Lecture 11 - Hiring and Culture, Part 2 (Patrick and John Collison, Ben Silbermann)

Part two of culture and team and we have Ben Silberman the founder of Pinterest and John and Patrick Collison the founders of stripe um Founders that have obviously sort of some of the best in the world at thinking about culture and how they build teams so there's three areas that we're going to cover today one will just be sort of General thoughts on culture as a follow-up to the last lecture and then we're really Going to dig into what happens at the founding of these companies and and building out the early team and then how

that changes and evolves uh as these guys have scaled their companies up to you know 100 plus I don't even know how many people you have now but quite a lot the very large organizations and how you adapt these principles of culture um but to start off I just want to uh ask a very open in a question which is what are the core pieces of culture that you Found to be most important in building out your companies start sure what are the what are the most important parts yeah it's on oh it's on um

yeah I mean I think I think for us like we think about it on a few Dimensions like one is like who do we hire and what do those people value um two is what do we do every day like why do we do it um three is what do we choose to communicate uh and then I think the fourth is what we choose to celebrate And I guess the converse of that is like what you choose to punish but uh in general I think running a company based on what you celebrate is more more

exciting than what you punish but I think those four things um kind of make up the bulk of it for us we've placed a a large emphasis on as stripe has grown and probably more than other companies is uh transparency internally uh and I think it's something that's been really valuable for stripe Uh and also a little bit misunderstood uh all the things people talk about like you know hiring really great people or giving them a huge amount of Leverage uh transparency for us plays into that we think that you know if you are aligned

at a a high level about what stripe is doing if everyone really believes in the mission and then if everyone has uh really good access to information and kind of has a good picture of the current state of Stripe uh then that gets you a a huge amount of the of of the way there in terms of working productively together uh and it it kind of forgives a lot of the other things that tend to break as you as you grow a startup and so we've as we've grown you know we we started off two

people we're now over 170 people we've put a lot of thought into the the tooling that goes around uh transparency because you know at 170 people there is so much information being produced that You can't just consume it all as a fire hose uh and so how we you know use slack how we use email things like that we can go into it more later uh but I think that's one of the core things that's helped us work well um I think culture to some degree is basically kind of the the resolution to a bandwidth

problem uh in the sense that uh you know maybe when you start out working on something you're sort of coding all the time but you can't code all of the things that You think the product might need or the company might need or whatever and so you decid to work with with more coders right um and uh and so you know the organization gets larger and maybe in some idealized world I don't think this is actually true but kind of ideally you could be involved in every single decision in every single sort of moment of

the company and everything that happens but obviously you can't or maybe you can at two people but you certainly Can't at even like five or 10 kind of that that point comes very quickly then by the time you're 50 it's completely hopeless and so culture is kind of how you uh kind of what the the the strands are that you sort of want to have the invariance that you want to kind of maintain uh as you can get specifically involved instead of fewer and fewer decisions over time um and uh I think when you think

about it that way you know maybe it's kind of importance Becomes sort of self evident right because again like the fraction of things you can be involved in directly is like diminishing I mean almost exponentially sort of assuming your your your your headcount growth is sort of on a curve that looks like you know one of the the great companies um and uh yeah that that's that's super important and and kind of it manifests itself in a a you know a bunch of you know different ways like for example uh in hiring uh I Think

a large part of the reason why the maybe the first 10 people you hire what kind of go to sh decisions are so important is because you're not just hiring those first 10 people you're actually kind of hiring a 100 people because you should think of kind of each one of those people as bringing along sort of another 10 people with them uh and sort of figuring out exactly what sort of what 90 people uh you would like those first 10 people to bring along is Is obviously uh you know it's it's going to be

quite consequential for for your uh for your company um but really briefly I think it's it's largely about sort of uh abstraction so one thing a lot of speakers in this class have touched on is how uh hiring those first 10 employees if you don't get that right the company basically uh will never recover but no one's talked about how to do that so so what what have the three Of you looked for um when you've hired these initial employees to get the culture of the company right how how have you found them and what

have you looked for uh sure so I guess this answer is different for every every company and I I'll say for for us it was very inductive so I literally looked for people that I wanted to work with and that I thought were talented um I think I've read all these books about culture because when I don't know how to do something I first go read things and everyone has all these Frameworks and I think one big big misconception um that someone said once is that people think culture is like architecture when it's a lot

more like gardening uh you know you plant some seeds and then you pull out weeds that aren't working and they sort of expand so when we first hired people um we Hired people that were like ourselves um and I often looked at like three or four different things that I I I really valued in people you I looked for people that worked hard and seemed high integrity and low ego um I look for people that were creative and that usually meant they were really curious they had all these different interests um some of our first

employees uh are probably some of the quirkiest people I've ever met um they were engineers but They also had all these crazy Hobbies like one guy had made his own board game uh with this elaborate set of rules another guy was really into magic tricks uh and he had coded not only like this magic trick on the iPhone but he had shot the production video in the preview um and I think that that that quirkiness has actually been a little bit of a calling card and we find that really creative Corky people that are excited

about many disciplines and are Extraordinary at one um tend to build really great products they tend to be great at collaborating um and the last thing is you know we really look for people that wanted to they just wanted to build something great and and they weren't they weren't arrogant about it but they just felt like it'd be really cool to take a risk and build something bigger than themselves um and that at the beginning is very very easy to select for um if you were in our Situation we had this horrible office like nobody

got paid and so there was no external reason other than being excited about building something uh to join in fact there was every reason not to um and that's something looking back I really really value because we always knew people were joining for the purest reasons and in fact we're willing to forgo other great job opportunities Market salary uh a clean office uh you know good equipment just for the chance To work so so um to this day I think a lot of those traits have been seated and are embedded in the folks that we

look at now um yeah the first 10 hires are really hard uh because you know you're you're making these first 10 hires at a point where no one's heard of this company no one really wants to work for it you're just these like two weird people working on this weird idea like like their friends are telling them not To join uh for our second employee uh uh he was like I think maybe he accepted the offer or he was just about to and his best friends like took him out the night before it was like

a full-on assault for uh you know why you should not join this company why this is like ruining your life basically um and uh and so anyway the guy subsequently or continued to join and actually one of those friends also now works at stripe uh but uh but uh this is what you're up Against yeah um and I mean it's also hard because no batch of 10 people will have as great an influence on the uh on the company those first 10 people um and I think everyone's impression of recruiting is you know you you

open LinkedIn it's sort of like ordering off the dollar menu you just like I want that one and that one and that one uh and now you have some hires whereas uh at least for us uh it was very much over uh a very long time period uh talking People we knew uh or friends of friends into joining uh we we didn't have you know huge networks uh Patrick and I were both in college at the time so there were no people that we'd you know we' really worked with to draw on uh and so

a lot of those early Stripes were people we had heard of friends of friends uh and the other interesting thing they all had in common is that they were all sort of um early in their career or undervalued in some way because when you Think about it if someone is a a known spectacular quantity then you know they're probably working in a job and very happy with that and so we had to to try and find people who were uh you know in the case of our uh design that we hired he was 18 and

in high school and in Sweden at the time uh in the case of our our CTO he was uh in uh he was in college at the time you know a lot of these people they were they were early on in their careers uh and the only way We could you know you you you can you can relax one constraint you can um you know relax the fact that they're talented or relax you know that it's apparent that they're talented uh and we you know not consciously but we we relax the ladder yeah I I

I think s of finding kind of the people who uh uh are kind I guess you to kind of think like a value investor right you're you're looking for the for the the human capital that's uh that's significant undervalued by the Market you know you probably shouldn't look to hire uh your your brilliant friends at Facebook and Google or whatever because they're already discovered you know if if they're W to join that's great but uh they're probably uh harder to convince um uh John I spent a little a while yesterday afternoon sort of trying to

figure out in retrospect um what kind of traits uh our first 10 or so people had in common that we thought were significant um you Know in general sort of speaking about culture uh you know I sort of want to cave out everything we say with you know I I Paul bu I think said that sort of advice is you know very limited experience wildly uh overe extrapolated um and uh I think there's a lot of Truth to that but uh for for our particular first 10 people the things we sort of uh figured out

that seem to be important were uh there also genuine and straight um I think that actually matters quite a Lot in that sort of there are people that uh that others want to work with um they're people that others trust they sort of have an intellectual honesty in how they approach problems and so forth um they were people who really liked getting things finished uh there's a lot of people who are really excited about tons of things only a subset of those are actually excited about like completing things uh you know there's a lot of

talk about for example uh hiring People you know off their GitHub resumes whatever I actually think that doesn't quite ring kind of correct to me in the sense that that places a large premium on sort of lots of different things I I think it's actually a priori sort of much more interesting to to you know work with someone who has spent two years sort of really investing in going deep in a particular area um and then uh the third trait that they all seem to have in common is they just sort of Cared a great

deal like it was offensive to them when something was just a little bit off and kind of again in hindsight there all these like crazy things we used to do that um uh I mean do in fact seem crazy like we probably shouldn't have done them but everyone was always like well was borderline insane instead of how much they cared about tiny details like we used to um uh like every single API requests that ever generated an error went to all Of our inboxes and phoned all of us uh because it seemed terrible to like

ever have an error that that you know uh didn't go and sort of get a resolution from the user standpoint um or we to like copy everyone else on every outgoing email and we'd like point out you know slight grammar or spelling mistakes to each other because it' be terrible to every send an email with a spelling mistake um so uh anyway those were the the three traits we come up With anyway a genuine um uh uh caring a great deal and um uh Sor was my second one the other one yes um completing sorry

sorry yes completing things like list of three items yeah Ian the only say I I just don't think there's any wrong place to find people um so when I look back at our our first few folks that we hired they came from all over the place like I put up ads on Craigslist I went to random Tech Talks um you know we met people at bar we used to throw weekly barbecues at the office it was like bring your own like bring your own food and drinks and then we would just talk to folks I

think every time I ever went and got coffee in palato like one of you guys was uh recruiting at Koopa because their office was is like strategically situated next to the best coffee shop um but I think that the really good people generally um they're generally doing something else And so you have to go seek them out rather than expecting that they're going to seek you out uh triple so uh when no one's ever heard of or is using uh the product that you're working on yeah and it's probably really important to have a uh

great elevator pitch not even for investors but just because everyone you uh run into to right now is you know maybe 6 months a year down the road a potential recruit uh and so the the Right time to have gotten them excited about your company the right time for them to have started following it and you know be thinking about it as they think about what they're going to do next um is you know as soon as you can start uh it's going to take a very long time to recruit people so being able to

consistently get people excited about what they're what you're doing uh will pay back dividends later maybe this is um uh a little bit Tangential but John I were also chatting about yesterday afternoon sort of uh like a bunch of our friends have sort of started companies right out of school we're sort of thinking about uh you know what what seems to go wrong in those companies uh and I think something that um that maybe the most common uh failure mode seems to be sort of doing something kind of overly Niche or overly sort of specific

and bounded I think maybe it comes from sort of uh like there's a Major shift in time Horizon as you go from classes to building a startup right a class kind of plays out on a quarter or a semester or whatever um whereas a startup is like a a five or 10 year thing um and I think this is really problematic because uh it's actually quite hard to hire people for Niche things uh in that if if you tell somebody look we're going to build a rocket that goes to Mars like I mean that sounds

almost impossible but it Also sounds [ __ ] awesome right uh and so it's actually pretty easy to can be able to work in it whereas if it's well you know we're going to build this I don't want to single out any particular idea because probably sound like I'm picking some actual startup that's doing it but you know if you pick something pretty narrow something that maybe kind of inductively comes out of the kinds of problems you'd solve as part of a class project that's actually much harder to Hire for one specific question that has

come up a lot um is how as a relatively inexperienced founder do you identify who the really great people are so you know you meet people at these barbecues or for your friends or whatever and maybe you've worked with them a little bit but what specifically did did you guys do in your processes to identify like you know what this person's going to be really great or when did you Really get it wrong but what what have you learned about how to identify Raw Talent if you can't just say well they work at Google or

Facebook they must be good well I mean you'll never like 100% know obviously until you work with folks which is why the flip side of it is you know if someone you hire just wasn't a good fit you owe it to the company and to them uh to tell them how they can improve and if they're not working out to fire them but I think that the Generally that question of talent falls into two big buckets like one is you have some sense of what makes them good at their job uh and there are some

areas where you have taste in that area um and there's somewh you don't and the ones where you don't are actually much more difficult um so what we would do is is we would do a few things like first before talking to anyone we try to get a sense for like what what is really world class in that discipline mean and this Becomes very very important later when you're hiring things like head of finance and you don't know anything about Finance except what was contained in like a library book you got about like an introduction

to finance or head of marketing um so uh I always made it a habit of like talking to people that I knew de facto were world class and then asking them specifically what are the key traits or characteristics that you look for what are the questions that you Ask and how do you and how do you find them and and if you're looking for the next person that's as good as you like where are where is that person working right now and like what's what's her phone number um I think that like learning what good

and bad is during the interview process is extremely expensive it's an expensive use of your time and it's an expensive use of everyone else's time so pre-calibration of that really matters um and then once you have Someone in sort of the interview process uh you'll build the process over time uh to both um screen quality and so um at Pinterest you know we have an evolving set of standard questions that we're always rotating through and we're always measuring are these good indicators or bad indicators of quality but the other thing that the questions are meant

to do is they're supposed to give a sense for is this the right place for that person to come and work um and this is to the Point you guys made about being very transparent about what's going to be easy or hard really great people want to do things that are hard they want to they want to solve tough problems and so um there was a there was a certain Brilliance in in Google setting out these interview questions that were thought to be really difficult because then people who like solving really difficult problems uh they

come out and Seek those um I think it's really important even as companies get bigger that you don't whitewash the risks um I heard that uh PayPal you would go in and after interviewing with like Peter teal and Max leevin then they would say and by the way like Von Master Card want to kill us and we might be doing something it's illegal uh but if you succeed you'll redefine payments um or when they were recruiting for the iPhone they didn't even tell people what they were Doing they're like you won't see your families for

uh three years um but when you're done when you're done your kids's kids will remember what you built um and I think that's a really good thing in recruiting as well that you're very very transparent about why you think it's an amazing opportunity but you lay out in gory detail um why it's going to be hard and then the right people select in or they select out um of that opportunity um evidence suggest is worth People to see their kids though um I feel like one thing you have to do uh as you try to

identify Talent is have the uh the confidence to to interview for it in a way that works for you uh I think uh you know if you're uh say you're not the you know the world's best engineer and you you're you're trying to interview engineering candidates uh I think it's tempting to try to Cargo C to what everyone else does and you know get them to code on a whiteboard and do Other engineering interview things you know you know in the case of stripe hiring our first engineer we we flew the guy out and we

uh spent a weekend coding with him and you know looked over his shoulder and kind of it was the only way we could really tell and get ourselves confident uh that that person was good and I think you can actually extend that to to other roles where again you're not an expert in that you know I'm no business development Guru but when we Interview people for business development rules we'll ask them to do a project you know where they H talk about how they would improve an existing partnership that stripe has or which new Partnerships

they would go out and do and again you know even though it's not my domain area I I am actually confident enough that I can I can judge those pretty well and I think people often have this impostor syndrome when it comes to to interviewing for roles yeah I think a pretty specific kind of just tactical thing um to to do for again the first 10 people is to work with them as much as you can uh before committing to hiring them I mean once you reach a certain scale it's kind of Impractical because it's

a huge time commitment on their side and also I mean it's just would be unscalable expensive from your side um but it it's really worth it to get the first 10 people right and so for a majority maybe even all of the first 10 people uh we we worked with them in some capacity usually for a week in advance and it's pretty hard to to fake it for for a week um uh it tend to be pretty clear qu quite quite quickly um another thing I thought of uh you know to the question of sort

of how how do you know like who's great or who's good enough whatever and people always talk about sort of this notion of the 10x person sort of whatever the skill set is I don't really know what 10x means I Think maybe the the slightly more kind of helpful or like intuitive version of that is is this person probably uh the best out of all of their friends at what they do um uh and so you know it's a little bit sensitive to how well they choose friends how many they have but uh for me

at least I find that kind of a more helpful way to think about it like is this the best engineer this engineer knows um and uh and the other thing I think that's actually prob just worth Mentioning in all those kind of first 10 people are even generally on the culture and hiring topic um I think everyone uh sort of doesn't realize until they go through themselves how important it is and large part because uh the like in life and the media and everything people focus way too much on Founders and that like here we

are and so kind of we're reinforcing the sort of structural narrative that like stripe is about John and Patrick and Pinterest is about Ben And so forth uh whereas I mean obviously sort of the vast majority of what our companies do like 99.9% is being done by people who are not us right and I think I mean obviously that's kind of it's obvious when you say it um but it's s of very much not just the the macro narrative and you know companies are abstract you kind of need to associate them with specific people but

I think it's worth bearing in mind that like for you know Apple you know everything was Was you know Steve Jobs was like a tiny tiny detail at the end right or Google with Lowry and so forth so don't screw it up is what you're saying something like that I think you know the only other thing I'll mention is that I think referencing people is really important um and uh referencing people is just what it sounds like you're basically asking people who have real material working experience um for their honest opinion and uh we we

do that really Aggressively and what we're trying to figure out is what's this person like to work with um uh we're not trying to validate like whether they told the truth on their resume because we assume that they're telling the truth so very standard questions that that I'll ask somebody um is in an interview I might I might I might say Hey you know we both know um Jonathan in common I'm going to talk to him uh you know in a couple weeks because we're both social friends Like if I asked him um what what

you're the best at or what you would be most proud of or what you were kind of working to improve what would what would he or she say um because it sort of tests a level of self-awareness and creates a bit of social accountability uh and then I'll try to ask something that makes the question which is typically very soft feel a little bit more quantitative and then calibrate that over time so uh you know in Evaluating this person of this Dimension do you think this is the top 1% of people you've ever worked with

the top 5% and the top 10% and it forces a scarcity that gives a materially different uh reference uh than if you just say hey like what's the best thing about John uh he told me you know he's good at these things can you validate they're like yeah sure because they they don't get anything so I think that's uh just a tool that people should should Take seriously yeah yeah and referencing isn't obviously easy to begin with uh but it it does actually prove really useful over time uh and you just have to people I

think especially for named references people really want to be nice so you have to do things like create an artificial SC scity by saying you know where would you rank this person amongst the people you've worked with in this role uh or you know there's list out on the internet of how to reference but uh You should aim to spend you know 15 minutes on the on the phone with that person not just let them say yeah this person is this person is awesome and then hang up that's also tremendous source of new recruits yeah

H that was references are also a tremendous source of new recruits um what what have each of you learned about once you hire these first people and they join what what have you done to to make them effective quickly to get them sort of you know to The right cultural Place uh you know cuz sort of hiring is usually very difficult but they not as difficult as making them happy and effective so what what do you do with these early employees to accomplish that um well the answer that's changed when we've gone from really small

to bigger uh when we first started we were generally hiring because we needed that person like a long time ago and so their whole onboarding was like here's your Computer we already set up your environment don't worry about it this is the problem that we have to solve together um and then because of the because of the nature of the startup so we were all in this like tiny two-bedroom apartment um all of the other things like building personal relationship spending time together getting to know it just all happened kind of automatically like you didn't

have to do anything um uh the one thing That I would add to that is though we would always try to remind people of like where we wanted to go someday cuz it's really easy when you first join to drop someone into a problem and then they think the whole world is like this little problem in front of them we'd always say you know hey someday we want to do for uh we want to do for Discovery what Google did for search and this is our plan for trying to get that done um now as

the company grows I think that uh That process has to get a little bit more formalized um and so we spend a lot of time thinking and honestly trying to constantly refine what does that person's experience look like from the day they came in uh to their very first interview through 30 days after they join like do they have somebody whose name they know do they know who their manager is have they sat down with people on their team uh do they know what the general architecture of the Company is and what the top priorities

are uh and we have a program and it's um a week long and then there sort function specific programs that go in deeper um and that's something that's always been refined and the output metrics that we look on that is one we ask people like what did you think afterwards and then 30 days afterwards and then we also asked their peers and their manager like hey is this person kind of up to speed do you feel like we've done a good job Making them productive and if if we haven't um that's a key a that

that team shouldn't be hiring any more people because they're not doing a good job bringing in new people um and be that we need to retool that um and so I think those things are important I just wouldn't discount just how important it is to get to know the person as a person like what are their aspirations what's their working style uh how do they like to be recognized um do they really Prefer being in total silence uh do they are they a morning person or night person like knowing those things I think uh it

just demonstrates that you care about them individually as well well as collectively like what your what your goals are uh I think there's two things that are important at any stage though the implementation will change the first is to get them up and running doing real work quickly because that's only when You can find the problems that's the only way they'll that's how progress is measured is how much real work they're doing and so you know when we have uh Engineers start we'll try to get them committing on the first day when we have you

know people in business R start we will have them in real meetings on the first day uh on on what they're meant to be working on but I think sometimes there's a tendency to to be tentative and help ease people in we're much more Of the um push people off the cliff um School uh and then I think the second is to try and start quickly giving people feedback and especially feedback on how to adapt to the culture because when you think about it like you know if you have built a strong culture uh as

you know all the companies up here you know are trying to then it's going to it's going to take some adapting for the person and it's not going to be necessarily easy you know when thing we had at stripe was Just the culture was was a lot more written uh and so you know you would have people who were right next to each other each with headphones on and just like I aming away to each other uh and for you know a lot of people coming in who hadn't worked in an environment like that it's

it's sort of hard in normal places exactly yeah uh and so uh everything from kind of high level how you're doing at your job to to to kind of minor cultural pointers the the the More feedback you can give them uh the better they'll do and it's unnatural right because it's unnatural to uh be constantly telling people that they're doing good or bad job you don't do that you know hopefully in your you know in your in your normal life you're more restrained uh but when you have employees that's kind of why do you owe

them for them to do well so I think this is sort of a good transition to as your companies have scaled um what what are The biggest changes you've had to make to your hiring processes and also how you sort of manage and run the teams as you've gone from you know two to 10 to 100 to a th000 employees there there are a lot of changes uh I mean I think one thing that we try to do on the team side is the goal is to make the teams feel as autonomous and Nimble as

possible within the constraints of having a large organization um and that means over time that we're always trying To make it feel like a startup of many startups rather than this monolithic organization with a set of foreign processes that cut horizontally through it and that's easier said than done I think that like we're not all the way there but um one of our goals is that each team has they control the resour that they need to to get things done they know what the most important thing is and how it's measured um and that way

then the management problem becomes Somewhat tractable otherwise it feels completely impossible if you can't decompose it into autonomous units like you just look at it and you're like oh my gosh like communication complexity is increasing geometrically management complexity like it's never going to work and so you have to sort of create these abstracted units or that's at least what we're going to try to do um and at Pinterest in particular the real challenge of creating those abstracted Units is um we want to actually have units that Encompass uh a super strong designer a super strong

um leader in engineering um often a writer um often uh um sometimes like a community manager we want them all to be self-contained um and so that makes the problem really hard but that's kind of core to our philosophy of how we build products we try to put people together that have all these different disciplines they're curious about lots of things then we Anchor them on a single project then we try to remove barriers to let them go fast when we find new barriers we sit down we think how do we speed that up I

think hiring um is a little bit different and I think the biggest uh the biggest change and the biggest asset that you get as you get more people is referrals become like more and more and more and more the lifeblood depending on sort of the network of all the people that you bring in so one of the really Lucky and in hindsight gr decisions that we made was our actual 14th or 15th person that we hired was a professional recruiter um and she had worked at startups um she had worked at big companies like apple

but she sort of knew where um that pipeline uh breaks down kind of knew the early indicators and taught everyone um not just how to sort of screen for talent but how scalably to identify the people that are going to be like culturally like really Good for the company and I I think looking back on that um is something that I I personally really value um you know there's just like a huge amount of stuff here right in that sort of uh I guess this is all under kind of the rubric of of managing growth

and you know like either your company sort of fails very quickly or sort of all of your problems become in some way about managing growth um one thing that I Think tends to take people by surprise and certainly took me by surprise is kind of how quickly um just like the time Horizons change uh in that sort of in your first month uh you're you're largely thinking about things on on maybe one month ahead right uh in that maybe that's kind of what your development uh road map is is oriented around your even in terms

of who you're working with maybe it's like really informal relationships where they Haven't sort of fully committed to to remain full-time or whatever right and that kind of the the the more time goes by I think that kind of has a reciprocal uh or corresponding uh increase in the time Horizon so after one year you're kind of thinking one year ahead after four years you're thinking four years ahead um and uh and that increases very quickly right and so after you know say after one month it's again super short term and then just uh 11

months later You should now actually be thinking and planning you know a year ahead and and think about kind of human structures on that time Horizon thinking about you know stuff Ben talked about like um you know where you want to be going long term and and things like that um I think that also plays into your hiring and the kinds of people you hire right in that in the really early days you kind of have to hire people who will be productive essentially immediately like You you you don't have the luxury of hiring people

who are sort of really promising but you know they're not quite going to be up to speed for another year or two they have to be able to contribute immediately but after two or three years now it sort of starts to get you know much more reasonable to to make those Investments and in fact if you're not making those Investments you're probably being much too shortterm uh and so I think that's uh that's really Important um a lot of it also just comes from uh sort of like all these problems in some sense are easy

like how do you build kind of good social bonds between people I mean we we all do it you know every day right uh it's kind of how do you how do you kind of make it systematic and sort of effective at scale and it's always kind of a very like severely imperfect approximation of what you ideally do if you were small and just kind of what what hacks can you Pull to sort of make it work as well as you possibly can at at a larger scale like a a rapidly growing company say growing

headcount you know two or 3x a year just like it's a very unnatural thing uh and so it's sort of you know what's what's the least bad way of sort of managing that period of growth human organizations aren't designed for it um and I think it's worth being sort of like quite systematic about sort of thinking about ways to do that but um Realizing that you probably can't do much better than uh than sort of adequate and you know for stripe it's things like we have three meals every day at sort of long tables where

kind of everyone can sit together right and if you think of sort of net how much more total human interaction happens as a result of having these kind of randomly mixed meals I mean it's vast right and there kind of a a whole list of things like that but I think that's kind of the General framework one thing I'm really curious about you guys value transparency how have you scaled it over time um I know we think about fing out it all the time I'm just curious um so uh you know startups in some sense

I can't remember who it was um sort of defined it as like a startup is kind of an organization that's not yet stuck with all these kind of principal agent problems that at most sort of large companies uh what is Locally optimal for you is very frequently you know not what is globally optimal for the company um uh and so uh you know there there as a consequence of that probably a lot of ways in which startup can work differently to a big company and a big company a lot of the you know things that

are good for you uh uh well you you you couldn't do them in a completely transparent environment right because people would think less of you or I mean you're not you're doing Things you're not supposed to but because everyone is kind of sailing in or rowing in the same direction at a startup you can actually just make all the information transparent uh and so um uh yeah I mean from a very early I guess I mentioned earlier like stripe used to uh BCC every other person at stripe on basically every single outgoing email unless you

opted out of it because we thought that would be sort of much more efficient you would wouldn't need to Have as many meetings if you could just kind of keep a breast of what's happening and over time we've sort of built uh an increasingly intricate sort of framework of mailing lists and we now have like a program for generating Gmail filters um and for like a pretty Rocky patch where 50 people or so uh to to to Ben's point of like asking people instead of how they're getting on after the first couple of days they

all reported terribly because because like They couldn't even you know find all the emails people were sending to them and they were missing things and everything um Gmail broke at one stage oh right at one point Gmail broke because you're just like sending too much email um and uh I mean it is hard to scale because it's I mean you you you might sort of contact somebody outside of the company um uh with like some great idea and maybe like person sitting across the way from you Thinks that's like the stupidest idea they've ever heard

right and you're kind of subject to the scrutiny of the entire organization to some degree with all of your communication like that's kind of the the challenging side of it and then you the the good side is people are much more informed about what's happening um I guess I I don't feel that I can give a much um stronger uh endorsement of it than it has worked so far um pretty Good uh yeah I'm actually really curious how or whether it'll work when we're you know 5,000 people or something like that if wherever at that

scale I think the two things that have helped us scale it are one changing the tools and two developing the culture around it uh and so on the tools front you know it used to be the case that uh or kind of the infrastructure it used to be the case that you could keep a breast by of What's Happen in the company by reading All the email now we have you know weekly All Hands sometimes with a deck and you know we actually have to go put all this work into developing a deck to to

communicate to people what's going on in the company uh since there's so much more uh and the second is on the cultural side you know so much information being available internally uh you have to develop cultural norms around how it's treated you know obvious things like you know the the fact that a Lot of it is confident confidential to stripe but even less obvious things like you know when emailing someone or talking in in in slack or IRC when that is is viewed by now 170 people it's actually you know it's pretty easy to get

stage right you know and it's uh it's pretty easy for you know what you thought was a a reasonable proposal you know you get this drive by criticism and you're you're you know now less likely to share in future and so we've had to Create Norms around you know when it's reasonable to jump into discussions and how that interaction works because people are on stage so much more I'm I'm pretty sure it's net good but um not to put her on the spot but uh Emily intern at striped this summer I'm curious like as an

intern what you thought of it I I think overall it's great I think like my first week I spent most of the time just reading hackpad and getting caught up on what the company was doing it can often Be quite distracting um from your own work as there are often times other parts of the company you're really interested in hpad by the way is like Google Docs but with a news feed and you can just like see all the documents yeah and you're encouraged to make everything public everything you work on um but overall it

gets you spun up really quickly and we also have things called spin-ups where every single sort of leader of a team at the company whether It's like CIS or its product gives like a 30 minute talk on what their team is currently doing and sort of how you can contribute if you're interested did you think email transparency was net good yes I remember having a hard time understanding what I should and should not subscribe to and um like the first week having like 2,000 emails in my inbox and then by the end you know there's

like three or four teams you actually want um that information coming In from All Right audience questions yes so this question is for fabrick and John um is it your experience that your early hours are a to draw a BL into leadership roles as the company skills and for Ben um how is what PS what p is today how is it different than your initial vision of the product and the audience would be all right we'll go uh first on have the people actually all three of you are weling as this have the people that

You've hired early been able to grow into leadership roles um in strip's case yes in that uh uh quite a number of the the first 10 people are in are in leadership roles now uh I think that's one thing that uh organizations again it's sort of an unnatural skill that they have to get good at is realizing that you know people don't necessarily come out of the womb being good at managing or you know being good at uh at leadership uh and Being able to to develop that in people uh and being able to uh

you know help people progress as they spend a number of years the company um it's it's a lot of it's a lot of work at a time when everyone is you know running around at their hair on fire uh but it it's also sort of damaging if the company can't develop that skill yeah I think for us the answer is some yes and some no um uh I don't know I think one of the big benefits of working At a startup is that you can be handed a challenge that no one else would be crazy

enough to give you the opportunity to to take on and that could be managing people it could be taking on a project um but the implicit contract with that is that uh if you ask someone to take a really big risk on that it shouldn't be like one way through the door and if you don't succeed otherwise it creates fright to to give it a sh so you know we have some folks that are managing large Teams that started as um kind of individual programmers where they were engineering and they said hey I'd love to

try I'd love to try leading a project and then leading a group and then taking responsibility for management taking a group uh and we have other folks that tried it and then we're like I'm really glad I tried it because I never want to do that again uh and we try to make sure that for those people like you can have just as much impact at a company um Through your individual contributions as an engineer or designer you don't have to manage um but but it's really hard to predict until you give people a shot

and so my strong preference is that you give as many people a shot as possible um and in the few areas where you really feel like the there's too much kind of learning curve relative to the business objective you're trying to achieve that's when um you look for somebody who might be able to walk in and really Execute well on that job you want to answer question oh so the question was uh how's the vision changed since we initially started yes um a sure um well I mean I think on on the vision uh when

we first started you know I think we started it like like hiring very inductively we were like oh we're going to build this really cool tool people are going to enjoy it I love Collecting things maybe other people like collecting things um and what we didn't expect that kind of revealed itself early on was that um looking at other people's collections turns out to be this really amazing way to discover things that you didn't know you were looking for um and it becomes kind of a solution to a problem that a lot of other technology

don't have and so over the last couple years especially we've poured enormous kind of Technical and Design resources into building out recommendations products search products feed products um leveraging kind of the unique data that we have which are these pins that were all handpicked by someone and hand categorized um and then on the audience side I mean I think the first big surprise was you know truthfully like when we first started we didn't really know if anyone would use it and we were just happy that anybody that wasn't like related to us and obligated Uh

by like familiar relationship would use it and so one of the biggest surprises was has been how many people and how diverse those groups of people have been um and so I think that's been one of the things that's really exciting and and the funny thing is that is often like the company goes farther along your aspirations therefore like get bigger so so there's like this Gap that always exists I tell my team between like where we are and where I think we should be And even though objectively we're much farther along I feel like

the Gap is widened even farther um but I think that's a really common trait amongst people who found companies yes you said that like uh while selling the vision of the company you have to describe in G detail that how hard it is going to be and like you won't see their families for three years but then it would also be the thing that their grandchildren would be proud of But how do you really know like both of you know that the second part is like it's not it's not guaranteed but the first part that

they're not going to see their family for the next year is going to be there for short so like how can you be authentic like selling that vision of the company or is it like about like giving High returns for the high risk that they can giving them a lot of equ great is that so so the question is uh most startups are not the IPhone you can't guarantee that people's grandchildren are going to remember this because most startups fail how do you convince people to sort of make sacrifices to join a startup I think

um uh part of the way sort of in which it resonates with people is because it's not guaranteed right if it were guaranteed then it would be boring uh and so it's that sort of there is the prospect of uh sort of you know affecting this outcome um but But nothing sort of nothing more than that potential um you know to the sort of not seeing their their uh families or kids or whatever uh I mean startups often do involve sort of longer hours in the beginning but uh you know I think well um uh

I think that that particular story is probably somewhat overstated uh I guess it was I think Scott forall was trying to recruit these people uh but I mean I even though startups especially in the earlier days tend to involve Somewhat work longer working hours I think there's kind of this tendency to to exaggerate it and sort of I mean it's it's like the startup version of fishing like every startup thinks they worked even more insane hours than you know the the next one back in the early days like we we literally never sleeped or slept

rather for uh for two years um uh so uh I don't know I I think that realistically for most people it's not that big a sacrifice right uh you're Maybe on average re being really realistic about it people work two hours more on average per day it it's it's certainly a sacrifice but it is not um uh for going all you know pleasure and enjoyment for for the next half decade yeah I mean I think even the iPhone wasn't the iPhone before it got done right so uh I mean no no smart person you're hiring

is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future that only you have and that joining is a Guaranteed thing and in fact if you're telling them that and they select in like they like you probably shouldn't hire them because they didn't they didn't pass like a basic intelligence test about uncertainty uh in the future um but I but I think it's fair to say like you know what's exciting and where you think it can go and where it's going to be hard and chart your best plan um and then tell them

like why their role in it Could be instrumental um because it is um you know I really liked what what you said uh you know if you tell people like Hey we're going to go to Mars it attracts the best people and then you're incrementally closer to getting to Mars um and and they know that going in um what I would discourage doing is just whitewashing all of that um and if people kind of are joining because they want sort of oh I want all the certainty and guarantee of working at Google Plus Like the

perk of working in a small startup with more email and transparency like that's a that's a really really negative sign um and uh for example when I interview people um they'll often say oh I'm really passionate about what you're doing and then I'm like where else are you interviewing and then then they'll just list like seven companies that have nothing to do with each other uh except they're sort of at the same stage we at they're like I you know I Love the problem of Discovery so I'm interviewing at uh stripe Dropbox Airbnb Uber uh

I'm also putting into my resume into Google X into that part of the division and that's a sign that they're probably not being authentic with which they care about and those folks often when things get really hard they won't stick it out um and work through it um because they were really signing up for an experience not for achieving a goal I think the other um thing that motivates People a great deal in addition to sort of the the prospect of sort of um uh you know affecting some outcome uh is just sort of the

the personal development angle in that a startup just because it's much kind of uh more lightly stuffed uh it's kind of a it's much less forgiving right in that like even if you're the best person in the world you're not going to or well whether or not you're the best or the worst person in the world you're probably not going To significantly alter Google's trajectory right um whereas uh if if you sort of really want to you know benchmark yourself and sort of see how much of a contribution and an impact you can make and

I think kind of that Prospect is quite compelling to a lot of the best people then a startup is sort of a much better place to to go test that all right last question who you want uh last question um so this is question for Ben but you guys can all Answer it um but how has your user base affected your hiring strategy so Pinterest is a site that's used like 80% by women um so how did that affect your initial hiring decisions how has your user base affected your hiring strategy yeah so you know

conventional wisdom is like you only hire people that religiously use your product every single day um and that probably works really well if you're making an API it's probably amazing um uh for us like we Screen for people that are ambitious and excited about um the vision of tracking Discovery online uh and they have to know like exactly how our service works and have to have used it but they may not be a lifelong user and that for us is this great opportunity because we can be like what is the barrier that's preventing you from

using it come join remove that barrier and help us get closer to kind of that Vision um I don't know there there's a lot of uh if you Read any startup book there's all this like startup wisdom that sounds like really reasonable but it's only useful if it works in your particular circumstance and so for us we've had to sort of broaden uh the lens a little bit and looking broadly about people that are ambitious about the mission uh that care about the product and our approach to building products even if from day one they

weren't our earliest users the one thing I'll just t on to That um is that uh when we talked about the fact that you know it's really hard to hire for those early employees and you know you have people who have other good options uh you know you're very much at the ugly duckling stage uh finding people who are passionate about your can be a great way to to find people because there you kind of have an unnatural advantage over other companies and so I know for sure in strip's case we definitely uh you know

uh we hired I Think it was four stripe users in the in the very early days uh and you know those were people who who we probably couldn't have gotten otherwise I'm sure it was the same in Pinterest case where like you you know you you'll get all this benefit of working at Pinterest and hey it's Pinterest uh you get to work where you pin um yeah thank you guys very much for coming in today thank you