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

27:30But I'm here to hear about your whole, all of your problems and see where we can help. Not promising we can help solve everything. But let's listen. that is infectious, both between the customers and internally. And so I'm able to bring more people into that practice at Stripe. I'm able to quickly grab an engineer and hop on a call. I can forward a message over to a Slack group, and they know that because the customer's speaking directly, it's somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day. You know, we could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what's going to the customer wants or we could talk to them directly.

28:08And 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 can pattern match relatively quickly, what are the styles of customers that represent where the world is going, the most ambitious, the most technical, the fastest growing, the most detailed, and you don't need 10 ,000 to those people to talk to. If you're text message friendly with five or ten 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.

28:57I love these. So I'd love to learn more about these tactics that you found helpful. So you've shared this idea of silence. Talking to someone and just being silent and I forget the phrase used but just like ideas emerge like your whole roadmap can merge from that silence. 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? I'll just text you and I have questions. If there's anything else to add to these, that'd be awesome.

29:27And 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 the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem. They're busy. They're snacks to eat. They have families. They have other things to do. There's a lot going on in the world. A lot. Your dumb product, it's amazing that they would spend any of their time discussing it at all. I mean, most of the time, if you don't like something, you just move along. You just apathetically, silently move forward in the world.

30:13And so the fact that someone took their finite time to succinctly with curiosity, communicate to the world or you about your product. That's a unbelievable gift that should be, you know, p0 alert level intensity. And so I will leave a meeting. I will change what I'm doing to just get one message back to them. Even if it's, hey, I got this. I'm about to go to dinner. Can I hit you up tomorrow. Oh yeah, thank you. Awesome. I can't even believe you 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.

31:04That's night, night and day. And it's also fun fact, tip. When people are really hot on an issue and it mistakes, we have SLA breaches, we have errors, you're going to want to get on that stuff fast. And in those situations, my bar for how we will respond to this folks is not to just sort of solve the problem, but is to turn them into a promoter. And most of the time we're able to, even if there was a pretty relevant issue, I remember one time in Atlas, we had this bug in which for a handful of our legal docs, they were handing out, let's say, 25 shares, rather than 25 % of the shares we dropped the percentage sign, and thankfully a founder noticed this and the docs and tweeted about it.

32:02I was like, my heart, my heart, my heart, my paused, you know, and I was like, oh no, this could be a serious issue. We were able to fix it and regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone that was impacted. 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. We didn't. That person was incredibly gracious about the situation and said, anytime you want me to just read your docs, be happy to. I have a law degree. I care about this topic. I want to brainstorm with you about ways that Atlas could do more document creation.

32:37was like, wow, I can't believe I was in this sort of defense position. And now we've gained a friend in the world who can be eyes and ears and brainstorm with us and we, the team maintains a really close relationship with that person as they do with many, many founders to use Atlas. And so just again, we were so quick to put the outside world in this other camp where we need to touch it with kid gloves and treat it as a big blob and a cohort and a statistic when it is a human with a problem who likes snacks, who is busy. And it's fun to do and it turns out to be an incredibly easy, fast way to figure out what to build.

33:19There'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 in bugs and texting of people. They're just like, there's so many people that potentially I'd have to be interacting with. 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 feedback. How do you pick the people to zero in on? I think there's two parts of this. One, what a problem to have. Of all the problems in the world, I'm overwhelmed by customer interest is on the top list of problems I want to have.

34:00I 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 sun, 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, you need, you need that the art, there's an art and science to picking where to go deep. You know, I will happily respond to folks with. I really appreciate that. Do you mind sending me a screenshot or a video and some of them don't?

34:44Okay, that's fine. You kind of get a sense of quickly looking at how they wrote about it or pattern, just pattern matching, how detailed they were or how much they seen that they want to engage and kind of bounce 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.

35:33And then from there, you really do owe it to them to follow up if they're going to be that detailed. And at that point, you really have a product friend for life and you'll kind of continuously go back to them. So, you know, you have to kind of 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. I was curious if anyone would send anything. We'll be taking videos for the next three days to go, you know, super deep. I'd be like, oh my goodness, I would love to be part of the So strike bug finder program, like, may I apply?

36:17I'm like, oh, 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 with 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 mention somewhere is that you only pay attention to feedback from people that are paying customers and ignore everything else.

36:59Can you talk about that? People who build things for people tend to be empathetic and interested in curious folks who have friends. and then those friends want to use your stuff because they know you and they like you and they'll have good feedback. But you need to figure out, is that actually your customer or is that your friend trying it? Who is actually your target customer? Exactly. Not a company or a segment, you know, not digital natives that are ex big. I'm talking about Sarah in this department who has these tabs open and just faced this problem and Needs to solve it by 4 p .m. 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 as the social network B2C stuff.

37:57I have less intuition on They're very willing to exchange money for solving their problems. Incredibly so. Often times, 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 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 is like okay rather than I was like well don't pay attention to that quite as much You know really pay attention to like who is your target customer and are you in a fast iteration cycle with for them And are they telling their friends?

38:50But that wasn't enough because people are so drawn myself included drawn to the the friendliness that I just said a rule which is we discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero. Like, that is not of interest to us. It doesn't, we don't even write it down. It's not part, it's just not part of what we're talking about at all. We're only interested in Sarah, our target customer, and can we get her to solve whatever the problem is as quickly as possible, as jankily as possible, and go from there. 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.

39:39I want feature XY 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, I feel it 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 right that 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.

40:24This 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 $10 ,000, it would have to do X. That's a really cool line to use. Is there any other advice there of just had a 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 that have issues where a big company will say, hey, we're an enterprise, and we're gonna pay you this big contract.

41:10All you need to do is build features, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and go through security steps, ADCD, EFG, and the siren song of the big three -year contract of your first enterprise buyer, even when you're already big. There's always a, you know, go from Fortune 1 ,000 to Fortune 500 to Fortune 10 to Fortune 1. You know, there's always more. There are so many stories of the rug being pulled in the middle and they never actually use it in the contract, never lands, same in partnerships. And so I would say the same thing, which is like, if we're super serious about this, send us a million dollars.

41:46Like, why are 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 need it to really work with this system we haven't talked about yet.

42:29Now that we're paying we want to even faster. And so I find that just it puts a fork in the road towards faster success or avoiding the non -success case. Even at Stripe Scale, I've heard our founders somewhat push this methodology on us, where you, 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 RedMap. So a big lesson you're sharing here is essentially make sure people are ready to pay for something that they're asking for. That is the ultimate sign that they actually...

43:12And I'm really 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 real commitment that is extremely different than ready to. So I will often be on the phone or video, whatever with a founder.

43:54and I will have them practice paying, like, have them practice charging me. I'll just say, hey, I'm just a friend, I'm trying to help you out. There's a little bit self -serving because I work at Stripe and I want to get feedback on our products. I'll say, feel free to sign up for any invoicing or payment service. I don't really care which one you're welcome to choose Stripe. If it's easy enough for you, I'd love to hear your two cents. and send me an invoice or a payment link for a dollar right now. 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.

44:33You have already done this, you already have a dollar in your account. It'll just, you've already have your logo on the top right of the invoice. It will feel great. And I probably could go through my email inbox and just see one dollar receipts to random people because I'm just so convinced that the difference between paying and like willing, ready, thought I thought they would pay is, you know, night and day different. Yeah, there's this term willingness to pay that I feel like it should change as you're saying to just cross that willingness to end just paying. Pay, exactly. Yeah, and we can refund the money.

45:08There'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, it worked. I'm like, we're not, whatever. And people just start to spill. They'll just start to spill and eventually they'll get to their biggest problem pretty quickly. Let's talk about metrics kind of going in different direction. Many people told me I need to ask you about picking metrics and the importance of metrics and how you think about metrics. So let me just maybe start with a question of just why do you think picking the right metric and why are metrics so important in building successful products?

45:52I 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? Sharts that showcase things are going up into the right on one hand and then tweets on the other. So metrics, quantitative and qualitative, and I really see them as deep siblings and equals. You really need both. It's not O -K -R's versus something. There are some things you want the texture of the person on video showing how complicated I think was. And then also we're trying to make an economically viable system that we can run at large scale and you can't keep all that stuff in your head and need to measure it.

46:50And 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 what was actually the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective. where as 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.

47:32How 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. So you have to think about it a bit. Another reason why it's spent a lot of time crafting a small number of these metrics is they 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.

48:08And 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 and metrics on the left and a series of tweets on the right is a pretty great combo. So here's an example. A couple of years ago, I had been working in our payments group at Stripe for a bit. And then I started working on some of our banking and incorporation services.

48:54So 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 co -founders' address, but they didn't know the co -founders' address. They couldn't log into the dashboard to figure out their 83B manual filing instructions. And we saw this you know basically the first week of spending time on Atlas. I was just like just showing me all the support tickets. Are they happy support tickets?

49:36People writing in being like, oh I love this services, it's absolutely fantastic. Can you just do ABS even more for me or they're like sad support tickets? I'm like, oh my God, they're all sad support tickets. And so we're just kind of asking ourselves, well, why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend? I was like, well, it would have to accomplish ABS activities for them. You'd have to get their company. You'd have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS. You'd have to handle all the downstream administrative, 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.

50:10We could measure all of the intermediate parts. We could measure the success rate and the frequency of incorporation services. And we do all those things. But if you looked at the support tickets, there's just no way if you had a support ticket, you would recommend due to a friend. And so we suggested this metric to ourselves companies that have no support tickets through the incorporation service, the whole process. From the moment you start the application open, actually the first page load at the very beginning, all the way through the process, waiting for the government, waiting for the IRS, and we give you two more weeks to write into support.

50:52We 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 the average. You could have the average as .3, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're, you know, that getting to .2 is going to cause them to tell their friends more. And we looked and only 15 % of founders were getting through Atlas with zero support tickets through that metric.

51:30And 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, and presumably it'll fix it. People like that more and then tell their friends. And over about 18 months, we took that number from 15 % to 85. We basically just flipped it. And you can look at the market share, plotted on the same time. on the same time frame and it's like the same shape. And 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.

52:21You know, we were to showcase the internal Alice metrics which we often just screenshot in chat 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 products back, the scope, the solution? And oh, want to learn more? Just reply to the support ticket email, figure out what they need it, what they need. And so we kind of turned all of engineers on the team into PMs to go and, like, one issue at a time, figure out what needed to change and build products for it.

53:09And that's where we push forward on A3B elections, automating it, sending in the mail for folks. We built our own signing service. We turned everything into a click. We did just sort of the obvious things we saw in the tickets, but as the PM, I was able to just sort of not on autopilot, but really sit back and have

53:31Contentful conversations with engineers who were bringing solutions and ideas for product rather than one person going through all of the potential ideas, scoping them and assigning them. And because it was based in what people were saying and wanted, it was very motivating for everyone on the team. So somewhat long answer, but figuring out something in which every day we can wake up and look at the same metric and with some confidence, know what to do is so much better than let's figure out what to do each month and kind of like starting from scratch. I think this is amazing and important advice.

54:10Just 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 impact. Funny enough, Airbnb, one of the teams actually had a metric sort of like this. Basically, we're reducing the people contacting Airbnb with support issues. But when they're happening, is their team started just making it harder to contact support? Because they're like, maybe they don't need to contact support all about all these trivial issues, so maybe let's 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?

54:47We look at multiple metrics, but we will optimize around one, and you have to use your own judgment to look at some of these countermeasures and pick them. We would also, you know, that would sort of be our overarching metric for a year, but then we would pick specific tactical metrics about how we would accomplish it. So just an example that both is how we solved to 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.

55:43So there some incredibly, 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 to try and 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 overturned rejections where someone writes back in saying, hi, like come on, I'm totally just making something reasonable, what's up, why did you reject me?

56:23And 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 get excited about a chart that goes up into the right. It's kind I don't know meme, oh that's going up to the right.

57:05I'm really excited about charts that go up into the left. So you have to figure out some optimization that you're trying to maximize. And so in this particular case of this risk review, we would look at, hey, for the cohort of customers that started last month, how quickly did we get them to their final risk review by number of days since they submitted? And so you want a chart that looks a lot like, just here we go, you know, right up to the top because you want 100 % of your customers to get their final decision as quickly as possible. And once you know it, when we looked at the chart, it was doing this, right?

57:47And so each month we would just make it a little better, a little better, a little up to the left, up into the left, up into the left. And now basically 100 -ish percent of people get their risk of view 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. It's just like you can decide when to stop a tactic because you get to some level of success that you're comfortable with.

58:20And you can always choose to pick it back up later. So there's some really cool lessons here of just how to pick a good metric, just to kind of maybe summarize what I'm hearing is, You kind of work backwards from essentially NPS. Like how many, why aren't people recommending Atlas? You found, okay, well, people that are complaining and having issues with support and running into problems, most likely are going to be detractors not going to want to recommend Atlas. So let's have those really ambitious goals. Eventually nobody has a support ticket slash, let's just track having to do all of zero issues.

58:51And then you identify, okay, what's driving a lot of these support tickets? Okay, it looks like this risk timeline to like get to the certain milestone. So let's make that our goal for the next quarter, whatever. And it's focused there and then make it impact. And then I mentioned move on to other levers within this bucket of zero contacts. You have to pick the right metric for your audience. I wouldn't like, I wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone. Those are not a terrible one to export. But in the founder 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?

59:34They want to talk to an older sibling of sorts about how it went and so we Decided that our go -to -market strategy would be to delight our current customers such that they would tell their friends. And other businesses, I mean, that's always somewhat useful, but you can also reach people with billboards and Google ads and other types of upsells. That's very difficult in the moment that someone is starting a company that's sort of a natural geographic. Can you get the picture of the bird exactly the right time? How are you even supposed to go find people who are about to start companies? Thankfully, they have this practice of just asking their friends.

1:00:18And so if their friends loved it, they're gonna just recommend it. And that has, 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? Like, why is this actually gonna move what our customers want and the business board? And when you can line them all up, It can be quite, quite beautiful, just 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 logline anytime We think that a user bumped into a problem.

1:01:14So maybe they hit a 404, or maybe their payout was one day after the ETA or they had more than 10 payment declines. You can kind of brainstorm, again, or just listen to customers, what would cause you to personally have a bad day and then just emit an event when that occurs? And then you could just make a bar chart, a 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... ...amit the logline and count it.

1:02:02Like 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 user's having a bad day chart, emit a logline 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, any time anybody has an idea about why it costs for us having a bad day, just emit a logline, like put it on this chart, and then what we can choose over time, which bad day reasons we want to burn down and hopefully just eradicate them, not just minimize them, but it gave us kind of a background noise counting system for where there are problems.

1:02:52And anytime there's an incident or some customer issue, the first thing I think is, ooh, like I wonder if we have a bad day, 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 didn't have it but at least we're aware and we can evaluate it against other bad days that we want to burn down. What does sometimes a little bit 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 is immediate action. It's like okay cool we have to figure out a way to account this bad day.

1:03:28We got to get it on the chart. That way we can make an informed decision about, you know, when to invest in improving it. I love this idea. I haven't heard this before. So the idea is just make 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, when my newsletters, the payments go through Stripe. I check my dashboard every day. Cool. So what would be a bad day? Oh, I see. I see some silence happening here. You know, it's not loading. The number is taking a long time to show up.

1:04:03Something being completely off in there. Not being able to log in.

1:04:13That silence. That's good. I just want to keep going. The question is how much, you know, to the audience is how much of the silence will get it out before? but this is what I'm talking about, right? Is I could guess them, right? But as you were saying those, I know the URL of those charts. I know the log in one, because I feel that too. So I'm going to play with Stripe all the time and then you get a 2FA, 2 Frequently, and come on, I had the same cookie, I was just here yesterday. So we can't 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 It's like product catnet.

1:05:00I 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 couple They're just like quick metrics things. This is a bit above I Don't know some people like cycling or something, I guess I like metrics. People get a really nice bike. I got a lot of metrics. Picking metric titles that make you feel something. So we could have called that measure of companies, you know, number of companies that do not send a support ticket over X period and Y period, you know, with men met you see sometimes see these charts where the metric itself like named itself This is just companies with zero support That's it and it the brevity and the focus and the customer Mindset built into the chart name can become currency inside the company.

1:06:06It's like oh, I'm working on making the like this chart go up and it feels good to just say the name out loud rather than some complicated underscores and minns and maxes and you know the database field name is 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 a motivating thing to talk about. And then lastly on metrics is there's just good hygiene that people should bring to their measures.

1:06:53Percentages shouldn't have 41 bull, you know, significant digits if only two of the digits are relevant. You should keep all the measures of your dashboard on the same X -axis. These are just stylistic things that increase the frequency that people want to just wake up every day and open the dashboard and look at it. And that is so powerful if your whole team is looking at the same set of information that has the heartbeat of the customer every single day. In fact, we can measure at Stripe the usage of our dashboards by team. And so we can see which teams are themselves looking at their own metrics.

1:07:37And 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 not an area that's sort of behind the scenes is being counting reliability only is the machine hot. You can make metrics that mean something to the customer and you would be proud if they were to be screen shot and put on the internet to be like, wow, I feel like that company is taking their promise to me seriously and I can see myself on those metrics as a customer. That's where we're really shooting for. So, to me, we're back with you just out 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.

1:08:30In your experience, you find that really powerful and important. A couple years ago, straight to internal work to make an internal metrics kind of dashboard system. And we have a special place called Go Metrics. Many people use a Go slash service where you can just quickly go to a URL. And again, I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy. My rule is, if it's not on Go Metrics, I'm not going to look at it. So if people can send me one -off queries or charts or screenshots or presentations or emails of charts and data, but that is in the wind. We can't interrogate the query. Betrics are almost always wrong for many weeks.

1:09:16We didn't quite get the definition correctly. You have to live in the metric for quite a while before you really believe in it And so if you're always looking at some one -off version It's just very difficult to for to rise up to the level of importance that is A thing we should trust to help us decide what to do that's an incredibly high bar and so I just find you have to to look at it frequently enough. And if you're gonna 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.

1:09:59I was so excited to finally see this. And then a couple days later, huh, like quite understanding. What does that actually mean? I saw this other metric from this other angle that kind of makes it feel counterintuitive that it's like this and then you kind of look into it. Wait a second, we've been counting along the whole time. Oh no, and then you look at it the third week and it's a completely different version. And then you hope that we forget about it and maybe we'll go into something else. Nope, we're not going to forget about it. Week four comes around here. Wait a second. Okay, then the team meeting starts.

1:10:35Hey, just a reminder, let's just bring up the metric again, not a screenshot of it, go or the URL and just that level of frequency and specificity and ritual around it is what brings it into the decision making culture. And again, we 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 a thousand metrics. We just don't physically have time the day to bring that level of care and understanding to so many things. So then it forces you to when know 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.

1:11:22It's about Finding how we're customer ones and then different versions of how do we sort of know it's true over time and our tactics and proving it Sound so simple when you describe it that way This episode is brought to you by Anville. Their Document SDK helps product teams build and launch software for documents fast. Companies like Carta and Vouch Insurance use Anville to accelerate the development of their document workflows. Getting to market fast is a top priority for product teams. And the last thing that you or your developers want is to build document workflows from scratch. It's time consuming, expensive, and distracts from core work.

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1:12:39The best part about Anvil is the level of customization their SDK provides. Non -technical folks love Anvil's drag -and -drop builder and developers love their flexible APIs and easy to understand documentation. build documents software fast with Anvil. That's useanvil .com slash Lenny to learn more or start a free trial. That's use an VIL .com slash Lenny. Kind of along these same lines or something that I've learned you started at Stripe to help people obsess with 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.

1:13:18I'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, 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 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.

1:14:06There'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 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 test or 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, I thought this was great just a second ago. So, and many of us have experienced that.

1:14:43Now, 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 your shipping, you're going to have your customers, you're going to be doing great product work. Meanwhile, your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world and decrease all the trust you've earned to build what you're building now. It is actually difficult to decide, well, what hours during the week am I going to block like block off from my future progress to see it from the customer's perspective today.

1:15:38And there are various techniques to try to incentivize or to structure a group of people to do it. Stripe has a thing called friction logs as well, which is a single individual will pretend to be 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 end to end and have the time to write it up. And the position in the company to send it out as a critique to potentially to not just your own team, but in a whole organization.

1:16:30So that's actually like a pretty high bar to crossover. So I was kind of brainstorming, what can we do to make this more fun and have the frequency, which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase. And we kind of iterated through a through a few of 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 BPMs, just like literally anyone who wants to sign up, support person, sales person, someone who's on our events team and engineer and our infrastructure stack, anybody.

1:17:09Can sign up for a study group? We show up maybe four to eight people total. We pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. maybe we want to accept money in person at an upcoming farmers market or we want to run a multi country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business. Something quite complicated. We could pick any motivating goal. And there are two rules to study group rule one is you do no longer work at Stripe. You're not, you do not work at Stripe. Not pretend you work, don't work at Stripe. Not try to forget. You do not work at Stripe.

1:17:55You've never worked at Stripe. You work at, when we make up a name of the company, you know, Dolphin Aquarium Industries, and we will pick a CEO of the company from the, from the group 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? So we actually embody the customer. We will not break character. It's a little bit of improv thing. And as the kind of myestro of study group, I will firmly but kindly, if I hear you use any internal stripe knowledge, which is natural to do, you're like, well, 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.

1:18:47If I can see you use any introl strike knowledge, I'll just pause and say, hey, let's redo the sentence or redo what we did with no strike knowledge as a reminder, you don't work it straight. And it takes us a couple times, but people really get into it, and all of a sudden, we'll start making up characters, and the CEO will be like, oh, Tim, You're a designer. You know, where are we going to get the color palette? All of a sudden, 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 in a time, you start, you actually start to believe that you don't work at start.

1:19:28And you work at, to often aquarium industries and you start to really feel it. So that's rule one, you don't work at start. 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 or 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 are in the last just this year, last few months of 2024. More than 250 people have gone like participating in a study group and it is deeply eye -opening for those involved.

1:20:16The responses are, you know, sort of business emotional, you know, not super emotional, but just wow. I I can't believe how hard it was to accomplish X, Y, and Z. I thought we were amazing at blogs. Well, we actually are so pretty good, but we need to get back towards amazing. Wow, I didn't even know that internally people would know that our products did one, two, and three. And this has become so internally popular that teens have adopted for themselves. And so we've kind of franchised study group internally already where different teams will will run it. But I think we're going to continue it because it, I think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic.

1:20:59People 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 other reason I appreciate your podcast as well. It's like 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 the amount of time. No one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all. It's a random group of people. We don't even introduce ourselves about what team we worked on. We're just all here as participants to embody the customer. And then I think lastly, a reason why it's work, and many of these just didn't actually super surprising to me.

1:21:39I wouldn't have been able to print ahead of time is, it is just fun. It's just fun. People want to make up the name of the company. They're excited about what Dolphin Industries would sell a person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO and it's just, there's a little theatrics to it, but 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 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.

1:22:40So 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 planted. It's fascinating that something that there's so much theatrics and ceremony necessary for a product team and a company to find out these things about their product. You would think people are like, oh, no, we know how onboarding looks. We know all these things, but you're basically what you're saying is you don't and you need to do these sorts of things in order to really know what your product is like these days.

1:23:20The customer does not live in our walls. They aren't. They're not here, you know, they're not, they don't know our lingo and it is just so natural for our internal mindset and lingo to to flow into the application over time, and you need some counterbalance to get there. And I think that's an, it has to be an unnatural counterbalance. I used to frustrate me actually more. 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.

1:24:12So 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. You 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 well -oiled and run by great people.

1:25:03So you need something unnatural. There's an interesting trend through it, and thread through it talks so far. Broadly, there's just like an obsession with making something great and awesome. And then a layer below is just an obsession with 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.

1:25:39You're not in your head, the sideways a little bit. So I'd love to hear just your thoughts and just like the subcession with experience and user issues. And okay, but we have to throw over the business. What are the metrics for moving? If someone else has a strategy for moving revenue that isn't getting it from customers, I want to know about it. Because it is so hard to get it from customers, if there's some faster path, please tweet me and tell me about it. Because it's very hard, a lot of work to do. So if there's something else, I want it on the table, but I often find it's part of the product experience.

1:26:16So 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 into a big enterprise. Like nothing is sort of off limits from product. In fact, I was chatting with a friend who runs to company and they were a small company on the verge of product market fit, starting to feel customers starting to pull. And they're like, ah, but our self service funnel is, it's so leaky. And we have all this support coming through self service.

1:27:02First of all, congratulations. Like, 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 until 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 contacts? There's a really sales contacts. They're like, oh, they want to learn more about how they get started. They want to know the expertise about, this is a particular, a health care related company.

1:27:33They wanted to know their health care choices available. They wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had to it. I was like, that's the product. That's the product. Like, 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 they get on the phone, they know the first name of the person they're talking to because they have it from the onboarding form 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.

1:28:16And I was really inspired by Fidelity, which is a big financial institution, where many people listening might have switched jobs and had to move their 401k or something like this from job A to job B. Maybe in some universe it'll be three clicks, but not today. Or certainly not when I tried a couple of years ago, you got a call and go on a phone tree and all this shenanigans. And then I got on on the line with someone from Fidelity, you know like high Jeff They knew about the old company they Confirmed my address. There's a wheat by the way. This is not a digital process yet. We're gonna FedEx you 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 and like put it back to the festive.

1:29:15Like wow, that is product. That is a product experience where I think some people would say, oh, look, the product experience has to only be in software. So I feel when people think, oh, you know, product quality and craft has some limit towards business value. Like there's some, ask them to that you have to be like, well, kind of product play time quality is over. We need to talk about business. It's like, let's figure out exactly what is causing the business to happen and make it product. Even if it doesn't look naturally the same as our sort of SaaS software, browser, mobile, whatever versions, I think we can see the entire experience as it.

1:29:57And 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 as sustainable ways, I want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than the person that we're trying. I love that and clearly it's 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 and that you're going to share.

1:30:34But one last question about study groups. Who, how do you decide what product you're going to pick to do a study group on? And then what is 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. They actually proactively say, Hey, we should study group blah. Or we're launching something next week.

1:31:08We should study group it before it goes out the door. Or now I actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group based on what people want. And then 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 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 anything anything at all can be studied group, it just takes about an hour and a couple people and you open up the Zoom and that's it. And then for expectation wise, look, it is so tempting to put more regulation on something.

1:31:51Like, okay, well, everything coming out of this program needs to be scored and rubriced and have SLA's, that is extremely reasonable as some of these next steps because we do notice things that are of serious issues and we have some formal processes inside of Stripe for elevating bugs to certain priority levels that get tagged and have SLA's 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 gonna 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 involved in some piece of it, and not want to act on it, because seeing your fellow team members Nate's 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, I didn't really know or they have some special setup.

1:33:05You 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 pain stakingly slowly not being able to do so. If that's not what excites you as a product person to want to solve, you know, it's like the things that not for you. But then again, you have your own organization system, you have your own things you need to shift, and study group doesn't have a mandate that comes from it. We have our own, it's more of a cultural piece of information that is very high signal and then people tend to use that high signal for quick prioritization.

1:33:49I 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 strike like in many companies you know pencils down, fix the problem, severity levels, non -negotiable slackrooms happens, war rooms, all that stuff. 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 to put down your pencils. You do need to acknowledge it at Stripe within seven days. And even if it doesn't mean to fix it, it's like a person looks at it and says, is hey, we're gonna do it or not do it.

1:34:38That's still a 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 gonna do anything that isn't driving this metric in goal that we have. And I think for teams like that, it's hard to hear, just like, oh, someone's gonna send you all of these problems that you're experienced. There's the negative version where the founders like goes through the product like a CEO of a larger company, just, oh my god, look at all these problems.

1:35:11You 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 going to do better. There's a huge amount of trust here involved in your colleagues, which is we want to provide teams great information.

1:35:47And the best teams welcome that information. It doesn't mean that it comes with an auto 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... Let the teams relapel them. And so maybe it's actually not a p0 from their eyes, and we like... That's the trust we put in the teams. I think that the... 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 pantomining the customer and with a zero with z, enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge.

1:36:48If you have practices in those three categories. I'm comfortable 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. I'm happy that we're doing this. Well, everyone go 1 .75X 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. I want to help people understand what the hell it is and the stuff that's happening there.

1:37:28And 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 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 global investors, often to take USD or to charge US customers.

1:38:21And 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 now Why did it require an airplane? Right and so you you you start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst someone with a laptop Who has access to the whole internet and that is a burning problem All right, that is not a tier three issue I am not able to run my business about getting on an airplane should be sending

1:39:05Alerts off in your whole in your whole psyche that you have discovered something important and so I wasn't at strike at the time I was at a very but I'm very thankful that I was running my own start 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. But it's a little strange because it's all the same MacBooks and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and smarts.

1:39:49And 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 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.

1:40:34And then it also comes from experience of seeing it happened. Instacart signed up for strike with a Gmail address and then COVID happened and they delivered critical food to everyone when when people were reasonably not allowed to go to the grocery store easily. So you just don't know what the next G -Mill address is going to do. And so in Atlas we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started and that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time. And so over the last few years for those who have either used Atlas or started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit, you might have seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist being automated.

1:41:29And so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83B 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 incentivized as a founder. And this is not one of these greedy loophole situations. The IRS in the 1980s made this this IRS rule in order to spur a more entrepreneurship. They want this. And the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to 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 had happened at all.

1:42:21And 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 the same issue, just alarm bells in your head all the whole time. And And I also just heard story after story, and I just put on my to -do list for the team. We are going to solve this A3B election thing. And there are very good reasons not to do it, because it comes with potential huge liability, you don't want to screw it up. It's nail mail. You're really going to monetize this. This is really what the competitive advantage to do it. You can kind of argue yourself not to do it in a million ways.

1:43:03But again, back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning into a single click, it was obvious test and we got started on it. Infrastructurally, we've been automating these steps and when this podcast errors, 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 friend's names, what the name of the company will be, and 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, build a few things and you click go and then like a burrito coming to you, like a pizza tracker, we will just handle all of the downstream activities that used to be hey remember to come back in and purchase your shares.

1:43:57Why am I purchasing my shares? I 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 A3BL show. 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, these are our visions. So you can quit your job on a Sunday night, get the Sunday scary's, I'm done with this thing. And on Monday morning, fill out this form. And the next day, be able to run a billion dollar business because we will have automatically handled getting you access to banking systems, to payment systems, to handling all the equity paperwork, filing a 3B election, where you can just shift from having worrying about the company starting process to just building and shipping.

1:44:51and you'll just get kind updates in the background. Cool, the IRS has given you a tax ID, cool or 83B 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 where we can get you access to the financial system before the IRS and the 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 want to take all that complexity and just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start.

1:45:41That check list that they go through, we just have the robot do exactly the same thing. And so in some ways is a really big deal in a big ship because it completely automates the company starting process. But in other ways, it's an incredibly incremental step that has taken us three years to get to, where we had to systematically automate the internal steps each to one. And now we've done the work to wrap it all up into one button. 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.

1:46:21Yeah, Atlas was actually a little reasonable before we decided to do all this work. It's like, why do, why do this next step of completely automating it when it was actually like fairly straightforward before? Atlas has above 80 NPS, which is quite high. Apple is in the low 60s. AirPods is 75. I love my AirPods. So at least 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 the scenes because we see that companies are charging their customers sooner when they go through this automated process versus waiting.

1:47:08And it's a little strange. You just started your company. Well, what does it really matter to wait next or 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 days or weeks, which we're seeing like half the time it takes to get to your first customer, just take like shave a whole week off of your company.

1:47:47And you can kind of see GDP being born like sooner. And And you, you, you, you win my whole life knowing that, okay, GDP is not finite and it can grow, but I've never really seen it. And now I've actually seen it grow faster sooner. And I think anything we could do to just move that forward is going to inspire and lower the bar for more people to be an entrepreneur because 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.

1:48:40Very cool to see that bringing the best of the internet and and making an available world wide can cause more people, can be correlated with more people becoming entrepreneurs. And I think we should just keep doing that. It isn't incredibly inspiring. And I think this is gonna 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 in the like, never mind a few days later, if it's still stuck in some queue. Totally. And then you don't know where these things are gonna go.

1:49:15We 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 business that just how businesses are working day -to -day.

1:49:58It'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 AdList 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 push people towards expectations higher, then they will want to make their companies better and which is all benefit from that.

1:50:38How 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 in situations where we can automate it and be the only.

1:51:28And that's a different mindset. So in terms of, you know, why we picked up 83B election as a topic. Like when we made that decision, you made a commitment that we're going to, we're going to do this forever. Like we're going to do this forever. There's 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 like go go go versus the long term compounding. Go, go, go, was when we assigned one engineer, hey, it's your job today to send one piece of paper to the office with this third party mail service.

1:52:09Why? Doesn't matter. Today, just send a single piece of paper to the office and an incredible engineer. She went on to leave all of 83 be -elections 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? We're like, well, look, I mean, the A3 collection is just sending this piece of paper to the IRS. Like 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 and SLAs and reporting systems and alerts and playbooks and backup processes.

1:52:58Like this is in a very intense amount of internal structure we use. But again, we have to look at where the value is. The value isn't 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 is 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 that well, we built it, it must be working.

1:53:43Later we'll add alerts. Later when there are problems we'll figure out playbooks. Well, look, when it's the third party building it, you're like, wait a second, whooms if they screw up. Cool, we better figure that out. We better OCR all the results. We better 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.

1:54:18And each year we write a document called, should we do this ourselves and we look at the other nine of us around the room ago? Of course, we shouldn't. Let's go onto something else. So again, we're just we're just really stitching it together, but ensuring that it happens. Awesome. Okay. That was imagining facts machines. Just There are vaccines occurring there are vaccines occurring Not in the strip. There and there are phone calls being made and there are robots waiting on phones On mold as well. There's amazing. There's quite a lot going on Yeah, I yeah, I see here. I saw a stat that one in six new Delaware corporations are now started on stripe Atlas That's absurd.

1:54:54Yep. I'm very excited to tell you when it's one in five, but I that is not today Okay, sounds like we're close or 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. And one of the, it's like, stabby kind of came up with a little bit last year that I've just personally deeply obsessed with is founding teams in which the co -founders are in multiple countries. So that kind of nickname this, again, it's like they're giving things a good title, headlines, cross -border founders.

1:55:36Wow, like more than 20 % of multi -founder teams have at least one founder from another country. That is astounding to me that the internet can 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 Alice team itself represents this. We were very intentional of how we built the Atlas team. It's majority women and more diversity to hire, 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.

1:56:26They are so much worse. There's no real science necessary here. We just enforced 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, it 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 on each higher it was harder and harder to hire someone of a different background. Just naturally folks didn't want to join that type of team and that was the last time I've ever ever going to make that mistake.

1:57:08Which 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 out like with the with the distribution of of people on backgrounds in your candidate pool and go from there. And I think that is one of the reasons why that 10 person in group is so effective is it has just a lot of diversity and and perspective. Another skill Jeff Weinstein is incredible at that I wasn't even aware of we're going to add them to the list. And I actually self -loaded the team and I noticed that.

1:57:46And 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 have started a company recently, you're starting a company right now, the whole world is counting on you to pick a customer, solve for a 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.

1:58:24That is, you know, imagine life without Google Docs, where you'd have to hire an IT person to run your IT backend on employee 3. You'd have an IT person or imagine the world without AWS for EC2 or S3 or any of these cloud services and your rack and computers yourself You're just absolutely not going to try to do anything. So we just like we just see the Company structure the those structure 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 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 it's just gonna unlock huge amount more people choosing to do it.

1:59:16Interesting, I'm so curious what that ends up being. Like if you really think about what you're doing here, if you believe that entrepreneurship and innovation and technology make the world better, 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. It's funny because I go back to, again, I also hear from founders, entrepreneurs, like, oh, I can't think of an idea. I need a start -up idea. And yet everything in the world is broken. And I also recall my first startup early 2010, 2012 -ish, a joined -of -friends company.

1:59:57me, that was started at the same time that the Stripe Founders started Stripe. And that is, that 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 were 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 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 should have had to do.

2:00:59And we think those things are fair game to play within 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 sit enough silence and hear the same people complain about it, problems, you you too might find something as big as online payments are hard, which was sitting right in front of all of us. I think it's important to note, it doesn't necessarily have to be a venture -backed venture scale company, right? There are many, most businesses in the world are not venture -backed venture -scale, billion -dollar companies.

2:01:33You 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.

2:01:49people really love owning a lot of their company and being successful. So you just got to pick the right capital structure for your business. And again, the amount of money that has been generated of the companies that started through Alice, you said $5 billion. Basically, that's the GDP of a Vatlist that Alice is. And that's like revenue per year and that's growing. Per year. Yeah. And obviously, a lot of it would have happened anyway, but still, So it accelerated, it's probably growing faster. A lot of it probably never would happen. Yeah, we ran a survey a little bit ago. We need to rerun this where we just asked people what they have started their business without Adless.

2:02:27And 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 Google employees leaving their job to build something. It's people from every possible background, every possible role, every possible job, every possible age group who see problems and can solve it. So it's dramatically more fragile than people think. Well great work Jeff and team Atlas and Stripe in general. Fun. Let's talk about one last thing. There's like so many more things I still want to talk about maybe we'll have a quick. Yeah, we're going fast. Make it too X speed.

2:03:10So this LS is basically a zero to one product. I know you didn't start initially, it was there, but you took it from, I don't know, maybe you took it from 0 .5 or something to, to one 100 now. And a lot of people struggle with starting things like this within larger companies, like Stripes a large company, right? They, like, you know, a very innovative, well run company, but it's also a large company. and clearly you, you made, you made should 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 in named.

2:03:43Jeff is really good at cutting through the BS. You hear so much about frameworks and all this complicated stuff that people talk about in PM circles when the most straightforward, obvious thing is probably right. I get so annoyed after calls with Jeff sometimes because I know he's right about something. I bang my head against the wall for months. And so talk about just like what you've done, 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. Like I just talk to 50 customers who all yell the same thing.

2:04:19Here they are in varieties of quotes and forms and the rest of it. and then you put some three bullet points of strategy around why it's important. It's gonna 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 wanna 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, aligned people with deep customer -sponsored Stories, storyboarding some solution visually with a Sharpie and not a pencil, not Figma initially, not higher low fidelity.

2:05:06I 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, Now, pick our 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 head count 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 83B election.

2:05:53And again, by the time it was podcast errors, we'll have crossed 10 ,000 to 83B elections filed. And we have done them all 100 .000 % on time.

2:06:05With the burning use case, why customers are going to need it, why we can do it, it cheaply, effectively, safely over a long period of time. And here's the way to get tangible forward progress quickly against the stick figure vision, but with something in the browser or want one version of it, let's just get one thing working one time. I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof rather than proof by theory or proof by debate. Just like, look, we did it one time. Hey, I'm holding the piece of paper. Yeah, pretty motivating. We could, you know, we just, have we just print it out the rain information?

2:06:51We'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 a 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 the 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.

2:07:43You 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, you're like, 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 its impact on the curves and you start to like root for it more. I think that's how we got it there. I will say one other thing which is that making something economically viable is extremely important.

2:08:24And so when I'm probably the fourth person to run Atlas and it's quite a pantheon of people prior to me, including the founder of MOZE, which is a compliance startup watershed, which is this amazing climate reporting tool. Also, let Atlas Patrick McKenzie, patio 11 for many folks do. Wow, what an alumni group this is. We owe ourselves a dinner. We owe ourselves a new one. Quite a group. And now we have a new person who's, so I technically no longer lead Atlas. So I 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 in Twitter.

2:09:03She's fantastic and we just 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 over time. So we, 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. It's just like, look, if you're a customer acquisition style product, well, showcase why it's this is the best customer acquisition for the dollar for the company.

2:09:41If you are a margin -generating and creating ecosystem, growing portion of the business, well, then your metrics have to show it. And so just, you can't just have half the story of just the product quality and the tweets. You have to have the economics. Who else is going to put this much energy into this style of product? And that gives us confidence that we should invest in the long term because alternatives can come and go. And we, I'd like my super encourage to do 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.

2:10:19Yeah, there actually wasn't an alternative on point Angelist and then they're like, no, Stripe is a kill and 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 Angelist announced that they were doing incorporation and banking and cap table altogether, which is 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. And I love many of the people who work there, I work with some of the best legal minds to end the RUV setup.

2:10:57There's 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. Or like, look, in the very long term, this company starting process is going to become a efficiency cost problem. And there's so much long tail complexity with dealing with multiple financial institutions, multiple government processes, all of this legal complexity that it will be, and it's difficult to charge a lot of money for it because it's hard to charge people money when they haven't even started the business yet. We looked at it and said, look, we're going to keep this long -term compounding approach because we think that this is where it's going to go.

2:11:45And it was a zero interest rate environment at the time. Angelist built a phenomenal product. I looked at it with nothing but admiration and happiness, but it also kind of smarted and hurt. And we just kept building, kept building, kept building. and I got a phone call one night on my wife's birthday before we sat down for dinner and it was Dan at Angelist. I hope he'll tell you a story who I love, an incredible product mind and he led product over Angelist for startups and he said, hey, we're gonna get out of the incorporation. This is not gonna be our focus going forward to you want the business.

2:12:28It was like a year and a half after they had really gone out or two years after they got out or something like this. It was like, wow. And we had kept such an open relationship with them. We had paired with them on legal constructs. We had discussed 83 be election openly and a lot of people like, oh, I can't believe you're talking to the competitor. You know, like, look, 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 a corporation.

2:13:04One time is because they were playing softball and they had an off, this real story, and we've discussed it. And so when and and the angelist was incredible in how they evaluated it, we're like evaluating different partners, but because of our working relationship and the quality of your product. And 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 Angelis if you need a company and go right over to Atlas. And that was a really amazing moment because I respected them so much and I looked up to them so much that they would mutually, beneficially choose to do that.

2:13:47And everybody was excited and happy and customers are happy and it's been an incredible relationship since in which you can start on Angelis, go through Atlas and all of your information is automatically populated and Angelis automatically. We've since rolled that out with several other partners, Mercury, Carter, others, but Angelis really left the way there and we've just maintained a great relationship with Team. But it's just like such a, it took a while but it really reproved to me that they're are not competitors, it's alternatives. And if you care about your customer, you care about their alternatives.

2:14:19And 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 like significantly better off. Wow, that is an awesome story. I don't know if you've shared that anywhere else. There's so many lessons there that I could like spin off on. Just like not 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.

2:14:52I couldn't really draw it up any better, and I just think the world is better off with more specialization, and it's a pain in the butt. It's a pain in the butt to these corporations. You really, I think we can get, yeah, I think you want more specialization and more partnership, and I think a lot of foundations are trying to do that now. Okay, so let me let me go back to the lessons you shared on how to build something new at a big company and then we can We can wrap up so I took a bunch of notes here and these are awesome and they actually resonate a lot with Mehika who came on the podcast who's all who's at Figma been the person building a lot of zero to one stuff and so it's nice that There's these trends that are coming up again and again So one tip is just storyboard the ideal like with a sharpie draw out here's this exciting vision of what this could be if we were to pull it off without constraints.

2:15:41Unconstrained, powerful vision. Two is solve a burning use case, make it clear like this is a huge problem for a lot of people. There's probably stories you should there. Show tangible forward progress. Just like, look at this. We made this progress. We made this progress. Center solves a piece of blank paper. Look at this. It's a huge milestone. And to have momentum and Mahika talked about this, just like keep the fire alive. I keep the fire live show momentum, we're making progress, this metrics moving up into the right. And then there's like a milestone, I felt like you had like an early milestone of like, we made progress.

2:16:13And 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, If we need to do this, follow me.

2:17:01It's, oh my gosh, the world needs this. Let's figure out how to do it even faster. And a tip 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 is one of the pieces of software I love. Ed just a really easy learning curve to create visual diagrams. And rather than sort of doing a UXR about it, we just say, hey, what would you hope this dashboard would happen?

2:17:44They 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. I'm 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 we're going to use in the first place? Now, look, that doesn't always work because not all of your customers are going to be, you know, product designers at heart. But more of them than you think. And I think it's it's giving your customers right access and not just read access to your company is incredibly powerful.

2:18:18And 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 is like wow we haven't even had design look at it They're like no actually the customer drew it Great why are we guessing I think you have an unfair advantage where your customers 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 a hundred of them and you'll find somebody somewhere who No, you just got to sit in a little more silence. You'll some bell raise their hand There's a quote you shared somewhere that I'm that relates to what you just said that your dad one said you can't screw up a sentence if it begins with the customer That's true.

2:19:03Yeah, my dad runs a An IT business in Baltimore to help other businesses with their computer systems and my growing up I would literally physically clean the keyboards of his employees and dust the mice. But yeah, he's very, very custom -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 would take it once that further and he would sometimes physically bring a chair over in a meeting and say the customer is sitting here and he'd have pretend. And then he would kind of fake talk to the invisible customer.

2:19:44Hey, 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? That'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 to sense physically with the customer and then start your sins, you just have a much better shot at it. That's an amazing story. Very a steady group at Ish. Like, early prototype. Jeff, we've covered so much ground.

2:20:18I have two hours more worth of questions, but we need to get it off, I think. Is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get there? Very exciting lightning round. Really excited about whatever you're building up there, thinking of building. My email address is incredibly easy to find.

2:20:41My Twitter which 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? 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 wine sign, 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? Woohoo!

2:21:16Here we go. What are two or three books you recommended most to other people? I know a lot of people in the pockets recommend high output management, but it should be, you know, swap the Bible out for it at all the hotels in the world and in the little drawer, just like put it everywhere. You just can't go wrong, though. So 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. That was very clarifying to me that it's just like not an individual effort. It is the sum of everything I'm involved in is how to measure it.

2:21:58So that's definitely up there. A nice pair to that book as a moosh afterwards is orbiting the giant hairball, a corporate 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 the hairball of the organization to inspire others, keep himself engaged and to bring creativity and excitement and try to pull people off the hairball as he orbited it.

2:23:06And so I think it's just like a fun afternoon read with beautiful illustrations about just kind of how to stay sane at big companies and where to be a little goofy and take the the advantage and gravity of the hairball but not the succumb by it and to be able to orbit it. Those two are really fun. I will say one other one I like just because I'm going to talk about strategy here. This has been more getting stuff done than some other tactical things, but seven powers and I know you had the author recently on which was awesome. I ran in, so I won't explain the books just go, you just watch the podcast of it, but it just walks through many of the business powers and sort of modes a company can have.

2:23:51I ran into the author. Hamilton, Hamilton, yes thank you. What a cool name. Very cool name, Eliterative, at the box lunchroom one time where I worked at box, acquired one of our companies and I was like, hey any luck finding the eighth power. He's like, I'm looking, I'm looking. I was like, ran off with his sandwich. Another one other funny, someone embarrassing moment about that book is when I was applying to work at Stripe, I was in some email conversation with our CEO Patrick Carlson, who's quite well read and enjoys books and I was, you know, trying to showcase I like books a little bit, though not at any level at him.

2:24:32And I just had mentioned like I just finished reading Seven Powers and I kind of recommended it to him, but it jokes on me because as he's quoted in the forward that I had skipped. So he was very kind to let me know that he had read it and he has 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 favor, Power? By the way, do you have a favor, Power? 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.

2:25:05So that's the one that always stands out to me. I like counter -positioning also and at least with going cheap in that audience is kind of positioning, but I really enjoy process. The process power because it is very difficult to, as an organization, get good at anything and if you could do that over a long period of time as a sustainable way, you have it power. This is the nerdiest chat I've ever had, which is your favorite seven 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.

2:25:41And rarely is it actually a power. Usually people can kind of copy it, but when you nail it. That's even better because then if your competition thinks they have it. Yeah, exactly. They won't invest in the other ones. So I like it even more for that reason. I love it. But I was going to say with Patrick Hall said and being quoted in the book, not only was he just like wrote part of the forwarder, it was a code. but he basically credited seven powers of helping build and strike. No big deal. Toi. Yeah. Okay, the sliding round is going great. This is like a very microcosm of our whole chat so far.

2:26:13Second question. Do you ever favorite recent movie or TV show? How to with John Wilson, that's on HBO. It's, okay, so for those who haven't seen it, not really giving away anything, because it's just wild when you watch it, you can't give it away. This videographer has found footage, He's just like walking through Manhattan, other, 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, really understanding people and he does it through this incredibly dry humor of stitching together this video footage to tell a different narrative.

2:27:13And I think some of this, I used to live in New York and I love a loving California, but I miss that frequency of strangeness. And you can see that through that TV show. Fantastic. Movie I recently watched The Quiet Girl, which is a film about a young Irish girl who is sort of from a dysfunctional home and has this opportunity to live with a family friend who is with families more have more opportunity for her and more empathetic to her and And just, it just showcases, again, how fragile things are. It's a very intense film, but there's something beautiful in how much opportunity was in front of this young girl.

2:28:03So it's a tear -jerker, but a great one. 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 and all these automator services. Raycast seems to have cracked the nut on automation, nerd complexity, but also UI ease and some nice touches and just like loads quickly does the basics. It's fully programmable, extensible, just like a huge fan of Raycast.

2:28:46And then I think for product people, if you don't have clean shot installed for screenshots, you're just behind the curve. I, they're 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 got a new laptop, it's Raycast first and clean shot second. Wow. I am going to download a clean shot immediately. Yes, it's excellent. I've been using Sketch as I've got my blurring. As much as I appreciate, SketchFox, clean shot is an incredible piece of software.

2:29:22Amazing. I'm going to do that. All right. Two more questions. Do your favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends or family find useful and work early? 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 the later say go -go -go back to me and like, like, huh, don't I say that sometimes? Like, yes, you say it a lot. So apparently Go Go Go is one of them. I also love that. Say, like, let's make some mistakes. Just when we're like brainstorming something or saying a sushi restaurant and talk sushi guy or guy and just just to like showcase like, hey, let's be creative to do whatever you want.

2:30:04I'm 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 gonna use that for my podcast guest. Let's just make some mistakes. Let's make some story about it I mean at that point, you were like, what okay fine sure I like the combo those two go go go go go Let's just make some you have to 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 Olsen and John Carlson for many years I'm curious what the most useful feedback or advice you have heard from them or learned from them.

2:30:40On 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 and topos. was like quite a lot of stuff. I knew nothing about finance, I knew nothing about the scale that we're talking about. They entrusted me somewhat insanely with that responsibility. And so on the first month, we had our quarterly business review where just the normal quarterly process and they was like, okay, cool, I'll do the next one.

2:31:21I'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 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 like with the permission because I was going to have to write this doc about how we're doing. A company had been in existence for like seven years before I got here. I already had some reasonable scale. I didn't, it was just an intense, it was just an intense operation and I remember writing the first draft and sending it to him because it was, I didn't want to send it, he had kind of pushed me to do it a bit and I figured I'd give him an early draft and he wrote back, this doesn't sound like you yet.

2:32:10The willingness to entrust a new person to provide their own perspective and bring it into a very formalized document like that was an impressive and like that's that really spoke to me and I reverted completely and I made it sound like me and I've tried to make things sound like me since. John's is more of a gut punch I'll say. So I've reported to John, the co -founder. He maybe nine months into reporting to him. He, I would run around with a clipboard. I was a little bit manic of getting a lot done, a lot going on at the strike at the time. And I would, we'd have a one hour, one on one, I'd be listing all of the things that we had accomplished and the problems we have and where we need escalation help and where we're stuck and all this and the other, just lots of stuff.

2:33:04I had, you know, checklists and physical paper flipping it over a little bit frantically. And he said, you are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through a hundred But I need you stuck on problems one and two Oh man That like hurt. I was like, oh shoot. I am I'm I'm 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 1 and 2 and not talk about problems 3 through 100. Even if we're working on them, we would just not talk about them and we would get stuck on problems 1 and 2.

2:33:52And that was phenomenal advice, which I was like, oh, shit, I'm gonna be fired. But it was like, it was really a deeply impactful sentence. Wow. What a powerful, great, helpful. That's great advice. He really little like it right there. I fall in. Yeah, I love this. Oh my, a sweet fighter style or something. But it's your point, very impactful and helpful. Yeah. Jeff, we did it. Cool. The archaeology is complete. I appreciate the time -lining. It was fun. And I don't do too many of these, so curious to people to be back and really appreciate the questions. Amazing. Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

2:34:33Appreciate it, Lenny. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.