Reading this post made me think that while many companies advertise an entrepreneurial environment and the ability to do impactful work, the true test of this culture is 1) the ability to hire former founders and 2) those former founders loving their work.
Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong company endorsement.
I am glad to see we are now explicitly mentioning the aspects of Stripe culture that make it founder friendly.
- Huge transparency
- Management optimizes for autonomy & distributed decision-making
- Upwards review processes > downwards decision-making
- Level obfuscation
- Shipping culture
- People who are of the quality you'd normally only find by hiring them yourself (and frequently better)
My 3rd week at Stripe (around 7 months ago) Patrick just sat down next to me at lunch, knew my name, and started talking about what my team was working on in great detail. Asked me many direct, important questions and really listened.
As a former CEO of a VC-backed company, I knew he was 100% on his game -- and around you at work you can see that pretty much everyone trusts the execs to be insanely competent, because they are. My only wish is that they don't take as many solo plane rides, haha. :)
Plenty of blue-chip startups have future founders working for them...yet it seems to me that having past founders is much more rare. An incredibly strong company endorsement.