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

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 metrics. Well, what was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective?

Starting point is 00:00:28 And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand and then tweets on the other. You started at Stripe, something called study groups. We show up four to eight people total, pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work at Stripe. And rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer. Today, my guest is Jeff Weinstein.

Starting point is 00:00:59 Over the course of his six plus years at Stripe, Jeff was the product lead for Stripe's payment infrastructure teams where he helped scale Stripe payments to hundreds of billions of dollars in volume a year. He also led PMs and teams on a number of zero to one bets at Stripe, and most recently took on the scaling of Stripe Atlas, which, as of the day this podcast launches, allows you to incorporate a new company in a single day, including handling 83B 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.

Starting point is 00:01:39 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 operationalized product craft and quality. He shares a popular program that he started at Stripe called Stripe Study Groups that I think you should steal.

Starting point is 00:02:12 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.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Jeff, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny, of Lenny's podcast. I knew what to expect, but it is fun to see the first name and the podcast all line up. I really appreciate you asking. 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.

Starting point is 00:03:09 And then the professor would say very reasonably, hey, I think you should bump down a level to the previous semester's pace. And you said, I actually know that. That's why I'm in this class. I want to be in the class that I'm potentially the worst at. This isn't how most people think. This isn't how most people operate. Usually people want to get good grades.

Starting point is 00:03:26 so they want to be at the top of their class. Clearly, you have a different approach and a different mindset. Where did this come from for you? And how did this shape the way you think about product and the work that you do? Some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to rationalize it for myself in some form. So in retrospect, that sounds kind of highfalutin. But at the time, I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in.

Starting point is 00:03:49 But I think it comes from growing up, I went to a pretty hippie-dippy, K through 12 school in Baltimore, Maryland, where we were really asked to think about why we were in school and to pick any of the courses that were of interest to us outside of AP programs or grades or any particular requirements. You really got to choose your own path. And I recall one particular class in high school, which was somewhat a science class, but it was called the history of science. And we actually walked through and studied all of the, at the time, best understood ways the world worked in science, but then later were turned out to be wrong, right? In the 1500s, we believed X, Y, and Z, in the 1600s, we've A, B, and C, just very confidently in 1500s, we thought

Starting point is 00:04:46 something and then in the 1600s they thought something very different and so this class was quite impactful on me where we spent an entire year studying things that are not true and it was fascinating and that particular teacher employed another trick on us during that class which was it took the tuition fee of our school and divided it by the number of hours and wrote the cost on a ticket and then handed us in the beginning of the year tickets for every single one of the classes, and he would stand at the door, and you would have to give him a ticket at the end of the class if he thought it was worth it. And just like that practice of deep intellectual understanding of how people evaluated something

Starting point is 00:05:33 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 there was a real college, university, people were coming from often quite more rigorous backgrounds of things that were true. I was a bit unprepared. And I remember actually taking a micro-economics 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.

Starting point is 00:06:07 We practiced the same quizzes. we read the same books and he got the top grade in the class and I got the bottom. And that's from where that quote came from where the professor said, I think you should potentially bump down. I was like, I already know that stuff. Like I'm interested in this topic. I'm going to try to improve. But look, just because I'm significantly worse than the other kids in the class that has like

Starting point is 00:06:27 little to do with if I should leave and he was particularly cool with it. This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all in one product experience platform for any type of application. Tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product. With all the tools you need in one simple-to-use platform, Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product

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Starting point is 00:08:08 Wish that you could know what your customers really need. Cycle unifies all of your customer interactions from support chats to user research, gong calls, and app store reviews into one neat collaborative space. Cycles AI then extract actionable insights on autopilot. Cycle will learn what you're building so that it can label incoming feedback automatically. That means you'll get a full voice of customer report without manually triaging feedback. Then simply you cycle ask to dig deeper into any topic and generally custom AI-generated summaries across your entire feedback repository.

Starting point is 00:08:42 What makes Cycle different is the way that it lets you close feedback loops in each release. Feedback is not used just as a way to prioritize what to build, but also as a tool that creates trust with all stakeholders. Sign up for a free cycle trial today at cycle.app slash Lenny and put your feedback on autopilot. That's CYCLE.c.c.m.app slash Lenny. It's really interesting that you went to this liberal artsy, FAPID-DP school as you described, which a lot of people bash on,

Starting point is 00:09:12 like why spend all this college money and time on a liberal artsy kind of education? And you end up being really successful in a very technical, highly analytical data-driven company. And it's interesting that that experience still helped you succeed in this other path. It did take a change, though, because I started in English, was my selected major in school. but then I kept playing with computers and I kept liking math and I looked at the roles of the,

Starting point is 00:09:40 you know, 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 up and up again. And everyone who was leading those places had technical backgrounds and I liked computers a lot. So I added computer science as an engineering degree midway through school. So I ended up having to take those same, had to take the real science classes with the pre-med kids and the rest of it. I did similarly poorly, but I did end up with a computer science degree and a liberal arts degree. So it was a journey, but I had to make a pretty big switch in the middle to like get on that path. I asked you if there was one thing that you'd love to get across in this podcast.

Starting point is 00:10:22 I asked you what it be. And here's what you said. Here's the first item on this list that you sent me, quoting, go, go, go, ASAP, plus optimistic, comma, long term compounding approach. Can you just talk about what you mean by that? Yeah, there's two things going on here. So I sort of see the world as immediately we have just such opportunity to take action in front of us. We can be optimistic and go, go, go as soon as possible. I think that a lot of life is, you know, you get as much furniture as you have as you have room in the house.

Starting point is 00:10:58 We will do the work the night before it's due. So let's just make it due tomorrow. can we turn tomorrow into today? So just optimistically seeing if we can just inject energy to go, go, go, has produced surprising results. And I think it ignites in other people that same interests, and then it kind of feeds off each other. And that's, I think, really in my bones from growing up.

Starting point is 00:11:24 And then I've added over time how to learn this longer-term, compounding, more strategic mindset, where some of the things we want to accomplish, be it at my startups in the past or at Stripe, they can't be solved in the afternoon. They're going to require layers of infrastructure and services and applications and UI and partnerships that really look like that kind of iceberg drawing.

Starting point is 00:11:53 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 impair my instinct of, like, let's get it done today, let's move forward, let's see what we can get done. Let's make some mistakes. Let's try it out. With where are we going?

Starting point is 00:12:09 What needs to be true over time? Where can we always invest? What will we sort of never regret spending time in? We'll never regret spending time making the latency of our payments APIs at Stripe faster. We'll never regret making it more reliable to send 83B election mails to the IRS. We will never regret those things. So let's just always compound those capabilities over time. Then the trick is, like, how do you mix this?

Starting point is 00:12:34 go, go, go attitude with a long-term compounding. And that's something I still struggle with, but I try to purposely balance it more than I used to. It's such a good way of summarizing just how to be successful in a lot of things. Go, go, go, ASAP, stay optimistic, focus on long-term compounding growth. Is there an example of that in action? I know we're going to talk about Atlas a bunch, but I guess is there an example of that working for you as a product you worked on? I work at Stripe, which is an infrastructure company. We build things that help businesses do online commerce in various forms and have had a few roles at Stripe. I'm in our beautiful office here in South San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:13:17 One of which was the product person that helped us decide how we were going to go global and how we're going to offer multiple ways for people to pay. It turns out there's more than just credit cards in the world. There's small hundreds of ways that people will naturally want to pay for things online. And as a business, you're going to, of course, just want to accept whatever it is people want to pay with. And for the first seven or eight years of strike, well prior to my being here, you know, the incremental country ads and the incremental new payment methods was relatively flat over time. And that was surprising to all of us who worked here because the world wanted it and we had a lot of people working on it and we were working very hard. But it wasn't producing returns in the way that we wanted.

Starting point is 00:14:11 And so actually the optimistic, as soon as possible, go-go attitude was not working, right? No matter how much energy you poured into building Thailand payment methods or UK bank transfers or an in-person payment system in Latin America. We just couldn't rack up points and get it done. So we had to step back and say, well, what is the world going to look like in 10 years? What was going to need to be true? And how can we start to go there now? Which meant going a lot slower, building internal platforms, sending people around the world to start to build these payment methods, uproot their lives, pay for their apartments, get them on airplanes, start using these payment methods actually in the world.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And so it really like our line, flatline for a while. And we're like, okay, is this strategy working? Is it not working? But then over time, we start to see it switch to nonlinear again and go from whatever it was 10 payment methods at the time. And L-Stripe accepts over 100. So we got to like 50 really quickly and then kind of like skyrocketed to 100. And I remember there being a meeting where we said, well, maybe we should just like lock everyone in the basement and see if we can get from 10 to 50. That would be, you know, the intensity startup go-go-go-go-go attitude.

Starting point is 00:15:20 But we looked at the individual components of what it meant to get this done and how, how long we wanted this to be true for, and we had to go a lot slower. So that was like a very formative decision where you had to mix the go, go, go with the long-term compounding. Awesome. Okay. So let's start to delve deeper into some of the specific skills that I hear you're incredible at and that I've seen you be incredible at on Twitter and LinkedIn and things

Starting point is 00:15:48 like that. So the first is craft, craft and quality. I'm told by many people that you have a very strong. obsession with craft and user experience and quality. And even more so, I'm told that you teach people at Stripe how to be obsessed with craft and quality and user experience in a very systematic way. I feel like this is something a lot of people are starting to realize is really important and or are trying to get better at, either personally or at their company. So first of all, let me just ask why is this so important to you? Why do you think craft and experience and quality is so

Starting point is 00:16:22 important. Why do you put so much emphasis on it yourself? I think I'm really working backwards from failures in the past and avoiding them. And so maybe just a quick story. I had a, I started a company several years ago based on just a personal pet peeve of mine, which was I was a sequel analyst. Many of you listening might have written sequel in the past. Maybe the robots write the sequel for you now, but I still need to write a little sequel yourself. And every single time I wrote a sequel query, wanted to run the same subsequent analysis. I wanted great version control. I wanted all the cool stuff that GitHub had for code,

Starting point is 00:17:02 but for writing data code. And so my friends and I built a little Python tool, which basically let you run our style queries. It lets you draw charts and pivot tables quickly and sharing all this modern SaaS application stuff, but applied. to SQL a few years ago. And we turned that into a company.

Starting point is 00:17:29 We got some progress. But then there was this moment one day where we had maybe a couple hundred customers. And we had an error where we basically by accidentally shut down the service. And it was sort of bricked for 10 or 20 minutes. And at the time, we were all kind of hustling in our little dinky office to get the application back online.

Starting point is 00:17:53 And we really kind of were proud of ourselves about how reasonably quickly we did and people went back to using it. It wasn't a super long outage and we didn't lose any data. We're just like kind of high-fiving each other. And we went about our day. And about a year later, I realized that that was a, I missed a huge moment that I should have pounced on, which is that during those 20 minutes, our customers weren't furious. they weren't emailing us like crazy, they weren't texting us, they weren't trying to find us on Google Maps and knock on our door and say, hey, I need this thing back online immediately.

Starting point is 00:18:33 We heard a couple comments from them. It was little murmurs. And I didn't realize at the time, like, that was the signal that I did not have, like, we did not have product market fit. And I ended up wasting many more years on that project. And wasting is a sort of big word. We built an amazing software. liked it, we're able to sell the company. It helped many of us learn how to really build software. But I'm really trying to avoid that situation again. And I think craft is kind of a

Starting point is 00:19:04 dessert that you get after the meal of does your thing solve a real problem in the world and are people clamoring, needing it badly. And that's really my obsession, is in finding problems, in which people will pause their entire day to solve. They will leap through the computer to be like, oh, my God, I have that problem. Do you have a solution? And if you, you know, focus on that style of product development and we can get into just how do you kind of like listen for that and then turn that into product. Later, you might get the opportunity to really provide craft and beauty and touches and

Starting point is 00:19:50 moments and delight. But certainly there is no amount of craft. There is no amount of beauty. There's no amount of delight or touches you can add to a thing that will solve the problem we had at our at our startup, which is that people didn't really need this. And that's sort of like the biggest error is like picking something in which people don't really need it and then going through these practices of trying to like make it great when maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. I think a lot of people see all these tweets and messages about just like obsess what the craft of what you're building and you can easily lose sight of nobody, nobody even cares about what you're building. It could be the most incredible experience ever designed, but if it's not

Starting point is 00:20:31 something anyone ever wants, it doesn't really matter. People don't really get out of bed for their second problem, right? They get out of bed for their first problem and you have to carefully listen and not pitch your customer or your prospective customer as you're trying to figure this out. And I think this advice, not even advice, just style applies to small companies, big companies, anyone, which is people don't want to be pitched. You know, I'm sometimes on a UXR call with a very well-meaning person or a founder who has a new product that they want advice on or they want to find customers. And the first thing that they start talking about when we get on the call is, hi, I'm the CEO of X, Y, and Z company. we do one, two, and three. I want to show you a demo.

Starting point is 00:21:21 It's like, hold up. I'm a customer. I have, like, what a wasted opportunity you've kind of, you've just done here. I have so many problems. You're sort of guessing ahead of time, what is my top problem? And now that you've anchored and limited to the pitch,

Starting point is 00:21:43 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 top of their mind. And they're not the customer's job to interrupt you and say, hey, could you stop your pitch? Like, I want to tell you about my top problem. And you can sort of see this down the stream, which then companies who launch things, put craft, have a great launch, raise money, are then like later gone. Right.

Starting point is 00:22:09 And it's because they built something that wasn't solving a burning need. And I think you can kind of stem it all the way back to they were just pitching rather than, sitting in silence and just waiting for their customer to just open their heart out about what's the most burning thing. And sometimes I'll prompt our customers. I'll just, I'll say, hey, do you mind just opening up your email? Like, what's in there? Or if you weren't talking to me right now, what would you be working on? Or, hey, last week, what grind your gears? What, like, what are you not looking forward to? Or Magic One, like, what do you wish you could, You could just half off your plate immediately.

Starting point is 00:22:48 Forget it. Forget, forget Stripe. Forget about the thing we work on. Just in your whole life, like, what is it that you do not want to be doing? Or a massive opportunity you wish was just one door away. And it's a little awkward because they don't know why you're asking that kind of question. But then you just sit there in silence. And for the most part, if you have amazing customers who are smart and ambitious and are trying to build their own business,

Starting point is 00:23:14 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 learned a lot at Stripe from that. And that's where you can start to find adjacencies. Well, hey, I don't know if Stripe could really help me with this. But it wouldn't be cool if we could identify if the person signing up on our site wasn't fraudulent or is who they say they are or isn't a bot or are they really a dog on the internet. We're like, huh, we keep hearing this as the major complaint from all of our customers.

Starting point is 00:23:48 But we're not an identity company. It's like, well, I guess now we are because all of our customers who are trying to build their business, 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. So I love where we're going with this. This is where I was going to actually talk about next is just your ability to talk to customers and user research. It feels very unique. Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just like sharing your email constantly, getting

Starting point is 00:24:28 on calls with people constantly. There's this like, you're like breaking this wall between, that a lot of people imagine there is between the PM and the lead of a team and the customer. Like you're not relying on user research. You're not waiting for someone else to do this work for you. Talk about just why and how you do this. Because I think there's so much to learn from just how you operate in finding opportunities, picking problems to solve by talking to customers. It's where the business comes from as customers.

Starting point is 00:24:56 You know, it's not a long shot hypothesis about why to talk to them. It's like if they love your stuff, they will tell their friends and pay fair prices for the product. We're so fortunate through the internet that, people kind of announced themselves as having as being interested in a topic. Sometimes they are interested in it by posting on Reddit a long thread or a screenshot of a customer service interaction that bugged them or hopeful that from their dorm room in country X someone else in the world has solved the same problem and the internet has given us all this absolutely magical forum that you can just yell out the window and then billions of people

Starting point is 00:25:52 could just like could actually listen to what you said out the window. Now, that's not all the time true for all people in all situations, but dramatically more true now than ever before in human history. And so the fact that people wouldn't be listening to their customers and really jumping through the computer to talk to them, surprises. me. It's like they have much like I always sometimes think, do they have some other strategy? Are they so confident in what they're building that they don't need to hear directly from the people who will be using it? And I think some of it is my own fear that I'm going to make

Starting point is 00:26:32 the same mistake I've made in the past, which is build something that people like they're using, but isn't solving a burning enough problem such that they're going to stop their day. They're going to tell their friends, we're going to be able to sustain the company economically over a long period of time. And that really just comes from hearing people's most burning problems. And then the jumping through the, just jumping through the computer and talking to them takes a little bit of, of nervous gumption, you know, kind of like walking up to a person at a bar cocktail party and saying, hi, my name is Jeff. It can be a little awkward, but then you get it, it's kind of a rush once it starts to work. And once you get the iterative loop that they're excited to talk to you, they have problems.

Starting point is 00:27:20 They see you as a trusted, not salesy, not pitching, not narrow-minded to just my product and my position, but I'm here to hear about all of your problems and see where we can help. Not promising we can help solve everything, but let's listen. That is infectious, both between the customers and internally. And so I'm able to bring more people into that practice at Stripe. I'm able to quickly grab an engineer and hop on a call. I can forward a message over to a Slack group, and they know that because the customer is speaking directly, it somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day. We could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what's going to the customer wants, or we could talk to them directly. And you have to use a little bit of,

Starting point is 00:28:11 art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to. But even at Stripe's scale, where we're dealing with many millions of businesses and many hundreds of millions of consumers on the other end of those businesses, you can pattern match relatively quickly. What are the styles of customers that represent where the world is going, the most ambitious, the most technical, the fastest growing, the most detailed. And you don't need 10,000 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 where to go that you kind of forget how you did it in the past. I love these. So I'd love to learn more about these tactics that you've found helpful.

Starting point is 00:29:02 So you've shared this idea of silence, talking to someone and just being silent. And I forget the phrase used, but just like ideas emerge. Like your whole roadmap can 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.

Starting point is 00:29:20 You talked about text messaging. Just like, hey, can I get your number? And I'll just text you when I have questions. If there's anything else to add to these, that'd be awesome. And then what else have you found just like ways to actually get to a customer and find opportunities that are important? Speed is an important one. which is just reducing the time between the moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way

Starting point is 00:29:46 to talk about some problem. They're busy. There's snacks to eat. They have families. They have other things to do. There's a lot going on in the world, a lot. Your dumb product, it's amazing that they would spend any of their time discussing it at all. I mean, most of the time, if you don't like something, you just move along. You just apathetically, silently move forward in the world. And so the fact that someone took their finite time to succinctly with curiosity communicate to the world or you about your product, that's a unbelievable gift that should be, you know, P0 alert level intensity. And so, I will leave a meeting. I will change what I'm doing to just get one message back to them. Even if it's, hey, I got this. I'm about to go to dinner. Can I hit you up tomorrow?

Starting point is 00:30:48 Oh, yeah. Thank you. Awesome. I can't even believe you responded. That puts us in the camp of on the right trajectory where they're going to feel that they have a almost secret portal between this big brand of a company and another human who's just actually curious with. going on, that's night, night and day. And it's also like, fun fact, tip, when people are really hot on an issue and it could blow up on social or they're going to start becoming a detractor, we make mistakes, we have SLA breaches, we have errors. You're going to want to get on that stuff fast. And in those situations, 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 and most of the time we're able to even if there was a pretty relevant issue. I remember one time in Atlas, we had this bug in which for a handful of our legal docs, they were handing out,

Starting point is 00:31:50 let's say, 25 shares rather than 25% of the shares. We dropped the percentage sign and thankfully a founder noticed this in the docs and tweeted about it. I was like my heart like kind of like paused. And I was like, oh, no, this could be a really serious issue. And we were able to fix it and regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone that was impacted. And I was thinking of myself, wow, we really let this person down. We have one job to do, which is to get their company right. And we didn't. And that person was incredibly gracious about the situation and said,

Starting point is 00:32:27 anytime you want me to just read your docs, I'd be happy to. I have a law degree. I care about this topic. I want to brainstorm with you about ways that Atlas could do more document creation. It's like, wow, I can't believe I was in this sort of defense position. And now we've gained a friend in the world who can be eyes and ears and brainstorm with us. And the team maintains a really close relationship with that person as I do with many, many founders who use Atlas. And so, again, we're so quick to put the outside world in this other camp where we need to touch it with kid gloves and treat it as.

Starting point is 00:33:03 as a big blob and a cohort and a statistic when it is a human with a problem who likes snacks, who is busy. And it's fun to do. And it turns out to be an incredibly easy, fast way to figure out what to build. There's a bunch of stuff I want to follow up here. One is people may be hearing this and like, oh, my God, I'd be overwhelmed with feedback and people to fix problems for in bugs and texting of people. They're just like, there's so many people that potentially.

Starting point is 00:33:33 potentially I'd have to be interacting with. How do you try to narrow that down? Like I know Atlas is a very highly adopted product. There's a ton of people. There's probably bugs often, people sending you feedback. How do you pick the people to zero in on? I think there's two parts of this. One, what a problem to have. Of all the problems in the world, I'm overwhelmed by customer interest is on the top list of problems I want to have. I think most entrepreneurs would purchase that problem as a state. And so if you're in it, I think take a deep breath and look at the sunrise or sunset and just enjoy the fact that you've built something that is meaningful enough that people would spend their time. Again, there are amazing snacks that they could be spending

Starting point is 00:34:22 the time on otherwise. So that's a huge deal. And then two, you need, you need the art. There's an art and science to picking where to go deep. You know, I will happily respond to folks with, I really appreciate that, do you mind sending me a screenshot or a video? And some of them don't. Okay, that's fine. You kind of get a sense of quickly looking at how they wrote about it or a pattern, just pattern matching, how detailed they were or how much they seem that they want to engage and kind of balance it that way. Otherwise, you know, you can tell folks, this is really awesome. Do you mind sending me an email with three to five bullet points about the details of how you got to this issue?

Starting point is 00:35:16 And that's not a 30-minute meeting. Don't need to blow up your whole life to get on the phone with them. It's not a huge homework assignment to them, but it's enough structure that it will self-select those who want to go deep. And then from there, you really do owe it to them to follow up if they're going to be that detailed. And at that point, you really have a sort of product friend for life. And you'll kind of continuously go back to them. So, you know, you have to kind of tune, tune it. I also will bound some of these efforts.

Starting point is 00:35:51 So I'll just completely make up one day a program. So, hi, Stripes doing a bug finder program. I made that up as I was driving to work one morning, tweeted it. I was curious if anyone would send anything. We'll be taking videos for the next three days to go super deep. People are like, oh, my goodness, I would love to be part of the Stripe Bugfinder program. Like, may I apply? I'm like, oh, you know, it's very selective.

Starting point is 00:36:19 Of course. But yes, of course for you. It's just giving people permission through a program, even if it is deeply arbitrary, I find helps with the bounding it. And then later I can follow up with the world, hey, we ran our first program. We got 65 videos, which we did. We found dozens of issues, which we did. It was an incredibly valuable use of our time.

Starting point is 00:36:48 And it really came from just a single tweet. Something I saw you mentioned somewhere is that you only pay attention to feedback from people that are paying customers and ignore everything else. Can you talk about that? People who build things for people tend to be empathetic and interested and curious folks who have friends. And then those friends want to use your stuff because they know you and they like you. And they'll have good feedback. But you need to figure out, is that actually your customer or is that your friend trying it?

Starting point is 00:37:26 Who is actually your target customer? Exactly. not a company or a segment, you know, not digital natives that are X big. I'm talking about Sarah in this department who has these tabs open and just faced this problem and needs to solve it by 4 p.m. Like that level specificity. If that's your customer, and I'm talking mostly about B2B, which is where I spend a lot of my time as the social network, B2C stuff, I have less intuition on.

Starting point is 00:37:59 they're very willing to exchange money for solving their problems. Incredibly so. Oftentimes, if you listen with enough silence, they might even say, I'll pay you money to solve blah, if you sit there long enough in silence. And so you could listen to your friendly friend who you got to play with your beta version, and they'll say they liked it, and they will click around. But that is extremely different from Sarah, who has the actual problem and is willing to pay. And it is so tempting to go down the first path with the friend group that I sort of needed a rule,

Starting point is 00:38:40 which is like, okay, rather than, I was like, well, don't pay attention to that quite as much. You know, really pay attention to, to like, who is your target customer and are you in a fast iteration cycle for them and are they telling their friends? But that wasn't enough because people are so drawn, myself included, drawn to the friendliness, that I just set a rule, which is we discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero. Like, that is not of interest to us. It doesn't, we don't even write it down. It's just not part of what we're talking about at all. We're only interested in Sarah, our target customer, and can we get her to solve whatever the problem is as quickly as possible, as jankly as possible, and go from there?

Starting point is 00:39:25 And it's a for, and then the paying part is a forcing function because, again, even with Sarah, because you're paying attention to her and solving her problem a bit, she'll say, of course, oh, this is great. I want feature X, Y, and Z. Can it do one, two, and three? Naturally, she would say that. But if you said, and by the way, this thing is $10,000, will happily refund your money 100% the second you don't like it.

Starting point is 00:39:54 She might say, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Yeah, I like this thing, but not $10,000. For $10,000, it would need to solve X. And you're like, oh, there it is. Right. That was actually what the thing that was of value. And we were all kind of dancing around this. It's usefulness.

Starting point is 00:40:15 It's useful. We're on the right track. And because I've fallen down that path myself and so many times, I just set a rule. This is great. I was actually going to ask this technique of using silence. To help people actually practice it, you just share this kind of quote of for you to pay $10,000, it would have to do X. That's a really cool line to use. Is there any other advice there have just had to practice this idea of creating silence to help the potential customer share what they actually need?

Starting point is 00:40:44 I encourage people to take an improv training class or two just to get people out of their skin a bit. By the way, this advice applies to big companies also, not just small ones. And we have issues, and I hear other larger companies have issues where a big company will say, hey, we're an enterprise and we're going to pay 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, ABCD, EFG, and this siren song of the big three-year contract, of your first enterprise buyer, even when you're already big. There's always a, you know, you can go from Fortune 1000 or Fortune 500 to,

Starting point is 00:41:27 Fortune 10 to Fortune 1, you know, there's always some more. And there are so many stories in the rug being pulled in the middle. And they never actually use it and the contract never lands. Same in partnerships. And so I would say the same thing, which is like, if we're super serious about this, send us a million dollars. Like wire us a million dollars. We'll happily wire it back anytime you need it.

Starting point is 00:41:51 But let's actually put some stake in the ground about the value. And I find that in the cases in which they're like, whoa, wait a second, no, absolutely not. We can't commit here. That's really good signal because you're about to spend a huge amount of time building something that might not ever be used. And that's the majority case I hear. Or you might get the opposite, which is sounds great. Let's make sure our teams are trained on it faster.

Starting point is 00:42:22 How can we get you to our office to explain it? we needed to really work with this system we haven't talked about yet. Now that we're paying, we want it even faster. And so I find that just it puts a fork in the road towards faster success or avoiding the non-success case. And even at Stripe Scale, I've heard our founders somewhat push this methodology on us, where you one from the outside might think, well, it's a 8,000 person company, surely they have just regular ways of building things for larger customers. And 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 make sure people are ready to pay for something that they're

Starting point is 00:43:10 asking for. That is the ultimate sign that they actually... Ready to pay is different than paying. Significantly different. Significantly different. I've also thought of well, But as long as they're ready to pay and they said they would pay and they look at the contract, we should feel good. That is not the same as paying. Paying is an independent group of people saying my problem is burning enough that I'm willing to exchange something I have that has value for the promise of what you're going to do. And now it's like a real commitment.

Starting point is 00:43:43 That is extremely different than ready to. So I will often be on the phone or video, whatever, with a founder. and I will have them practice paying, like have them practice charging me. I'll just say, hey, I'm just a friend. I'm trying to help you out. There's a little bit self-serving because I work on Stripe and I want to get feedback on our products. I'll say, feel free to sign up for any invoicing or payment service. I don't really care which one.

Starting point is 00:44:16 You're welcome to choose Stripe. If it's easy enough for you, I'd love to hear your two cents. And send me an invoice or a payment. link for a dollar right now. Like right now. That way you don't, when it comes time to actually charge your first customer, it won't be your first time. It won't feel weird.

Starting point is 00:44:33 You have already done this. You already have a dollar in your account. It'll just, you've already have your logo on the top right of the invoice. It will feel great. And I probably could go through my email inbox and just see $1 receipts to random people. Because I'm just so convinced that the difference between paying and like willing, ready thought i thought they would pay is you know night and day different yeah there's this term willingness to pay uh that i feel like it should change as you're saying to just cross that

Starting point is 00:45:04 willingness to and just paying paying exactly yeah no yeah and we can refund the money there's no like there's no issue at all other just other tricks on how to get people going is ask them about their regular life as a human you know what did you do yesterday And they'll be like, oh, at work, I'm like, we're not, whatever. And people just, they'll start to spill. They'll just start to spill and eventually they'll get to their biggest problem pretty quickly. Let's talk about metrics, kind of going in a different direction. Many people told me I need to ask you about picking metrics and the importance of metrics and how you think about metrics.

Starting point is 00:45:42 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 in building successful products? I somewhat walk around with the belief that the product manager's responsibility is to produce product market fit. And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand and then tweets on the other. So metrics, like, you know, quantitative and qualitative. And I really see them as deep, deep siblings and equals. You really need both. It's not, oh, OKRs versus something.

Starting point is 00:46:33 There are some things you want the texture of the person on video showing how complicated thing was. And then also we are trying to make an economically viable system that we can run at large scale and you can't keep all that stuff in your head and need to measure it. And so I think metrics at their best are a numerical representation of the value we're providing for the customer. One could measure anything. You can just start counting events and log lines.

Starting point is 00:47:02 We've made it incredibly cheap to count stuff. And so now we have this big privilege of choosing what to measure. And I really just try to map it all the way back to, well, what was actually the value that we're trying to produce for the customer? And can we measure it from their perspective? Whereas I think it's natural both because when you work inside of the company, you're just thinking internally, but also the way that the metrics are collecting. inside your application to be more internal oriented.

Starting point is 00:47:32 How many people logged in, okay, that's a fine measure, but how many people accomplished what they were trying to do after they logged in is not just necessarily sitting there as a single event in your database. You have to think about it a bit. Another reason why I spend a lot of time crafting a small number of these metrics is they force tradeoffs and decisions. So we could all sit around,

Starting point is 00:47:57 all day and say, hey, I heard all these customer problems. We should build X, Y, and Z. And another person could absolutely reasonably say, well, I heard from these customers, we should build one, two, and three. And they're all true. We could have a lot of success in both. But the majority case is that we don't build either. And we sit around and argue and bicker and we go slowly. What are we going to do to naturally, organically, every day, orient a larger group of people in the right direction and see if our tactics are generating progress over time for a customer from their perspective. And metrics on the left and a series of tweets on the right is like a pretty great combo. So here's an example. A couple of years ago, I'd been working in our payments

Starting point is 00:48:46 group at Stripe for a bit. And then I started working on some of our banking and incorporation services. So in Atlas, when I started working on it, it had had some success. It had already existed for four or five years prior to me spending time on it. But when I started to look at the support tickets, people were pretty unhappy frequently. They had a docu sign stuck in their email box. They needed co-founder's address, but they didn't know their co-founder's address. They couldn't log into the dashboard to figure out their 83B manual filing instructions. And we saw this, you know, basically in the first week of spending time on Atlas, I was just like, just show me all the support tickets.

Starting point is 00:49:35 Are they happy support tickets? People are writing in being like, oh, I love this service. It's absolutely fantastic. Can you just do A, B, see more for me or are they like sad support tickets? I'm like, oh my God, they're all sad support tickets. And so we're just kind of asking ourselves, well, why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend? I was like, well, it would have to accomplish A, B, and C activities for them. You know, it would have to get their company.

Starting point is 00:49:57 It would have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS. It'd have to handle all the downstream administribia. But surely, if they had a bunch of support tickets at the end, they're not going to go tell their friends to use this thing. We could measure all of the intermediate parts. We could measure the success rate and the frequency of incorporation services. And we do all those things. but if you looked at the support tickets, there's just no way if you had a support ticket,

Starting point is 00:50:24 you would recommend it to a friend. And so we suggested this metric to ourselves, companies that have no support tickets through the incorporation service, the whole process. From the moment you start the application open, actually the first page load at the very beginning, all the way through the process,

Starting point is 00:50:46 waiting for the government, waiting for the IRS, and we give you two more weeks to write into support. We give like an extra buffer two weeks. And if you get through that whole thing with no support tickets, that's a yes. If you have any number of support tickets, that's a no. And we just looked at the percentage of founders that were going through the service with zero support tickets, which is very different than looking at an average, right?

Starting point is 00:51:12 You could have the average is 0.3, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're, you know, that getting to point two is going to cause them to tell their friends more. And we looked and only 15% of founders were getting through Atlas with zero support tickets through that metric. And I just thought, okay, well, let's just drive that number way up. And let's look at the support tickets aside what people are needing and we'll bake it into the product and presumably it'll fix it. people like that more and then tell their friends. And over about 18 months, we took that number from 15% to 85. We basically just flipped it.

Starting point is 00:51:54 And you can look at the market share plotted on the same time frame, and it's like, the same shape. And I think you have to find a measure by which it speaks directly to what the customer wanted and that if you by accidentally leaked your dashboard to them, your customer would be ecstatic to learn that that's what you were measuring the whole time. You know, if we were to showcase the internal Atlas Metrics, which we often just screenshot and publish, I think they'd be pretty happy to hear that we were spending all of our time making sure that none of them had support tickets.

Starting point is 00:52:33 And it was incredibly encouraging and motivating to the engineers on the team because we could just assign them a topic. Hey, here's look at all these support tickets. Why don't you come up with the product spec, the scope, the solution. Oh, want to learn more? Just reply to the support ticket email, figure out what they need it, what they need. And so we kind of turned all of engineers on the team into PMs to go and like one issue at a time, figure out what needed to change and build products for it.

Starting point is 00:53:09 And that's where we push forward on A3B elections, automating it, sending in the mail for folks. We built our own signing service. We turned everything into a click. We just did sort of the obvious things we saw on the tickets. But as the PM, I was able to just sort of not on autopilot, but really sit back and have contentful conversations with engineers who are bringing solutions and ideas for product rather than one person going through all of the potential ideas, scoping them and assigning them. And because it was based in what people were saying and wanted, it was very motivating for everyone on the team. 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,

Starting point is 00:54:00 know what to do is so much better than let's figure out what to do each month and kind of like starting from scratch. I think this is amazing and important advice. Just the power of a single metric that everyone on the team can understand, rally around, and use to prioritize the work they're doing. I've seen exactly the same sort of impact. Funny enough, Airbnb, one of the teams actually had metrics sort of like this, basically reducing the people contacting Airbnb with support issues. But when they end up happening is their team started just making it harder to contact support because they're like, maybe they don't need to contact support about all these trivial issues.

Starting point is 00:54:37 So maybe let's encourage them to figure it out themselves. Is there anything you've learned about try to avoid these kind of, of second order effects that are kind of perverse incentives of a metric. We look at multiple metrics, but we will optimize around one and you have to use your own judgment to look at some of these countermeasures and pick them. We would also, you know, that would sort of be our overarching metric for a year, but then we would pick specific tactical metrics about how we would accomplish it. So just an example that both is how we solved a problem,

Starting point is 00:55:19 but also just like a style of metric that was useful to us. Of course, some of these support tickets included things like, I'm waiting to hear back from Atlas about if they're going to approve my application, because Stripe is required for very good reasons to evaluate certain business types or sanctions lists and so the worldwide product.

Starting point is 00:55:43 So there is some, you know, incredibly should be incredibly quick, but there is a bit of like a review process. And of course, if you were not hearing back from us, you would be upset. You're trying 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?

Starting point is 00:56:08 And we knew that our tactic was just to drive up how quickly we got to a final decision on folks and to reduce the number of overturn rejections where someone writes back in saying, hi, like, come on, I'm totally just making something reasonable. What's up? Why did you reject me? And so we would pick these overarching single metric, which was the companies with zero support tickets, but then we would have a specific KR that was owned by an engineer, which is the tactic that we're going to do. And so we would not allow ourselves the perverse tactics to sort of just casually exist, we would choose which tactics we're going to do and then set a metric for it. And the other reason I love this metric is it's a cohort metric by which you're trying to

Starting point is 00:56:56 drive something up into the left. Sometimes people get excited about a chart that goes up and to the right. It's kind of a meme. Oh, that's going up to the right. I'm really excited about charts that go up into the left. So you have to figure out some optimization that you're trying to maximize. And so in this particular case of this risk review, we would look at, hey, for the cohort of customers that started last month, how quickly did we get them to their final risk review by number of days since they submitted? And so you want a chart that looks a lot like, here we go, you know, right up to the top because you want 100% of your customers to get their final decision as quickly as possible. When you know it, when we looked at the chart, it was doing this, right? And so each month,

Starting point is 00:57:48 we would just make it a little better, a little better, a little up into the left, up into the left, up into the left. And now basically 100-ish percent of people get their risk review within an hour from, you know, a long tail taking a long time. And so we would constrain the tactic through a metric and then kind of like watch it through an optimization function. And then when we got to a point where we were happy with the target, we could put down the tactic. That's another like really useful thing about metrics. It's just like you can decide when to stop a tactic because you get to some level of success that you're comfortable with and you can always choose to pick it back up later. So there's some really cool lessons here of just how to pick a good metric just to kind of maybe

Starting point is 00:58:27 summarize what I'm hearing is you kind of work backwards from essentially NPS. Like how many, why aren't people recommending Atlas? You found, okay, well, people that are complaining and having issues with support and running into problems most likely are going to be detracting. is not going to want to recommend Atlas. So let's have this really ambitious goals. Eventually nobody has a support ticket slash, let's just track having you all of zero issues. And then you identify, okay, what's driving a lot of these support tickets?

Starting point is 00:58:54 Okay, it looks like this risk timeline to like get to this certain milestone. Let's make that our goal for the next quarter or whatever. And it's focused there and then make an impact. And then I imagine to move on to other levers within this bucket of zero context. You have to pick the right metric for your audience. audience in I wouldn't like I wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone. That was not a terrible one to export. But in in the founder founders choosing where to get started mindset, again,

Starting point is 00:59:27 this isn't just deeply spending time listening to your customers. They all ask their friends, hey, how did you start your company? They want to talk to an older sibling of sorts about how it went. And so we decided that our go-to-market strategy would be to delight our current customers such that they would tell their friends. And other businesses, I mean, that's always somewhat useful, but you can also reach people with billboards and Google ads and other types of upsells. That's very difficult in the moment that someone is starting a company. That's sort of a natural geographic. Can you get the picture of the bird at exactly the right time?

Starting point is 01:00:10 how are you even supposed to go find people who are about to start companies. Thankfully, they have this practice of just asking their friends. And so if their friends loved it, they're going to just recommend it. And that that has that the metric and the tactic and the go-to-market all lined up rather than sometimes in cases you might hear someone say, well, let's make the product quality better. Well, we all make the product quality better, but why? Like, why is this actually going to move what our customers want and the business forward? And when you can line them all up, it can be quite, quite beautiful, especially when you can see it month over month for a long period of time. One other metric I think that I would export to anybody is if you are unsure what to measure, we have this, I don't know, if we stole it from somebody else or if we came up with internally, whatever, is just users having a bad day where we will just emit a log line.

Starting point is 01:01:08 Anytime we think that a user bumped into a problem. So maybe they hit a 404 or maybe their payout was one day after the, the, the, the, the, the ETA, or they had more than 10 payment declines. You can kind of brainstorm, again, or just listen to customers. What would cause you to personally have a bad day and then just omit an event when that occurs? And then you could just make a bar chart, a stacked bar chart, of all the bad day reasons and the frequency by which they're happening and is eye-opening to see those frequencies. And it's kind of a metric I hadn't thought about until Stripe's scale in which you just don't know what's happening until you emit the log line and count it. Like the frequencies could be kind of mind-blowing. And I think for almost any scale business, if you are bored one day and you're not sure what to measure,

Starting point is 01:02:11 just make a users having a bad day chart, emit a log line and count it as a bar chart. And then anybody else can add their own bar chart on top of it. And so it's become a way for teams to scale their understanding of users through metrics by just saying, hey, look, anytime anybody has an idea about why a customer is having a bad day, just amid a log line, like put it on this chart. And then we can choose over time, which bad day really. reasons we want to burn down and hopefully just like eradicate them, not just like minimize them. But it gave us kind of a background noise counting system for where there are problems.

Starting point is 01:02:52 And anytime there's an incident or some customer issue, the first thing I think is, ooh, like I wonder if we have a bad day. I wonder if we have a bad day reason for this. and if we do, I actually feel okay. I'm like, oh, yeah, it is a bad day for this customer. I wish I didn't have it. But at least we're aware and we can evaluate it against other bad days that we want to burn down. What does sometimes a little bit grind my gears or 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, for me, immediate action.

Starting point is 01:03:25 It's like, okay, cool. We have to figure out a way to count this bad day. We got to get it on the chart. that way we can make an informed decision about, you know, when to invest in improving it. I love this idea. I haven't heard this before. So the idea is just make a list of what happens to a potential customer that would cause them to have a bad day.

Starting point is 01:03:42 What are some examples for Striper Atlas that you guys have been? Are you a Stripe customer, Lenny? I am. I check my, with my newsletters, the payments go through Stripe. I check my dashboard every day. Cool. So what would be a bad day for you? Oh, I see.

Starting point is 01:03:54 I see some silence happening here. you know, it's not loading. The number is taking a long time to show up. Something being completely off in there. Not being able to log in. Silence. That's good. I just want to keep going.

Starting point is 01:04:19 The question is how much, you know, to the audience is how much of the silence will get it out before it was live? But this is what I'm talking about, right? Is I could guess them, right? Yeah. But and I can, as you were saying those, I know the URL of those charts. I know the login one because I feel that too. So I'm going to play with a stripe all the time.

Starting point is 01:04:41 And then you get a 2FA too frequently and come on. I had the same cookie. I was just here yesterday. So we count all that stuff and try to make it better over time. But I'm so excited when someone brings me a new bad day I hadn't thought about yet. Because that's just like product cat in it. I love it. And your advice here is this.

Starting point is 01:05:02 doesn't necessarily have to be your goal or metric. It's just start watching this thing because that could lead to a lot of interesting ways of operating. A couple other just like quick metrics things is a bit above. I don't know. Some people like cycling or something. I guess I like metrics. People get a really nice bike. I got a really great metric. Picking metric titles that make you feel something. So we could have called that measure of companies, you know, number of companies that do not send a support ticket over X period and Y period, you know, with min, you know, you sometimes see these charts where the metric itself, like named itself. This is just companies with zero support. That's it. And the brevity and the focus and the

Starting point is 01:06:00 customer mindset built into the chart name can become currency inside the company. It's like, oh, I'm working on making the like this chart go up and it feels good to just say the name out loud rather than some complicated underscores and mins and maxes and, you know, the database field name is like still in the chart title. These, these are aesthetic choices, but I think make dramatic differences in, the cultural willingness for people to buy in and get excited about it and reduce the need of a product person to just remind everyone every day why they're doing it. It's like the metric is motivating us because it's a motivating thing to talk about. And then lastly on metrics is there's just good hygiene that people should bring to their measures.

Starting point is 01:06:53 Percentages shouldn't have 41, you know, significant digits. if only two of the digits are relevant. You should keep all the measures of your dashboard on the same x-axis. These are just stylistic things that increase the frequency that people want to just wake up every day and open the dashboard and look at it. And that is so powerful if your whole team is looking at the same set of information that has the heartbeat of the customer every single day. In fact, we can measure at Stripe the usage of our dashboards. by team. And so we can see which teams are themselves looking at their own metrics. And that is an incredibly useful predictor of how on the same page they are and how customer-obsessed they are.

Starting point is 01:07:46 So I just think it's not an area that's sort of behind-the-scenes, bean-counting, reliability-only is the machine hot? You can make metrics that, mean something to the customer and you would be proud if they were to be screenshot and put on the internet to be like, wow, I feel like that company is taking their promise to me seriously. And I can see myself on those metrics as a customer. That's where we're like, we're really shooting for. So it's a mirror back what you just said there, which I think is a subtle point potentially is just making the dashboard look nice, like the hygiene of the naming conventions and the decimal points and the chart.

Starting point is 01:08:30 In your experience, you find that really powerful and important. A couple years ago, Stripe did internal work to make an internal metrics kind of dashboard system. And we have a special place called Go Metrics. Many people use a go slash service where you can just quickly go to a URL. And again, I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy. My rule is if it's not on Go Metrics, I'm not going to look at it. So if people can send me one-off queries or charts or screenshots or presentations or emails of charts and data, but that is in the wind. You know, we can't interrogate the query.

Starting point is 01:09:13 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, for it to rise up to the level of importance that is a thing we should trust to help us decide what to do. That's an incredibly high bar. And so I just find you have to look at it frequently enough. And if you're going to look at it frequently enough, it means it needs to be in a discoverable place.

Starting point is 01:09:51 You almost go through a couple stages of grief about it because we'll kind of put a metric up in a place. And everyone initially is like, wow, this is great. Like, I was so excited to finally see this. And then a couple days later, huh, like, I don't quite understand it. What does it, like, actually mean? I saw this other metric from this other angle that kind of makes it feel, you know, counterintuitive that it's like this. And then you kind of look into it. Wait a second.

Starting point is 01:10:19 We've been counting it wrong the whole time. Oh, no. And then you look at it the third week, and it's a completely different version. And then you hope that we forget about it. Maybe we'll go into something else. Nope, we're not going to forget about it. Week four comes around. You're like, wait a second.

Starting point is 01:10:32 Okay, this is, then the team meeting starts. Hey, just a reminder. Let's just bring up the metric again, not a screenshot of it. Go to the URL. And just that level of frequency and specificity and ritual around it is what brings it into the decision-making culture. And again, we treat it the exact same as we do tweets. It's a quantitative and qualitative right next to each other.

Starting point is 01:10:56 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 of the day to bring that level of care and understanding to so many things. So then it forces you to win know so many things you could care about down to a small number of things that you really must care about. And again, that practice goes back to do you really understand what your customer wants? And so for all these tactics, it's about finding out your customer once and then different

Starting point is 01:11:27 versions of how do we sort of know it's true over time and our tactics improving it. Sounds so simple when you describe it that way. This episode is brought to you by Anvil. Their document SDK helps product teams build and launch software for documents fast. Companies like CARTA and vouch insurance use Anvil to accelerate the development of their document workflows. Getting to market fast is a top priority for product teams. And the last thing that you or your developers want is to build document workflows from scratch. It's time-consuming, expensive,

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Starting point is 01:12:39 The best part about Anvil is the level of customization their SDK provides. Non-technical folks love Anvil's drag-and-drop builder, and developers love their flexible APIs and easy to understand documentation. Build documents software fast with Anvil. That's use Anvil.com. slash Lenny to learn more or start a free trial. That's use an vial.com slash Lenny. Kind of along these same lines are something that I've learned you started at Stripe to help people obsessed with the user experience and get quality to where it needs to be and move a lot of these metrics,

Starting point is 01:13:15 something called study groups. Talk about what that is. I'm very curious. Okay, let's imagine we understand our customer. We've understand their burning problem. We've built a solution that's in their hands. They're using it's hopefully better than their alternatives and they're starting to use it. And we have some real traction. You could still measure the success. You could still look at the tweets. And then, of course, you go to pick it up yourself and you're like, wait a second.

Starting point is 01:13:46 This thing is horrible. How did it get so bad? Anyone who's built a product that has gone over the horizon of it's actually improduct. 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 multiple teams and multiple products going on. There's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad. I actually have a hard time naturally explaining it.

Starting point is 01:14:13 You kind of think to yourself, well, it's code. It just must be running the same every day. But somehow you do enough things in a row and what was once a smooth end-to-end flow for accomplishing a test for a customer is all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated, broken mall that where all the doors are busted and you have to know exactly the way to get through the dashboard to solve your problem. Wait a second. I thought this was great just a second ago. So many of us have experienced that. Now, okay, what are we going to do about it? Well, one is it is really difficult to take time during the day to allow yourself to even know that this is true.

Starting point is 01:15:03 Because if you're working on one particular team, you're going to have some next thing you're shipping, you're going to have your customers, you're going to be doing great product work. Meanwhile, your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world and decrease all the trust you've earned to build what you're building now, it is actually difficult to decide, well, what hours during the week am I going to block, like, block off from my future progress to see it from the customer's perspective today? And there are various techniques to try to incentivize or to structure a group of people to do that. Stripe has a thing called friction logs as well, which is a single individual,

Starting point is 01:15:54 will pretend to be a customer and go through a product experience end to end and write it down. And that has been quite successful at Stripe for very motivated people who can block off the time and have the wide enough context to do a complicated thing end to end, and have a time to write it up. and the sort of position the company to send it out as a critique to potentially to not just your own team, but in a whole organization. So that's actually like a pretty high bar to crossover. So I was kind of brainstorming.

Starting point is 01:16:36 What could we do to make this more fun and have the frequency by which we're looking at our own products dramatically increased? And we kind of iterated through a few of a thorough. ideas and I landed on this thing called study group, which is basically a random group of people inside the company. They might not work on any particular team. They might not all BPMs. Just like literally anyone who wants to sign up, a support person, a salesperson, someone who's, you know, on our events team, an engineer and our infrastructure stack, anybody can sign up for a study group. We show up maybe four to eight people total. We

Starting point is 01:17:16 pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Maybe we want to accept money in person at an upcoming farmer's market, or we want to run a multi-country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business. It's something quite complicated. We could pick any motivating goal. And there are two rules to study group. Rule one is, is you do no longer work at Stripe. You do not work at Stripe, not pretend. You don't work at Stripe, not try to forget. You do not work at Stripe.

Starting point is 01:17:55 You've never worked at Stripe. You work at, and we make up a name of the company, you know, dolphin aquarium industries. And we will pick a CEO of the company from the group amongst us. And okay, Jenny is the CEO. Hey, Jenny, like, what do you want to do today? Like, well, I want to sell in-person tickets the dolphin aquarium. It's like, cool. Where would you start? So we actually embody the customer.

Starting point is 01:18:23 We will not break character. It's a little bit of improv thing. And as the kind of maestro of studied group, I will firmly, but kindly, if I hear you use any internal stripe knowledge, which is natural to do, you're like, well, because you work on a team and you know where that button really is. And you know the docs link goes a little bit to the wrong place. But if you click the other link, you'll get to it. If I can see you use any internal striped knowledge, I'll just pause and say, hey, let's redo the sentence or redo what we did with no stripe knowledge. As a reminder, you don't work in stripe. And it takes us a couple times, but people really get into it. And all of a sudden, we'll start making up characters. And, you know, the CEO will be like,

Starting point is 01:19:08 oh, Tim, you're our designer. You know, where are we going to get the color palette? All of a sudden, that's a person who's not a designer, right, in real life, is now all of a sudden having to practice the empathy from to be in the customer's position. And because we're going to be doing it for an hour, hour and a half at a time, you start, you actually start to believe that you don't work in strike and you work at Dolphin Aquarium Industries and you start to really feel it. So that's rule one. You don't work a straight. And rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. We're not here to critique. We're not here to solution or suggest. We're not here to file bugs. All of those things is recorded. We can do that later, whatever. This is just about

Starting point is 01:19:53 practicing empathy for the customer and going through the product. And we have done more than 25 of these at Stripe thus far in the last, just this year, last few months of 2024, more than 250. people have gone like participate in a study group and it is deeply eye-opening for those involved. The responses are, you know, sort of business emotional, you know, not not like, not super emotional, but just wow. I, 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, I didn't even know that internally people wouldn't know that our products did one, two, and three. And this has become so internally popular that teams have adopted for

Starting point is 01:20:49 themselves. And so we've kind of franchise study group internally already where different teams will run it. But I think we're going to continue it because it, I think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic. People just want more group activities. I think some of it is the slowness by which we do it. We're not rushing through it. Which is another reason I appreciate your podcast as well. 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 kind of the amount of time. No one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all. It's a random group of people. We don't even introduce ourselves about what team we worked on. We're just all here as participants to embody

Starting point is 01:21:32 the customer. And then I think lastly, a reason, why 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 print ahead of time is it is just fun. It's just fun. People want to make up the name of the company. They're excited about what Dolphin Industries would sell a person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO. And it's just, there's a little theatrics to it, but it has been different enough from our other approach. is for a company like Stripe, which is already like pretty focused on this topic, that we think that it's, there's enough legs here that we're going to keep it and kind of invest

Starting point is 01:22:18 in groups pretending to be a customer and going through it painstakingly slowly rather than only demos or only writing, which has other benefits, but misses. the participation of a larger group and more fresh eyes. So it's been fun, and we named it study group, I guess I named it study group, because I wasn't sure what it would be initially. So I just came up with something that sounded cutesy, but gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time,

Starting point is 01:22:54 and this is where we've landed. It's fascinating that something, that there's so much theatrics and ceremony necessary for a product team and a company to, find out these things about their product. You would think people are like, oh, we know, we know how onboarding looks. We know all these things. But basically what you're saying is you don't.

Starting point is 01:23:15 And you need to do these sorts of things in order to really know what your product is like these days. The customer does not live in our walls. They aren't. They're not here. You know, they're not, they don't know our lingo. And it is just so natural for our internal mindset and lingo to flow. into the application over time and you need some counterbalance to get there. And I think that's an, it has to be an unnatural counterbalance.

Starting point is 01:23:45 It used to frustrate me actually more. I'm like, wow, why aren't we all like, why aren't we doing it? Well, we're actually doing great work to move something forward and we have our local optimizations. It would be difficult to get to this level of specialization that multi-product companies are trying to do without that level of focus on a per team. basis, but then you need something unnatural to help us bring it back. And so I'm constantly looking for non-punitive, fun ways objectively to get more perspectives

Starting point is 01:24:21 from the outside in. If it's breaking the fourth wall to get on the phone on Twitter, if it's looking at a metric of users having a bad day, which is just like counting what's happening, can't argue with that, or a random group of people just kind of scratching their head trying to find a button, those are truths. Those are truths in the world that we're trying to make sure our inputs to all of our teams. And if you don't have those inputs, I can totally naturally see where the entropy of the world leads you to have Frankenstein bad products, even when all the individual parts are

Starting point is 01:24:59 like well oiled and run by great people. So you need something unnatural. There's an interesting trend and thread through our talk so far. Broadly, there's just like an obsession with making something great and awesome. And then a layer below is just an obsession with the user experience being as great as possible. And for a lot of PMs, there's not a direct line between make the experience as amazing as possible to growth and revenue and success and things like that. And it feels like for you and for Stripe broadly, there's this innate, implication. If we're making the experience better and better and better, we will grow.

Starting point is 01:25:39 You're nodding your head of the sideways a little bit. So I'd love to hear just your thoughts and just like this obsession with experience and user issues and okay, but we also have to grow to the business. What are the metrics are moving? If someone else has a strategy for moving revenue that isn't getting it from customers, I want to know about it because it is so hard to get it from customers. If there's some faster path, please tweet me and tell me about it. Because because we were, this is very hard, a lot of work to do. So if there's something else, I want it on the table, but I often find it's part of the product experience.

Starting point is 01:26:16 So maybe it's internal sales tools. We can do a study group about our internal sales tools process and our deal desk and our margin structure. We can do a friction log on our third party vendor process or a migration service or the way an ecosystem partner helps deploy our services into a big enterprise. Nothing is sort of off limits from product. In fact, I was chatting with a friend who runs a company, and they were a small company on the verge of product market fit,

Starting point is 01:26:52 starting to feel customers starting to pull. And they're like, oh, but our self-service funnel is, it's so leaky. And we have all this support coming through self-service. First of all, congratulations. like unbelievable that they're going through your product, even attempting self-service and contacting you. The majority case would be no one tries or they try and fail and don't contact you. So again, what a problem to have. And two, they wanted to minimize the support in that particular case. It's like, well, what's actually in those support tickets? What's in those sales

Starting point is 01:27:22 contact? There's a really sales contacts. They're like, oh, they want to learn more about how they get started. They want to know the expertise about, this is a particular company. It's a health care-related company. They wanted to know their health, the health care choices available. They wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had to it. I was like, that's the product. That's the product. The thing you're talking about is the product. Turn those moments during your self-serve process into not self-serve and make the product experience be, let's get you on the phone. And now when they get on the phone, they know the first name of the person they're talking to because they have it from the onboarding forum. And all of a sudden, it feels,

Starting point is 01:28:02 like you are still in the product, but it's not software. Now it's a person, but it's a person backed by internal software, which knows as much as they can about the customer and what they want. And I was really inspired by Fidelity, which is a big financial institution, where, you know, many people listening might have switched jobs and had to move their 401K or something like this from job A to job B. you know, maybe in some universe it'll be three clicks, but not today or certainly not when I tried a couple years ago. You got a call and go on a phone tree and all the shenanigans. And then I got

Starting point is 01:28:42 on the line with someone from Fidelity, they're like, hi, Jeff, they knew about the old company. They confirmed my address. They said, by the way, this is not a digital process yet. we're going to FedEx you an envelope and inside it is going to be the thing for you to sign. Here's going to be exactly where to sign. Here's like a picture we're going to sign. We've put another envelope inside that envelope ready to go. And so you just take the papers from envelope one, sign them where it says and put them in envelope two and put it back to the facts.

Starting point is 01:29:15 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. So I feel when people think, oh, you know, product quality and craft has some limit towards business value. Like there's some asymptote that you have to be like, well, product plate time quality is over. We need to talk about business. It's like, let's figure out exactly what is causing the business to happen and make it product, even if it doesn't look naturally the same as our sort of SaaS soft.

Starting point is 01:29:51 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 tools that help with compliance and everything else. And again, if people have a way to make all those things bad and lead to great increasing revenue over time and sustainable ways, like I want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than the person that.

Starting point is 01:30:21 that we're trying. I love that. And clearly it's worked for Stripe. Just one last question. I want to talk about Atlas and dive into just like, what is Atlas and how is it doing and things like that? I know there's some new stuff coming that you're going to share. But one last question about study groups.

Starting point is 01:30:36 How do you decide what product you're going to pick to do a study group on? And then what is that expectation with the result? I imagine there's a PM sitting around like, oh, my God, I just got this 10-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 kind of kick it off. And now because it has a bit of an internal brand and it's exciting and people have gone to study group say nice things about study group there. They actually proactively say, hey, we should study group blah. Or we're launching something next week. We should study group it

Starting point is 01:31:08 before it goes out the door. Or now I actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group based on what people want. And now we're kind of, again, franchising it. So we're going to have study group captains and people run their own study groups. And so I can, we can really scale this behavior, but we did our first study group of an internal tool recently. And so that I think is going to catch on. Just anything at all can be study grouped. It just takes about an hour and a couple people and you open up the Zoom and that's it. And then for expectation wise, look, you can, it is, it is so tempting to put more regulation on something. Okay, well, everything coming out of this program needs to be scored and rubriced and have SLAs.

Starting point is 01:31:58 That is extremely reasonable as some of these next steps because we do notice things that are of serious issues and we have some formal processes inside of Stripe for elevating bugs to certain priority levels that get tagged and have SLAs for teams to acknowledge and review. And so we kind of funnel the outputs of a study group into our already existing formal processes rather than having some new special thing that's going to bother a particular team. I will say, though, that it is difficult to watch one of these study groups and if you are the team, you know, involved in some piece of it and not want to act on it.

Starting point is 01:32:43 because seeing your fellow teammates struggle to use your thing in some way is more motivating than the customer, because you can kind of always say to the customer, well, they didn't really know or they have some special setup. You know, you probably shouldn't say those things, but you can kind of rationalize it. Whereas a group of people incentivized to have actually accomplished it who got together to do so, painstakingly slowly not being able to do so. If that's not what excites you as a product person to want to solve, you know, it's like this thing's not, it not for you. But then again, you have your own optimization system. You have your own things you need to shift.

Starting point is 01:33:34 And study group doesn't have a mandate that comes from it. we have our own, it's more of a cultural piece of information that is very high signal, and then people tend to use that high signal for good prioritization. I will say, though, that we have added the SLAs to certain bug levels that begin to match a bit of our incident process. So, you know, in an incident stripe, like in many companies, you know, like pencils down, fix the problem, severity levels, non-negotiables, lack of, lack of, 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

Starting point is 01:34:20 tags for our bug system. And if it is a sort of a P zero bug, which is not an incident, right? It doesn't mean to put down your pencils. You do need to acknowledge it at Stripe within seven days. And even if it doesn't mean to fix it, it's like a person looks at it and says, hey, we're going to like do it or not do it. that's still a pretty strong bar for a non-incident-related craft issue. It feels just at Stripe, there's this cultural focus on we want to make the product great. We want to make the experience as great as possible. A lot of companies, just teams, we have this goal. We're not going to do anything that isn't driving this metric and goal that we have.

Starting point is 01:34:59 And I think for teams like that, it's hard to hear just like, oh, someone's going to send you all of these problems with your experience. You know, there's like the negative version where the founder, like goes through the product like a CEO of a larger company just oh my god look at all these problems you need to fix these immediately and a lot of times of those it's like completely distracting from the things they need to do the goals they're trying to drive things that actually really really matter that the CEO may not be thinking about and it feels like you're trying to find this balance of like here's like problems that exist you don't need to fix them you probably should here's like the most important stuff but also there's often you find a correlation between make the experience better you're going to you're going to do better there's a huge amount of trust here involved in your colleagues, which is we want to provide teams great information and the best teams welcome that information. It doesn't mean that it comes with a author opinion from the outside world that says you must do X. We have a rubric on some of the craft-related bugs, but again, we also allow our, we let the teams relabel them. And so, Maybe it's actually not a P0 from their eyes.

Starting point is 01:36:11 And we like, that's the trust we put in the teams. I think that the failure mode is when you don't look. And so we need unnatural, safe, fun lore that gets us out of our chair and into the customer's mindset. Best is if it's you and you're your own customer. Okay. Second best would be sitting right next to the customer in the outside world and then like, okay, fine.

Starting point is 01:36:40 I'll take a third best, which is pantomining the customer and with a zero, with enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge. If you have practices in those three categories, I'm comfortable with the failure modes. I love that. This is definitely going to be the longest episode I've ever done, which is exactly what I expected. And I'm happy that we're doing this. Everyone go 1.75x or something. I like when people are like, oh, this episode was really good. I had to slow down to 1.75 or something.

Starting point is 01:37:12 How are you even listening at that speed? No, it's 1.0 speed. That's what this episode needs to be. There's two more areas I want to spend some time on. One is Atlas. We've talked a lot about on the surface of Atlas. I want to help people understand what the hell it is and the stuff that's happening there.

Starting point is 01:37:28 And two, I want to talk about getting stuff done at a big company, something that you've done at Stripe, and I hear you have a lot of good advice on. So, first of all, what is Atlas? We've talked a bit about it. the best way to understand what Alice is and who it's for. In 2016, a bunch of Stripes were traveling the world. Stripes is what we call teammates here. And they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world. And you would hear this unbelievable story from incredible

Starting point is 01:37:58 entrepreneurs who have a laptop, which is that they'd have to fly to the United States on an airplane to make a U.S. company in order to get access to use financial system, to raise money from U.S. or global investors, often to take USD or to charge U.S. customers. And you know, you could have sat around and said, huh, is that illegal? They don't live in the U.S. You know, can they have a U.S. company? Absolutely. The U.S. loves this. It is incredibly encouraged for people from around the world to make a U.S. company, and many people do. Now, why did it require? an airplane. And so you you start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst

Starting point is 01:38:47 someone with a laptop who has access to the whole internet. And that is a burning problem. Right. That is not a tier three issue. I am not able to run my business without getting on an airplane should be sending alerts off in your whole and your whole psyche that you have discovered something important. And so I wasn't at starting. at the time, but I'm very thankful that I was running my own startup at the time, I was very thankful that the people at Stripe decided to try to tackle that problem. And so Atlas is a way to start a company in a few clicks. And we think that's an incredibly big deal because while there are smart humans across the whole planet, the opportunity that they have is not uniform. And it is, but it's a little

Starting point is 01:39:41 strange because it's all the same MacBooks and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and smarts. And so what can we do to dramatically lower the barrier to great people solving problems? And we found over and over again that increasing the ease and simplicity and decreasing the cost and complexity tends to lead to just more of that thing. And we have a fundamental. belief that there should be more startups and they're not finite. And that belief comes from both just a core hope because there are so many problems in the world that don't seem to be being solved fast enough by our current institutions and larger companies that we think will

Starting point is 01:40:29 actually, you know, we need entrepreneurial energy to tackle them. And then it also comes from experience of seeing it happened. Instacart signed up for strike with a Gmail address. And then COVID happened. And they delivered critical. food to everyone when when people were reasonably not allowed to go to the grocery store easily. So you just don't know what the next Gmail address is going to do. And so in Atlas, we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started. And that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time. And so over the last few years, for those who have either used Atlas or I've started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit, you might have seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist being automated.

Starting point is 01:41:29 And so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83B election, which is this absolutely Byzantine silliness system by which you have 30 calendar. days to send a one-page document to the IRS that could radically change the economics of how you are incentivized as a founder. And this is not one of these greedy loophole situations. The IRS in the 1980s made this, made this IRS rule in order to spur more entrepreneurship. They want this. And the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to accomplish. You have to send a snail mail in to an IRS address in a particular format in a particular way with no verification that happened at all. And if you do it 31 calendar days, there's no redo. Okay.

Starting point is 01:42:25 Now, again, if you're a product person, you hear the founders terrified all day long about this same issue. Just alarm bells in your head all the whole time. And so 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 going to solve this A3B election thing. And there are very good reasons not to do it because it comes with potential huge liability. You don't want to screw it up. It's nail mail.

Starting point is 01:42:53 You're really going to monetize this. This is really what the kind of is a competitive advantage to do it. You can kind of argue yourself not to do it in a million ways. But again, back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning into a single click. it was obvious to us and we got started on it. Infrastructurally, we've been automating these steps. And when this podcast airs, I guess today, it will be true that when you go to start a company on Atlas,

Starting point is 01:43:23 it will just be a single click. You go to type in your friend's names, what the name of the company will be. It'll tell you if it's available automatically or not. You can split the company up 50-50 or whatever do you want to do, fill out a few things and you click go and then like a burrito coming to like a pizza tracker. We will just handle all of the downstream activities that used to be, hey, remember to come back in and purchase your shares. Why am I purchasing my shares? I'm just getting started. Why am I writing a check for

Starting point is 01:44:01 $10 and putting into a bank account that I can't even open yet? And then I have to wait for that to be done to get the 83 people strong. All of those steps are now just handled in the background so that we can get you ready for business in a day or two. And so you can quit your, you know, this is our vision. So you can quit your job on a Sunday night, get the Sunday scaries. I'm done with this thing.

Starting point is 01:44:24 And on Monday morning, fill out this form. And the next day, be able to run a billion dollar business because we will have automatically handled getting you access to banking systems, to payment systems, to handling all the equity paperwork, filing your 83B election, where you can just shift from having worrying about the company starting process to just building and shipping. And you'll just get kind updates in the background. Cool. The IRS has given you a tax ID. Cool. Your 83B election is filed. Cool. All the founders have their equity and you're ready, ready to go on the cap table. And we've done this by deeply integrated.

Starting point is 01:45:07 with the governments and deeply integrating with banking partners at where we can get you access to the financial system before the IRS and other governments come back with their sort of official yeses because we have we take care of the problem in the background by which we're faxing, phone calling, filling out forms on your behalf. And so we just want to take all that complexity and just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start, that checklist that they go through. We just have the robot do exactly the same thing. And so in some ways, it is a really big deal in a big ship because it completely automates the company starting process. But in other ways, it's an incredibly incremental step that

Starting point is 01:45:58 has taken us three years to get to, where we had to systematically. automate the internal steps each one. And now we've done the work to wrap it all up into one button. You can just watch how your company is doing in the dashboard. Well, first of all, congrats, Jeff and the Atlas team on shipping this. I know this is a big milestone and it's been a long time coming. Yeah. Atlas was actually a little reasonable before we decided to do all this work.

Starting point is 01:46:25 It's like, why do this next step of completely automating it when it was actually like fairly straightforward before. Atlas has above 80 NPS, which is quite high. Apple is in the low 60s. AirPods is 75. I love my AirPods. So Atlas in the 80s with almost 50% response rate is quite high. And so we still chose to do another year of work to automate all of this work behind the scenes because we see that companies are charging their customers sooner when they go through this automated process versus waiting. And it's, you know, a little strange. You just started your company.

Starting point is 01:47:14 Well, what does it really matter to wait an extra seven days or 20 days before you can get off, before you can really get going on business? Those are really fragile days with your building. And to some of our conversation earlier, that amazing. feeling of getting your first customer and being in it with them and money actually exchanging hands and getting that relationship, if we can slide that forward in the world by a couple days or weeks, which we're seeing like half the time it takes to get to your first customer, just like shave a whole week off of your company. And you can kind of see GDP being like born, like sooner.

Starting point is 01:47:52 and you with my whole life knowing that, okay, GDP is not finite and it can grow, but I've never really seen it. And now I've actually seen it grow faster or sooner. And I think anything we could do to just move that forward is going to inspire and lower the bar for more people to be an entrepreneur because they'll see how satisfying that can be. And another stat which really was interesting to me recently is that we have seen since doing much of this automation work that more solo founders are using Atlas than ever before. And I think it's because you can just do a lot more on the internet as a founder with no code tools and everything else and get going. Very cool to see that bringing the best of the internet and making it available worldwide can cause more people, can be correlated with more people.

Starting point is 01:48:51 people becoming entrepreneurs. And I think we should just keep doing that. It is incredibly inspiring. And I think this is going to be a huge deal. Like, it's hard to think about how many, what sorts of changes in tech could transform how many companies are started and how many companies not just started, but actually happen. Because to your point, you may start in the like, nah, never mind a few days later, if it's still stuck in some queue.

Starting point is 01:49:13 Totally. And then you don't know where these things are going to go. We have the sort of cohort of 2024 startups and Atlas. got to $50 million in revenue twice as quickly as the cohort in 2023. And so we kind of also think sometimes, oh, it was the pandemic that pushed everything online. Those are our best years. It's like we're seeing the earliest cohort charts of new startups, just like cracking up into the right.

Starting point is 01:49:40 And that's very exciting because you also hear sometimes, well, the funding market is down and valuations and this and that and the other. that is much more of a point in time capital analysis and much less of a business, just how businesses are working day to day. It's really in the revenue that is representative of their futures, and that looks amazingly bright. And then, of course, these companies go off to do pretty wild things. Companies that have started through Atlas has been 55,000 of them to date,

Starting point is 01:50:13 are doing $5 billion a year in revenue. I think it actually resets their expectations of what other tools will be in the future. It's like, well, if it was so easy for me to get my company started, well, why is it so hard to do banking? Well, thankfully, there are some great services for it. But I think it's if we can, if we can push people towards expectations higher, then they will want to make their companies better. And we'll just all benefit from that. How much of this is based on you guys doing like sending faxes and sending mail yourself? Like, I don't know how much you can talk about the behind the scenes, but is there a lot of through this ops element to automating some of this?

Starting point is 01:50:51 Atlas is in total 10 people, which is, I think, a relatively small group for the role that it plays in the wider startup ecosystem. And we just don't pick up work. We can't automate because we know that we need the leverage. And so we're not going to tackle, we're not going to put ourselves in situations in which we have to compete to be the best. We're going to put ourselves in situations where we can automate it and be the only. And like that's a different mindset. So in terms of, you know, why we picked up 83B election as a topic, like when we made that decision, you made a commitment that we're going to, we're going to do this forever. Like we're going to do this forever.

Starting point is 01:51:43 this is a piece of infrastructure for the rest of the internet, that is a very high bar to set as the thing you're going to do. And so we're happy to take our time. This is part versus Go Go Go Go Go versus the long term compounding. Go Go Go was when we assigned one engineer, hey, it's your job today to send one piece of paper to the office with this third party mail service. Why? Doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:52:10 today just send a single piece of paper to the office and an incredible engineer and she went on to lead all of 83B election work she sent it and the proof of just receiving the piece of paper at the office that we had just sent yesterday is incredible proof right we're like well look I mean the 83 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. On the long-term compounding part, we were extremely serious about how we picked our third-party

Starting point is 01:52:49 vendors and backup vendors and what promises an SLA is and reporting systems and alerts and playbooks and backup processes. Like this is a very intense amount of internal structure we use. But again, we have to look at where the value is. The value is in making sure it happens. does it need to be us sending the mail? Does it need to be us talking to government? Not necessarily. And we have chosen to work with third parties and many backup third parties as well, because, one, there's expertise in the world of physically printing and sending mail that the 10 of us

Starting point is 01:53:21 are not going to today become experts in. And two, I think it also causes us to build better software in that we now need to evaluate if something's actually working. because it's happening externally. Whereas when you build it yourself, again, you have this natural feeling, well, we built it, it must be working. Oh, later we'll add alerts. Later, when there are problems, we'll figure out playbooks.

Starting point is 01:53:48 Well, look, when it's a third party building it, you're like, wait a second. WOMS if they screw up, like, cool, we better figure that out. We better OCR 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,

Starting point is 01:54:05 it forced us to be more rigid where we needed to be rigid and create interfaces and kind of commitments. And again, we work with a bunch of great third parties and backup third parties to execute this. And each year we write a document called should we do this ourselves and we look at the other nine of us around the room and go, of course we shouldn't. Let's go on to something else. So again, we're just we're we're just really stitching it together, but ensuring that it happens. Awesome. Okay. I was imagining fax machines just there are back machines occurring. There are effects machines occurring. Not in the Stripe box.

Starting point is 01:54:38 And there are phone calls being made. And there are robots waiting on phones on hold as well. Oh, amazing. There's quite a lot going on. AI is here. I saw a stat that one in six new Delaware corporations are now started on Stripe Atlas. That's absurd. Yep.

Starting point is 01:54:55 I'm very excited to tell you when it's one in five, but that is not today. Okay. Sounds like we're close. We're on our way. Sounds like we're close. The other stat I have here is that the fastest growing cities for startups. Here's what I have.

Starting point is 01:55:08 I don't know if you know this, but Boulder, Shenzhen, and Las Vegas. They're everywhere. And the part, one of the, it's not,

Starting point is 01:55:16 it's like that we kind of came up with a little bit last year that I, I've just personally, deeply obsessed with, is founding teams in which the co-founders are in multiple countries. So like,

Starting point is 01:55:28 we kind of nickname this. Again, it's like, they're giving things a good title, uh, headlines, cross-border founders. Wow, like more than 20% of multi, multi-founder teams have at least one founder from another country.

Starting point is 01:55:48 That is astounding to me that the internet could bring people together like that. And I think that's going to provide more perspectives, more solutions will be local and global. Just all perspectives are great. And again, I think the Atlas team itself represents this. We were very intentional of how we built the Atlas team. It's majority women and we have more diversity to hire. But we were just very intentional to make it a team that had diverse perspectives. You've been on teams that don't have diverse perspectives of any type.

Starting point is 01:56:26 They are so much worse. There's no real science necessary here. We just enforce that we had the opportunity to build a, build this team that way. And it was really important to me that it represented a world we wanted things to look like and to represent. And, you know, it just had to be very intentional about it, because I've made mistakes in my career previously where my startup was all men when we sold to a box one of them. And it on each hire was harder and harder and harder to hire someone of a different background, just naturally folks didn't want to join that type of team. And

Starting point is 01:57:04 And that was the last time I've ever going to make that mistake, which is that early, the candidate pool must match where you want the team to go. It's not a down funnel problem. It is an up funnel problem and where you have to just make sure that for each role, you're comfortable with the, like with the distribution of people and backgrounds in your candidate pool and go from there. And I think that is one of the reasons why that 10 person in group is so effective is it has just a lot of diversity and perspective.

Starting point is 01:57:38 Another skill Jeff Weinstein is incredible at that I wasn't even aware of. We're going to add them to the list. And I actually saw photo the team and I noticed that. And so great work. Is there anything else on Atlas that you wanted to share before I get into how you actually made Atlas happen at a company like Stripe that has a billion things to do? We just want to hear about what's hard for you. You know, if you look back in your emails and if you started a company recently,

Starting point is 01:58:02 your starting company right now, the whole world is counting on you to pick a customer, solve their problem 10 times better than their alternative, get it to them, charge for it, become economically viable and build a great business that provides great services. We are not counting on you to become experts at this silliness of administratively running your company. That is, you know, imagine life without Google Docs, where you'd have to hire an IT person to run your IT back end on employee three. You'd have an IT person.

Starting point is 01:58:38 Or imagine the world without AWS for EC2 or S3 or any of these cloud services and you're racking computers yourself. You're just absolutely not going to try so many things. We just see the company structure, the structure bringing people together to be like that. And we want to automate more and more and more of it and turn into software.

Starting point is 01:58:59 So we're looking for the next things to work on. We have a couple ideas, but we expect to turn more of groups of people working together that administration into software. And I think I'm just going to unlock huge amount more people choosing to do it. Interesting. I'm so curious what that ends up being. Like, if you really think about what you're doing here, if you believe that entrepreneurship and innovation and technology make the world better, you're creating such an unlock to allow more of that. And like I said, I think it's hard to imagine and think of other examples that could be as transformative and impactful as just making this process. It's funny because I go back to, again, I also hear from founders, entrepreneurs, like,

Starting point is 01:59:40 oh, I can't think of an idea. Like, I need a startup idea. And yet everything in the world is broken. You know, and I also recall my first startup early 2010, 2012-ish, a joined a friend's company. That was started at the same time that the strike. founders started Stripe. And that is, I think about that a lot. Because with the same information, knowing how hard it was to accept online payments,

Starting point is 02:00:14 I chose to work on something else where they didn't. They work on making it easy in seven lines of code to accept payments online, which turned out to be really useful. So I really encourage people to be very useful. sensitive to the problems that they see and just not let any any little hiccup go unnoticed. And I think Atlas is really a manifestation of that, which is let's actually look at every single thing you went from hobby to economically successful operation and which of the any moment along the way you shouldn't have had to had to do. And we think those things are fair game to play with in any

Starting point is 02:01:01 topic, I think that there are many more gigantic businesses, important things to be solved sitting in plain sight. I can't see them always. But when you hear, if you sit enough silence and you hear the same people complain about problems, you too might find something as big as online payments are hard, which was sitting right in front of all of us. And I think it's important to note it doesn't necessarily have to be a venture back, venture scale company, right?

Starting point is 02:01:29 There are many, most businesses in the world are not. venture back venture scale billion dollar companies you can build a profitable company it's a kind of funny we've all um put this badge of honor of giving away a lot of your company uh you know people really love owning a lot of their company and being successful so you just got to pick the right capital structure for your for your business and again uh the amount of money that has been generated of the companies that started through Atlas, you said $5 billion, basically. That's the GDP of Atlas.

Starting point is 02:02:06 That Atlas is, that's like revenue per year. And that's growing. Per year. Yeah. And, you know, obviously some of, a lot of it would have happened anyway, but still, there's accelerated. It's probably growing faster. A lot of it probably never would happen.

Starting point is 02:02:19 Yeah. We ran a survey a little bit ago. We need to rerun this where we just asked people what they have started their business about, without Atlas. And about 20% of people said they wouldn't have or wouldn't have them had then. And again, these things are fragile. Right. And it's not all, it's not all Google employees leaving their job to build something. It's people from every possible background, every possible role, every possible job, every possible age group who see problems and can solve it. So it's dramatically more fragile than people think. Well, great work, Jeff and Team Atlas and Stripe in general. Fun.

Starting point is 02:03:00 Let's talk about one and last thing. There's like so many more things I still want to talk about. Maybe we'll have a few. Yeah, we go real fast. Make it 2x speed. So this Ellis is basically a zero to one product. I know you didn't start initially. It was there, but you took it from, I don't know, maybe it took it from 0.5 or something to 1,100 now.

Starting point is 02:03:20 And a lot of people struggle with starting things like this within larger companies. Like Stripes a large company, right? They, it's like, you know, a very innovative, well-run company. but it's also a large company. And clearly you, you made shit happen, you and your team. What kind of things have you learned? Actually, let me read a quote. Here's a quote that kind of describes you being good at this

Starting point is 02:03:41 from one of your former colleagues who will go named. Jeff is really good at cutting through the BS. You hear so much about frameworks and all this complicated stuff that people talk about in PM circles when the most straightforward, obvious thing is probably right. I get so annoyed after calls with Jeff sometimes because I know he's right about something. I bang my head against the wall for months.

Starting point is 02:03:57 And so talk about just like what you've done, how you've learned about getting stuff done at a large company. What do you need to do right? Not having things be your idea, I think is really powerful. It's like, I just talk to 50 customers who all yell the same thing. Here they are in varieties of quotes and forms and the rest of it. And you put some three bullet points of strategy around why it's important. It's going to help you win more market share.

Starting point is 02:04:27 and the rest of it and how you can do it well. Cool. I mean, what else could we want to do? Maybe somebody has something where 51 people have the same burning thing. But the majority failure mode is we do nothing. That's the majority failure mode. And so one, aligning people with deep customer stories, storyboarding some solution visually,

Starting point is 02:04:57 with a Sharpie and not a pencil, not Figma initially, not high or low fidelity. I can never remember which one is the detailed one, but just like Sharpie. What is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem? And that's, you know, Pixar style storyboard. You don't need to be a designer. You can just draw like stick figures on a piece of paper or whimsical or whatever you want. do. And with those things, if you're not asking for, you know, 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

Starting point is 02:05:42 version working. It was very motivating to get that single piece of paper in the mail with, which was blank to kick us off on the 83B election. And again, by the time this podcast airs, we will have crossed 10,000 83B elections filed and we have done them all 100.00% on time. With the burning use case, why customers are going to need it, why we can do it cheaply, effectively, safely over a long period of time. And here's the way to get tangible forward progress quickly against the stick figure vision, but with something in the browser or want one version of it. Let's just get one thing working one time. I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof rather than proof by theory or proof by debate. It's just like, look,

Starting point is 02:06:42 we did it one time. Hey, I'm holding the piece of paper. Pretty motivating. We could, you know, if we just, if we just printed out the right information, we'd be done. Okay, actually, there's a lot to do other than just that, but it really pushed us for. So I think cutting through a little bit of the red tape is about momentum and making each step not such a big deal and asking for less permission. And then, of course, once you have a little bit of that under your belt, you're going to naturally be trusted with taking more of those kinds of bets. paired with some of the things we talked about earlier of everyone's looking at the same place about the metrics. Everyone can watch the success.

Starting point is 02:07:34 We don't need to do big internal updates with long-winded PowerPoint presentations and scrambles the night before. You can just go to the metrics page and see how we're doing. That brings so much trust to the group that people start going from, hey, why do we We have this Atlas thing that doesn't really produce so much money. It's like charging people, companies when they don't have money. We're a big payments business. How do you even compare these things to, wow, look at the progress that they are making against

Starting point is 02:08:10 the mission and look at its impact on the curves. And you start to like root for it more. I think that's how we got it there. I will say one other thing, which is that making something economically, viable is extremely important. And so when I, I'm probably the fourth person to run Atlas. And it's quite a pantheon of people prior to me, including the founder of Mosey, which is a compliance startup, watershed, which is this amazing climate reporting tool. Also led Atlas, Patrick McKenzie, patio 11 for many folks do. Wow, what an alumni group. This is we owe ourselves a dinner.

Starting point is 02:08:49 We owe ourselves a dinner. We owe ourselves quite a group. And now we have. have a new person who's, so I, you know, I technically no longer lead Atlas. So we've hired up a whole team, which is really exciting. And Haley Halverson, who's joined us about a year or two ago, she leads Atlas now, and you can find her on Twitter. She's fantastic. And we just, we swap jobs over a course of a year, just one month at a time, the roles. And so she worked for me, and then I worked for her, and then she's gone off to hire some amazing people to run Atlas. So it's really quite a privilege to have these people lead it over time. So we, But it was really important for us to communicate why we're going to run this in an economically

Starting point is 02:09:27 viable way. And I think that applies to all products and all businesses. It's just like, look, if you're a customer acquisition style product, well, showcase why this is the best customer acquisition for the dollar for the company. If you are margin generating, moat, creating ecosystem growing portion of business, well, then your metrics have to show it. And so just you can't just have half the story of just the product quality and the tweets. You have to have the economics.

Starting point is 02:09:58 Who else is going to put this much energy into this style of product? And that gives us confidence that we should invest in in the long term because alternatives can come and go. And I super encourage there to be more Atlas alternatives. That would be great for founders. But I think over the long term, it'll be difficult to do so just because of the business model. Yeah. There actually was an alternate at one point Angelist and then they're like, no, Stripe is a kill in it. Let's just send everyone to Atlas.

Starting point is 02:10:26 So I had worked on strike payments for a while and I had just started on Atlas. And I think that same month, Angelus announced that they were doing incorporation and banking and cap table altogether, which was exactly what I wanted to do. And I was like, oh, shoot, did I sign up for the wrong thing? Angel is such a smart group of people. So customer oriented, great brand. I love many of the people who work there. I work with some of the best legal minds and they have the RUV set up. There's like so much awesomeness here.

Starting point is 02:10:59 I was like, should we just, should we really compete? Like, what should we do here? And we thought about it more and more. Like, look, in the very long term, this company starting process is going to become a efficiency cost problem. and there's so much long-tail complexity with dealing with multiple financial institutions, multiple government processes, all of this legal complexity that it will be, and it's difficult to charge a lot of money for it because it's hard to charge people money when they haven't even started the business yet.

Starting point is 02:11:35 We looked at it and said, look, we're going to keep this long-term compounding approach because we think that this is where it's going to go, and it was a zero-interest rate environment at the time, Angelus built a phenomenal product. I looked at it with nothing but admiration and happiness, but it also kind of smarted and hurt. And we just kept building, kept building, kept building, and I got a phone call one night on my wife's birthday before we sat down for dinner. And it was Dan at Angel's, I hope he'd be comfortable telling a story, who I love, an incredible product mind and he led product over Angelus for startups and he said, hey, we're going to get out of incorporation. This is not going to be our focus going forward. Do you want the business?

Starting point is 02:12:28 It was like a year and a half after they had really gone out or maybe two years after they gone out or something like this. I was like, wow. And we had kept such an open relationship with them. We had paired with them on legal constructs. We had discussed 83B election openly. And a lot of people like, oh, I can't believe you're talking to the competitor. You know, like, look, we all share the same mission here. You know, yes, we're competing, but it's, are we really all better off from treating each other at arms distance? We had a shared Slack channel.

Starting point is 02:13:00 We discussed when the Delaware was slow on a corporation. One time is because they were playing softball and they had an afternoon off. That's a real story. And we've discussed it. And so when, and the angelus was incredible. in how they evaluated it. We're like evaluating different partners, but because of our working relationship

Starting point is 02:13:20 and the quality of your product and we saw we were going with 83B election and the intensity of that, they just put up a webpage that said to get started with Angelis, if you need a company, go right over to Atlas. And that was a really amazing moment because I respected them so much

Starting point is 02:13:41 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 were happy. And it's been an 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,

Starting point is 02:14:02 Mercury, Carter, others. But Angelus really led the way there. And we just maintain a great relationship with team. But it's just like such a, it took a while, but it really re-proved to me. that they're not competitors, it's alternatives. And if you care about your customer, you care about their alternatives. And if you care about the mission, you need to all work together.

Starting point is 02:14:22 And look, there's some friendly competition, of course. We all want to win. But in the long term, I think all parties are like significantly better off. Wow. That is an awesome story. I don't know if you've shared that anywhere else. There's so many lessons there that I could like spin off on and just like not worrying about our competition, staying heads down, just solving customer.

Starting point is 02:14:42 problems, staying close to your competition, not being afraid to talk to them, sharing advice with each other, just building the best possible product. I don't know. There's a ton there. That's super interesting. I couldn't really draw it up any better. And I just think the world is better off with more specialization. And it's a pain in the butt. It's a pain in the butt to these corporations. Like you really, I think we can get, yeah, I think you want more specialization and more partnership. And I think a lot of companies are trying to do that now. Okay. So let me, me go back to the lessons you shared on how to build something new at a big company, and then we can wrap up.

Starting point is 02:15:19 So I took a bunch of notes here, and these are awesome. And they actually resonate a lot with Mihika who came on the podcast, who's at Figma been the person building a lot of zero to one stuff. And so it's nice that there's these trends that are coming up again and again. So one tip is just storyboard the ideal, like with a Sharpie, draw out. Here's this exciting vision of what this could be if we were to pull it off without constraints, It's unconstrained, powerful vision. Two is solve a burning use case, make it clear.

Starting point is 02:15:46 This is a huge problem for a lot of people. There's probably stories you share there. Show tangible forward progress. Just like, look at this. We made this progress. We made this progress. Sent ourselves a piece of blank paper. Look at this.

Starting point is 02:15:57 It's a huge milestone. And have momentum. And Mahjica talked about this. Just like keep the fire alive. Keep the fire alive. Show momentum. I'm making progress. This metric's moving up into the right.

Starting point is 02:16:07 And then there's like a milestone. It felt like you had like an early milestone. of like lia this. We made progress. And then also have the business case, basically. Look how much we could make and look what this could be if we were to succeed. Anything you'd add there, anything you'd correct. Bringing the earliest customers into the room with your team as soon as humanly possible, we would just invite a founder to the team meeting. We would pipe all their feedback into a Slack channel automatically. We have all the NPS scores going to a channel and anytime it's not a 10 for 10, we follow up directly. Just like constant engagement with a customer creates the momentum where

Starting point is 02:16:54 it doesn't need to be the product person or some other leader saying, we need to do this, follow me. It's, oh my gosh, the world needs this. Let's figure out how to do it even faster. And a tip that the team has tried, and this is well since I'm involved day to day, is literally inviting customers in to design the product, which I had actually never heard of. Hey, we're thinking about what happens after incorporation now. And what can we do to help founders after they've set up their company? What would be magical there? We just invite founders in into a whimsical, which is one of a piece of software I love. edge is a really easy learning curve to create visual diagrams.

Starting point is 02:17:36 And rather than sort of doing an AUXR about it, we just say, hey, 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 had now scratched my head. I'm several years into, you know, decade plus building things. And I was like, I was doing this by myself. Why didn't I just assign it to the people who were going to use it in the first place? Now, look, that doesn't always work because not all of your customers are going to be, you know, product designers at heart, but more of them than you think.

Starting point is 02:18:09 And I think it's giving your customers right access and not just read access to your company is incredibly powerful. And I think I had not quite seen it so directly where you just actually designed what they want. But I saw a diagram of something we're working on right now. I was like, wow, we haven't even had design look at it. They're like, no, actually the customer drew it. Great. Why were we guessing? I think you have an unfair advantage where your customers are founders and oftentimes have product skills and design skills. But I love that it's true, but I will really push because you don't need a hundred of them.

Starting point is 02:18:46 And you'll find somebody somewhere who knows. You just got to sit in a little more silence. They'll raise their hand. There's a quote you shared somewhere that relates to what you just said, that your dad once said, you can't screw up. sentence if it begins with the customer. That's true. Yeah, my dad runs a, um, an IT business in Baltimore to help other businesses with their computer systems. And my, growing up, I would literally physically clean the keyboards of his employees and, you know, dust, dust the mouse. But yeah, he's very, very customer oriented where I get a lot of it from.

Starting point is 02:19:22 And my mom's a painter. So I think there's some, uh, combination of talents or interests there. But yeah, he, he would take it one step for and he would sometimes physically bring a chair over in a meeting and say the customer is sitting here and you'd have to like pretend and then he would kind of fake talk to the invisible customer. Hey, based on what you've seen today at the meeting, I saw him do this one time. Like based on what you've seen today at the meeting, are you more likely to pay your bill or less likely to pay your bill based on what you witnessed? It's a little intense on the pantomime, but I think the point gets across it. You just, if you begin, again, because it's so natural to think internal, if you begin the sentence physically with the customer and then start your sentence, you just have a much better shot at it. That's an amazing story.

Starting point is 02:20:10 Very steady group-ish, like an early, early prototype. Jeff, we've covered so much ground. I have two hours more worth of questions, but we need to. Let's lock. We need to take a. Get it off, I think. Is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

Starting point is 02:20:30 Really excited about whatever you're building out there, thinking of building. My email address is incredibly easy to find. My Twitter handle is incredibly easy to find. Do not hesitate to send me cold emails. My love language is loom videos of bugs, but feel free to send anything you have off the top of your head. I respond to good cold emails. Don't hesitate.

Starting point is 02:20:51 What's the email real quick for people? If finding my email address is your issue, I can't possibly be, but it is my first initial and last name at basically everything in the world. Though my handle on Twitter is Jeff underscore Weinstein. But gosh, if you can't find my email address, then you got a bigger problem. Okay. We'll link to it in the show notes as well. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Starting point is 02:21:14 Hoo! Who! Here we go. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? I know a lot of people on the podcast recommend a high. management, but it should be, you know, swap the Bible out for it at all the hotels in the world and in the little drawer, just like put it everywhere. You just can't go wrong, though. It is just an incredible clarity of how to spend your time as a leader, a manager of other people,

Starting point is 02:21:43 just like a very high bar for how evaluating your work as the sum of everyone around you. that was very clarifying to me that it's just like not an individual effort. It is the sum of everything I'm involved in is how to measure it. So that's definitely up there. A nice pair to that book as a moose, like a moose bush afterwards, is orbiting the giant hairball, a corporate fool's guide to surviving with grace, I think is the full exact title by Gordon McKenzie, which is the story of a illustrator at Hallmark, the greeting card company.

Starting point is 02:22:22 And it turns out to be a, again, bureaucratic, slow-moving organization that over time just added rules and policies and rules and policies and kind of quelled creativity and innovation, which is surprising at a greeting card company, but it existed. And so this is his incredibly well-drawn book, as you'd imagine, with beautiful illustrations about how he orbited the hairball of the organization. organization to inspire others, keep himself engaged, and to bring creativity and excitement and trying to like pull people off the hairball as, as he orbited it. And so I think it's just like a fun afternoon read with beautiful illustrations about just kind of how to stay sane at big

Starting point is 02:23:11 companies and where to be a little goofy and take the advantage and gravity of the hairball, but not to be like succumbed by it and to be able to orbit. it. Those two are really fun. I will say one other one I like just because we haven't talked about strategy here. This has been more getting stuff done and some other tactical things, but seven powers. And I know you had the author recently on, which is awesome. I ran in. So I won't explain the books. You just watch the podcast of it, but it walks through many of the business powers and sort of moats a company can have. I ran. into the author, Hamilton, Helmer.

Starting point is 02:23:55 Hamilton, Helmer, yes, thank you. What a cool name. Very cool name, alliterative. At the Box lunchroom one time where I worked at Box. They acquired one of our companies. And I was like, hey, any luck finding the eighth power? He's like, I'm looking, I'm looking. He like ran off with his sandwich.

Starting point is 02:24:11 Another, one other funny, somewhat embarrassing moment about that book is when I was applying to work at Stripe, I was in some email conversation with our CEO. Patrick Carlson, who's quite well read and enjoys books, and I was, you know, trying to showcase I like books a little bit, though not at any level of him. And I just had mentioned, like, I just finished reading Severn Powers and I kind of recommended it to him. But it jokes on me because he's quoted in the foreword that I had skipped. So he was very kind to let me know that he had read it and he is quoted in it. So I was like, oh, shoot, maybe I won't get the job. But I got through that part at least.

Starting point is 02:24:49 Those books have spoken to me. Do you have a favorite power, by the way, Lenny? Do you have a favorite power? Well, his favorite power is counter positioning. I also like that power a lot because I think it's the one that really changes everything about how you build your company. So that's the one that always stands at. I like counter positioning also and Atlas with going cheap and that audience is counter positioning. But I really enjoy process, the process power because it's just like I think it is very difficult.

Starting point is 02:25:19 to, as an organization, get good at anything. And if you could do that over a long period of time, a sustainable way, you have a power. This is the nerdiest chat I've ever had, which is your favorite seventh power? I love it. But on that power, I asked him about it. He makes a really strong point there that that's rarely is it actually a power for people. They think, like, the way we execute is going to be our advantage. And rarely is it actually power?

Starting point is 02:25:43 Usually people can kind of copy it. But when you nail it. That's even better, because then if your competition thinks they have, it. They won't invest in the other ones. So I like it even more for that reason. I love it. But I was going to say with Patrick Collison being quoted in the book, not only was he just like wrote part of the foreword or was a quote, he basically credited seven powers of helping build strike. No big deal. Totally. Yeah. Okay. This lightning round is going great. This is like a very

Starting point is 02:26:10 microcosm of our whole chat so far. Second question, do you ever favorite recent movie or TV show? How to with John Wilson? That's on HBO. It's, okay, so for those who haven't seen it, not really giving away anything because it's just wild when you watch it. You can't give it away. This videographer has found footage, or he's just like walking through Manhattan, other parts of the country, but mostly New York, with just like a camera. For 10 years, just filming intensely weird things. And if you've spent any time in New York, you know, there's plenty to film. And then has put together this narrative afterwards about certain topics, like how to, uh,

Starting point is 02:26:49 make risotto or how to take out the trash or how to and it's a way of seeing life through the eyes of these vignettes like diving down and really understanding people and he does it through this incredibly dry humor of of of stitching together this this this this video footage to tell a different narrative and I think some of this I used to live in New York and I love I love I love living California but I miss that frequency of strangeness. And you can see that through

Starting point is 02:27:23 that TV show. Fantastic. Movie, I recently watched The Quiet Girl, which is a film about a young Irish girl who is sort of from a dysfunctional home and has this opportunity to live with a family friend

Starting point is 02:27:39 who is with families more have more opportunity for her, more empathetic to her, and just represent, It just showcases like how fragile things are. It's a very intense film, but there's something beautiful in how much opportunity was in front of this young girl. So it's a tearjerker, but a great one.

Starting point is 02:28:06 You have a favorite product you have recently discovered that you love? I love my computer. I'm fast at my computer. Being fast at my computer helps me just go from intention to just out in the world. I've fallen back in love with Raycast, which is an automation tool for those who have watched the journey of Spotlight and Quicksilver and Alfred and all these automator services. Raycast seems to have crack the nut on automation, nerd complexity, but also UIEs and some nice touches and just like loads quickly does the basics. It's fully programmable, extensible, just like a huge fan of Raycast. And then I think for product people, if you don't have clean shot installed for screenshots, you're just behind the curve.

Starting point is 02:28:52 Being able to take a screenshot and blur particular things or point at stuff or have arrows and lines and just like have that be second nature fast instantaneous is so useful to be able to communicate what you're seeing. So when I got a new laptop, it's Raycast first and clean shot second. Wow. I am going to download a clean shot immediately. Yes, it's extremely good. I've been using sketch. as by my blurrings. As much as I appreciate the sketch folks,

Starting point is 02:29:20 clean shot is an incredible piece of software. Amazing. I'm going to do that. All right, two more questions. Do your favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with friends or family, find useful in worker in life?

Starting point is 02:29:30 I don't even realize I say go, go, go a lot, but I do. I actually say it and write it. So people, I hear that they'll later say go, go back to me. I'm like,

Starting point is 02:29:39 huh, don't I say that sometimes? Like, yes, you say it a lot. So apparently go, go, go, go is one of them. I also. I love that.

Starting point is 02:29:45 say, like, let's make some mistakes. Just when we're, like, brainstorming something or sitting at a sushi restaurant and talk sushi guy or gal, just to, like, showcase, like, hey, let's be creative, do whatever we want. No pretense. I'm not evaluating anything. Like, let's make some mistakes. It's just like a weird thing. They're so good.

Starting point is 02:30:09 I'm going to use that for my podcast, yeah. Let's just make some mistakes. Like, let's make some. Don't worry about it. I mean, at that point, I was like, what? Okay, fine, sure. I'm like, cool. I like the combo of those two.

Starting point is 02:30:18 Go, go, go, go. Let's just make some mistakes. You have to use it in certain circumstances and not for the five-nines of reliability on our API, but it does have its place. Final question. You worked with Patrick Allison and John Collison for many years. I'm curious what the most useful feedback or advice you have heard from them or learned from them.

Starting point is 02:30:40 On my first month working here, which I guess is six some years ago now, I was, they put me in charge of our payments infrastructure services. So that's all the back end systems that communicate with the financial system and all the internal APIs where we build the external APIs and products on top of. I was like quite a lot of stuff. I knew nothing about finance. I knew nothing about the scale that we're talking about. They entrusted me somewhat insanely with that responsibility.

Starting point is 02:31:11 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. They're like, no, like, you, no, you, you, you write it. Like, it'll be even better that you, that you write it. Like, oh my God. Like, it's just like forcing me to have to in the fourth week have that catalyst to understand the whole business and like with the permission, because I was going to have to write this doc about how we're doing. Company had been in existence for like seven years before I got here.

Starting point is 02:31:51 It 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 kind of pushed me to do it a bit. And I figured I'd give him an early draft. And he wrote back, this doesn't sound like you yet.

Starting point is 02:32:09 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 really spoke to me and I rewrote it completely. And I made it sound like me. And I've tried to make things sound like me since. John's is more of a gut punch, I'll say. So I reported to John, the co-founder. He maybe nine months into reporting to him, he, I would run around with a clipboard.

Starting point is 02:32:45 I was a little bit manic of getting a lot done, a lot going on at the stripe at the time. And I would, we'd have a one hour, one-on-one. I'd be listing all of the things that we had accomplished and the problems we have and where we need escalation help and where we're stuck and all this, that, and the other. Just lots of stuff. I had, you know, checklists and physical paper flipping it over a little bit frantically. And he said, you are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through a hundred, but I need you stuck on problems one and two.

Starting point is 02:33:21 It's like, oh, man, that like hurt. I was like, oh, shoot, I am. I'm productive on the non-hardest problems. And I was trying to mask, not on purpose mask, but just who wants to be stuck on something so hard when there's so much else to do. And from then on, I would show up to him with problems one and two and not talk about problems three through 100, even if we were working on them. We would just not talk about them. And we would get stuck on problems one and two. And that was phenomenal advice, which, you know,

Starting point is 02:33:55 I was like, oh, shoot, I'm going to be fired. But just like, but, but, but it was like, it was like, it was really a deeply impactful sentence. Wow. What a, what a, what a powerful, great, helpful. Like, that's, that's great advice. He really looked at my soul and like, yeah, like, a street fighter style or something. But it's your point, very impactful and helpful. Yeah. Jeff, we did it. Cool.

Starting point is 02:34:21 The archaeology is complete. I appreciate the time, Lenny. It was fun. And I don't do too many of these. So I'm curious to people's feedback and really appreciate the questions. Amazing. Jeff, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate Lenny.

Starting point is 02:34:34 Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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

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