.

He also led 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 83 elections, incorporation documents, getting your EIN, share purchases and all the things that used to take weeks or months before a company could begin 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 how 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 talk 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 knew what to expect, but it is fun to see.

The first name and the podcast all line up.

I really appreciate you asking. I wanted to start with a quote that I found from you that I think gives a little perspective into how you think and how you approach the world.

Here's the quote. Very frequently, I would do poorly on tests 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. it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to rationalize it for myself in some form, so...

In retrospect, that sounds kind of highfalutin, but at the time, I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in.

I think it comes from growing up. I went to a pretty hippy dippy K through 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 or any particular requirements.

You really got to choose your own path. And I recall one particular class in high school, which was, sort of somewhat a science class, but it was called the history of science.

And we actually walked through and studied all of the, at the time, best understood ways the world worked in science, but then later were turned out to be wrong.

In the 1500s, we believed X, Y, and Z. In the 1600s, we've A, B and C just very confidently in the 1500s we thought something, and then in the 1600s we 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 They 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 if 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 by just like the physical act of handing that ticket to the teacher. that really clicked for me.

And so when I got to college and it was a real college, university, People are coming from often quite more rigorous backgrounds of things that were true, I was a bit unprepared.

And I remember actually taking a microeconomics class that was quite advanced and had a close friend, and we studied exactly the same information.

We sat and 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. 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.

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That's C-Y-C-L-E dot app slash Lenny. It's really interesting that you went to this liberal artsy, hippy-dippy school, as you described, 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 backgrounds of the people who were running 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, everyone who was leading those places had technical backgrounds and I liked So I added computer science as an engineering degree midway through school.

So I ended up having to take the real science classes with the pre-med kids and the rest of it.

And I did... similarly poorly, but I did end up with a computer science degree and a liberal arts degree.

So it was... It was a journey, but I had to make a pretty big switch in the middle to get on that path.

I asked you if there was one thing that you'd love to get across in this podcast.

I 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 ASAP 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. I sort of see the world as immediately 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 get as much furniture as you have room in the house.

We'll do the work the night before. It's So, let's just make it do tomorrow.

Can we turn tomorrow into today? It's just.

Optimistically. seeing if we can just inject energy to go, go, go has produced surprising results.

And 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've added over time had to learn this longer term compounding, more strategic mindset where Some of the things we want to accomplish, be it at my startups in the past or at Stripe, can't be solved in the 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, but then there's 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 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 in?

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 mails to the IRS.

We will never regret those things. So let's just always compound those capabilities over time, then the trick is like, how do you mix this go, go, go attitude with a long-term compounding?

And that's something I still struggle with, but I try to purposely balance it more than I used to.

It's such a good way of summarizing just how to be successful in a lot of things.

Go, go, go ASAP. Stay optimistic. focus on long-term compounding growth.

Is there an example of 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 or a product you worked on?

I work at Stripe, which is an infrastructure company.

We build things that help businesses do online commerce in various forms, and I've had a few roles at Stripe. our beautiful office here in South San Francisco.

One of which was, 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.

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 go-go attitude was not working, right?

No matter how much energy you poured into building Thailand payment methods or UK bank transfers or you know, an in-person payment system in Latin America.

We just 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 start to build these payment methods, uproot 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, is this strategy working?

Is it not working? But then over time, we start to see it switch to nonlinear again and go from whatever it was, 10 payment methods at the time in Lstripe. accepts over 100.

So we got to like 50 really quickly, and then kind of like skyrocketed to 100.

And I remember there being a meeting where we said, well, maybe we should just lock everyone in the basement and see if we can get from 10 to 50.

That would be the intensity startup go, go, go attitude.

But we looked at the individual components of what it meant to get this done and how 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 go, go, go 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 be 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 crafting. and quality and the user 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 at their company.

So first of all, let me just ask, why is this so important to you?

Why do you think Kraft 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 of you listening might have written SQL in the past.

Maybe the robots write the SQL for you now, but you still need to write a little 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.

My friends and I built a little Python tool, which basically let you... run R-style queries, it lets you draw charts and pivot tables quickly and sharing sort of all this modern SaaS application stuff, but applied to SQL a few years ago.

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 bricked 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 really kind of 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.

We're just like kind of high-fiving each other.

And we went about our day. And about a year later, I realized that 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 that was the signal that we did not have 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 liked it.

We were 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 are people clamoring, needing it badly, And that's really my obsession is in finding problems in which people will will pause their entire day to solve. leap through the computer to be like, oh, my God, I have that problem.

Do you have a solution? focus on that style of product development and we can get into just how do you kind of like 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's no amount of 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 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 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 or your prospective customer as you're trying to figure this out.

And I think this advice not even advice, just style applies to small companies, big companies, anyone, which is People don't want to be pitched.

I'm 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 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 the customer. I have...

But what a wasted opportunity 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 going to miss, you're very likely going to miss the burning problem that they have on the top of their mind. on the top of their mind and it's not the customer's job to interrupt you and say, hey, could you stop your pitch?

I want to tell you about 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, are then like later gone.

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 heart out about what's the most burning thing.

And sometimes I'll prompt our customers.

I'll say, hey, do you mind just opening up your email?

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 grinded your gears?

What are you not looking forward to? Magic wand, what do you wish you could just have off your plate immediately?

Forget it. Forget stripe. about they work on 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 door away.

And It's a little awkward because they don't know why you're asking that 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 learned a lot at Stripe from that, and that's where you can start to find adjacencies, right?

Well, hey, I don't know if Stripe could, you know, really helped me with this is but it wouldn't be cool if if we could identify if the person signing up on our site wasn't fraudulent, or is who they say they are, or isn't a bot, or are they really a dog on the internet?

We keep hearing this as the major complaint from all of our customers.

But 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 all have this problem.

Via silence, you can just create your roadmap 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 your ability to... talk to customers and use 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.

You know, 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 the same problem.

And the internet has given us all this absolutely magical forum that you can just yell out the window And then billions of people 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, I always sometimes think, 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 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 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 partner. not salesy, not pitching, not narrow-minded to just my 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. forward a message over to a Slack group and they know that because the customer speaking directly, it somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day.

We could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what the customer wants, 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, where we're dealing with many millions of businesses and many hundreds of millions of consumers on the other end of those businesses, you 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 of those people to talk to.

If you're 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 to use, but just ideas emerge.

Your whole roadmap can emerge from that silence.

So let me share a few of the things you shared so far, and I'm curious what else.

Two 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'll just text you when 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 just reducing the time between the moment a customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem.

They're busy. There's snacks to eat. They have families.

They have other things to do. There's a lot going on in the world, a lot.

Your dumb product. It's amazing that they would spend any of their time discussing it at all.

I mean, most 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 P zero 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 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 and day.

And it's also... 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, I my bar for how we will respond to those 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 our legal docs, they were handing out, let's say 25 shares rather than 25% of the shares we dropped. the percentage sign and thankfully a A founder noticed this in the docs and tweeted about it.

I was like, my heart. like paused, you know, and I was like, oh no, this could be a really serious issue.

And we were able to fix it. regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone that was impacted.

And I was thinking to 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, anytime you want me to read your docs, I'd 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 founders who use Atlas.

And so just again, We're 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, 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 may be hearing this and like, oh my God, I'd be overwhelmed with feedback and people. to fix problems for and bugs and texting of people.

There's just like, there's so many people that potentially Uh, I'd 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 sending you feedback.

How do you pick the people to zero in on?

I think there are two parts to 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 and 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 two, there's an art and science to picking where to go deep.

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 just pattern matching, how detailed they were or how much they seem that they... want to engage and kind of balance it that way.

Otherwise, 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 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 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, Stripe's 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.

And people are like, oh my goodness, I would love to be part of the Stripe Bug Finder program.

Like, may I apply? I'm like... you know, it's very selective, you know, of course, but yes, of course for you, it's just, you're giving people, permission through a program, even if it is deeply arbitrary, I find helps the that bounding it.

And then later I can follow up with the world.

Hey, We ran our first program. We got 65 videos, which we did.

We found dozens of issues, which we did. 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 and interested and 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 X big.

I'm talking about Sarah and, in this department who has these tabs open and just faced this problem and needs to solve it by 4 PM, like that level specificity.

If that's your customer, And I'm talking mostly about B2B, which is where I spend a lot of my time is the social network B2C stuff I have less intuition on. they're very willing to exchange money for solving their problems.

Incredibly so oftentimes they'll, if you're listening 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. 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.

And it is so tempting to go down the first path with the friend group. that I sort of needed a rule, which was like, okay, 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 for them?

And are they telling their friends? But that wasn't enough because people are so drawn, myself included, drawn to the the friendliness that I just set a rule, which is we discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero.

That is not of interest to us. We don't even write it down.

It's just not part of what we're talking about at all.

We're only interested in... in Sarah, our target customer, and can we get her to solve whatever the problem is as quickly as possible, as gently as possible. and go from there. it's a four 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. will 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 like, oh, there it is.

That was actually what... the thing that was of 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 is 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 ten thousand dollars it would have to do x that's a really cool line to use is there any other advice there 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 improv training class or two. just to get people out of their skin a bit.

By the way, this applies to big companies also, not just small ones. and we have issues and I hear other larger companies have issues where big company will say, hey, we're an enterprise and we're going to pay you this big contract, all you need to do is build features 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and go through security steps, ABCDEFG.

And this siren song of the big three-year contract of your first enterprise buyer Even when you're already big, there's always a...

There's, you know, you can go from fortune 1000 to fortune 500 to fortune 10 to fortune one.

You know, there's always more. And there are so many stories of the rug being pulled in the middle and they never actually use it and the contract never lands.

And 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. wire us a million dollars, we'll happily wire it back anytime 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 needed to really work with this system we haven't talked about yet.

And now that we're paying, we want it 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 Stripe scale, I've heard our founders somewhat push this methodology on us, where one from the outside might think, well, 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 roadmap.

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 And by the way, ready to pay is different than paying.

Significantly different. significantly different.

I've also thought of well, as long as they're ready to pay and they said they would pay and they look at 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 like a 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 and I will have them practice paying, have them practice charging me.

I'll just say, hey, I'm just a friend, I'm trying to help you out. is a little bit self-serving because I work at Stripe and I want to get feedback on our products. 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.

Like 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 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 $1 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 pay.

Exactly. Yeah. And we can refund the money.

There's no, like, there's no issue. at all other just 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, at work?

I'm like, or not, whatever. And people just, they'll start to spill. they'll just start to spill and eventually they'll get to their biggest problem pretty quickly.

Let's talk about metrics kind of going in a 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 of 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?

Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right. on one hand and then tweets on the other. metrics like you know quantitative and qualitative and i really see them as deep siblings and equals.

You really need both. It's not, oh, OKRs versus something like there are some things you want the texture of the person on video showing how complicated the thing was.

And then also we are 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 you 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 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, well, 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 I spend a lot of time crafting a small number of these metrics is they force trade-offs 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. And 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 bicker 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 are generating progress over time for a customer from their perspective. 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'd been working in our payments group. at Stripe for a bit, and then I started working on some of our banking and incorporation services.

In Atlas, when I started working on it, It had 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 DocuSign stuck in their email box.

They needed a co-founder's address, but they didn't know their co-founder's address. 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 writing in being like, oh, I love this service.

It's absolutely fantastic. or they're like sad support tickets.

I'm like, oh my God, they're all sad support tickets.

And so just kind of asking ourselves, well, why would... why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend?

I was like, well, It would have to accomplish A, B, and C activities for them.

It would have to get their company. It would have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS.

They'd have to handle all the downstream administrivia.

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 can measure the success rate and the frequency of incorporation services.

And we do all those things. But if you 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 begin like 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 number of support 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 an average, right?

You could have the average as 0.3, But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're you know, that getting to point two 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 aside what people are needing and we'll bake it into the product. 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 can look at the market share. plotted on the same time frame, and it's like the same shape.

I think you have to find a measure by which it speaks directly to what the customer wanted and that 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, if we were to showcase the internal Atlas 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, Oh, want to learn more?

Just reply to the support ticket email. figure out what they needed, what they need.

And so we kind of turned all of the engineers on the team into PMs to go and... 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 just did sort of the obvious things we saw on the tickets.

But as the PM, I was able to just sort of not on autopilot, but really sit back and have contentful conversations with engineers who are 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 based in what people were saying and wanted, it was very motivating for everyone on the team. 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 starting from scratch.

I think this is amazing and important advice.

Just the power of a single metric that everyone on the team can understand Rally Round and use to prioritize the work they're doing.

I've seen exactly the same sort of Funny enough, Airbnb, one of the teams actually had at metrics sort of like this, basically reducing the people contacting Airbnb with support issues.

But what ended up happening is their team started just making it harder to contact support. because they're like, maybe they don't need to contact support about all these trivial issues.

So maybe let's not let's encourage them to figure it out themselves.

Is there anything you've learned about trying to avoid these kind of second order effects that are kind of perverse 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 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 a problem, but also 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 are some you know, should be incredibly quick. but there is a bit of a review process.

And of course, if you were not hearing back from us, you would be upset.

You're trying to make your company immediately.

This is 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 overturn rejections where someone writes back in saying, Hi, 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 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.

Sometimes people will get excited about it. chart that goes up and to the right.

It's kind of a meme. Oh, that's going up to the right.

I'm really excited about charts that go up and to 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 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 to get their final decision as quickly as possible.

Once you know it, when we looked at the chart, it was doing this.

Right. And so each month we would just make it little better a little better a little up to the left up into 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 another really useful thing about metrics is you can decide when to 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.

Why aren't people recommending Atlas? you found, okay, well, people that are complaining and having issues port and running into problems most likely are going to be detractors not going to want to recommend atlas so let's let's have those 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 get to this certain milestone. let's make that our goal for the next quarter or whatever and let's focus there and then make an impact.

And then I imagine move on to other levers within this bucket of zero context.

You have to pick the right metric for your audience.

I wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone.

That was not a terrible one to export. But in the founders choosing where to get started, mindset.

Again, this isn't 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 at exactly the right time?

How are you even supposed to go find people who are 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 say, well, let's make the product quality better.

Well, we all make the product quality better.

But why? Why is this actually going to move what our customers want and the business forward?

And when you can line them all up, It can be quite beautiful, especially when you can see it month over month for a long period of time.

One other metric I think is that I would export 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 omit an event when that occurs.

And then you could just make a bar chart, a stacked 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 Stripe 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 are bored one day and you're not sure what to measure, just make a users 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 submit a log line. like put 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 like minimize them but it gave 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, 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 what does sometimes a little bit grind my gears or gives us an opportunity is like when we didn't know about that bad day and it's a surprise to us too, That is like, for me, immediate action.

It's like, okay, cool. We have to figure out a way to count this bad day.

We gotta get it on the chart. That way we can make an informed decision about when to invest in improving it.

I love this idea. I haven't heard this before.

So the idea is just make a 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...

Are you a Stripe customer, Lenny? I am. I check my, with my newsletters, the payments go through Stripe.

I check my dashboard every day. Cool. So what would be a bad day for you?

Oh, I see. I see some silence happening here.

It's not loading. The number is taking a long time to show up.

Something being completely off in there.

Not being able to log in. The silence is good.

I just want to keep going. The question is how much, you know, to the audience is how much of the science will he edit out before it goes live?

But this is what I'm talking about, right?

Is I could guess them, right? Yeah. But...

And as you were saying those, I know the URL. of those charts.

I know the login one, because I feel that too.

So I play with Stripe all the time. You get a 2FA too frequently and come on.

I had the same cookie. I was just here yesterday.

So we count all that stuff and try to make it better over time.

But I'm so excited when someone brings me a new bad day I hadn't thought about yet because that's just, that's like product catnip.

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. yeah ways of operating a couple other just like quick metrics things this is a bit of a I don't know.

Some people like cycling or something. I guess I like metrics.

Like people... People get a really nice bike.

I got a really great metric. Picking metric titles that make you feel something.

So we could have called that measure of companies number of companies that do not send a support ticket over X period and Y period, you know, You sometimes see these charts where the metric itself 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 the company. oh, I'm working on making this chart go up and it feels good to just say the name out loud rather than some complicated underscores and mins and maxes and, you know, the database field name is like still in the chart title.

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 is a motivating thing to talk about.

And then lastly, on metrics is There's just good hygiene that people should bring to their measures percentages shouldn't have 41 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 customer obsessed they are.

So I just think it's, It's not an area that's sort of behind the scenes, bean 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 They're promised to me seriously, and I can see myself on those metrics as a customer.

That's where we're really shooting for. So to mirror back what 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 In your experience, you find that really powerful and important.

A couple years ago, Stripe did... internal work to make an internal metrics kind of dashboard system and we have a special place called GoMetrics.

Many people use a go slash service where you can just quickly go to a URL and Again, I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy.

My rule is, if it's not on GoMetrics, 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.

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 thing, version, it's just very difficult for it 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. 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.

You almost go 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. great.

Like I was so excited to finally see this.

And then a couple of days later, huh? quite understand it.

What does it actually mean? I saw this other metric from this other angle that kind of makes it feel... you know, counterintuitive that it's like this.

And then you kind of look into it. 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.

Maybe we'll go on to something else. Nope, we're not going to forget about it.

Week four comes around, you're like, wait a second.

Okay. This is then the team meeting starts.

Hey, just a reminder. Let's just bring up the metric again.

Not a screenshot of it. Go to the URL. And just that level of frequency and specificity and ritual around it is what brings it into the decision-making And again, we treat it the exact same as we do tweets.

It's the quantitative and qualitative right next to each other.

And because you're putting that amount of attention to it, you can't have 1,000 metrics.

We just don't physically have time in the day to bring that level of care and understanding to so many things.

So then it forces you to winnow 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 out what your customer wants and then different versions of how do we sort of know it's true over time. and our tactics improving it.

Sounds so simple when you describe it that way.

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That's useanvil.com slash lenny. Kind of along these same lines, there's something that I've learned you started at Stripe. to help people obsessed with the user experience and get quality to where it needs to be and move a lot of these metrics, something called study groups.

Talk about what that is. I'm very curious.

Okay. Let's imagine we understand our customer.

We've... understand their burning problem.

We've built a solution that's in their hands.

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 and there's multiple teams and multiple products going on.

There's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad.

I actually have a hard time naturally explaining it you kind of think to 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 for a customer is all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated broken mall that where 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 ago.

So many of us have experienced that. 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 off from my future progress to see it from the customer's perspective today and there are various techniques to try to incentivize or to structure group of people to do that stripe has a thing called friction logs as well, which is an 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 to end and have the time to write it up and the sort of position the company to send it out as a critique to potentially to not just your own team but but in a whole organization so that's actually like 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 by which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase. iterated through a thread through through ideas and i 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, support. a support person, a salesperson, someone who's on our events team and 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 farmer's market, or we want to run a multi country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business.

It was something quite, 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 do not work at Stripe. Not pretend you don't work at Stripe.

Not try to forget. not work at stripe you've never worked at stripe you work at we make up a name of the company you know dolphin aquarium industries, and we will pick a CEO of the company from the group. 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 embody the customer.

We will not break character. It's a little bit of the improv thing.

And as the kind of maestro 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 know where that button really is and you know the docs link. goes a little bit to the wrong place, but if you click the other link, you'll 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 no Stripe knowledge.

As a reminder, you don't work in Stripe.

And it takes us a couple of times. But people really get into it.

And all of a sudden, we'll start making up characters.

You know, the CEO will be like, oh, Tim, you're our designer. where are we going to get the color palette?

All of a sudden, there's 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's position.

And because we're going to be doing it for an hour, hour and a half at a time, you start, you actually start to believe that you don't work at Stripe and you work at Dolphin aquarium industries and you start to really feel it.

So that's rule one, you don't work as 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 Stripe thus far in the last just this year, last few months of 2024.

More than 250 people have participated in the study group.

And it is deeply eye opening for those involved.

The responses are you know, sort of business emotional.

Not super emotional, but just wow. I sort of can't believe how hard it was to accomplish X, Y, and Z. I thought we were amazing at blah.

It's like, well, are still pretty good, but we need to get back towards amazing or wow, I didn't even know that Internally, people wouldn't 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 franchised study group internally already where different teams 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. Which is another reason I appreciate your podcast as well.

Let's really get into the details and not be rushed for time.

You forget that you have a meeting at the end kind of amount of time. no one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all.

It's a random group people, we don't even introduce ourselves about what team we worked on.

We're just all here as participants to embody the customer.

And then I think lastly, a reason why it's and many of these have just been actually super surprising to me, I wouldn't have been able to print ahead of time, 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. person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO.

And it's just... There's a little theatrics to it, but it...

It has been different enough from our other approaches for a company like Stripe, which is already pretty focused on this topic. that we think that there's enough legs here that we're going to keep it and kind of invest in groups pretending to be the customer and going through it painstakingly slowly. rather than only demos or only writing, which has other benefits but misses the participation of a larger group and more fresh eyes.

So that'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, but gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time, and this is where we've landed.

It's fascinating that there's so much theatrics and theater a 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 how onboarding looks.

We know all these things. 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 here. They don't know our lingo and it is just so natural for our internal mindset and lingo to flow into the application over time and you need some counterbalance. to get there.

And I think that has to be an unnatural counterbalance.

It used to frustrate me, actually. I'm like, wow, why aren't we all like, why aren't we doing this? well, we're actually doing great work to move something forward and we have our local optimizations.

It'd be difficult to get to this level of 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 and thread through our talk 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 the 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 for Stripe broadly, there's this innate implication.

If we're making the experience better and better and better we will grow. you're nodding your head sideways a little bit.

So I'd love to hear just your thoughts on just like this obsession with experience and user issues and okay but we actually have to grow 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 this is 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 a friend who runs a company and they were small company on the verge of product market fit, starting to feel customers starting to pull and they're like, 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 they'll 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? really sales contacts.

They're like, oh, they want to learn more about how to get started.

They want to know the expertise about, this is a particular company, it's a healthcare related company.

They wanted to know their health care choices available.

They wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had I was like, that's the product.

That's the product. The thing you're talking about is the product.

Turn those moments during your self serve process into not self-serve and make the product experience be, let's get you on the phone when the And now when they get on the phone, they know the first name of the person they're talking to because they have it from the onboarding forum.

And all of a 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 they can about the customer and what they want.

And I was really inspired by Fidelity, which is a big financial institution. where many people listening have switched jobs and had to move their 401k or something like this from job a to job b you know, maybe in some universe, it'll be three clicks, but not today, or certainly not when I tried a couple years ago, you got to call and go on a phone tree and all the shenanigans.

And then I got on... on the line with someone from Fidelity, they're like, hi, Jeff.

They knew about the old company. confirmed my address and said, by the way, this is not a digital process yet.

We're going FedExU, an envelope, And inside it is gonna be the thing for you to sign.

Here's gonna be exactly where to sign. Here's like a picture we're gonna 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.

I'm like, put it back to the factory, it's 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 the 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... product playtime quality is over, we need to talk about business.

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 sort of SaaS software, browser, mobile, whatever, I think we can see the entire experience as it.

And from there, I include the sales process.

I include the support process. I include 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 in sustainable ways.

I want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than than the person that we're trying.

I love that. And clearly it's worked 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.

How do you decide what product you're going to pick to do a study group on and then What is the 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 would be fun to 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 it before it goes out the door or Now I actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group, uh, based on what people want.

And then and now we're kind of. again, franchising it.

So we're going to have study group captains and people run their own study groups.

And so I can, we can really scale this behavior.

But we did our first study group of an internal tool recently.

And so that I think is going to catch on just any anything at all can be study grouped it just takes about an hour and couple of 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 rubric 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 teams 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 a 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 uh 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 to the customer, well, they didn't really know or They have some special set up. you probably shouldn't say those things, but you can kind of rationalize it.

Whereas a group of people incentivized 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, this thing's not for you,

But then again, you have your own optimization system.

You have your own things you need to ship. 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 though that we, have added the SLAs to certain bug levels that begin to match a bit of our incident process.

So in an incident stripe, like in many companies, pencils down, fix the problem, severity levels. non-negotiable slack rooms happen, war 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. 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 gonna 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 isn't driving this metric and goal that we have.

And I think for teams like that, it's hard to hear just like, oh, someone's gonna send you all of these problems with your experience.

There's like the negative version where the founders goes 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 it's like completely distracting from the things they need to do, the goals they're trying to drive, things that really, really matter. 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 gonna do better. there's a huge amount of trust here involved in your colleagues which is We wanna provide teams great information And the best teams welcome that information.

It doesn't mean that it comes with a... author opinion from the outside world that says you must do X. We have a rubric on some of the craft-related bugs, but again, we also allow our we let the teams relabel them.

And so maybe it's actually not a P zero from their eyes.

And we like, that's the, of the trust we put in the teams.

I think that the The failure mode is when you don't look.

And so we need unnatural, safe, fun, lore that gets us out of our chair and into the customer's mindset.

Best is if it's you and you're 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 pantomiming the customer and with a zero... enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge.

If you have practices in those three categories, uncomfortable with the failure modes.

I love that. This is definitely going to be the longest episode I've ever done, which is exactly what I expected.

And I'm happy that we're doing this. 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 How are you even listening at that speed?

No, it's 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've talked a lot about on the surface of Atlas. 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.

What's the best way to understand what Atlas is and who it's for?

In 2016, A bunch of stripes were traveling the world.

Stripes is what we call it. teammates here, and they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world.

And you would hear this unbelievable story from incredible entrepreneurs who 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 or global investors often to take USD or to charge US customers and You know, you could have sat around and said, huh, is that illegal?

They don't live in the US. 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.

Why did it require an airplane? Right, and so 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 three issue. I am not able to run my business without getting on an airplane.

Should be sending... alerts off in your whole psyche that you have discovered something important.

And so I wasn't at Stripe at the time. But I'm very thankful that I was running my own startup at the time.

I was very thankful that the people at 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 is... but it's a little strange because it's all the same Mac books and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth 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 are 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 happened.

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 I've started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit, you might have seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist being automated.

And so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83 election, which is this absolutely Byzantine silliness system by which you have 30 calendar days to send a one-page document to the IRS that could radically change the economics of how you are incentivize as a founder.

And this is not one of these greedy loophole situations.

The IRS in the 1980s made this made this this IRS rule in order to spur more entrepreneurship.

They want this. And the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to accomplish.

You have to send a snail mail in to an IRS address in a particular format in a particular way with no verification that it 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, the founders terrified all day long about this same issue, just alarm bells in your head all the whole time.

I had experienced 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...

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.

Is this really a 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 got started on it.

Infrastructurally, we've been automating these steps and when this podcast airs, 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, what the name of the company will be.

It'll tell you if it's available automatically or not.

You can split the company up 50-50 or whatever you want to do.

Fill out a few things and you click go. And then like a burrito coming to 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.

I'm purchasing my shares. I'm just getting started.

Why am I writing a check for... $10 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 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 scaries.

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 your 83B 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 has given you a tax ID.

Cool, your 83 election. is filed, cool, all the founders have their equity and you're 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 other governments come back with their sort of official yeses because we have We take care of the problem in the background by which we're faxing, phone calling, filling out forms on your behalf.

And so we just wanna 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 do exactly the same thing.

And so in some ways, is a really big deal and a big ship because 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 company is doing in the dashboard.

Well, first of all, congrats, Jeff and the Atlas team on shipping this.

I know this is 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, uh, Apple is in the low sixties 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 a little strange.

You just started your company. What does it really matter to wait an extra seven days or 20 days before you can get off before you can really get going on business, those are really fragile days that you're 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 relationship.

If we can... slide that forward in the world by a couple of days or weeks, which we're seeing like like half the time it takes to get to your first customer, just like shave a whole week off of your company.

And yeah, You can kind of see GDP being born sooner.

And 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 they'll see how satisfying that can be.

And another stat 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 Atlas than ever before.

And I think it's because you can just do a lot more on the internet as a founder with no code tools and everything else and get going. very cool to see that bringing the best of 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.

It was 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 happened.

Because to your point, you may start and then like, nah, nevermind 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 in Atlas, got to $50 million in revenue twice as quickly. as the cohort in 2023.

And so we kind of also think sometimes, oh, it was the pandemic that pushed everything online.

Those are our best years. It's like, We're seeing the earliest cohort charts of new startups just like cracking up into the right.

And that's... very exciting because you also hear sometimes, well, 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 a business that just how businesses are working day to day, it's really in the revenue that is representative 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 other tools will be in the future.

It's like, well, if 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. we'll just all benefit from that.

How much of this is based on you guys doing like sending faxes 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 startup ecosystem 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 gonna put ourselves in situations in which we have to compete to be the best.

We're gonna put ourselves and situations where we can automate it and be the only.

And like, that's a different mindset. So in terms of why we picked up 83 election as a topic, when we made that decision, we made a commitment that we're going to do this forever.

Like we're going to do this forever. This is a piece of infrastructure for the rest of the internet. that is a very high bar to set as the thing you're going to do.

And so we're happy to take our time This is part versus GoGoGo versus the long-term compounding.

GoGoGo 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, uh, Mail service.

Why? Doesn't matter. Today, just send a single piece of paper to the office and an incredible engineer.

And she went on to leave. all of the 83B 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?

Well, look, I mean, the A3 election is just sending this piece of paper the IRS, we just did it, right?

That go, go, go 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 an SLA is 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 in making sure it happens. Does it need to be us sending the mail?

Does it need to be us talking to government?

Not necessarily. And we have chosen to work with third parties and many backup third 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, well, we built it, it must be working.

Oh, later we'll add alerts. you know, later when there are problems, we'll figure out playbooks.

Well, look, when it's a third party, building it, you're like, wait a second, what happens if they screw up?

Like, cool, we better figure that out. We better OCR 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 back up 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 and go, Of course we shouldn't.

Let's go on to something else. Again, we're just really stitching it together, but ensuring that it happens.

Awesome. Okay. I was imagining fax machines.

There are fax machines occurring. There are fax machines occurring.

Not in the Stripe office. And there are phone calls being made and there are robots waiting on phones. on hold as well.

There's quite a lot going on. AI. AI is here.

I saw a 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 it is not today.

Okay, sounds like we're close. We're on our way.

Sounds like we're close. The other stat I have here is that the fastest growing cities For startups, here's what I have.

I don't know if you know this, but Boulder, Shenzhen, and Las Vegas.

They're everywhere. it's like stat we kind of came up with a little bit last year that I'm just personally deeply obsessed with is, founding teams in which the co-founders are in multiple countries.

So we kind of nicknamed this again. It's like they're giving things a good title. headlines, cross-border founders.

Wow. more than 20% of multi, multi-founder teams have at least one founder from another country.

That is astounding to me 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 again, I think the Atlas team itself represents this. we were very intentional of how we built the Atlas team.

It's majority women and we have more, more diversity to, but we were just very intentional to make it a team that had diverse perspectives. you've been on teams that don't have... diverse perspectives of any type, they are so much worse.

There's no real science necessary here. We just enforce that we had the opportunity to build this team that way and it was really important to me that it represented a world we wanted. things to look like 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 hire was harder and harder and harder to hire someone of a different background, but just naturally folks didn't want to join that type of team.

And that was the last time I've ever, ever gonna make that mistake, which is that early, the candidate pool must match where you want the team to go.

It's not a down funnel problem. It is an up funnel problem and where you have to just make sure that For each role, you're comfortable with the distribution of... of people and backgrounds in your candidate pool and go from there.

And I think that is One of the reasons why that 10 person 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 him 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 has a billion things to do?

We just want to hear about what's hard for you.

If you look back in your emails and you remember, If you started a company recently, you're starting a company right now.

The whole world is counting on you to pick a customer, solve their 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.

That is, you know, Imagine life without Google Docs, where you'd have to hire an IT person to... run your IT backend 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 you're racking computers yourself you're just absolutely not going to try so many things we just like we just see the company structure, the structure of bringing people together, to be like that and we want to automate more and more and more of it and turn it into software.

So 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 into software.

And I think that's just gonna unlock huge amount more people choosing to do it.

Interesting. I'm so curious what that ends up being.

If you really think about what you're doing here, if you believe that entrepreneurship and innovation and technology make the world better... you're 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.

Again, I also hear from founders, entrepreneurs, like, oh, I can't think of an idea.

I need a startup idea. And yet everything in the world is broken.

And I also recall my first startup, early 2010, 2012-ish, I joined a friend's company.

That was started at the same time that the Stripe founders started Stripe.

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 worked on making it easy in seven lines of code to accept payments online, which turned out to be really useful.

So 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, important things to be solved sitting in plain sight.

I can't see them always. But when you hear, if you said enough silence, and you hear the same people complain about 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 backed venture scale company, right?

Most businesses in the world are not venture-backed, venture-scale, billion-dollar companies.

You can build a profitable company It's kind of funny.

We've all put this... badge of honor of giving away a lot of your company. people really love owning a lot of their company and being successful.

So you just got to pick the right capital structure for your, for your business.

And again, the amount of money that has been generated of the companies that started through Atlas, you said $5 billion, basically that's the GDP of, of Atlas that Atlas.

And that's, that's like, revenue per year and that's growing per year yeah 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.

Yeah, we ran a survey. A little bit to go.

We need to rerun this where we just ask people what they have started their business about without Atlas. about 20% of people said they wouldn't have or wouldn't have had then.

And again, these things are fragile. And it's not all...

It's not all Google employees leaving their job 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 last thing. There's like so many more things I still want to talk about.

Maybe we'll have. Make it 2x speed. So this Atlas 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 you took it from 0.5 or something to 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 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 unnamed.

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 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.

What do you need to do right? not having things be your idea, I think is really powerful.

It's like, I just talked to 50 customers who all yelled the same thing. here they are in varieties of quotes and forms 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 win 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 where 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, aligning people with, deep customer stories. storyboarding some solution visually with a Sharpie and not a pencil.

Not Figma initially, not high or 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 storyboard.

You don't need to be a designer. You can just draw like stick figures on a piece of paper or whimsical or whatever you want to do.

And with those things, If you're not asking for the sun and the moon on headcount and team size to make some forward progress, like who could stop you?

Let's get some first version working. it was very motivating to get that single piece of paper in the mail which was blank. to kick us off on the 83th election.

Again, by the time this podcast airs, we will have crossed 10,000 83-day elections filed.

Wow. and we have done them all 100.000% 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.

It's just like, look, we did it one time.

Hey, I'm holding the piece of paper. Pretty motivating.

If we just printed out the right information, we'd be done.

Okay, actually, there's a lot to do other than just that, but 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. We don't need to do big internal updates with long-winded PowerPoint presentations and scrambles the night before, you can just go to the metrics page and see how we're doing.

That brings so much trust. to the group that people start going from, hey, why do we have this?

Atlas thing that doesn't really produce so much money is like charging people companies when they don't have money.

We're a big payments business. How do you even compare these things to, wow, look at the progress that they are making against the mission and look at look at its impact on the curves and you start to 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 Mosey, which is a compliance startup, Watershed, which is this amazing climate reporting tool, also led Atlas, Patrick McKenzie, Patio 11 for many folks do.

Wow, what an alumni group this is. We owe ourselves a dinner.

We owe ourselves 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 Haley Halverson, who's joined us, about a year or two ago.

She leads Atlas now and you can find her on Twitter.

She's fantastic. 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 she's gone off to hire some amazing people to run Atlas.

So it's really quite a privilege to have these people lead it over time.

But it was really important for us to communicate why we were going to run this in an economically viable way, and I think that applies to all products and all businesses is just like, look, if you're a customer acquisition, style product, well, showcase why this is the best customer acquisition for the dollar for the company.

If you are margin-generating moat creating, ecosystem growing portion of the business, well, then your metrics have to show it.

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 in the long term because Alternatives can come and go, and I super encourage there to be more Atlas alternatives.

That'd be great for founders. But I think over the long term, it'll be difficult to do so just because of the business model.

Yeah, there actually was an alternative at one point, AngelList, and then they're like, no.

Stripe is killing it. Let's just send everyone to Atlas.

So I had worked on Stripe payments for... a while and I had just started on Atlas And I think that same month, Angelus announced that they were doing incorporation. and banking and cap table all together, which was exactly what I wanted to do.

And I was like, oh shoot, did I sign up for the wrong thing?

Angel is such a smart group of people, so customer-oriented, great brand.

I love many of the people who work there and work with some of the best legal minds to they have the ruv set up there's like so much awesomeness here 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 gonna keep this long-term compounding approach because we think that this is where it's going to go.

And it was a zero interest rate environment at the time.

AngelList 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 AngelList, I hope you'll be comfortable telling the story, who I love, an incredible product mind.

And he led product over at AngelList 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? I was like, it was like a year and a half after, after they had really gone out or two years after they'd 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 83B election openly. And a lot of people were like, oh, I can't believe you're talking to the competitor. you know like look we we all share the same mission here you know yes we're competing but it's Are we really all better off from treating each other At arm's distance, we had a shared Slack channel.

We discussed when The Delaware was slow on incorporation.

One time is because they were playing softball.

And they had an afternoon off. That's the real story.

And we've discussed it. And AngelList was incredible.

And in how they evaluated it, we're like evaluating different partners.

But because of our working relationship and the quality of the of your product and they saw we were going with 83B election and the intensity of that.

They just put up a webpage that said to get started with AngelList, if you need a company, go right over to Atlas.

And that was a really amazing moment because it 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 AngelList, go through Atlas, and then all of your information is automatically populated into AngelList automatically.

And we've since rolled that out with several other partners, Mercury, Carter others but Angeles really led the way there and we I just maintain a great relationship with the team, but it's just like such a, it was, it took a while, but it really reproved 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 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 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 and just like Not worrying about competition, staying heads down, just solving customer problems, staying close to your competition, not being afraid to talk to them, sharing advice with each other, just building the best possible product.

I don't know. 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 to these corporations.

I think we can get Yeah, I think you want more specialization and more partnership.

And I think a lot of companies are starting to do that now.

Okay, so let me go back to the lessons you shared on how to build something new at a big company.

And then we can we can wrap up. So I took a bunch of notes here and these are awesome and actually resonate a lot with Mihika, who came on the podcast, 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.

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 there show tangible forward progress.

Just like, look at this. We made this progress.

We made this progress. sent ourselves a piece of blank paper look at this it's a huge milestone and and have momentum.

And Mahika talked about this, just like keep the fire alive, keep the fire alive.

Show momentum, making progress. This metric's moving up and to the right.

And then there's like a milestone, felt like you had like an early milestone of like, Leo, so 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 add there, anything you'd correct?

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 leader 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. that the team has tried, and this is well since I've been involved day to day, is literally inviting customers in to design the product, which I had 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 a piece of software I love,

Edge is a really easy learning curve to create visual diagrams. rather than sort of doing an AUXR about it, we just say, hey, What would you hope this dashboard would have?

And they grab a thing and they start typing and they start drawing what they want their dashboard to be.

Like, why were we guessing beforehand? I kind of now scratch my head. several years into you know, decade plus building things.

And I was like, I was doing this by myself.

Why didn't I just assign it to the people who are going to use it in the first place.

Now look, that doesn't always work because not all of your customers are going to be up product designers at heart, but more of them than you think.

And I think 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 a diagram of something we're working on right now.

I was like, wow, we haven't even had design look at it.

They're like, no, actually the customer drew it.

Great. Why were we guessing? I think you have an unfair advantage where your customers are founders and oftentimes have product... skills and design skills.

But I love that. It's true, but I will really push because you don't need 100 of them.

And you'll find somebody somewhere who...

No, you just got to sit in a little more silence.

They'll raise their 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, uh, Bye.

IT business in Baltimore to help other businesses with their computer systems.

Growing up, I would literally physically clean the keyboards of his employees and dust them out, dust the mice.

But yeah, he's very, very customer oriented where I get a lot of it from.

And my mom's a painter. So I think there's some combination of 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 and you'd have to like 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. uh it's a little intense on the pantomime but i think the point gets across that you just if you begin Again, because it's so natural to think internal.

If you begin the sentence physically with the customer and then start your sentence, You just have a much better shot at it.

That's an amazing story. Very study group-ish, like an early prototype. um jeff we've covered so much ground i have Two hours more worth of questions, but we need to... Let's lock.

We need to cut it off, I think. Is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? really excited about whatever you're building out there, thinking of building,

My email address is incredibly easy to find.

My Twitter handle is 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 the top of 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, I can't possibly be, but it is my first initial and last name at basically everything in the world, though my handle on Twitter is Jeff underscore Weinstein.

But gosh, if you can't find my email address, then you got a bigger problem.

Okay, we'll link to it in the show notes as well.

With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Are you ready? Woo! Here we go. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people?

I know a lot of people in the podcast 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.

You just can't go wrong, though. It is just an incredible clarity of how to spend your time as a leader, a manager of other people, just like a very high bar for how evaluating your work as the sum of everyone around you. around you that was very clarifying to me that it's just like not an 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 moose boosh afterwards is orbiting the giant hairball, a corporate fool's A Cobra Fool's 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 pull people off the hairball 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 advantage and gravity of the hairball, but not be... succumb by it and be able to orbit it.

Those two 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 was awesome.

Uh, ran in, so I won't explain the book, you just watch the podcast of it, but it walks through many of the business powers and sort of moats a company can have.

I ran into the author, Hamilton Helmer. Hamilton Helmer.

Yes. Thank you. What a cool name. very cool name, alliterative, 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, as he ran off with his sandwich.

Another funny, somewhat embarrassing moment about that book is when I was applying to work at Stripe, I was in some email conversation with our CEO, Patrick Carlson, who is quite well read and enjoys books.

And I was... trying to showcase I like books a little bit, though not at any level of him.

And I just had mentioned, I just finished Reading seven powers and I kind of recommended it to him but it jokes on me because he's quoted in the foreword that I had skipped and 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 books have spoken to me.

Do you have a favorite power, by the way, Lenny?

Well, his favorite power is counter positioning.

I also like that power a lot because I think it's the one you can That really changes everything about how you build your company.

So that's the one that always stands out to me.

I like counter-positioning also, and... Atlas with going cheap and that audience is kind of positioning.

But I really enjoy process. Um, the process power, because just like, I think It is very difficult to, as an organization, get good at anything.

And if you could do that over a long period of time in a sustainable way, you have the power.

This is the nerdiest chat I've ever had.

Which is your favorite seventh power? I love it.

But on that power, I asked him about it.

He makes a really strong point there that that's Rarely is it actually a power for people.

They think like the way we execute is 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.

They won't invest in the other one. So I like it even more for that reason.

I love it. But I was going to say, with Patrick Collison being quoted in that book, not only was he just like... uh wrote part of the forwarder was a quote he basically credited seven powers of helping Build and strike.

No big deal. Yeah. Okay. This lightning round is going great.

This is like a very microcosm of our whole chat so far.

Second question, your favorite recent movie or TV show?

How to with John Wilson. That's on HBO. Okay, so for those who haven't seen it, I'm not really giving away anything because it's just wild when you watch it.

You can't give it away. This videographer has found footage where he's just walking through Manhattan and 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've spent any time in New York, you know there's plenty to film. and then has 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 and really understanding people.

And he does it through this incredibly dry humor of stitching together this this video footage to tell a different narrative.

And I think some of it is that we used to live in New York I 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 woman girl who is sort of from a dysfunctional home and has this opportunity to live with a family friend who is with families more have more opportunity for her, more empathetic to her, and just showcases again, like how fragile things are um 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 tearjerker, but a great one. Do you have a favorite product you have recently discovered that you love?

I love my computer. I'm fast at my computer.

Being fast on my computer helps me just go from intention to just out in the world.

I've fallen back in love with Raycast which is an automation tool for those who have watched the journey of Spotlight and Quicksilver and Alfred 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 basics it's fully programmable extensible just like a huge fan of Raycast.

And then I think for product people, if you don't have CleanShot installed for screenshots, you're just behind the curve. there's so being able to take a screenshot and blur particular things or 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 a new laptop, it's Raycast first and CleanShot second.

Wow. I am going to download CleanShot immediately.

Yes, it's extremely good. I've been using Skitch as my Blur instance.

As much as I appreciate the sketch folks, CleanShot is an incredible piece of software.

Amazing, I'm gonna do that. All right, two more questions.

Do you have a favorite life motto? that you often come back to share with friends or family, find useful and worker 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 hear that they'll later say go-go-go back to me.

I'm like, huh, don't I say that sometimes?

Like, yes, you say it a lot. So apparently GoGoGo is one of them.

I also... I love that. Say like, let's make some mistakes. just when we're like brainstorming something or, you know, sitting at a sushi restaurant and talk to the sushi guy or gal and just... just to like showcase like hey Let's be creative.

Do whatever you want. No pretense. I'm not evaluating anything.

Like, let's make some mistakes. It's just like a weird thing.

They're so good. I'm going to use that for my podcast guests.

Let's just make some mistakes. Let's make some.

Don't worry about it. At that point, everyone's like, what?

Okay, fine, sure. Cool. I like the combo of those two.

Go, go, go, go. Let's just make some mistakes while we're going. use it in certain circumstances and not for the five nines of reliability on our API, but it does have its place.

Final question. You worked with Patrick Collison and John Collison for many years.

I'm 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, seven years ago now, I was... they put me in charge of our payments infrastructure services.

So that's, all the backend systems that communicate with the financial system and all the internal APIs where we build the external APIs and products on top of is 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 somewhat insanely with that. responsibility.

And so on the first month, we had our quarterly business review where just the normal quarterly process.

And I was like, OK, cool. I'll do the next one.

I'll write the next one. I've been here one month.

They're like, no, you write it. it'll be even better that you write it."

I was like, oh my God. It's just like forcing me to have to, in the fourth week, have that catalyst. to understand the whole business and with the permission, because I was going to have to write this doc about how we're doing. the company had been in existence for like seven years before I got here is already at some reasonable scale.

I didn't, 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 had kind of pushed me to do it a bit.

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 that really spoke to me, and I rewrote it completely, and I made it sound like me.

Hmm. I've tried to make things sound like me since John's is more of a gut punch.

I'll say so I reported today This is 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, a lot going on at Stripe at the time.

And I would, We'd have a one hour one-on-one listing all of the things that we had accomplished and the problems we have and. and where we need escalation help and where we're stuck and all this, that and the other, just lots of stuff.

I had 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 100. but I need you stuck on problems one and two.

It's like, oh man. that like hurt i was like oh shoot i i am i've i've i'm 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 100, even if we were 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 was like, oh, shoot, I'm going to be fired.

But it was really deeply impactful sentence.

Wow. What a powerful, great, helpful, like that's great advice.

He really looked at my soul. Yeah, I love this.

Like a Street Fighter style or something. but it's your point, very impactful and helpful.

Jeff, we did it. Cool. The archaeology is complete.

I appreciate the timeline. It was fun. And I don't do too many of these.

So I'm curious to people's feedback and really appreciate the questions.

Amazing. Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

Appreciate it. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

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[Product Mastery: Jeff Weinstein on Customer Empathy, Metrics, and Building at Stripe]-[Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)]

📋 Summary

Unlocking Product Success: Lessons from Jeff Weinstein

The "Go-Go-Go" and Long-Term Compounding Philosophy

Obsession with Customer Empathy and Silence

Metrics as a Numerical Representation of Value

The "Study Group" Concept

Getting Things Done at Scale

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript