I hadn't heard about Works in Progress before, but looks like incredibly well researched content. Pretty stark difference between the writing and what you see on something like sfgate.com or cnn.com.
I find it pretty awesome that the Stripe is successful enough to start branching out from core product into founder hobby areas. The cynical perspective is that this is not core to the product, but I find it kind of beautiful that the founders can do a bit of what is personally interesting to them with their company.
This reminds me of another incredible resource for deep learning articles: https://distill.pub/, which unfortunately looks like is going silent.
Stripe actually been in the business of "content" for quite some time by now. Unfortunately, https://press.stripe.com/ doesn't date anything they are releasing apparently, but I remember reading about things they've released for at least a couple of years. They also famously "purchased" patio11, probably mostly because of his skills of writing and promoting content on the internet.
Does anyone know Stripe's strategic reason to acquire a content company and/or run Stripe Press? I find it hard to think of the connection here other than a philanthropic effort by the founders.
plainly put, propaganda. Technological companies face increasing pressure from regulators and the public and the answer is to produce their own media, see also a16z branching out into content more and more, sidestepping the press in general.
Works in Progress has people like Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute on board which is aligned with the kind of policies these companies would want to see.
"Mike Solana: The first real instantiation of Techlash we saw in the media happened about a year ago, though there’s been talk of it for longer. It was anti-Uber and anti-Facebook stuff, and it all felt pretty fake. The average American doesn’t really care about those supposed problems at all. They love Uber and aren’t concerned with whether Facebook is “violating privacy.” I have plenty of friends who care a lot about privacy, especially libertarians, and they don’t like to hear this. But the average person just isn’t concerned when they get targeted advertisements for trendy leather boots or some other product that they actually want.[...]
Fixing the first piece presents a difficult question: How do you tell a story about yourself that is compelling? For a long time, Tech didn’t and we got away with it because our products were just so good. It doesn’t really matter what stories you’re telling about Uber; everybody just wants to use it. It’s harder now in the midst of an aggressive negative media narrative about how evil we are."
That is indeed some A grade propaganda that manages to put a very strange spin on things in an attempt to paint these concerns as weird fringe things that only a tiny handful of people care about and only for misinformed and nefarious reasons.
In reality the techlash voices are growing at every level. Multiple governments around the world are updating legislation, imposing fines, developing new regulations.
The entire political spectrum hates Facebook for a whole host of reasons.
This isn’t just a “we need a better story” like that piece would have you believe.
Indiehackers makes a lot of sense since they can sell builders on using Stripe Payments and Stripe Atlas on Day 0.
Here though, I'm not so sure - maybe they try to sell intellectual content creators on a Gumroad alternative via Stripe Checkout? Seems like too small of an opportunity to be worth pursuing
Edit: honestly, could just be a recruiting play. IMO they have the brand "our founders are incredibly intellectually curious, and some of the smartest people work here", and this acquisition could help strengthen that brand. I think this could be the most plausible reason.
Patrick Collison has spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create a culture dedicated to excellence and progress. He doesn't just want to build a great company and improve the world's GDP; he wants to find out what makes people innovate faster.
There's a few people here saying it's brand marketing or propaganda, but I don't think it's either, because neither are ambitious enough.
> other than a philanthropic effort by the founders.
This is 95% of the reason I want to have non-trivial sums of "spending money".
That might be $1000/mo I can throw at whatever I want, or, in the case of Stripe, something that can be easily rolled into accounting books, but counts as "experimental philanthropy".
A defining feature of the modern world is that power bows before narrative and memes.
Stripe (or, rather, individuals associated with Stripe) seem to be happy to contribute in ways to making it more likely that some of their views of the world are more likely to happen, simply by amplifying certain voices, in a fair and transparent manner.
Related: it might be that you don't mean to be dismissive of cool things about founders taking efforts to be philanthropic, but it sure comes across that way.
I think you’re right. I’d do stuff like that if I was a billionaire. You have the ability to shift resources to what you think is important; this probably costs a comparable amount to a single SWE.
Having said that- Stripe does have a credible claim to making a % of the GDP of the internet. Maybe they view this sort of activity as increasing that; progress studies in general does have the potential to have a non-trivial impact on the economic impact of the internet.
Something about it reminds me of https://www.ft.com/ in how they use a non white background for a lot of the text. I find it pleasant to read on/with. It’s fun that the print version is also not white.
"Mens in Black" would like a word about grammar... Although I guess it doesn't matter for an "acquire and expire" target whose name wasn't publicly recognised to start with.
Nope, works is the valid plural here, consider "Department of Public Works", "By their works shall ye know them".
Work is not reliably a mass noun: it makes sense to speak of a work by a particular author.
In fact I suspect that's the joke in the name, "work in progress" uses the mass noun and "works in progress" uses the count noun, which is somewhat specific to creative, well, works.
I find it pretty awesome that the Stripe is successful enough to start branching out from core product into founder hobby areas. The cynical perspective is that this is not core to the product, but I find it kind of beautiful that the founders can do a bit of what is personally interesting to them with their company.
This reminds me of another incredible resource for deep learning articles: https://distill.pub/, which unfortunately looks like is going silent.