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

0:00 Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just breaking this wall between the PM and the customer. The moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem, that's a unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them. If you're text message friendly with five or ten of those, you are going to have so much direct signal that is infectious. Many people told me I need to ask you about picking matrix. Well what was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective? And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand, and then tweets. On the other. You started at Strike, something called study groups. We show up four to eight people total, pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work at strike. And rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer. Today my guest is Jeff Weinstein.

0:59 Over the course of his six plus years at Stripe. Jeff was the product lead for Stripe's payment infrastructure teams. We helped scale Stripe payments to hundreds of billions of dollars in volume a year. He also led PMs and teams on a number of zero to one bets at Stripe. And most recently took on the scaling of Stripe Atlas. Which, as of the day this podcast launches, allows you to incorporate a new company in a single day.

1:22 Including handling eighty three B elections. Incorporation documents, getting your EIN. Share purchases and all the things that used to take weeks or months before a company could begin operating. At this point, one in six new Delaware corporations are started on Stripe Atlas. Which blows my mind.

1:39 This episode ended up being the longest in my podcast history. Because I wanted to basically do an archaeology of an incredibly effective and admired product leader. We spent the entire conversation digging deep into the many skills that Jeff has built that enable him to consistently build successful and beloved products. We get into his go go go plus optimism long term compounding philosophy of building products. How to think about and operationalize product craft and quality. He shares a popular program that he started at Stripe called Stripe Study Groups that I think you should steal.

2:13 We also talk about how to effectively talk to customers, how to know if you have product market fit for your new product, how to pick great metrics for your team, what he's learned about getting shit done at a big company, also advice that he's gotten from the founders of Stripe, and so much more. This episode is for anyone who's looking to level up their product building chops in every way. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you Jeff. Weinstein.

2:43 Jeff, thank you so much. for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny, of Lenny's podcast. I was I wasn't no I I knew what to expect, but it is fun to see. The first name and the podcast all line up. I

2:58 Really appreciate you asking. So I wanted to start with a quote that I found from you that I think gives a little perspective into how you think and how you approach the world. So here's the quote. Very frequently I would do poorly on test in school, and then the professor would say, very reasonably, Hey, I think you should bump down a level to the previous semester's pace. And you said

3:16 Uh, I actually know that. That's why I'm in this class. I wanna be in a class that I'm potentially The worst at. This isn't how most people think. This isn't how most people operate. Usually people want to get good grades. They want to be at the top of their class. Clearly you have a different approach and a different mindset.

3:31 Where did this come from for you and How did this shape the way you Think about product and And the work that you do. Some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to uh rationalise it for myself in some form, so

3:44 Uh in retrospect that sounds kind of highfalutin, but at the time I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in. But I think it comes from Growing up I went to a pretty hippy dippy K through twelve school in Baltimore, Maryland, where We were really Asked to r think about

4:02 why we were in school and to pick any of the courses that uh were of interest to us outside of A P programs or grades or any particular requirements, you really got to choose your own path and I recall one particular class

4:20 In high school. uh which was Sure. somewhat a science class, but it was called the history of science. And we actually walked through and studied

4:31 All of the At the time Best understood ways the world worked. In science, but then later were turned out to be wrong. Right. In the fifteen hundreds we believed X, Y, and Z. In the sixteen hundreds we believed A, B, and C just

4:45 Very confidently in the fifteen hundreds, we thought Something and then in the sixteen hundreds they thought something very different. And so this Class was quite impactful on me where we spent an entire year

4:56 Studying things that are not true. And it was fascinating. And that particular teacher employed another trick. uh on us during that class, which was

5:06 Um He took the tuition. fee of our school. and divided it by the number of hours and wrote wrote the cost on a ticket. And to

5:14 And then handed us in the beginning of the Yeah. tickets for every single one of the classes and he would stand at the door And you would have to give him a ticket at the end of the class if he thought it was worth them worth like worth it. I just like that practice of

5:29 deep intellectual understanding of how people evaluated something at the time. And choosing for yourself to spend the time on it by just like the physical act of handing that ticket to the Teacher. That really clicked for me. And so when I got to college and

5:46 It was a real c real college, university. He works. Coming from Often quite

5:53 more rigorous backgrounds of Things that were true. Uh I was a bit unprepared. And I remember actually like taking microeconomics class that was quite advanced and had a close friend and we studied exactly the same information. We sat and looked at the same cheat sheets, we practiced the same quizzes.

6:09 We read the same books and he got the top grade of the class and I got the bottom. And That's the from where that quote came from, where the professor said, Well, you should Then. Potentially bumped down. I was like, I already know that stuff. Like

6:21 I'm interested in this topic. I'm gonna try to improve, but look. Just because I'm significantly worse than the other kids in the class, that has like little to do with if I should leave and he was particularly cool with it. This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application.

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9:07 It's really interesting that you went to this liberal artsy PDP school as you described, which a lot of people bash on, like why spend all this college money and time on a liberal artsy kind of education. And you end up being really successful in a very technical, highly analytical. data driven company. And it's interesting that that Experience still.

9:25 helped you succeed in this other path. It it did take a change though, because I started in English. was my Selected major in school.

9:35 But then I kept playing with computers I kept liking math. And I looked at the roles of the Yeah, the backgrounds of the people who were running the types of companies I loved at the time Facebook was getting super phenomenally successful Apple was already on their

9:49 on their up and up again and all everyone Everyone who was leading those places had technical backgrounds and I like computers a lot. So I added computer science as a eng as an engineering degree midway through school. So end up having to take those same I had to take the real science classes with the pre med kids and the rest of it, and I did uh similarly poorly. But I I did end end uh up with a computer science degree and and a liberal arts degree, so it It was

10:11 It was a journey, but I had to make like a a pretty big switch in the middle to like get on that path. I asked you if there was uh one thing that you'd love to get across in this podcast. I asked you what would it be? And here's what you said, here's the first item on this list that you sent me. Povering.

10:28 Go go go ASAP plus optimistic comma long term compounding gr approach. Can you just talk about what you mean by that? Yeah, there's two things going on here. So I I sort of see the world as Immediately we need We have just such opportunity to take action.

10:46 In front of us we can be optimistic and go go go as soon as possible. I think that a lot of life is How you know, you get as much furniture as you've h as a room in the house. We

10:59 Well Do the work the night before It's due. So let's just make it due tomorrow. Can we turn tomorrow into today? It's a just Optimistically Seeing

11:09 If we can just inject energy to go go go. Has produce surprising results. And I think in ignites in other people that same interest and then it kind of feeds off each other. And that's I think really in my bones from growing up. And then I've added over time had to learn this longer term

11:28 compounding more strategic mindset. Where Some of the things you want to accomplish, be it at my startups in the past or or at Stripe, they can't be solved in an afternoon.

11:41 They're going to require layers of infrastructure and services and applications and UI And partnerships that really look like that kind of iceberg drawing you see where you just see the top but then there's the whole thing underneath. And I've had to learn over time to pair

12:00 my instinct of like let's get it done today. Let's move forward. Let's let's see what we can get done. Let's make some mistakes. Let's try it out. With Where are we going? What needs to be true over time, where can we always invest? What

12:13 What will we sort of never regret spending time in? We'll never regret spending time making the latency of our payments APIs at Stripe. Faster will never regret. Uh. Making it more reliable to send AD three B election mails to the IRS. Like we will never regret those things. So let's just always compound

12:31 those capabilities over time, then the trick is like how do you mix this go, go, go attitude with the long-term compounding? And that's something I still struggle with, but I try to purposefully balance it more than I used to. It's such a good way of summarizing just how to be successful in a lot of things. Go, go, go, ASAP, stay optimistic. Focus on long term compounding.

12:52 Growth. Is there an example that In action. I I I know we're gonna talk about Atlas a bunch, but I guess is there an uh example of That Working.

13:01 For you as or a product you worked on. I work at Stripe, which is a uh infrastructure company, we build things that help businesses do online commerce in various forms and I've had a few roles At Stripe I'm in.

13:13 our beautiful office here in South San Francisco. One of which was What's the product person that helped us decide how we were going to go global

13:25 And how we're gonna offer multiple ways for people to pay. Turns out there's More than just credit cards in the world. There's small hundreds of ways that people will naturally want to pay for things online. And as a business, you're gonna of course just want to accept Whatever it is people want to pay with. And for the first

13:42 Seven or eight years of strife well prior to my My being here. You know the The Incremental

13:50 country ads and the incremental new payment methods was relatively flat. over time. And That was surprising to all of us who worked here because the world wanted it and we had a lot of people working on it.

14:04 and we're working very hard. But it wasn't producing returns in the way that we wanted. And so actually the optimistic as soon as possible go go attitude was not working, right? No matter how much energy you poured into building

14:18 Thailand payment methods or UK bank transfers or uh you know an in person payment system in Latin America. We just like couldn't Rack up points and get it done. So we had to step back and say

14:31 Well what is the world gonna look like? In ten years. What was going to need to be true and how can we start to go Go there now. Going a lot slower.

14:41 Building internal platforms. Sending people around the world to start to build these payment methods. Uh. uproot their lives, pay for their apartments, get them on airplanes, start using these payment methods actually in the world. And so it really like our line flatlined for a while and we're like, okay, is this strategy working? Is it not working?

14:57 But then over time we start to see it. switch to nonlinear again and go from Whatever it was, ten payment methods at the time and now stripe. except over a hundred, so we got to like fifty really quickly and then kinda like skyrocketed to a hundred. And

15:10 I remember there being a meeting where we said, Well maybe we should just like lock everyone in the basement and see if we can get from ten to fifty. That would be you know the intensity startup go go go attitude. But we looked at the individual components of what it meant. to get this done and how how long we wanted this to be true for. And we had to go a lot slower.

15:28 So that was like A very Formative decision. Where You had to mix the go go go with

15:36 The long term compounding. Awesome. Okay, so let's start to delve deeper into some of the specific skills that I hear you're incredible at and that I've seen you be incredible at on Twitter and And LinkedIn and things like that. So the first is Craft. Craft and quality.

15:52 I'm told by many people that you have a very strong uh obsession with craft. And user experience and quality. And Even more so, I'm told that you teach people at Stripe how to be obsessed with craft and quality and the user experience in a very systematic way.

16:08 I feel like this is something a lot of people. are starting to realize is really important and or are trying to get better at. either personally or at their company. So First of all, let me just ask why is why is this so important to you? Why do you think craft And experience and quality is so important. Why do you

16:23 Put so much emphasis on it yourself. I think I'm really working backwards from Failures in the past. And avoiding them. And so maybe just a quick story.

16:34 I had a I started a company several years ago based on just a personal Pet peev of mine. uh which was I was a SQL analyst. Many of you listening might have written SQL in the past. Maybe the robots write the SQL for you now, but uh still need to write a little self. And every single time I wrote a SQL query, I wanted to run the same subsequent analysis. I wanted great version control. I wanted all the cool stuff that

16:59 GitHub had for code, but in a in in But for writing data code. And so My friends and I built a little Python tool which, you know, basically let you Run R style.

17:12 Queries, it lets you draw Uh charts and pivot tables quickly and sharing all all sort of All this mo modern SaaS applications stuff, but applied.

17:23 to SQL a few years ago. And We turned that into a company. We got some progress, but then there was this moment one day where

17:34 We had maybe a couple hundred customers. And we had an error. Where We basically by accidentally shut down the service and it was sort of bricked. Oh.

17:44 Ten or twenty minutes. And At the time. We were all kind of hustling in our little dinky office to get the application back online. And we really kind of

17:55 We're proud of ourselves about how reasonably quickly we did. And people went back to using it. wasn't a super long outage and we didn't lose any data. We're just like kind of high fiving each other and we went about Or day.

18:08 And about a year later I realized that that was a I missed a huge Moment that I should have Pounced on. Which is that during those twenty minutes

18:19 Our customers weren't Furious. They weren't emailing us like crazy. They weren't texting us. They weren't trying to find us on Google Maps and knock on our door. and say, Hey, I need this thing back online immediately.

18:34 We heard a couple comments from them. It was little murmurs. And I didn't realise at the time like That was the signal that I did not like we did not have product market fit. I end up

18:45 Wasting many more years on that project and wasting is a sort of big word. We built amazing software, people liked it, we were able to sell the company Yeah. it it helped it helped many of us learn how to really build software. Mm.

18:58 But I'm I'm really trying to avoid that situation again. And I think craft is kind of a Dessert? that you get after the meal of does your thing solve a real problem in the world?

19:12 And are people Clamoring. Needing it. Badly. And that's really my obsession is in

19:20 Finding problems in which People will pause their entire day to solve. they will leap through the computer to to be like, oh my God, I have that problem. Do you have a solution? And if you

19:33 You know. focus on that style of product development and We can get into just How how do you kind of Like listen for that and then turn that into product.

19:44 later you might get the opportunity to really Provide. craft and beauty and touches and moments and delight. But certainly there is no amount of craft, there is no amount of beauty, there's no amount to light or touches you can Add to a thing.

19:59 That won't Solve the problem we had at our at our startup, which is that people didn't really need this. Um and that's sort of like the biggest error is like picking something in which people don't really need it. And then going through these practices of trying to like make it great when

20:14 Maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. I think a lot of people. See all these tweets and messages about just like obsessed with the craft of what you're building and you can easily lose sight of nobody

20:25 Nobody even cares about what you're building. It it could be the most incredible experience ever designed, but if it's not Something anyone ever wants. It doesn't really matter. People don't really get out of bed for their second problem. Right. They get out of bed for their first problem and you have to carefully listen and not

20:43 H your customer, your prospective customer, as you're trying to trying to figure this out. And I think this advice I don't even apply it's just style applies to small companies. Big companies, anyone. Which is

20:56 People don't want to be pitched. You know, I I I'm sometimes on a UXR call with a very well meaning person or a founder who has a new product that they want. advice on or they want uh Take

21:10 Find customers and the first thing that they start talking about when we get on the call is High I'm the CEO of X, Y, and Z company. We do one, two, and three. I want to show you a demo. It's like

21:23 H hold up. Uh. I'm I'm a customer. I have Like what a wasted opportunity you you've kinda you've you've just done here. I have so many problems H you're sort of guessing ahead of time.

21:38 What is my top problem? And now that you've anchored and limited to the pitch, you're you're going to miss. You pretend very likely going to miss. the burning problem that they have on the top of their On the like on the top of their mind and they're you know, it's not the customer's job to interrupt you and say, Hey, could you stop your pitch? Like I want to tell you about my

21:57 My top problem. And you can sort of see this. Which then Companies who Launch things.

22:03 Put craft. Uh have a have a great launch, raise money. Are then like later gone. Right. And It's because they built something that wasn't.

22:12 Solving a burning need. And I think you can kind of stem it all the way back to they were just pitching rather than Sitting in silence. And just Waiting.

22:23 For their customer to just open their heart out about what's the most Burning thing. And sometimes I'll I'll prompt our customers. I'll just I'll say, Hey, do you mind just opening up your email?

22:33 Like what what's in there? Or if you weren't talking to me right now, what would you be working on? Yeah. Hey, last week what what what what grind what grinded your gears? What like what are you not looking forward to or Magic wand, like what do you wish we could you could just like have off your plate immediately? Forget it, forget stripe, forget about thing or not, just in your

22:51 whole life. Like what is it? That you do not want to be doing. Or a massive opportunity you wish was just one door away.

23:01 And It's a little awkward. Because they don't know why you're asking that kind of question. But then you just sit there in silence and for the most part If you have amazing customers who are smart and ambitious and are trying to build their own business

23:14 They're going to want to offload their hardest thing to somebody else if you've earned trust. along the way, and certainly not pitching is a great way of earning trust. You're just listening. We've we've we've learned a lot at Stripe from that. And that's where you can start to find adjacencies, right? Well, hey, I don't know if Stripe could Yeah, really help me with this is but it wouldn't be cool if If uh

23:34 We could identify If the person signing up on our site like wasn't fraudulent or is who they say they are, or isn't a bot, or is or are they really a dog on the internet, or like Huh, we keep hearing this. As the major complaint from all of our customers and But like we're not an identity company. It's like well I guess now we are because all of our customers who are trying to

23:56 build their business like all have this problem and so Via silence, you can just create your roadmap pretty quickly. And drop a lot of the long UXR long survey, long build cycle. Approach.

24:15 So I love where we're going with this. This is where I was gonna actually talk about next is just uh your ability to talk to customers and use research. It feels very Unique. Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just like Sharing your email constantly.

24:28 uh getting on calls with people constantly. There's this like You're like breaking this wall between that a lot of people imagine there is between the PM and the lead of a team and the customer. Like you're not relying on use research. You're not waiting for someone else to

24:42 Do this work for you? Uh Talk about just why and how you do this.'Cause I think there's so much to learn from just how you operate in Finding opportunities, picking problems to solve by talking to customers.

24:53 It's where the business comes from is customers. You know, it's not a long shot. um hypothesis about Why to talk to them. th if they love your stuff, they will tell their friends and pay fair prices for the product. We're so fortunate.

25:14 through the internet that people kind of announce themselves as having as being interested in a topic. Sometimes they are interested in it by Hosting on Reddit's a long thread. Yeah.

25:27 a screenshot of a customer service interaction that Fuck them. Yeah. hopeful that from their Dorm room.

25:36 In country X, someone else in the world has solved the same problem. And the internet has given us all Yes. absolutely magical forum that you can just Yell out the window.

25:50 And then Billions of people could just like li could could actually listen to what you said out the window now that's not all the time true for all people in all situations

25:59 But Dramatically more true now than ever before in human history. And so the fact that people wouldn't be listening to their customers And And really

26:11 jumping through the computer to talk to them surprises me. Like they have m like I'm I always sometimes think, do they have some other strategy? Are are are they So confident in what they're building that they don't need to hear directly from

26:26 the people who will be using it. And I think Some of it is my own fear that I'm going to make the same mistake I've made in the past, which is build something that people Like

26:36 They're using But isn't solving a burning enough problem such that They're going to stop their day. They're going to tell their friends we're going to be able to sustain the company.

26:47 economically over a long period of time. And that really just comes from hearing People's most burning problems. And then the jumping through the To the Like just jumping through the computer and talking to them takes

26:59 A little bit of of nervous gump gumption, y you know, kinda like walking up to a person at a Bar co cocktail party and saying hi Hi, my name is Jeff. It it can be a little awkward, but then you Get it it's kind of a rush once it starts to work. And once you

27:14 Get the iterative loop that They're excited to talk to you. They have problems. They see you as a trusted not salesy, not pitching. not narrow minded to just my

27:28 my product and my position, but I'm here to hear about your whole your whole pro all of your problems and see Where we can help. Not promising we're gonna help solve everything, but let's listen. That is infectious, both between the customers.

27:40 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 For a

27:53 a message over to a Slack group. And they know that because the customer speaking directly, it somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day, you know, we We could go to our meeting where we're gonna guess what's going to the customer wants, or we could talk to them. directly.

28:07 Uh And You have to use a little bit of Art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to. But

28:17 Even at Stripe 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.

28:40 And you don't need ten thousand of 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

28:51 Where to go? That You kinda forget how you did it in the past. I love these. So I'd love to learn more about these tactics that you found helpful. So you've shared this idea of silence.

29:04 Talking to someone and just being silent. And I forget the phrase used, but just like ideas emerge, like your whole roadmap can emerge from that silence. So let me share a few of the things you shared so far, and I'm curious what else. Two is tweeting just like hey, I'm looking to improve Atlas right now, what bugs do you have? Here's my email address.

29:20 Uh you talked about text messaging. You just like hey, can I get your number? and I'll just text you when I have questions. If there's anything else to add to these, that'd be awesome. And then what else have you found just like ways to actually get to a customer and find Opportunities that are important. Speed is an important one.

29:36 Which is redu just reducing the time between The moment a customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way. to talk about some problem. They're busy. There's snacks to eat.

29:52 They have families. 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

30:04 discussing it at all. I mean most of the time if you don't like something You just Move along. You just Apathetically, silently, move forward in the world. And so the fact that someone

30:15 took their finite time. To succinctly With curiosity. communicate to the world or you about your product, that's a Unbelievable gift.

30:27 That should be P zero alert level Intensity. And so I will leave a meeting.

30:36 I will So Change what I'm doing to just Get one message back to them. Even if it's hey, I got this.

30:45 I'm about to go to dinner. Can I hit you up tomorrow? Oh yeah, thank you. Awesome. I 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

30:59 big brand of a company and another human who's just actually curious what's going on. That's Night night and day. And it's also it. Like

31:08 Fun fact. Tip. When people are really hot on an issue and it could blow up on social Or they're gonna start Becoming a detractor. We make mistakes, we have SLA breaches.

31:20 We have errors. you're gonna wanna get on that stuff fast. And In those situations I my bar for where like for how we will respond to those folks is not to just sort of solve the problem, but is to turn them into a promoter.

31:35 And most of the time we're able to, even if there was a pretty relevant issue. I remember one time in Atlas Um Yeah. We had this bug in which

31:45 For a handful of our legal docs they were handing out let's say twenty five shares rather than twenty five percent of the shares we dropped. The percentage sign. And

31:57 Thankfully a a founder noticed this in the docs and and tweeted about it. I was like my heart like like paused, you know, and I I was like, Oh no, this could be a ser really serious issue and we're able to fix it and and regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone. That was impacted. And I was thinking to myself

32:14 Wow, we really like let this person down. We have one job to do, which is to get their company right, and we didn't. And that person was incredibly gracious about the situation. And

32:26 said, Any time you want me to just read your docs, I'd be happy to. I have a law degree. I care about this topic, I wanna brainstorm with you about ways that Atlas could do more document creation. Like wow, I I can't believe I was in this sort of defense position. And now we've

32:43 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 I do with many, many, many founders who use Atlas. And so just again

32:54 Wait. We're so Quick. to put the outside world in this other camp where we need to touch it with Kid gloves and treat it as

33:04 a big blob and a and a cohort and a statistic. when it is a human with a problem who likes snacks who is busy And It's fun to do and it turns out to be an incredibly easy, fast way to figure out what to build.

33:19 There's an a bunch of stuff I wanna follow up here. One is people may be hearing this and like, Oh my god, I'd be overwhelmed with Feedback and people. to fix problems for and bugs and texting of people. There's just like Um There's so many people that potentially

33:34 Uh I have to be interacting with. How do you How do you try to narrow that down? Like I know Atlas is a very uh highly adopted product. There's a ton of people, there's probably Bugs often people sending you feedback. How do you pick the people to zero in on?

33:46 I think there's two parts to this. One, what a problem to have. Yeah. Of all the problems in the world, I'm overwhelmed by customer interest. Is on the you know, the top list of problems I I I want to have.

34:00 I think most entrepreneurs would Purchase that problem as a state. And so if you're in it. I think

34:09 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 uh that they could be spending the time on. Otherwise. So that's a

34:26 That's a huge deal. And then two, you need you need the 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.

34:41 Or a a video and some of them don't. Okay, that's fine. You kind of get a sense of Quickly looking at how they wrote about it or

34:50 A pattern just pattern matching how detailed they were. Yeah. How much They seem that they

34:58 want to engage and kind of Kind of balance it that way. Otherwise, you know, you can You can tell folks This is really awesome.

35:07 Do you mind? Sending me an email. with three to five bullet points about the details. Of how you got to this issue. And

35:17 That's not a thirty minute meeting. Don't need to blow 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

35:29 It will self select those who want to go deep. And then from there. you really do owe it to them to to follow up if they're going to be That detailed and at that point. you really have a sort of product friend for life.

35:41 And you're kinda continuously go back to them. So y you know, you You you have to kinda tune Tune it. I also will bound some of these efforts. So I'll

35:52 just completely make up one day. A program. So High uh stripes doing a Um

35:59 Bug finder program. I made that up as I was driving to work one morning. Uh tweeted it. Just curious if anyone would send anything. We'll be taking videos for the next three days. To go

36:11 you know, super deep and people like, Oh my goodness, I would love to be part of the Stripe bug finder program. Like, may I apply? I'm like Uh you know, it's very selective. Uh yeah but yes, of course for you it's just you know you're giving people permission through a pro program even if it is Deeply arbitrary, I find helps the

36:31 that bounding it. And then later I can follow up with the world, hey. Uh we ran our first uh program. We got sixty five videos, which we did. Uh we found dozens of issues, which we did. Um It was an incredibly Valuable use of

36:47 of of our time and it it really came from just a s a single tweet. Mm. Something I saw you mention somewhere is that You only pay attention to feedback from people that are paying customers and ignore everything else. Can you talk about that?

37:00 People who build Things for people tend to be empathetic and interested and curious folks who have friends and then those friends wanna use your stuff because they know you and they like you. And they'll have good feedback.

37:19 But you need to Figure out. Is that actually your customer or is that Your friend trying it. Who is actually your target customer?

37:29 Exactly. Not a company or a segment. you know, not digital natives that are X big. I'm talking about Sarah. in this department who has these tabs open and just faced

37:42 this problem and needs to solve it by four PM. that level specificity. If that's your customer And when talking mostly about B to B, which is I where I spend a lot of my time as

37:55 the so social network B to C stuff I I have less intuition on. They're very willing to Exchange money. for solving their problems. Incredibly so.

38:08 Oftentimes they'll If you listen with enough silence, they might even say, I'll pay you money to solve blah uh if you if you sit there long enough in silence. And so you could listen to your friendly friend who you got to pl 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.

38:31 And It is so tempting to go down the first path. With the friend group. That I sort of needed a roll.

38:40 Which was like, okay, rather than I was like, Well, don't pay attention to that quite as much, you know, really pay attention to to like who is your target customer and Are you in a fast iteration cycle with for them and are they telling their friends? But that wasn't enough because people are so drawn, myself included, drawn to the The friendliness that I just set a rule, which is

38:57 We discount All of that feedback from our friends to zero. That is not Of interest to us. It doesn't we don't even write it down.

39:07 It it's not part it's just not part of what we're talking about at all. Yeah. Only interested. In Sarah, our target customer. And

39:15 Can we get Huh. To solve whatever the problem is as quickly as possible, as jankly as possible. And go from there. And

39:27 It's a fo 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.

39:39 I want feature X, Y, and Z. Can it do one, two, and three? Naturally she would say that. But if you said And by the way. Uh this thing is ten thousand dollars.

39:49 Um will happily refund your money a hundred percent the second you don't like it. She might say, Whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Uh yeah, I I like this thing, but not not ten thousand dollars. For ten thousand dollars, it would need to Solve X. And you're like, Oh, there it is, right there.

40:07 That was actually what the thing that was of value and we were all kind of dancing around this Its usefulness. It's useful. We're on the right track and because I've fallen down that path myself

40:21 And So many times I just set a rule. This is great. I was actually gonna ask. This technique of using silence. To help people actually practice it.

40:31 You just share this kind of quote of For y you to pay ten thousand dollars, it would have to do X. That's a really cool line to use. Is there any other advice there of just how to practice this idea of Creating silence to help. A potential customer.

40:42 share what they actually need. I encourage people to take an Impov training. Improv training class, uh or two. Just to get people out of their skin. Skin a bit.

40:53 By the way, this advice applies to big companies also, not just small ones. And we we have issues, and I hear other larger companies have issues where a big company will say, Hey, we we're an enterprise and we're gonna pay you this Big contract, all you need to do is build features one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and go through security steps, A, B, C, D, E, F G. And the siren song of the big three year contract of your first enterprise buyer.

41:21 Even when you're already big, it's there's always a You know, can go from fortune one thousand to fortune five hundred to fortune ten to fortune one, you know, th there's always some more. And there are so many stories of the rug being pulled in the middle and they never they never actually use it and the contract never lands. Same in partnerships. And and so I would say the same thing, which is like If we're super serious about this.

41:44 Send us a million dollars. Like why are us a million dollars? We'll happily wire it back. Anytime you need it. But let's actually

41:54 Put some stake in the ground about the value. And I find that In the cases in which they're like, Well, wait a second, no Uh absolutely not. Uh w we can't commit here. That's really good signal because you're about to

42:07 spend a a huge amount of time building something that might not ever be used, and that's the majority case I hear. Yeah. you might get the opposite, which is sounds great. Let's make sure our teams are trained on it faster.

42:22 Uh how can we get you to our office to explain it? We need it to really work with this system we haven't talked about yet, and now that we're paying, we want it even faster. And so I find that just It puts a fork in the road. Towards

42:36 faster success or Avoiding The non success case. Um Even at stripe scale.

42:44 I've heard our founders somewhat push this this methodology on us. Where you One from the outside might think. Well, it's a eight thousand person company.

42:53 Sure surely they have just regular ways of of of building things for larger customers and and and like we too need these style of Commitments. If we're going to go off roadmap. So a big lesson you're sharing here is essentially

43:07 Make sure people are ready to pay. For something that they are asking for. That is the ultimate sign that They actually ready to pay is different than paying. Mm. significantly different. Significantly different. I've also thought about of

43:21 of well, if 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.

43:40 And now it's like a A real commitment. That is extremely different than ready to. So I will often be on the phone or video, whatever, with a founder.

43:52 And I will Have them practice paying like haven't practiced charging me. I'll just say hey.

44:01 I'm just a friend. I'm trying to help you out. Uh. Is a little is 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

44:14 Payment service, I don't. really care which one, you're welcome to choose stripe. If it's easy 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.

44:25 That way You don't When it comes time to actually charge your first customer it won't be your first time. It won't feel weird. You have already done this. You already have a dollar in your account.

44:35 It'll just You already have your logo on the top right of the invoice. And I I probably could go through my email inbox and just see one dollar receipts to random people. Uh, because I'm just so convinced that the difference between paying

44:50 And Like willing, ready, thought I thought they would pay. As You know. N night and day different.

44:57 Yeah, uh there's this term willingness to pay. Uh that I feel like It should change, as you're saying, to just cross that willingness to and just Exactly. And we can refund the money. There's no like there's no issue. At all. Other just other tricks on how to get people going is

45:16 Ask them about their regular life as a human. You know, what did you do yesterday? And they'll be like, Oh, at work? I'm like Wh whatever.

45:27 And people just still start to spill. they'll just start to spill and eventually they'll get to their biggest problem pr pretty quickly. Let's talk about metrics kind of going in a different direction. Uh many people told me I need to ask you about Picking metrics. And the importance of metrics and how you think about metrics.

45:42 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?

45:50 in building successful products. I somewhat walk around with the belief that The product manager's responsibility is to produce product market fit. And okay, how do you know you have product market fit?

46:10 charts that showcase things are going up and to the right. On one hand. And then tweets on the other. So Metrics.

46:20 Yeah. quantitative and qu qualitative, and I really see them as Deep Deep siblings and equals. You you really need both. It's not

46:30 Oh OKRs versus something like There are some things you want. the texture of the person on on video showing how complicated a thing was.

46:41 And then also we're trying to make it economically viable system that we can run at large scale and you can't keep all that stuff in your head and need to me need to measure it. And so I think metrics at their best. Or A numerical representation of the value we're pro providing for the cop.

46:58 For the customer. One could measure anything. You can just like start counting events and log 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

47:10 really just try to map it all the way back to, well, what was the actually the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it? From their perspective. Whereas I think it's natural both because we when you work inside of a company you're just thinking internally, but also the way that the metrics are collected inside your application.

47:29 To be more internal oriented. how many people logged in. Okay, that's a fine measure but How many people

47:38 accomplished what they were trying to do. after they logged in is not just necessarily sitting there as a single event. in your database. You have to think about it a bit. Another reason why I spend a lot of time cra Crafting.

47:52 a small number of these metrics is they force trade offs and decisions. So we could all sit around all day and say Hey I heard all these customer problems, we should build X, Y, and Z. And another person could absolutely reasonably say, Well, I heard from these customers. We should build one, two, and three, and they're all true. We could have

48:09 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

48:22 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. Uh on the right is like a pretty

48:39 Great com combo. So Here's an example. Couple years ago I I'd been working in our our payments group.

48:47 at stripe for a bit. And then I I started working on uh some of our banking and and incorporation services as so In atlas When I started working on it. It had had some success, it had already existed for four or five years pri prior to

49:04 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.

49:15 Box they needed uh co founders address but they didn't know their co founders address they couldn't log into the dashboard to figure out their eighty three B manual filing instructions and We saw this. Yeah.

49:31 Basically in the first week of spending time on Atlas, I was just like, Just show me all the sport tickets. Uh are they happy support tickets of people writing in and being like, Oh, I love this service. It's absolutely fantastic. Can you just do A B and C more for me? Or are they like SAD support tickets? And like, oh my God, they're all sad support tickets. And so we're just kind of asking ourselves Well why would Why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend?

49:52 Was like, Well It would have to accomplish A B and C activities for them, you know, it would have to get their company, you'd have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS, it'd have to handle all the downstream amenist trivia, but surely if they had a bunch of support tickets at the end, they're not gonna go tell their friends.

50:09 To use this thing. We could measure all of the intermediate parts. We can measure the success rate and the frequency. of incorporation services and we and we do all those things. But if you like looked at the support tickets, there's just no way if you had a support ticket you would recommend you to a friend.

50:25 And so we suggested this metric to ourselves. Companies that have No support tickets. through the through the incorporation service. The whole process from the moment you start the application open.

50:41 actually the begin like the first page load at the very beginning. All the way through the process waiting for the government, waiting for the IRS. And we give you two more weeks to write into support. We give like an extra buffer two weeks. And if you get through that whole thing. With

50:57 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

51:08 zero support tickets, which is very different than looking at an average. Right. You could you could have the average as point three. But that doesn't necessarily mean that There you know, that getting to point two is going to cause them to tell their friends more.

51:21 And we looked. And Only fifteen percent of founders were getting through Atlas. With zero support tickets through that. Metric.

51:31 And I just thought, Okay, well, let's just drive that number way up. And let's look at the support tickets decide what People are needing and we'll bake it into the product and

51:42 Presumably it'll fix it. people like that more and then tell their friends. And over about eighteen months we took that number from fifteen percent. to eighty five. Uh we basically just flipped it.

51:54 And You can look at the market share. Plotted on the same. On the same time.

52:01 Frame and it's like Same shape. Uh and I think You have to find a measure by which

52:08 It speaks directly to the to what the customer wanted. And then if you by accidentally leaked your dashboard to them. Your customer would be ecstatic. to learn that that's what you were measuring the whole time.

52:21 you know, we were to showcase the internal Alice metrics, which we often just uh screenshot and publish. I think they'd be pretty happy to hear that we were sp spending all of our time making sure that None of them had sport tickets. And it was incredibly encouraging

52:35 Uh and motivating to the engineers on the team. Because we could just assign them a topic. Hey. Here's Lo look at all these support tickets.

52:45 Why don't you come up with the product spec, the scope? The solution. Oh, wanna learn more? Just reply to the support ticket email.

52:55 figure out what they need it what they need. And so we kind of turned all of the engineers on the team into PMs. To go and one like one issue at a time. figure out what needed to change and build products for it. And that's where we

53:10 push forward on A three B elections. automating it, sending it a mail for folks. We built our own signing service. We turned everything into a click. We We just

53:19 Did sort of the o the obvious things we saw on the tickets. But as the PM I was able to just sort of Not on autopilot, but really sit back and have contentful conversations with engineers who are bringing solutions and ideas for product.

53:36 Rather than one person going through all the potential ideas, scoping them and assigning them. And because it was Based in what

53:45 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.

54:02 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 a amazing and important advice. Just the power Of a single metric that everyone on the team can understand rally around and use to prioritize the work they're doing. I've seen exactly the same sort of

54:19 impact. Funny enough, Airbnb, one of the teams actually had Uh metric sort of like this, basically reducing the people contacting your B with support issues. Uh, but what ended up happening is their team started just making it harder to contact support. Because they're like maybe they don't need to contact support all about all these trivial issues, so maybe let's not let's encourage them to figure it out themselves.

54:40 Is there anything you learn about try to avoid these kind of second order effects that uh are kind of perverse incentives of a metric. We look at multiple metrics, but we will optimize around one and you have to use Your own judgment to

54:54 to look at some of these countermeasures and and pick them. Um We would also You know, that would sort of be our overarching metric for A year

55:06 But then we would pick specific tactical metrics about how we would accomplish it. So Just An example that

55:15 Oh it's i is how we solved a problem, but also it's just like a style of metric that was useful to us. of of course Some of these support tickets included things like I'm waiting to hear back from

55:31 Atlas about if they're going to approve my application because Stripe is required. For very good reasons to evaluate certain business types or Um

55:41 sanctions lists and sort of worldwide product. So there is some You know. Incredible. Incredibly should be incredibly quick.

55:48 But uh there is a bit of a like a r a review process. And Uh Course if you

55:54 were not hearing back from us, you would be upset to try to make your company immediately. This is ridiculous. Like let's get back to us quickly. And so we knew that one of the reasons that people were ready to support was like, Hey, what's up with my review? What's going on? And we knew that our tactic was

56:10 Just to drive up how quickly we got to a final decision on folks and to reduce the number of overturn rejections where Someone writes back in saying, Hi, like come on, I'm totally just thinking something reasonable. What's up? Why did you reject me? And so

56:24 We would pick these overarching single metric, which was which was the companies with zero support tickets, but then we would have a specific K R 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

56:44 casually exist, we would choose which tactics we're going to do and then set a metric for it. And the one the other reason I love this metric is it's a it it's a cohort metric by which you're trying to drive something up and to the left. I I sometimes People get excited about it.

57:01 chart that goes up and to the right. It's kind of a meme. Oh, it's going up to the right. I'm really excited about charts that go up and to the left. Uh so you have to figure out some optimization. That you're trying to maximize. And so in this particular case.

57:15 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

57:27 Final risk review by number of days since they submitted. And So you want a chart that looks a lot like Here we go. You know. Right up to the top because you want a hundred percent of your customers

57:41 to get their final decision as quickly as possible. Once you know it when we looked at the chart. It was doing this. Right. And so each month we would just make it A little better, a little better, a little up and to the left, up into the left, up into the left, and now basically

57:55 A hundred ish percent of people. get the risk review within an hour. From You know. A l a long tale taking a long time.

58:03 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 like really useful thing about metrics, is like you can decide when to stop. a tactic because you get to some level of success.

58:19 that you're comfortable with and you can always choose to pick it back up later. So there's some really cool lessons here, um, 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 an NPS. Like how many Why aren't people recommending Alice?

58:35 You found okay well people that are complaining and having issues with support and running into problems most likely are gonna be detractors not gonna want to recommend Atlas, so let's Let's have those really ambitious goals. U eventually nobody has a support ticket. Slash let's just track how many all of zero issues. And then you identify, okay, what's driving a lot of these support tickets. Okay, it looks like this risk timeline till I get to the certain milestone.

58:57 Let's make that our goal for the next quarter or whatever and Focus there. And then make an impact and then I imagine a move on to other levers within This uh

59:06 Bucket of zero contact. Pick the right metric for your audience. In I wouldn't like I wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone.

59:18 Though it's not a terrible one, uh to export. But in in the founder Founders choosing where to get started. mindset. Again, this isn't just deeply spending time Listening to your customers.

59:31 They all ask their friends, Hey, how did you start your company? They want to talk to An older sibling of sorts. about how it went. And so we

59:44 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 somewhere useful, but you can also reach people with billboards and Google ads. And

59:59 other types of upsells that's very difficult in the moment that someone is starting a company that's sort of a natural geographic, can you get the picture of the bird at exactly the right time. How are you even supposed to Go find people about to start companies. Thankfully they have this practice of just

1:00:17 Asking their friends. And so if their friends Loved it. They're gonna just recommend it and that that Has

1:00:26 that the metric and the tactic and the go to market all lined up. Uh 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

1:00:40 what our customers want and the business for it. And when you can line them all up It it can be quite quite beautiful. Just Especially when you can See it.

1:00:48 month over month for a long period of time. One other metric I think is I 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 it internally, whatever. is just users having a bad day.

1:01:05 Where we will just omit a log line. Any time. We think that a User bumped into a problem.

1:01:14 So maybe they hit a four o four. Or Maybe their payout. was one day after the the uh the ETA.

1:01:23 Or They had More than ten Payment declines. you can kind of brainstorm again, or just listen to customers, w what what would cause you to personally have a bad day?

1:01:34 And then just Omit an event when that occurs. And then you could just Make a bar chart, a stacked bar chart. Of all the

1:01:42 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

1:01:52 thought about until Stripe Scale. In which You just don't know what's happening until you Omit the log line and count it? Like the frequencies could be kind of mind blowing.

1:02:05 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 log line and count it as a bar chart. And then anybody else can have their own bar chart on top of it. And so it's become a

1:02:20 way for teams to scale their understanding of users through metrics by just saying, hey, look, anytime anybody has an idea about why a customer's having a bad day, just submit a log line. Like put on this chart. And then what we can choose over time. Which bad day reasons we want to burn down.

1:02:36 And hopefully just like eradicate them, not just like minimize them. But it it gave it gave us kind of a Background noise. Counting system.

1:02:49 Yeah. where there are problems And anytime there's an incident or some customer issue, the first thing I think is, Ooh, like I wonder if we have a bad day. I wonder if we have a bad day. Reason. For this

1:03:02 And if we Do I actually feel okay. I'm like, oh yeah, it is a bad day for this customer. I wish they 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

1:03:14 What does sometimes a little bit grind my gears or or gives is an opportunity is like when we didn't know about that bad day, and it's a surprise to us too. That is like to for me is immediate action. It's like okay, cool, we have to figure out a way to count this bad day. We gotta get it on the chart. That way we can make an informed decision about

1:03:32 you know, when to invest in in 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. Yeah. What what are some examples for Striper Atlas that you guys have a Are you a Stripe customer Lenny? I am. I check my with my newsletters, uh the payments go through Stripe, I check my dashboard every day. Cool. So what would be a bad day for you? Oh, I see. I see some silence uh happening here.

1:03:57 Um, you know, it not loading. The numbers taking a long time to show up. Something being completely off in there. Um Not being able to log in.

1:04:14 Silence. I just want to keep going. The question is how much you know to the audience is how much will of the science will we get it out before it before it goes live? But this is what I'm talking about, right? is I could guess them. Right. Yeah. And I I can as you were saying those, I know the like I know the URL.

1:04:35 Of those charts. Right I I I I know the login one'cause I I feel that too,'cause I'm playing with it stripe all the time and then get a two FA too frequently and Yeah, come on, I had the same cookie, I was just here yesterday. So we we count all that stuff and try to make it better over time.

1:04:50 But I'm So excited when someone brings me a New bad day I hadn't thought about yet, uh, because that's just It's like product cat. I love it. And your your advice here is this doesn't necessarily have to be your

1:05:04 goal or metric. It's Just start watching this thing'cause that could lead to a lot of interesting Yeah, ways of operating. Couple other just like quick metrics things a bit of a I don't know. Some people

1:05:16 Like cycling or something. I guess I like metrics. I I like people people get a really nice bike. I got a really nice metric. Um Picking metric. Titles that make you feel Feel something. So

1:05:30 We could have called that measure of companies Yeah. Number of companies that Do not send a support ticket.

1:05:41 over X period and Y period. You know. with men you know, you see you sometimes see these charts where the metric itself kind like named itself. This is just Companies with zero

1:05:54 Support. That's it. And it The brevity. And the focus and the customer

1:06:03 mindset built into the chart name. can become currency inside the company. Like Oh, I'm working on making the like this chart. Go up and it feels good to

1:06:12 Just say the name out loud, rather than Some couple Underscores and min's and maxes and you know the database.

1:06:23 field name is like still in the chart title. I these these are aesthetic choices that I think make Dramatic differences in the cultural willingness for people to buy in and get excited about it and reduce the need of a product person to just remind everyone every day why they're doing it. It's like the metric is motivating us because it's is a motivating thing to talk about. Um and and then lastly on metrics is

1:06:49 There's just good hygiene that people should bring to their measures. percentages shouldn't have Forty one. Bull the you know, significant digits if Yeah.

1:07:01 Only two of the digits are relevant. Uh You should Keep all the measures of your dashboard on the same X axis. These are just stylistic things that

1:07:13 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.

1:07:32 And so we can see Which teams. Are themselves looking at their own metrics. Uh, and then is an incredibly useful predictor.

1:07:41 Of how on the same page they are and how and how customer obsessed they are. So I just think it's It's it's not an area that's sort of behind the scenes. Bean counting.

1:07:55 reliability only. Is the machine hot? you can make metrics that mean something to the customer and you would be proud if they were to be screenshot and put on the internet and be like wow. I feel like that company is taking

1:08:10 They're promised to me seriously, and I can see myself on those metrics as a customer. That's That's where we're like we're really shooting for. So to mirror back what you just said there, which I think is a subtle point potentially is just making the dashboard Look nice.

1:08:25 like the hygiene of the naming conventions and the decimal points and the chart. your in your experience you find that really Powerful important. Couple years ago straight. T.

1:08:36 internal work to make an internal m 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 I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy. My rule is if it's not on cometrics, I'm not going to look at it. So

1:08:59 If P People can send me one off queries or charts or screenshots or presentations or emails of charts and data, but that is In the wind. You know, we can't interrogate the query

1:09:13 Metrics are almost always wrong for many weeks. we didn't quite get the definition correctly. You have to live in the metric for quite a while before you really believe in it. And so if you're always looking at some one off Version. it's just very difficult to to for it to rise up to the level of importance that is

1:09:34 a thing we should trust to help us decide what to do. That's an incredibly high bar. And so I I just find you have 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.

1:09:50 Mm-hmm. Um It you almost go through a couple stages of grief about it because I'll we'll kinda put a metric up in a in a place and everyone initially is like, Wow, this is great. Like, I was so excited to finally see this. And then a couple days later Huh. Like. Oh.

1:10:05 quite understand it. actually mean. Kind of Makes it feel you know, counterintuitive that it's like this. And then you kinda look into it, wait a second, we've been counting it wrong the whole time. Oh no. And then you look at it the third week and it's a completely different version. And then you hope that

1:10:26 We forget about it. Maybe we'll go on to something else. Nope, we're not gonna forget about it. Week four comes around, you're like, Wait a second. Okay. This is Then the team meeting starts. Hey, just a reminder, let's just bring up the metric again, not a screenshot of it, go to the URL. And just that level of

1:10:43 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 it's it's the quantitative and the 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.

1:11:02 to bring that level of care. and understanding to so many things. So then it forces you To Winnow. So many things you could care about.

1:11:11 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

1:11:21 So for all these tactics it's about Finding out what a customer wants and then different versions of of how do we sort of know it's true over time and our tactics in proving it. Sounds so simple when you describe it that way. This episode is brought to you by Anvil.

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1:13:19 Okay, let's imagine we've We understand our customer. We've Understand their burning problem. We've

1:13:27 built a solution that's in their hands, they're using it's hopefully better than their alternatives and they're start they're starting to use it and we have some real traction. You could still measure the success. You could still look at the tweets. And then of course you go to pick it up yourself and you're like, wait a second, this thing is Horrible. How how did it get so bad? Anyone who's built a product that has

1:13:52 gone over the horizon of it's actually in production and being used for Some you know a year or more. As you go to iterate on it. Especially when you're in a larger company and there's m multiple teams and multiple pro products going on.

1:14:06 There's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad. Uh I actually have a hard time naturally explaining it. You kind of think to yourself, Well, it's code. It just must be running the same every day. But somehow you do enough Things in a row and What was once a smooth end to end

1:14:24 flow for accomplishing a task for a customer is all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated Broken Maul that. where all the doors are busted and you have to you know exactly the way to get through the dashboard to s to solve your problem. Wait a second, we just I thought this was great just a second ago. So all I I mean many of us have experienced that. Now

1:14:45 Okay, what w what are we going to do about it? Well one is It is really difficult to Take time during the day. to

1:15:00 Allow yourself to even know that this is true. Because if you're working on one particular team you're going to have some next thing you're shipping. you're going to have your customers, you're going to be doing Great.

1:15:13 Product work. Meanwhile your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world. And uh decrease

1:15:22 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 to to to see it from the customer's perspective.

1:15:37 Today. And There are various techniques to try to Incentivise or to structure a group of people to do that. Stripe has a thing called friction logs as well, which is

1:15:52 And a a single individual will pretend to be A customer and Go through eight. product experience end to end and write it down.

1:16:00 And That has been quite successful at Stripe for very motivated people who Can Block off the time and have the wide enough context.

1:16:13 To cut. to do a complicated thing end to end and have the time to write it up. And the sort of position the company to send it out as a Critique.

1:16:25 Two Potentially to Not just your own team, but But in in a whole organization. So that's actually like a pretty high bar.

1:16:33 Two Crossover. So I was kind of brainstorming what could we do to Make this more fun. And

1:16:41 have the frequency but which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase. And we kind of Iterated through a thread. Through a view through ideas and I landed on this thing called study group. Which is basically A random group of people.

1:16:55 inside the company. They might not work on any particular team. They might not all be PMs. Just like literally anyone who wants to sign up, a support person, a salesperson, someone Who's you know, on our events team and engineer and our infrastructure stack, anybody. Can sign up for a study group. We show up.

1:17:13 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 uh farmers market.

1:17:26 Or we want to run a multi country global business Where we have Software that another business would use to run their business. I'm something quite quite complicated. We could pick any motivating

1:17:39 Goal. And there are Two rules to study group. Rule one is You do no longer work at Stripe.

1:17:49 You you're not you're not you do not work at Stripe. Not pretend you work don't work at Stripe, not try to forget you do not work at Stripe. You've never worked at Stripe. You work at And we make up a name of the company. Yeah. Dolphin Aquarium Industries.

1:18:04 And we will pick a CEO of the company from the from the group and Amongst us and okay, J Jenny is the CEO. Hey Jenny, like what what do you want to do today? Like, well I wanna So in person tickets to the dolphin aquarium. It's like

1:18:17 Hm. Where would you start? Right. So we actually embody the customer. We will not break character. It's a little bit of the improv thing. And

1:18:27 As the kind of maestro of study group. I will Firmly but kindly. If I hear you use any internal stripe knowledge, which it's natural to do, you're like, Well,'cause you work on a team and you 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.

1:18:47 If I can see you use any internal st straight knowledge, I'll just Pause. And say hey Let's re let's redo the sentence or redo what we did. W with no stripe knowledge, as a reminder, you don't work at stripe.

1:18:58 And It takes us a couple times. But People really get into it. And all of a sudden

1:19:04 uh we'll start making up characters and You know, the CEO will be like Oh, uh Tim, uh you're our designer. You know, where are we gonna get the color palette? All of a sudden there's a person who's not a designer right in real life is now All of a sudden having to practice the empathy. from to be in the customer's position. And because we're gonna be doing it for an hour, hour and a half at a time. You start

1:19:26 you actually start to believe that you don't And you you work at Dauphin. Aquarium industries and you start to really feel it. So that's rule one. You don't registrate. And rule two is

1:19:38 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. It's recorded, we can do that later, whatever.

1:19:51 This is just about practicing empathy. for the customer and going through the product and We have done more than twenty five of these at stripe thus far in the last Just this year.

1:20:04 last few months of tw of twenty twenty four. uh more than two hundred fifty people uh have gone like like participate in a study group. And it is deeply eye opening. For those involved.

1:20:16 The responses Or You know. Sort of. Business emotional, you know not not not not not super emotional, but just wow. I I I

1:20:27 I sort of Can't believe how hard it was to accomplish X, Y, and Z. I thought we were amazing at blah. It's like, well, we actually are still pretty good, but we need to get back towards amazing or wow that I didn't even know that internally people wouldn't know that our products did One two and three. And

1:20:45 This has become so internally popular that teams have adopted for themselves. And so we've kind of franchise study group internally already where different teams will will will run it. Um but I think we're gonna continue it because it I think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic. People just want more group activities.

1:21:02 I think some of it is The slowness by which we do it. We're not rushing through it. Um, which another reason I appreciate your podcast as well. It's like let's like really get into the details and not be rushed for time. You you forget that you have a meeting at the end. K kind of amount of time.

1:21:19 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. uh we're just all here as participants to embody The customer And then I think lastly, and a reason why it's it's it's work, and these are many of these just been actually super surprising to me. I wouldn't have been able to predict ahead of time is

1:21:42 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.

1:21:50 Uh. A person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO and It's just it there's a little theatrics to it. But it It has been different enough from our our our other approaches to

1:22:07 For a company like Stripe, which is already like pretty focused. On this topic. That we think that it's There's there's enough legs here that we're gonna keep it.

1:22:16 And and kind of invest in Groups. pretending to be The customer And going through it.

1:22:25 Painstakingly slowly? Rather than Only demos or only writing, which Has Other benefits.

1:22:35 But Mrs. the participation of a larger group and and more fresh eyes. So that's been It's been fun and we named it study group. I guess I named it study group because I wasn't sure what it would be initially. So I just came up with something that sounded cutesy. Uh but uh gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time and this is where we've landed.

1:22:56 It's fascinating that something That it there's so much theatrics and uh a ceremony necessary for a product team and a company to Find out these things about their product. You would think people are like, Oh, we know we know how onboarding looks, we know all these things, but You're what basically what you're saying is you don't.

1:23:15 And you need to do these sorts of things in order to really know what Your product is is light these days. The customer does not live in our walls. They aren't. They're not they're not here, you know. They're they're not They don't know our lingo and it is just so natural for

1:23:31 our internal mindset and lingo to flow into the application over time and you need some counterbalance to get there. I think that's an un has to be an unnatural counterbalance. I u it used to frustrate me actually. More.

1:23:50 Why why aren't we doing this? Well, we're actually doing great work to move something forward and we have our our local optimizations. It'd be difficult to get to this level of specialization that multiproduct companies are trying to do. Without that level of Focus.

1:24:06 on a per team basis, but then you need something unnatural. To help us bring it back. And so I'm Constantly looking for Non punitive. Fun ways.

1:24:18 Objectively to get more perspectives. From the outside in. If it's Breaking the fourth wall to get on the phone on Twitter. If it's looking at a metric of users having a bad day, which is just like counting what's happening, can't

1:24:32 Argue with that. Or a random group of people just kinda scratching their head trying to Find a button. Those are truths. Those are truths in the world that we're trying to make sure our inputs

1:24:44 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

1:24:54 Frankenstein bad products. Even when all the individual parts are like well oiled and and run by great people. So you need something unnatural. There's an interesting trend through our

1:25:07 and thread through our talk so far. Broadly there's just like an obsession. with making something great and awesome. And then a 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.

1:25:29 And it feels like For you and for Stripe broadly, there's this In eat. uh implication. If we're making the experience Better and better and better we will grow.

1:25:39 Uh, you're nodding your head a little sideways a little bit, so I'd love to hear just your thoughts on just like this obsession with Experience and user Issues and okay, but we also have to go to the business. What are the metrics we're moving? If someone else has a strategy for moving revenue that isn't getting it from customers I want to know about it.

1:25:57 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 We were it's very hard. A lot of work. to do.

1:26:08 So if there's something else. I want it on the table, but I often find it's part of the product experience. So maybe it's Internal sales tools. We can do a study group about our internal sales tools process and our deal desk and our

1:26:24 uh margin Structure. We can do a friction log on our third party vendor process or a migration service or the way Um

1:26:35 An 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

1:26:46 friend who runs a company and they were Small company. on the verge of product market fit, starting to starting to feel customers starting to pull, and they're like, Oh, but our our self service funnel is It's so leaky and we have all this support coming through self service. First of all, congratulations.

1:27:05 Okay. unbelievable that they're going through your product even attempting self service and contacting you, the majority case would be no one tries or they try and fail and they'll contact you. So again What a problem to have. And two. They wanted to minimize the support in that particular case. It's like, well, what's actually in those support tickets? What's in those sales con Those are really sales con contacts.

1:27:25 Like Oh, they want to learn more about how they get started. They they want to know the expertise about this is a particular company, it's a healthcare related company. They wanted to know their health the healthcare choices uh available. They wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had.

1:27:40 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 make the product experience be

1:27:53 Let's get you on the phone. And now when they when when they get on the phone, they know the first name of the person they're talking to because they they have it from the onboarding form. And all of a sudden it feels Like you are

1:28:05 still in the product, but it's not software, now it's a person. But it's a person backed by internal software, which knows as much as as as they can about the customer and what they want. And I was really inspired by um Fidelity, which is a big financial institution. Where You know.

1:28:22 You many people listening might have switched jobs and had to move their four one K or something like this from job A to job B. You know, maybe in some universe it'll be three clicks. But not today, or certainly not when I tried a couple years ago. You gotta call and go to phone tree and

1:28:40 All the shenanigans. And then I got on on the line with someone from Fidelity. You're like Hi Jeff. They knew about the old company.

1:28:48 They Confirmed my address. I said we by the way. Uh, this is not a digital process yet. We're gonna

1:28:55 Fat X U 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

1:29:09 The papers for envelope one, sign them where it says And put them in envelope two. I'm like Put it back to the fest. It's like wow. That is product. That is a product experience. Where I think some people would say, Oh, look, the product experience has to only be in software.

1:29:22 So I feel When people think oh You know product quality and craft. has some limit towards business value, like there's some

1:29:33 Ask them Tot that you Well Kind of Product plate time quality is over. We need to talk about business. It's like let's figure out exactly what is causing the business to happen and make it product.

1:29:46 Even if it doesn't look naturally the same as our as our sort of SaaS software, browser, mobile, whatever. versions I think we can see the entire experience as it And from there I include the sales process, I include the support process, I include

1:30:02 Uh you know, tools that help with Compliance and everything else. And Again, if people have a way to make all those things bad and lead

1:30:12 to great uh increasing revenue over time in sustainable ways like I want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than than than the version that That we're trying. I love that and clearly it's work for stripe. Just one last question. I want to talk about Atlas and dive into just like what is Atlas and how is it doing and things like that. I know there's some new stuff coming.

1:30:33 that you're gonna share. But one last question about study groups. Who how do you decide what product you're gonna 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 ten page report of all the problems. So initially I just made up a list of stuff that I thought would be fun to study group to kinda kick it off and now Because it has a bit of an internal Brand and it's exciting and

1:30:57 people who've gone to study group, say nice things about study group, they're they actually proactively say, Hey, we should study group Blah. Or Uh We're launching something next week. We should study group it before it goes out the door or

1:31:11 Now I actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group uh Based on what people want. And then and now we're kind of again, franchising it, so we're gonna have study group captains and People run their own study groups and so I can We can really sc scale this behavior, but

1:31:26 We did our first study group of an internal tool recently and so that's I think is gonna catch on. Just any anything at all can be study grouped. It just takes about an hour and couple people and you open up the zoom and that's it. And then for expectation wise Look, you can

1:31:43 It is It is so tempting to put more regulation on something. U Okay, well everything coming out of

1:31:53 This program needs to be scored. And rubriced. And have SLAs. That is extremely reasonable as some of these next steps because we do notice things that are of serious issues and we

1:32:06 Yeah. We have some formal processes inside of Stripe for Elevating bugs. to certain priority levels that get tagged and have SLAs for teams to acknowledge and review. And so we kind of Fun all

1:32:19 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

1:32:34 It is difficult to watch. One of these study groups. And if you are the team You know. involved in some piece of it and not want to act on it.

1:32:44 Uh because Teammates struggle to use your thing. in some way is more motivating than the customer.

1:32:58 Because you can kind of always say to the customer, Well, they didn't really know or They have some special setup. Mm. You you know, you probably shouldn't say those things, but you you can kind of rationalise it. Whereas

1:33:11 A group of people incentivized to have actually accomplished it, who got together to do so painstakingly slowly. Not being able to do so. If that's not what excites you as a product person to want to solve. You know, it's like the thing's not for you. But then again, you have your own

1:33:31 Optimization system, you have your own things you need to ship. That's and and Stud doesn't have a Mandate. Um that comes from it. We have our own We w it's more of a

1:33:42 cultural piece of information that is very high signal. And then People. tend to use that high signal for qu quick prioritisation. I will say though that we

1:33:54 S the SLAs to certain bug levels that begin to match a bit of our incident process. So In a you know, in an incident stripe, like in many companies you know. Pencils down, fix the problem, severity levels.

1:34:09 N non negotiable slack rooms happen, war rooms, all that stuff. You know, you don't want to do that with every single bug. But we have a rubric. of craft related Tags for our bug system and

1:34:22 If it is a sort of a P zero bug, which is not an incident. Right. It doesn't mean just put down your pencils. You do need to acknowledge it at stripe within seven days. And even if it doesn't mean to fix it, it's like a person looks at it and says, Hey, we're gonna like do it or not do it.

1:34:38 That's still pretty strong. bar for a non incident related Craft issue. It feels just at stripe there's this uh cultural focus on we want to make the product great. We wanna make the experience as great as possible. A lot of companies

1:34:55 It's just teams, we have this goal. We're not gonna do anything that isn't driving this metric and goal that we have. And I think for teams like that, it's hard to hear just like, oh, someone's gonna send you all of these problems with your experience. You know, there's like the negative version where the founders like goes through the product. like a CO of a larger company just, Oh my god, look at all these problems. You need to fix these immediately. And a lot of times those it's like completely distracting from the things they need to do, the goals they're trying to drive, things that act really, really mattered.

1:35:20 That this you 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. Probably should. Here's like the most important stuff. But also there's often you find a correlation between make the experience better, you're gonna you're gonna do better.

1:35:37 there's a huge amount of trust here involved in in your colleagues, which is We want to provide teams Great information. And they the best teams welcome that information. It doesn't mean that it comes with a

1:35:52 auter opinion from the outside world that says you must do X. We have a rubric on some of the Craft related. Bugs but it but again we also allow our We l let the teams relabel them. And so maybe it's actually not a P zero from their eyes, and we like that's the tr that's the trust we put in the teams.

1:36:14 I think that the The failure mode is when you don't look. And and so we need unnatural safe Fun.

1:36:25 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.

1:36:38 And then like, okay, fine. I'll take a third best, which is pantomiming the customer and with a zero w with z enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge. I if you have practices in those three Categories.

1:36:54 I'm comfortable with the failure modes. I love that. This is definitely gonna be the longest episode I've ever done, which is exactly what I expected, and I'm happy. that we're doing this. Well, everyone go one point seven five X or something. I like when people are like, oh this episode was really good. I had to slow down to one point seven five or something. What are how are you even listening at that speed? Um no it's one one point oh speed. That's what this episode needs to be.

1:37:20 There's two more areas I wanna spend some time on. One is Atlas. We've talked a lot about on the surface of Atlas, I wanna Help people understand what the hell it is and the stuff that's happening there. And two, I want to talk about getting stuff done at a big company. Something that you've done. at Stripe and I hear you have a lot of good advice on

1:37:36 So first of all. What is Atlas? We've talked a bit a bit about it. What's the best way to understand what Atlas is and who it's for? In twenty sixteen A bunch of stripes were traveling the world. Uh strikes is what we call call a

1:37:49 No teammates here. And they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world. And you would hear this Unbelievable story from incredible entrepreneurs who are Have a laptop. Which is that they'd have to fly to the United States.

1:38:05 on an airplane. to make a US company in order to Get access to use financial system. to raise money from US or or global investors. Often to take

1:38:18 you know USD or to charge US customers And You know, you could have sat around and said, Huh, is that illegal? They don't live it They don't live in the US, you know. Can they have a US company?

1:38:30 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?

1:38:42 Right. And so you you You start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst some with a laptop. Who has access to the whole internet. And that is a burning problem. Right. That is not a

1:38:56 Tier three issue. I am not able to run my business without getting on an airplane, should be sending alerts off in your whole in your whole psyche that you have discovered some something important. And so I'm I I wasn't that stripe at the time. But I'm very thankful that I was running my own start at the time.

1:39:15 I was very thankful that The people at Stripe decided to try to tackle that problem. And so Atlas is a way Two

1:39:24 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.

1:39:39 And it is But it's a little strange because it's all the same MacBooks. And it's a little strange'cause it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and and smarts. And so what can we do to Dramatically lower the barrier.

1:39:54 Two. Great people solving problems. And We found over and over again that Increasing the ease.

1:40:04 And simplicity and decreasing the cost and and complexity. tends to lead to just more of that thing. And we have a fundamental belief that There should be more startups.

1:40:17 And they are not finite. And that belief comes from Both are just a poor hope because there's 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

1:40:32 entrepreneurial energy to tackle them. And then it's also comes from Experience of seeing it happened. Instacart signed up for Stripe with a G ma address. And then Covet happened and they delivered critical Fo everyone when when

1:40:47 People were reasonably Uh not allowed to go to the grocery store easily. So

1:40:53 You just don't know what the next Gmail address is going to do. And so In Atlas we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started. And that mission has taken us to s just solve more of the problem over time.

1:41:12 And so over the last few years, for those who have either used Atlas or I've started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit. You might have seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist.

1:41:27 being automated. And and so a big one that we did about a year ago was this eighty three B election. Which is this Absolutely Byzantine.

1:41:39 silliness system in by which you have thirty calendar days to send a one page document to the IRS that could radically change. the economics of of how You are um incentivize as a founder. And this is not one of these you know greedy loophole situations. The IRS in the nineteen eighties made this.

1:41:59 Made this Uh This IRS rule in order to spur more entrepreneurship. They want this.

1:42:08 And the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to accomplish. You have to send a snail mail in. to an IRS address in a particular format in a particular way with no verification that it happened at all. And if you do it thirty one calendar days, there's no redo. Okay.

1:42:25 Now Again, if you're a product person, you hear The s founders. Terrified. all day long about this same issue, just alarm bells in your head all whole time and so

1:42:36 I had experienced it for myself as a founder several times, and I've also just heard story after story and I just put on my to-do list. For the team. we are gonna solve this A three B election thing. And there are very good reasons not to do it. Uh because it

1:42:49 comes with. potential huge liability, you don't want to screw it up. It's nail mail. Uh you're really gonna monetize this, you know the This is really but the Can I It's a competitive advantage to do it. You can kind of argue yourself

1:43:01 Not to do it in a million ways. But again, back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning into a single click. It was obvious to us and we and we got started on it. Infrastructurally, we've been automating these steps.

1:43:14 And when this podcast airs, I guess today. Uh uh It will be true that When you go to start a company on Atlas. It will just be a single click.

1:43:26 You go to Type in your friends' names. how 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 fifty fifty or whatever you want to do, fill out a few things. And you click

1:43:40 Go. And then Like a burrito coming to you. Like a pizza tracker. We will just handle

1:43:49 all of the downstream activities that used to be Hey, remember to come back in and purchase your shares. Why am I purchasing my shares? I'm just getting started. Why am I writing a check for ten dollars and putting into a bank account that I can't even open yet. And then I have to

1:44:06 Wait for that to be done to Get the A3PL shot. 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.

1:44:17 And so you can quit your you know, this is our vision. So you can quit your job on a Sunday night, get the Sunday scaries. I'm done with this thing. And On Monday morning fill out this form. And

1:44:29 The next day Be able to run a billion dollar business. Because we will have Automatically handled. Getting you access to

1:44:38 Banking systems. to payment systems, to handling all the equity paperwork. filing your A T V election. Where you can just Shift.

1:44:47 from having worrying about a company starting process to just building and shipping. And you'll just get kind updates in the background. Cool. The IRS has given you a tax ID. cool or eighty three P election.

1:44:59 Is filed. Cool, all the founders. have their equity and you're ready ready to go on the cap table. And we've done this by Deeply integrating

1:45:08 with the governments and deeply integrating with banking partners. at where we can get you access to The financial system. Before the IRS and the other governments come back with with their sort of official yeses because we have

1:45:25 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.

1:45:37 So that you get the same thing the Y C group gets when they start that checklist that they go through. We just have the robot do exactly the same thing. And so in some ways Is a really big deal on a big ship. Because it

1:45:50 Yeah. completely Automates. The company starting process. But in other ways, it's an incredibly incremental step that it's taken us three years to get to.

1:46:00 Where we Had to systematically Automate the internal steps each one. And now we've done the work. to wrap it all up.

1:46:11 into one button and you can just you can just watch how your company's doing in the dashboard. Well, first of all, congrats, Jeff and the Atlas team on shipping this. I know that's a big milestone and it's been a long time coming. Yeah. Atlas was actually a little reasonable before we decide to do all this work? It's like why do

1:46:27 Why do this next step of completely automating it when it was actually like Fairly straightforward before. Um Atlas has above eighty NPS. Uh which is

1:46:38 quite high. Uh Apple is in the low sixties, AirPods is seventy five. I love my AirPods. Uh So Atlas in the eighties with Almost fifty percent response rate. is quite high.

1:46:51 And so we still chose to do another year of work to automate all of this work behind behind the scenes because We see That Companies are charging their customers sooner.

1:47:05 when they go through this automated process versus waiting. And It's you know, a little strange. You just started your company. Well What does it really matter to wait an extra seven days or twenty days before you can get off you before you can really get gone on business.

1:47:22 Those are really fragile days which 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

1:47:35 slide that forward in the world by a couple of days or weeks, which we we see we're seeing Like half the time it takes. to get to your first customer, just take like shave a whole week. off of your company. And

1:47:48 You can kind of see GDP being like Yeah. Like sooner. And you You

1:47:55 When my whole life n 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.

1:48:07 I think anything we could do to just move that forward is going to Inspire And short. And lower the bar for more people to be an entrepreneur because they'll see

1:48:18 How? satisfying that can be. And another stat w 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.

1:48:33 And I think it's because You can just do a lot more on the internet as a founder. with no code tools and everything else and get going. Very cool to see that. bringing the best to the internet and making it available worldwide can cause more people

1:48:49 can be correlated with more people Becoming entrepreneurs I think we should just keep doing that. It's incredibly inspiring. And I think this is gonna be a huge deal. Uh like it's hard to think about how many

1:49:01 What sorts of changes in tech could be. transform how many companies are started and how many companies not just started, but actually happen. Because to your point, you may start in the like, nah, 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. We have T. sort of cohort of twenty twenty four startups in Atlas. got to fifty million dollars in revenue.

1:49:24 twice as quickly. as the cohort in twenty twenty three. And so we kind of also think sometimes, Oh, it was the pandemic that pushed everything online. That was those are our best years. It's like We're seeing the earliest cohort charts of new startups. Just like cr cr. cracking up and to 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.

1:49:47 That is much more of a point in time capital analysis and much less of Business. the the just how businesses are working day to day. It's really in the revenue.

1:50:00 That that that is representative of their And that looks Amazingly bright. And then of course these companies go off to do Pretty wild things.

1:50:09 companies that have started through Atlas has been fifty five thousand of them. Uh to date. are doing five billion dollars 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

1:50:28 If we can push people towards expectations. Higher then they will want to make their companies better and and We'll just all benefit from that. Mm.

1:50:38 How much of this uh 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 is there this ops element to automating some of this? Atlas is In total ten people. uh which is I think a relatively small group for the

1:51:00 Roll at it. plays in the wider sort of ecosystem and We just Don't

1:51:09 Pick up work we can't automate. Because we know that we need the leverage. And so we're not Going to tackle

1:51:19 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 And and like that's a different mindset. So in terms of you know, why we picked up eighty three B election as a topic like when we made that decision, we made a commitment.

1:51:37 That we're going to We're going to do this forever. Like we're we're gonna do this forever. This is a piece of infrastructure for the rest of the internet. That is a very high bar to

1:51:49 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

1:52:01 Hey. It's your job today to send one piece of paper to the office with this third party Uh Mail service. Why?

1:52:10 Doesn't matter. Today Just send a single piece of paper to the office and uh incredible engineer sh and she went on to lead all of the eighty three B election work.

1:52:21 She said it. And The proof of just receiving the piece of paper. At the office. That we had just sent yesterday.

1:52:30 is incredible proof, right? Where well, look, I mean the A three election is just sending this piece of paper to The IRS like We just did it. Right. That 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.

1:52:44 On the long term compelling 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 back up processes like this in a very intense

1:52:59 Amount of internal structure we use. And but again, we have to look at where the value is. The value is in making sure it happens. Does it need to be us sending the mail? Does it need to be us talking to government? Not necessarily.

1:53:12 And we have chosen to work with third parties and many back up third parties as well because One, there's expertise in the world of physically printing and sending mail that the ten of us are not going to today become experts in. And two, I think it also causes us

1:53:28 to build better software In that We now need to evaluate If something's actually working. Because it's happening externally. Whereas when you build it yourself, again, you have this natural feeling, well, we've built it, it must be working. Oh, later we'll add alerts.

1:53:45 you know, later when there are problems we'll figure out playbooks. Well look, when it's a third party Building it. You're like, Wait a second, wombs if they screw up. Like, cool, we better figure that out. We better O Cr all the results. We better, you know, do all these checksums. 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

1:54:07 To be more rigid where we needed to be rigid and create interfaces and and kind of commitments. And again, we work with a bunch of great third parties. uh and back up third parties to execute this. And we and each year we write a document called Should We Do This Ours? And we look at the other nine of us around the room and go, Of course we shouldn't. Let's go on to something else.

1:54:25 So Again, we're just we're we're just really st stitching it together. But ensuring that it happens. Awesome. Okay. I was imagining fax machines just to be able to do it. There are fax machines occurring. Not in the bias. There and there are phone calls being made and there are robots waiting on phones.

1:54:42 Uh on hold as well. There's Oh amazing. There's quite a lot going on. AI AI is here. Uh I saw a stat that one in six New Delaware corporations are now started on Stripe Atlas. That's absurd. Yep. I'm very excited to tell you when it's one in five, but I but it's not today.

1:54:59 Okay. Sounds like we're close. We're on our way. Sounds like we're close. The other stat I have here is that uh the fastest growing cities For startups, uh Here's what I have, I don't know if you know this, but Boulder. Shenzhen in Las Vegas.

1:55:13 They're everywhere. And I the part one of the It's not we kind of came up with. a little bit last year that I I'm just personally deeply obsessed with is founding teams in which The co founders are in multiple countries.

1:55:27 Yeah. So like We could kind of nickname this again. It's like There. giving giving things a good title.

1:55:33 uh headlines cross border founders. Um Wow. Like More than twenty percent. Of

1:55:42 Multi multi founder teams have at least one founder from another country. That is Astounding to me.

1:55:50 that the internet could bring people together like that. And I think that's gonna pr Provide. More perspectives. more solutions will be local and global. Just

1:56:02 Uh perspectives are great. And and again, I think the Alice team itself represents This We were very intentional of how we built the Atlas team. It's majority women and we have more more diversity

1:56:14 S To h to hire, but we were just very intentional to make it a team that had diverse perspectives. Uh.

1:56:21 You've been on teams that don't have per diverse perspectives of any type, they are so much worse. Uh there's no real science necessary here. We just enforce that as we had the opportunity to build build this team that way and It was really in

1:56:38 It represented the A world we wanted. Things to look like. And and to represent.

1:56:45 And You know, it we just had to be very intentional about it because I've made mistakes in my career Previously where My startup was all men. When when we sold to box one of them.

1:56:55 And It w on each hire was harder and harder and harder to hire Someone of a different background, but just naturally folks didn't want to join that type of team and That was the last time I've ever ever gonna make that mistake.

1:57:08 Which is that Early. The candidate pool must match. Where where you want the team to go. It's not a down funnel problem. It is an up funnel problem. Where you have to just make sure that

1:57:20 For each role you're comfortable with the out like with the with the distribution of of people and backgrounds in your candidate pool and go from there. I think that is it. One of the reasons why that ten person group is so effective.

1:57:34 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 gonna add'em to the list. And I actually saw a photo of the team and I noticed that. And so Great work.

1:57:48 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. You know, if you if you look back in your emails and and you rem If you started a company recently, you're starting a company right now. The whole world is counting on you to Pick a customer, solve their problem ten times better than their alternative.

1:58:14 Get it to them. charge for it, become economically viable, and build a great business that provides great services. We are not counting on you to become experts at this silliness of administratively running your company. That is you know. Uh Imagine life without Google Docs.

1:58:29 uh and w where you'd have to hire an IT person to Run your IT backend. Um on on employee three, you'd have an IT person, or imagine the world without AWS for E C two or S three or any of these cloud services and you're

1:58:44 racking computers yourself. You're just absolutely not gonna try for anything. So we just like we just see the company structure the cr the 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 of ideas, but

1:59:03 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. Interesting.

1:59:17 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. Your own. creating such an unlock to allow more of that. And like I said, I think it's 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 It I I go back to again I also hear from

1:59:39 Founders entrepreneurs like Oh I can't think of an idea. Like ah I need a I need a I need a start up idea. And yet everything in the world is broken. Yeah. Uh and I also recall my

1:59:51 First startup. early twenty ten, twenty twelve ish, I joined a Friends Company That was started at the same time that the Stripe founders started Stripe. And that is

2:00:05 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. Uh where they didn't.

2:00:19 They were On making it easy. in seven lines of code to accept Payments online. Which turned out to be

2:00:26 Really useful. Uh So I I really encourage people to be very sensitive. to the problems that they see and just not let any Any little hiccup go unnoticed.

2:00:41 Uh. 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

2:00:51 economically successful operation. And which of the Any moment along the way. you shouldn't have had to had to do. And we think those things are a fair game to play with in any topic.

2:01:02 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

2:01:12 When you hear If you said enough silence And you hear the same people complain about the problems, you too might find something as big as Online payments are hard. Which was sitting right in front of all of us. Mm.

2:01:24 And I think it's important to note, it doesn't necessarily have to be a venture back, venture scale company, right? There are many most businesses in the world are not venture back, venture scale billion dollar companies. You can Build a profitable company. It it's uh Kinda funny, we've all um

2:01:40 Put this. badge of honor of giving away a lot of your company. Uh People really

2:01:51 love owning a lot of their company and being successful. So you just gotta pick the right capital structure for your for your business. And again, uh the the amount of money that is of the companies that started through Atlas, you said five billion dollars basically. That's the GDP of of Atlas, that Atlas is And that's that's like revenue per year. And we that's growing. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, obviously some of a lot of it would have happened anyway, but still there's it accelerated. It's probably growing faster. Uh a lot of it probably never would happen to those. Yeah, we we ran a survey a little bit ago. We need to rerun this where we just ask people what they have started their business about.

2:02:26 without Atlas and About twenty percent of people said they wouldn't have or wouldn't have had then. And again, these things are fragile. Right, and it's not all It's not all

2:02:37 Google employees. Leaving their job to build something. It's People from Every possible background, every possible role, every possible job.

2:02:49 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. Um there's like so many more things I still want to talk about. Maybe we'll have a few make it to X speed. So This b L S is basically a zero to one product.

2:03:13 I know you didn't start initially was there, but you took it from I don't know, maybe you took it from point five or something to Uh to one and a hundred now. And a lot of people struggle with Starting things like this within larger companies. Like Stripe's a large company, right? They It's like you know, a very innovative.

2:03:28 Uh Well run company, but it's also large company. And clearly you. You made you made shit happen, you and your team. What kind of things have you learned? Actually, let me read a quote. Here's a quote that kind of describes uh you being good at this from one of your former colleagues who will go unnamed.

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

2:04:01 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 talked to fifty customers who

2:04:16 All yelled the same thing. Thing. Here they are in varieties of quotes and forms and the rest of it. And you put some three bullet points of strategy around why it's important. It's gonna help you win more market share and the rest of it and how you can do it well.

2:04:31 I mean. What what else could we Wanna do. Maybe somebody has something where fifty one people have the same burning thing. But The majority

2:04:41 Failure mode is we do nothing. That's the majority failure mode. And so One, aligning people with Deep

2:04:51 Customer stories. storyboarding some solution visually With a sharpie. And not a pencil. Not Figma initially.

2:05:04 Not hot. high or low fidelity. I can never remember which one is the detailed one, but just like sharpie. What is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem. And

2:05:18 That's you know, Pixar style storyboard. You don't need to be a designer. You can just draw like stick figures on a piece of paper or whimsical or whatever you want to do. And with those things

2:05:32 If you're not asking for You know, this s the sun and the moon on headcount and team size to make some forward progress. Like Who could stop you? You know, let's get some first version working.

2:05:43 It was very motivating to get that single piece of paper. in the mail. With the which was blank. to kick us off on the eighty three P election. And it we I again, by the time this podcast airs, we'll have crossed ten thousand eighty three B elections filed and we have will have done them all a hundred point zero zero zero percent on time.

2:06:02 Uh With the burning use case. Why customers are gonna need it, why we can do it. cheaply, effectively, safely over a long period of time. And here's the way to get tangible forward progress quickly.

2:06:19 Against the stick figure vision, but With something in the browser or want 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.

2:06:36 Rather than Proof by theory or proof by debate. It's just like look, we did it one time. Hey, I'm holding the piece of paper. Yeah, pretty motivating. Uh we could

2:06:48 You know, if we just And we just printed out their information. We'd be done. Okay, actually there's a lot to do other than just that, but it it really pushed us forward. So I think cutting through A little bit of the red tape.

2:07:02 is about Momentum. And making each step not such a big deal and asking for less Permission.

2:07:13 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. Uh. Paired with

2:07:26 Everyone's looking at the same place about the metrics. Everyone can watch the success. We don't need to do big internal updates with long winded PowerPoint presentations and scrambles the night before, you can just go to the metrics page and see how we're doing. That that in that brings so much trust.

2:07:48 to the group that people start going from Hey, why do we have this? Atlas thing that Doesn't you know, really

2:07:57 produce so much money, it's like charging people companies when they don't have money, 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 look at its impact on the curves.

2:08:13 And you start you start to like root for it more. I think that's how we got it there. I will say one other thing, which is that Making something economically viable is extremely important. And so

2:08:24 When I I'm probably the fourth person to run Atlas and it's quite a pantheon of people prior to me, including the founder of Mosey, which is a compliance Um

2:08:35 uh startup. Uh Watershed, which is this amazing c climate reporting tool also Um let Atlas Pat Patrick McKenzie Patty Eleven for Many folks do Wow, what an alumni group this year. We owe ourselves a dinner. Uh we owe ourselves a dinner. Quite quite a group. And now we have uh a new person who's so I you know, I technically no longer lead Atlas. So we've hired up a whole team, which is really exciting. And Haley Halverson, who's joined us.

2:09:00 uh about a year or two ago. She leads Atlas Now and you can find her on Twitter. She's fantastic and Uh we just uh we swap jobs over a course of a year, just one month at a time, the roles. Uh and so Uh, she worked for me and then I worked for her and then and she's gone off to hire some amazing people to run Atlas. So it's really quite a privilege to have These people.

2:09:19 We did it over time. So Wait. But it was really important for us to communicate. why we're going to run this

2:09:27 e in an economically viable way. And I think that applies to all products and all businesses. It's just like look, if you're a customer acquisition, Style product? Well show Showcase why it's this is the best customer acquisition. for the dollar for the company. If you are a margin generating

2:09:44 Moat moat creating ecosystem Growing. portion of the business? Well, 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

2:09:56 The economics. Who else is going to put this much energy into this style of of product and that gives us confidence that we should invest in in the long term because Uh alternatives can come and go and we Actually, I super encourage there to be more atlas alternatives. That'd be great for founders.

2:10:13 But I think over the long term it'll be difficult to do so just because of the business model. Yeah, there actually was an alternate at one point Angelist, and then they're like, No, Stripe is a kill in it, let's just send everyone to to to Atlas. So I I'd I'd worked on strike payments for A while.

2:10:29 And I had just started on Atlas. And I think that same month Angelus announced that they were doing incorporation and banking and cap table all together, which was exactly what I wanted to do. And I was like, Oh shoot. Did I sign up for the wrong thing?

2:10:45 Angel is a such a smart group of people, so customer oriented, great brand, and I love many of the people who work there and work with some of the best uh legal minds to And they have the R U V setup. There's like so much awesomeness here. I was like, should we just Should we really compete? Like what should we do here?

2:11:06 And we thought about it more and more like look In the very long term. This company starting process. is going to become a efficiency cost problem. And there's so much long tail complexity with dealing with multiple financial institutions, multiple government processes.

2:11:25 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.

2:11:34 Hm. We looked at it and said, Look We're gonna keep we're gonna keep this long term compounding approach. because we think that this is where it's going to go and it was a zero z zero interest rate environment at the time.

2:11:48 Angelus built a phenomenal product. I looked at it with Nothing but admiration and happiness, but it also kind of smartened and hurt. And we just Kept building, kept building, kept building.

2:12:00 And I got a phone call one night. On my wife's birthday. Uh before we sat down for dinner. And it was uh Um

2:12:08 d Dan at uh at Angelis. I hope he'd be comfortable telling a story, who I love, incredible product mind. And He led product over Angeles for startups. And he said, Hey We're gonna get out of incorporation.

2:12:21 This is not gonna be our focus going forward. Do you want the business? It's like a year and a half after after they had really gone out, or maybe two years after they gone out or something like this. I was like, Wow.

2:12:36 And we had kept such an open relationship with them. We had paired with them on legal constructs. We had discussed eighty three B election openly. And a lot of people are like, Oh, I can't believe you're talking to the competitor. Yeah, like Look, we we all share the same mission here. You know, yes, we're competing. But it's

2:12:52 Are we really all better off? From treating each other. At at arms distance we had a shared Slack channel. We discussed when the uh Delaware was slow on on a corporation. One time it's'cause they were playing softball and they had an afternoon off. That's a real story. Uh and we've discussed it.

2:13:10 And so when and and the Angelus was incredible. Yeah. In how they evaluated it. We're like evaluating different Uh partners but because Of our working relationship and the quality of

2:13:22 Yeah. O of your product and they saw we were going with eighty three B election? And intensity of that. They just put up um a web page that said to get started with Angelus, if you need a company, go right over to Atlas. And that was a really

2:13:38 Amazing moment because it it I respected them so much and I looked up to them so much. That they would mutually beneficially choose to do that. And everybody was excited and happy and customers are happy and it's been an inc

2:13:52 Incredible relationship since in which you can start on Angelus, go through Atlas, and then all of your information is automatically populated into Angelus automatically. And we've since rolled that out with. Several other partners, Mercury Car to others. But Angela's really led the way there and we just maintain a great relational routine. But just like such a

2:14:09 It was It took a while, but it really reproved to me. That they're not competitors, it's alternatives. And if you care about your customer, you care about their alternatives. And if you care about the mission, You you need to all work together. And look, there's some friendly competition, of course. We all wanna win.

2:14:26 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, uh that I could like spin off on and just like Not worrying about your competition, staying heads down, just solving customer problems, staying close to your

2:14:44 Competition, I'm being afraid to talk to them. sharing advice with each other, just building the best possible product. I don't know, there's a ton there that's super interesting. I couldn't really draw it up any better and I just think the world is Better off with more specialization and

2:14:57 The It's a pain in the butt it's a pain in the butt to these corporations like uh you really I think we can get Yeah. Yeah. I think You want More specialization and more partnership.

2:15:08 Um And I think a lot of companies are starting 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

2:15:23 Uh Mihika who came on the podcast, who's all who's Had 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 the s exciting vision of what this could be if we were to pull it off without constraints.

2:15:41 Unconstrained. Powerful vision. Uh two is solve a burning use case, make it clear like this is a huge problem for a lot of people, and maybe there's probably Stories you show there.

2:15:51 show tangible forward progress. Just like look at this. We made this progress. We made this progress. sent ourselves a piece of blank paper. Look at this. It's a huge milestone. And have momentum and Majica talked about this just like keep the fire alive. Keep the fire alive. Show momentum, we're making progress, this metric's moving up and to the right. And then and then there's like a milestone. Felt like you had like an early milestone of like look, we made a mil we made progress. And then also have uh the business case, basically. Look how much we could make.

2:16:16 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.

2:16:27 as soon as humanly possible, we would just Invite a founder to To the team meeting. We would pipe all their feedback into a Slack channel automatically we have all the NPS scores

2:16:43 going to a channel and any time it's not a ten for ten we follow up directly. Just like constant Engagement with a customer. Creates the momentum where

2:16:55 It doesn't need to be the product person or some other leader saying we need to do this. Follow me. Yeah. Oh my gosh, the world needs this. Let's figure out how to do it even faster. And a tip That

2:17:08 the team has tried and this is well since I've I've been involved day to day Uh 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

2:17:21 Founders after they've set up their company. What would be magical there? We just invite Founders in. Into a

2:17:29 Whimsical, which uh one of a piece of software I love. It's just a really easy learning curve to create visual diagrams. And Rather than sort of doing A U X R about it, we say, Hey

2:17:42 What would W what would you hope this dashboard would happen? They grab a thing and they start typing and they start drawing what they want their dashboard to be. Like why were we guessing Beforehand I kind of I now scratch my head. I'm Several years into

2:17:54 you know, decade plus building things and I was like I was doing this by myself. Why didn't I just assign it to the people who were gonna use it in the first place? Now look, that doesn't always work'cause not all of your customers are going to be Uh you know, product designers at heart, but more of them than you think.

2:18:09 And I think it's it's Giving your customers right access and not just read access. to your company is incredibly powerful. And I think I had not quite seen it so directly.

2:18:23 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.

2:18:33 Great. Uh why were we guessing? I think you have an unfair advantage where your customers are founders and oftentimes have a product. skills and design skills. Uh but I love that. True, but I will really push because you don't need a hundred of them. And you're c you'll find somebody somewhere who No, s you just gotta sit in a little more silence. You'll s some they'll raise their hand. Uh, there's a quote you shared somewhere that um that relates to what you just said, that your dad once said you can't screw up a sentence if it begins with the customer. That's true.

2:19:04 Yeah, my dad runs a Um an IT business in Baltimore to help other businesses with her. computer systems and my

2:19:12 Growing up I would literally physic clean the keyboards of his employees and you know dust dust them out dust the mice. But yeah, he he's very, very customer oriented where I get a lot of it from. And my mom's a painter, so I think there's some a combination of tal talents or interests there.

2:19:28 But He would take it one step further and He would sometimes physically Bring a chair over. in a meeting and say the customer is sitting here.

2:19:38 And you'd have to like pretend. And then he would kind of Fake talk to like Invisible customer. Hey, based on what you've seen today at the meeting, I saw him do this one time.

2:19:47 Like based on what you've seen today at the meeting. Are more likely to pay your bill. or less likely to pay your bill based on what you witnessed. Uh that's a l a little intense on the pantomime, but I think the point gets across that you just if you begin

2:20:00 Again, because it's so natural to think internal if you be begin the sentence physically with the customer and then start your sentence. You just have a much better shot at it. That's an amazing story. Very uh study group ish, like a early early prototype. Um, Jeff We've covered

2:20:17 So much ground. I have Two hours more worth of questions, but I we need to look. We need to take a cut it off, I think. Um, is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Really excited about whatever you're building out there or thinking of building.

2:20:34 My email address is incredibly easy to find. My Twitter handle is incredibly easy to find. Do not hesitate to send me cold emails. Uh, my love language is loom videos of bugs. But Feel free to send anything you have. Um, off the top of your head, I respond to good cold emails, don't hesitate.

2:20:51 What's the email real quick for people? Oh, if finding my email address is your issue. Okay. Uh I can't possibly be, but it is my first initial and last name at basically everything in the world. So my handle on Twitter is Jeff underscore Weinstein, but Gosh, if you if you can't find my email address, then you've got a bigger problem. Okay. We'll link to it in the uh show notes as well. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

2:21:15 What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? I I know a lot of people on the podcast recommend uh 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.

2:21:33 Uh it is just a an incredible Clarity of How to spend your time. as a leader, manager of other people just like

2:21:44 A very high bar for how Evaluating Your work as the sum of everyone around. ro around you. that was very clarifying to me that it's just like not an individual effort. It is the sum of

2:21:55 of everything I'm involved in is how to measure it. So that's definitely up there. A nice pair to that book as a a moose like a moose boosh afterwards is uh orbiting the giant hairball a corporate fool's Uh a Corfu's Guide to Surviving with Grace, I think is the full exact title. um by Gordon McKenzie, which is the story of a Illustrator.

2:22:19 At Hallmark. Uh Greeting card company. And it turns out to be a Again, bureaucratic, slow moving

2:22:29 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. Uh but it existed. And so this is his incredibly well drawn book, as you'd imagine, with beautiful illustrations, about how he orbited

2:22:49 the hairball of the organization. Two Inspire others, keep himself. Engaged? And to bring

2:22:59 creativity and excitement. And trying to like pull people off the hairball as as he orbited it. And so I think it's just like a fun afternoon read with beautiful illustrations about just kinda how to stay sane at big companies uh and where to be a little goofy and take the the advantage and gravity of the hairball, but not be like succumb by it and to be able to orbit it.

2:23:22 Those two are Really? Fun. I will say one other one. I Like just'cause I we haven't talked about strategy here, this m been more Getting stuff done and

2:23:31 Some other tacticals. things, but seven powers and I know you you had uh the author recently on, which was awesome. I Uh I so I won't explain the books, just go w you'll just watch the the podcast of it, but just walk it walks through many of the

2:23:46 business powers and sort of moats uh a company can have. I ran into The author, uh uh um Hamilton Helmer. Hamilton Helmer, yes, thank you. What a cool name.

2:23:58 Very cool name, alliterative. at the Box lunchroom one time where I I worked at Box, uh they acquired one of our companies. And I was like, Hey, uh any luck finding the eighth power. Uh He's like, I'm looking, I'm looking as he like ran off with his sandwich. Another one other funny uh somewhat embarrassing moment about that book is When I was applying to work at Stripe. Uh I was in

2:24:18 con some email conversation with our CEO, uh Patrick Calson. Hmm. I was You know.

2:24:28 Yeah. trying to showcase I like books a little bit, though not at any level. Him I just had mentioned, like I just finished reading seven powers and I kinda recommended it to him, but it jokes on me because he's quoted in the foreword that I had skipped. Uh so he was very kind to let me know that he had read it and he is quoted in it. Uh so I was like oh shoot, maybe I won't get the job. But um I got through that part at least. So th those those books have have spoken to me. Do you have power, by the way, do you have power?

2:24:56 Uh well his favorite power is counter positioning. I also like that power a lot,'cause I think it's the one you can That really changes everything about how you Build your company. So that's the one that we stand at. I love what you I like counter positioning also and uh atlas but with going cheap and that audience's kind of positioning, but I really enjoy process.

2:25:14 um the process power because Just like I think It is very difficult to as an organization get good at anything. And if you could do that over a long period of time in a sustainable way, you have a power.

2:25:26 This is the nerdiest chat I've ever had. Which is which is your favorite seventh power. I love it. But uh on that power, he I asked him about it. He He makes a really strong point there that that's Uh, rarely is it actually a powerful people. They think like the way we execute is gonna be our advantage and rarely is it actually a power. Usually people can kinda copy it, but

2:25:45 But when you nail it. Um that's even better because then if your competition thinks they have it, they won't invest than the other one. So I like it even more for that reason. I love it. Uh, but I was gonna say with Patrick Hallison being quoted in the book, not only was he just like uh uh w wrote part of the forward or was quote. He basically credited Seven Powers as helping Build stripe.

2:26:06 No big deal. Telling. Yeah. Okay. This lightning round is going great. This is like a very microcosm of our whole chat so far. Uh second question. Do you ever Favorite recent movie or T V show? How to with John Wilson?

2:26:18 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.

2:26:27 Uh Yes. Biographer has found footage where he's just like walking through Manhattan Other in other parts of the country, but mostly New York, with just like a camera.

2:26:37 for ten 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 uh make Resotto or how to take out the trash or how to

2:26:53 And it's a Way of seeing life through the eyes of these Vin yets. Like diving down and really understanding people, and he does it through this

2:27:03 Incredibly dry humor of of of stitching together this this uh this video footage to tell a different narrative. And I think some of it is that we used to live in New York and

2:27:15 I love I love I love living in California, but I I miss that. frequency of strangeness, and you can see that through. Uh that T V show fantastic. movie I recently watched The Quiet Girl, which is a film about a young Irish

2:27:32 Girl who sort of from a dysfunctional home and has this opportunity to live with a family friend. Who is With family's more

2:27:42 Um have more opportunity for her, more empathetic. Uh huh. And Just repres just it just showcases again like how fragile

2:27:53 Things are. Um, it's a very intense film, but I just there's something beautiful in how how much opportunity was in front of this This young y this y this young girl. So it's it's it's a tear jerker, but a great one. Do you have a favorite product?

2:28:08 You have recently discovered that you love. I love my computer. I'm fast at my computer. Um being fast on my computer helps me just go from intention to just out in the world.

2:28:20 I've fallen back in love with Raycast. uh which is a automation tool for those who have Watch 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

2:28:38 UI ease and some nice touches and just like loads quickly, does the basics. It's fully programmable, extensible. Just like a huge fan. of Raycast. And then I think for product people, you ha if you don't have clean shot installed for screenshots, you're just behind the curve. I There's so it ha being able to take a screenshot and blur particular things or point at stuff or have arrows and lines and

2:29:00 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 gonna download a clean shot immediately. Yes, it's exactly.

2:29:15 I've been using Sketch uh as my blurring since so as much as I appreciate the Sketch folks, uh clean shot is is an incredible piece of software. Amazing. I'm gonna 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 in work or in life. I don't even realise I say go go go a lot, but I do. I actually say it and write it. So people I hear that They later say Go Go Go back to me and like, Huh, don't I say that sometimes? Like, Yes, you say it a lot. Uh so apparently Go go Go is one of them. I also

2:29:45 I love that. Say Like let's make some mistakes. Uh just when we're like brainstorming something or

2:29:52 Um Saying a sushi restaurant with and Talk sushi guy guy or gal and just Just to like showcase like hey Let's be creative, do do whatever we want. I'm no pretense I'm not evaluating. Like let's make some mistakes. They're so good. I'm gonna use that for my podcast guest. Let's just make some mistakes. Don't worry about it. I mean at that point, what? Okay, fine, sure. Cool.

2:30:17 I like the combo of those two. Go go go go. Let's just make some mistakes. You have to use it in certain circumstances and not for the uh five nines of reliability on our API, but uh uh it it does have its place. Final question. You worked with Patrick Allston and John Callison for many years. Curious what the most useful feedback or advice You have

2:30:37 heard from them or learn from them. On my first month working here, which I guess is six, seven years ago now, I was They So that's

2:30:51 all the back end systems that communicate with the financial system and all the internal APIs where we build The external APIs and products on top of it like Quite a lot of stuff. I knew nothing about it. Finance, I knew n n nothing about the scale. that we're talking about, they entrusted me

2:31:07 Somewhat insanely, uh with that. responsibility and so on the first month we had our quarterly business review. Where, you know, just the normal quarterly process and they I was like, Okay, cool, I'll do the next one. I'll write the next one. I've been here one month. Like no, like you no you

2:31:27 You write it like it'll be even better that you that you write it's like Oh my God like it's just like the forcing me to have to In the fourth week. Have that Catalyst.

2:31:40 to understand the whole business and like with the permission 'cause I was gonna have to write this doc. about how we're doing. Company Binner. in existence for like seven years before I got here.

2:31:51 already at 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 kinda pushed me to do it a bit and

2:32:05 I figured I'd give him an early draft and he wrote back This doesn't sound like you yet. The willingness to entrust a new person to provide their own perspective and and bring it into A very formalized document like that. was an impressive and like that's that really spoke to me and I rewrote it completely and I made it sound like my end.

2:32:26 Mm. I've tried to make things sound like me sense. John's is more of a gut punch, I'll say. So I refer to John. The co founder. Yeah. Maybe

2:32:37 Nine months into report. According to him he I I would run around with a clipboard, I was a little bit manic. Oh. Getting a lot done, a lot going on at the stripe at the time.

2:32:52 And I would We have a one hour one on one I'd be listing all of the things that we had accomplished and the problems we have and where we need escalation help and where we're stuck and all this, that and the other. Just lots of stuff I had, you know. Checklists and

2:33:06 physical paper and flipping it over a little bit frantically. And he 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.

2:33:22 Oh man. That like hurt. I was like, Oh shoot, I I am I've s I've I'm getting I'm productive on the non hardest problems. And I was trying to Mask. Uh huh.

2:33:35 N not on purpose, Mask, but just Who wants to be stuck on something so hard when there's so much else to do. And from then on, I would show up to him with problems one and two and not talk about problems three through hundreds. Even if we're working on them. We'll just not talk about them. And we would get stuck.

2:33:50 On problems one and two, and that was phenomenal advice which I you know, I was like oh shoot, I'm gonna be fired, but just like but but it was like it was really uh Deeply Impactful.

2:34:02 sentence. Wow. What a what a powerful, great, helpful. Like that's that's great advice. He really scaling. Yeah. I love this. But it's your point, very impactful and helpful. Yeah.

2:34:19 Jeff, we did it. The archaeology is complete. I appreciate the time, Lenny. It was fun. And uh I I don't do too many of these, so um curious to people's feedback and Really appreciate the questions. Amazing. Jeff, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it, money.

2:34:34 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.com.

2:34:56 See you in the next episode.

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