We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best examples ever of simultaneously selling to the largest companies in the world while not giving up on a strong self-serve product. So many B2B companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock photography; no product imagery.
Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development.
Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.
Congrats, Patrick. The VMware + AWS experience is certainly a big plus for a company like Stripe.
I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one.
In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB.
It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin.
In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine.
Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.
Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS has, I would contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.
As you acknowledge, there are few companies that have made the transition from growth to growth+sales in the way AWS has. If Mike can help Stripe chart that course and avoid the shoals along the way, that's hugely positive for customers, employees and owners of Stripe.
I learned about AWS and Stripe at around the same time, but while AWS's dashboard has become truly overwhelming, Stripe has until recently been very focused on your core product.
I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc.
Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons?
(I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))
I think that the infrastructure market naturally breeds a lot of products for pretty specific/narrow use cases, whereas our strategy is more about marrying financial capabilities with very broad/flexible APIs. Given that, we've always valued very cohesive and composable functionality between the different facets of Stripe, having a straightforward and tightly integrated Dashboard, and so on. (That's no criticism of AWS -- we haven't launched 100+ different products and we aren't going to have a product suite as extensive as theirs any time soon.)
I do think that software complexity lifecycle management (and how that pertains to organizational considerations) is one of the tough problems in our industry. AWS has done an amazing job in terms of their pace of development and innovation, but, yes, it's also become a pretty complicated suite. I think we all currently face some kind of "fast development", "cohesive integration", "broad functionality" trilemma and how best to surmount it seems a big open question to me.
The number of companies (big ones, public ones!) where I can't for the life of me figure out what they sell from their website is truly astonishing. I understand that 1) if I can't understand it I'm not in their market, and 2) they probably want to be vague so they can sell their prospects whatever they ask for [1] but I still feel that they could gain a lot in the long term through brand awareness and people like becoming or meeting their target customer (but not having had any idea what that company did) by making a clear articulation of what the hell they do.
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
partly it is because in India you need licensing to sell fireworks , the demand is very very uneven, during Diwali season it is 10-30x compared to the rest of the year.
the fire hazard and pollution issues and till a while back child labour concerns as well is why it is regulated
The permanent year around sellers are few and serve as dealer than retailer . During the season they do both .
It was more sourcing a dealer on the fly and pretty common for fireworks .
Price is very fluctuating and there are huge markups due to the nature of demand .
Discerning buyers go to largest shop/wholesaler to get best price.
I knew a wholesaler/ early e-commerce player in this space (bigger players do not this due to regulatory challenges ). He will make his orders in January for delivery in august for season starting in sept/oct and typically paid 10%-15% list price at most.
Your "funny story" is very fitting here... there's a lot of value hidden in just knowing how to interface with AWS.
Lot of companies are actually the middleman between you and AWS (e.g. Heroku which provides managed databases, Redis instances, etc. which are all hosted in AWS.) Meaning that you are not the client of AWS; Heroku is.
Hi pc, huge fan of Stripe and its relentless focus on the "impatient developer", which so many enterprise companies miss the mark on. As a future co-founder interested in this space, do you have any talks or essays on how you built a developer centric company that has also a successful "enterprise" side to it?
Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing.
'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now.
I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not.
Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently.
There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction.
A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer.
I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.
This is sort of neat because the same problem seems to be mirrored for Stripe customers; for example, if my business caters to the impatient developer and I use Stripe for payments, I find myself having to explore outside the bounds of conveniently orchestrated payments, to more esoteric per-customer high-touch interactions for large enterprise customers. I wonder if there isn't room for Stripe to grow to help businesses deal with these... sort of business deals!
Hah. This is in fact a problem area that our Billing (https://stripe.com/billing) team is actively thinking about. You should reach out to ark@stripe.com if you want to discuss -- he can connect you with the right folks.
One thing that could help with acquiring both self serve and enterprise customers would be effective, B2B focused Facebook ads. I have a ton of experience with scaling these for other big B2B tech companies, email is in my profile if that sounds interesting.
Thanks for addressing this. Each of these points was an immediate worry as I was reading the post, nice to see you’ve already thought of them and addressed them.
Just me or does anyone else think there’s going to be a reckoning in interchange regulation in the US like Europe soon?
Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace.
The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi-partisan action sooner rather than later addressing this very question eg Durbin Amendment Part 2.
My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.
there’s probably very little fraud with touchless payments like Apple Pay - most issuers require some verification to add the card to a phone in the first place. if that becomes a growing % of in person payments i don’t see the justification for high card present rates.
also some data suggests people have moved to more debit transactions during Covid over credit which are cheaper to process anyway and usually means less fraud - so maintaining a fixed processing rate means margins for processors are probably even better right now
Visa/MasterCard/amex are a huge tax on society, and they won by anti-competitive processes. Society wins very little by a 2-3% tax on all transactions.
I think the problems with credit card for businesses in the US are almost solely cost. There are other minor issues, but until Stripe works to bust up the interchange, they really aren't working on the true problem with payments.
(Fraud is a distant #2 issue for most merchants and for most people I've chatted with Stripe's radar is more expensive than the fraud itself).
My co-founder and I started Imagine Financial to solve exactly this problem. We are coming out of stealth and addressing the problem of interchange head-on. We believe interchange is an unnecessary excessive tax, and we are offering an alternative to all US merchants.
This is an incredibly hard problem, we are learning and don't have all the answers, but it's about time someone tried to disrupt it. Businesses and consumers are suffering, and they should not be charged in this way. Our network is rolling out over the next few weeks and would love to gather feedback from those who want to get involved in changing this industry!
It is a fair bit, but for any credit or debit card transaction they’re actually taking on the risk of essentially fronting the cost of the transaction. Well really their partnering bank does, but if something happens they’re left covering that cost. They also have to split the profit with their collaborating bank and possibly the credit card companies. Nowadays I suspect the risk isn’t all all that high, or at least not 2.9 less slim profit margin high. So in the end 2.9% isn’t highway robbery but they’re also not working on slim margins.
Very unlikely. They could if you go to MS or GCP or VMware. Note that some people might know stories about it, but most of these people wouldn't be able to talk about it.
We migrated from stripe to paddle in the last month due to stripe not having any built in tax functionality. They do have a separate provider to calculate taxes but then you need to work with multiple services and worry about all those working well. We went with paddle since it's all built in because technically they are the ones who get paid, take off a bit off the top, charge taxes and file them.
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Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development.
Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.
I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one.
In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB.
It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin.
In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine.
Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.
As you acknowledge, there are few companies that have made the transition from growth to growth+sales in the way AWS has. If Mike can help Stripe chart that course and avoid the shoals along the way, that's hugely positive for customers, employees and owners of Stripe.
I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc.
Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons?
(I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))
I do think that software complexity lifecycle management (and how that pertains to organizational considerations) is one of the tough problems in our industry. AWS has done an amazing job in terms of their pace of development and innovation, but, yes, it's also become a pretty complicated suite. I think we all currently face some kind of "fast development", "cohesive integration", "broad functionality" trilemma and how best to surmount it seems a big open question to me.
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
the fire hazard and pollution issues and till a while back child labour concerns as well is why it is regulated
The permanent year around sellers are few and serve as dealer than retailer . During the season they do both .
It was more sourcing a dealer on the fly and pretty common for fireworks .
Price is very fluctuating and there are huge markups due to the nature of demand .
Discerning buyers go to largest shop/wholesaler to get best price.
I knew a wholesaler/ early e-commerce player in this space (bigger players do not this due to regulatory challenges ). He will make his orders in January for delivery in august for season starting in sept/oct and typically paid 10%-15% list price at most.
I don't remember if they answered exactly what you are asking, but my memory of the episode is definitely positive!
Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing.
'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now.
I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not.
Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently.
There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction.
A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer.
I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.
...is hiring not usually an event where employer and employee both benefit?
Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace.
The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi-partisan action sooner rather than later addressing this very question eg Durbin Amendment Part 2.
also some data suggests people have moved to more debit transactions during Covid over credit which are cheaper to process anyway and usually means less fraud - so maintaining a fixed processing rate means margins for processors are probably even better right now
If consumers feel the credit card fees more directly, they will likely revolt.
maybe just allowing a discount for cash and pin debit
Visa/MasterCard/amex are a huge tax on society, and they won by anti-competitive processes. Society wins very little by a 2-3% tax on all transactions.
I think the problems with credit card for businesses in the US are almost solely cost. There are other minor issues, but until Stripe works to bust up the interchange, they really aren't working on the true problem with payments.
(Fraud is a distant #2 issue for most merchants and for most people I've chatted with Stripe's radar is more expensive than the fraud itself).
This is an incredibly hard problem, we are learning and don't have all the answers, but it's about time someone tried to disrupt it. Businesses and consumers are suffering, and they should not be charged in this way. Our network is rolling out over the next few weeks and would love to gather feedback from those who want to get involved in changing this industry!
http://www.gotimagine.com/merchants
Feel free to reach out to community@gotimagine.com to get involved.
Deleted Comment
Thank you!
Since they did that earlier this year: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...
Has anyone done this with stripe successfully?