Just for the record, my fam *doesn’t know where I’ve worked for the last 7 years* but also thinks I’m BFFs with Sundar. As usual, not sure whether I should be humbled or flattered.
A truly monster gigantic enormous set of ships from the Billing team, a collection of amazing human beings who regularly have nightmares about prorations, fractional cents, and product catalogues so that YOU don't have to.
Claude Artifacts are insane — I cannot believe how good the product is. You can ask it to build most little internal tools in minutes (at least, the UI) and customize further via code. Feels like a superpower for semi-technical people.
When we wrote the charter for Stripe Billing ~3-4 years ago, the dream user was Atlassian: they're the canonical example of an enterprise-scale SaaS business that "doesn't have one business model." Seemed very aspirational at the time.
Super 😍 they're now live on Billing
Atlassian joins great company in Notion, Slack, The Atlantic, and 100k+ other forward-thinking businesses building their subscription billing platform on Stripe.
I'm here to say that the "mob" and "mafia" metaphor is overused, I'd rather call us the "yakuza". The mob hires too many people, I'd rather be low on opex and headcount like the yakuza.
I decided to move back to SF in October, and knew that this time, I wanted to invest in my community. But as a pandemic side effect, I forgot all of my social skills!
@cremebruleecart
showed me the Pancake Way. If you like pancakes and live in SF, join us?
Enterprises are moving from just enabling near-term remote work to now digitizing business processes for the long-run. Excited to be powering to the future of workflow with major Box Relay updates:
Personal news:
I've started a fund called Rat Capital with my friends
@cglodha
and
@davidjwiner
.
Why? 1/ Tara backwards = "a rat" 2/ Rats can be epigenetically programmed if they're licked 3/ we have no money, so investment = garbage we've scavenged from SF streets.
When I heard Jay was working on
@stripe
Financial Connections, I thought "huh, not the guy I'd have picked to build Stripe's dating app."
I'm assuming he had to pivot to an API to connect financial accounts, much more his speed.
We’re launching Financial Connections today, enabling businesses and their customers to safely share their financial data. Businesses can go directly to Stripe to access a privacy-first authentication flow and our new data API.
Yesterday was my last day at Stripe, after 7 years (!) and 6 products. I’ll treasure (yes, Treasury pun) this experience, and it’s hard to put into words how grateful I am. It’s still early days for Stripe, and I’m proud to have played a small part.
If I were playing Tyler Cowen’s “underrated/overrated” game, I’d say that we are underrating the rare magic of “work that gets it right.”That is, work that is energizing, meaningful, promotes progress, has great people, is intellectually challenging, and provides ownership.
I’m excited about embedded finance — the idea that the non-finance companies can embed financial tools into their products to create a better and more cohesive user experience for their end user.
As a Stripe employee, I have two reactions to this tweet:
1) It's still early days for Stripe, and there's more work to do now than ever before.
2) This screenshot is so lovely and nostalgic, but why is "Get Started with Stripe" in title case, it's f'ing killing me?
The obvious takeaway is "the best ideas come from anywhere" but the only slightly less obvious takeaway is "recurring revenue models are always the best idea."
I just learned from a former longtime Amazon employee, the idea for Prime came from an IC engineer. He wrote up a 6 page memo. He was inspired by the Costco membership model. It was built as a test. It's now the key pillar of Amazon. The best ideas can come from anywhere.
If annoying job req language like "thrive in a collaborative environment involving different stakeholders and subject matter experts" gets you down, may I interest you in an alternative? Work with me in a Business-Speak-free (amongst other stuff) PM role!
~A month ago, I left Billing for Financial Products to tackle something new at Stripe with an incredible group of people. If that also appeals to you (or someone you know), we're hiring a PM for Corporate Card in NYC.
Would be nice if you could format a doc for printing such that all the hyperlinks turned into a tiny QR code. I want to follow up on the links while reading the physical version!
is stripe treasury simply a ploy for me to launch a fintech substack? I can tell you, for all those who were desperately asking (read: nobody), it is not the case.
Introducing Stripe Treasury—an API to embed financial services in your platform. Let your customers:
🏦 Manage money in interest-earning accounts
💸 Move money with ACH and wire transfers
⏩ Get faster access to revenue
💳 Spend funds with issued cards
I have eaten
the coronavirus supplies
you were storing
on the top shelf
And which
you were probably
saving
for total pandemic
Forgive me
I was WFH
so unable
to cook for myself
Boss to team: "You know when your mother speaks to you in a really loving way, and you can't trust her to give you real feedback?"
Every immigrant kid in the room: "uh what?!"
My father's Google Home doesn't recognize the word "Connecticut" when said with a thick Indian accent. But since he has the same exact Tamil accent as Sundar Pichai, I imagine the team will be hearing CEO feedback as soon as Sundar makes his first trip to CT. Biding my time.
@micsolana
Never forget the Treaty of Tordesillas where Spain and Portugal drew one line to divvy up the entire world between them…damn really makes you think, “where are they now” etc.
The main thing I learned from making two tiktoks this week is that is insanely fucking hard work. Making a group tiktok is like writing and producing an episode of Seinfeld! Maybe what America needs to turn economic productivity around is Gen Z, seriously.
Free $100M idea: Do a remake of "The Producers", but crypto. (Founders try to make a fraud crypto startup, it accidentally becomes successful, they can't cash out, there's singing & dancing)
There’s a great quote from the early Amazon days, which is “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out alright.”
Patrick shared this note internally about the Financial Connections/Plaid kerfuffle. Glad to put it behind us, and I'm look forward to continued vibrant competition in fintech (which customers benefit from!) in the future.
Slack's pricing is the shining example I constantly cite to SaaS startups. They did the hard, right thing by taking the integral of active usage over a period rather than just charging for all seats/month. Now the hard thing is easy with Stripe Billing. 😉
These days, I find myself thinking about:
1. Technology tools to cut carbon
2. Global financial infrastructure (yes, +crypto!)
3. CA’s housing crisis
4. Getting more wind instruments sampled in hip hop
5. The creeping dread that I may indeed be turning into my parents
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,” but only slightly less well known is this: "never ask an executive an open ended question when action items are on the line!”
Working from your parents' house means that at any given moment, they could be:
* taking calls
* blending
* vacuuming
* running a pressure cooker
* ringing bells
* diy construction
* buying 5 pet howler monkeys
* launching a space shuttle
* causing the eruption of Krakatoa
People who took a big bet on me:
*
@DStrachman
& the Thiel Fellowship
*
@grifftgaff
and Dani DeLeon got me my job at Stripe.
*
@isaach
helped me get into product. Nobody wanted me to do it nor gave me a shot except Isaac.
*
@noahmp
and
@kurrik
took many, many big bets on me.
I can remember at each career inflection point the person who took a bet on me.
When I joined Google it was Kim. When I moved to product, Marissa. Then to Redpoint, it was the early stage team : Geoff, Tim, Chris, & Scott. Lloyd & Frank at Looker for their Series A. Today, it’s
Everyone's talking about AI ushering-in an era of infinite product customizability, but not enough about designing the right primitives, with the right set of users, to make that customizability possible.
The former CEO of Lego (Knudstorp) gets it!
()
Everyone says the best part of working at Stripe is working with amazing peers *like* Eduardo. But for me, the best part of working at Stripe was **actually** working with Eduardo.
After ~7 amazing years at
@stripe
, it's time to say adiós.
I have no words (in english or spanish 😉) to describe how fortunate I feel to have had the opportunity to work with this team.
Wait, so let me check if I got this: the point of buying the Constitution was to donate it to a museum. And now it’s going to a museum, but 1) Ken Griffin is footing the bill instead 2) paid a higher price thanks to y’all bidding it up. Feels like, ahem, a win? I don’t get it. 🤨
There's a great West Wing quote where Tobi, the speechwriter, talks about writing "37 pages for 2.5 paragraphs" to explain the essence of a bill. All that said, it's worth remembering that your 2.5 paragraphs will only be good if you spent the time to write the 37 pages.
If you’re a developer with opinions on payments APIs, we’d love your feedback on some new ideas Stripe’s cooking up. 😋
If you're chosen, you'll get:
🤫A sneak peek into new stuff
🎁$150 gift card
👩🏾🍳A promise I'll never *literally* cook anything for you
Super proud of
@chu_onthis
and
@jamesfzhang
. They shipped something excellent, that *works at scale*, with a tiny team, really quickly...in a really big organization! Most importantly, it's undoubtedly what our users wanted & needed.
Introducing the Stripe Billing customer portal. Let your customers:
⬆️ Upgrade, downgrade, or cancel a subscription
✏️ Update their payment methods
🧾 View their billing history
Chocolate chip pancakes for the kids this morning. Each one is irregular and no two are the same....I’m telling them it’s a metaphor for humanity (but it’s really just my poor culinary skills).
It took working in payments for ~8 years to get me to stop reading POS as “piece of shit,” and these days I just wonder why everyone is talking about point of sale all the time
I was once in a product review where a leader was surprised that my team's feature actually worked. Our EM
@kurrik
's response was "thanks, we try not to ship garbage."
People are all about galaxy brain product advice but tbh I'm just out here tryin' not to ship garbage.
@epang33
@stripe
Defend your business against churn with Stripe Billing. 💸💡
On average, we've turned 40% of would-be declined payments into revenue.
We auto-update old cards, send failed payment emails to your customers, and use ML to intelligently retry payments.
Some of the most unusual things that make
@hazelcough
the greatest:
1. She talks about growing her skill over time, vs. industry myth of “born a CS prodigy”
2. She loves reading *real literature* over biz books
3. She focuses on building people as much as she does systems
Excited to share
@hazelcough
's path to the Payments Products Tech Lead role at
@stripe
. Michelle shares a bunch of tools she uses like her "top 3" doc of current priorities and using a decision log when she and her team designed Stripe Payment Intents.
I've worked on accounting/treasury adjacent things for nigh on ~4 years now, and still think that "General Ledger" could make a great cereal box character that fights unnecessarily fast growing expenses.
@tarstarr
@stripe
The Stripe Corporate Card scales with your business. Rewards adapt to your spending: 2% cash back on your top two spending categories and 1% on everything else. After your first $5K spent, you’ll also get $50K in free payment processing with Stripe.
To the frenemies who told me that WF chickpea spaghetti was good: it tastes like silt from the Nile River was mixed with sawdust & CSPAN, then made into spaghetti form. I fundamentally distrust your character now, and believe you to be slightly malevolent.
Being the person to type transcript-style notes in a meeting is a great way to parse who actually has great content, versus who has been getting by on charisma. It's actually kind of shocking.
Every time we have wildfires in California, I’m reminded of the unspeakable cruelty of using prison labor ($1/hr, $5/day) as 40% of our firefighting force. There’s something so dystopian and horrible about this.
After a year of sampling remote "fun games" with my team, have to say the most fun (for me and not for anyone else) is still the "confidence interval" game – how good are you at estimation, and knowing when you're right?
@far33d
The "no PMs" nonsense aside, the thing I found hilarious was his description of the ideal engineer as someone who is "meeting the people who pay their salaries and building what they ask for."
I never would want to work at this guy's company as an engineer!
Today, members of our 30+ person Billing team (across multiple geos and offices!) dressed like Friday Arne, except for
@kurrik
, who chose that one Friday to dress like Monday Arne.
Tech people are always looking for examples of “first principles thinking triumphing over industry expertise” and let me tell you, the perfect example is “giving highly specific instructions for a haircut” versus “let the hairdresser do their thing.”
I currently suffer a Great Injustice, which is never getting credit from my Apple Watch for standing at my standing desk. In these unprecedented times, validation from digital sources is all that's keeping us going. We will not stand for this. Literally.
Winston pre-LASIK: 30 interceptions / season
Winston post-LASIK: 5 Pass TD with 0 Int in a season-opener
So when I get LASIK next month:
Tara pre-LASIK: 30 bad PRDs/ quarter
Tara post-LASIK: reinvents payments?? earns gajillions in revenue?? ships everything?? JUST YOU WAIT!
Jameis Winston is the first QB in NFL history to throw 5 Pass TD with 0 Int in a season-opener in his first career start with a new team.
Overall, he's the 7th quarterback with 5 passing touchdowns & no interceptions in a opener & the 1st since Lamar Jackson in 2019.
My 3 year old niece asked my cousin to check out the "beautiful princess on the TV." My cousin comes over to see the princess. Reader, that princess was Stormy Daniels.
I'm a big fan of print journalism & monetizing in a way that directly corresponds with the value that the product delivers. Proud that this entirely powered on Stripe Billing.
The🔝 feature request I’d hear while on Billing was “scheduling future changes”, so that you can upgrade on Jan 1st, switch to 💳4567 on July 30th, end contract after 3 ♻️, or change the billing cycle to start in May. This was an *insane* feature to build, and it’s here!
Automate your billing... from the future!
Subscription schedules now let you:
⏱ Start a subscription on a future date
📆 Backdate a subscription to a past date
⏫ Upgrade or downgrade a subscription
I accidentally threw my bf's airpod case into the wash, so I've been timesharing my airpod case as a form of penance. These two incidents have become a bigger test of our relationship than quarantine itself, let me tell ya.
@brahn
@stripe
We're adding Revenue Recognition to Stripe Billing. You'll get a dashboard with downloadable reports detailing your revenue and deferred revenue. Gone are the days of tying thousands of rows of data together. 😄📒 Sign up for the beta:
"In this document, I will first describe why the strawman is made of straw. Second, I will describe why it isn't a man at all, but a dog. Third, I will tell you why we considered a strawberry, but ultimately decided in favor of the strawdog as a higher ROI undertaking."
I’m moving out of my apartment and have to finally contend with this dragon’s hoard of dry goods I amassed during the Early Quarantine era. I am now eating my way through canned soup for every meal, and feeling like this could easily qualify as one of Hercules’ 12 Labors.