watching you operate on Twitter you're just breaking this wall between the PM and the customer the moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem that's a unbelievable gift I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them if you're text message friendly with five or 10 of those you are going to have so much direct signal that is infectious many people told me I need to ask you about picking matrics well what was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective and okay how do you know you have product Market fit charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand and then tweets on the other you started at Stripes something called study groups we show up four to eight people total pretend to be some company with some outcome problem rule one is you do not work at stri and Rule two is we're not here to solve any problems this is just about practicing empathy for the customer today my guest is Jeff Weinstein over the course course of his six plus years at stripee Jeff was the product lead for Stripes payment infrastructure teams where helped scale stripe payments to hundreds of billions of dollars in volume a year he also LED PMs and teams on a number of 0 to1 bets at stripe and most recently took on the scaling of stripe Atlas which as of the day this podcast launches allows you to incorporate a new company in a single day including handling 83b elections incorporation documents getting your EIN share purchases and all the things that used to take weeks or months before a company could begin operating at this point one in six new Delaware Corporations are started on stripe Atlas which blows my mind this episode ended up being the longest in my podcast history because I wanted to basically do an archaeology of an incredibly effective and admired product leader we spent the entire conversation digging deep into the many skills that Jeff has built that enable him to consistently build successful and beloved products we get into his go go go plus optimism long-term compounding philosophy of Building Products how to think about an operationalized product craft and quality he shares a popular program that he started at stripe called stripe study groups that I think you should steal we also talk about how to effectively talk to customers how to know if you have product Market fit for your new product how to pick great metrics for your team what he's learned about getting done at a big company also advice that he's gotten from the founders of stripe and so much more this episode is for anyone who's looking to level up their product building chops in every way if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Jeff Weinstein Jeff thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thank you Lenny of Lenny's podcast I was I wasn't I knew what to expect but it is fun to see the first name and the podcast all line up I really appreciate you asking so so I wanted to start with a quote that I found from you that I think gives a little perspective into how you think and how you approach the world so here's the quote very frequently I would do porly on test in school and then the professor would say very reasonably hey I think you should bump down a level to the previous semester's pace and you said uh I actually know that that's why I'm in this class I want to be in the class that I'm potentially the worst at this isn't how most people think this is how most people operate usually people want to get good grades they want to be at the top of their class clearly you have a different approach in a different mindset where did this come from for you and how did this shape the way you think about product and and the work that you do some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to uh rationalize it for myself in some form so uh in retrospect that sounds kind of high futin but at the time I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in but I think it comes from growing up I went to a pretty hippie dippy K through2 School in Baltimore Maryland where we were really asked to think about why we were in school and to pick any of the courses that were of interest to us outside of AP programs or grades or any particular requirements you really got to choose your own path and I recall one particular class in high school uh which was you know sort of somewhat a science class but it was called The History of Science and we actually walked through and studied all of the at the time best understood ways the world worked in science but then later were turned out to be wrong right in the 1500s we believed X Y and Z in the 1600s believed a b and c just very confidently in 1500s we thought something and then in the 1600s they thought something very different and so this class was quite impactful on me where we spent an entire year studying things that are not true and it was fascina ating and that particular teacher employed another trick on US during that class which was um they took the tuition fee of our school and divided it by the number of hours and wrote wrote the cost on a ticket and and then handed Us in the beginning of the year tickets for every single one of the classes and he would stand at the door and you would have to give him a ticket at the end of the class if he thought it was worth them worth like worth it and just like that practice of deep intellectual understanding of how people evaluated something at the time and choosing for yourself to spend the time on it by just like the physical act of handing that ticket to the teacher that really clicked for me and so when I got to college and there a real real College University people are coming from often quite more rigorous backgrounds of things that were true uh I was a bit unprepared and I remember actually like taking a microeconomics class that was quite Advanced and had a close friend and we studied exactly the same information we sat looked at the same cheat sheets we practiced the same quizzes we read the same books and he got the top grade in the class and I got the bottom and that's the from where that quote came from where the professor said I think you should bump potentially bump down I was like I I already know that stuff like I'm interested in this topic I'm going to try to improve but look just because I'm significantly worse than the other kids in the class that has like little to do with if I should leave and he was particularly cool with it this episode is brought to you by pendo the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product with all the tools you need in one simpl to ous platform pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then turn those insights into action all so you can get your user to do what you actually want them to do first pendo is built around product analytics seeing what your users are actually doing in your apps so that you can optimize their experience next pendo lets you deploy inapp guides that lead users through the actions that matter most then pendo integrates user feedback so that you can capture and analyze what people actually want and the new thing in pendo session replays a very cool way to visualize user sessions I am not surprised at all that over 10,000 companies use it today visit pendo.io menty to create your free pendo account today and start building better experiences across every corner of your product PS you want to take your product LED know how a step further check out peno's lineup of free certification courses led by top product experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career learn more and experience the power of the pendo platform today at pendo.io Lenny pend today's episode is brought to you by cycle the AI power feedback platform for product teams is your customer feedback a tangled mess of slack threads survey responses and overflowing inboxes wish that you could know what your customers really need cycle unifies all of your customer interactions from support chats to user research gong calls and App Store reviews into one neat collaborative space Cycles AI then extracts actionable insights on autopilot cycle will learn what you're building so that it can label incoming feedback automatically that means you'll get a full voice of customer report without manually triaging feedback then simply you cycle ask to dig deeper into any topic and generate custom AI generated summaries across your entire feedback repository what makes cycle different is the way that it lets you close feedback loops in each release feedback is not used just as a way to prioritize what to build but also as a tool that creates trust with all stakeholders sign up for a free cycle trial today at cycle.app Lenny and put your feedback on autopilot that's cycle.app Lenny it's really interesting that you went to this liberal artsy hidp school as you describe which a lot of people bash on like why spend all this college money and time on a liberal artsy kind of education and you end up being really successful in a very technical highly analytical data driven company and it's interesting that that experience still helped you succeed in this other path it it did take a change though because M I started in English was my selected major in school but then I kept playing with computers and I kept liking math and I looked at the roles of the you the backgrounds of the people who were running the types of companies I loved at the time Facebook was getting super phenomenally successful Apple was already on their on their up and up again and all everyone everyone who was leading those places had technical backgrounds and I lik computers lot so I added computer science as a as an engineering degree Midway through school so and having to take those I had to take the real science classes with the Premed kids and the rest of it and I did similarly poorly but I I did end end up with a computer science degree and a liberal arts degree so it was it was a journey but I had to make a pretty big switch in the middle to like get on that path I asked you if there was uh one thing that you'd love to get across in this podcast asked you what would it be and here's what you said here's the first item on this list that you sent me quoting go go go as that plus optimistic comma long-term compounding approach can you just talk about what you mean by that yeah there's two things going on here so i i s of see the world as immediately we need we have just such opportunity to take action in front of us we can be optimistic and go go go as soon as possible I think that a lot of life is how you know you get as much Furniture as you H as you room in the house we will do the work the night before it's due so let's just make it due tomorrow can we turn tomorrow into today it's so just optimistically seeing if we can just inject energy to go go go has produced surprising results and I think ignites in other people that same interest and then it kind of feeds off each other and that's I think really in my bones from growing up and then I added over time had to learn this longer term comp founding more strategic mindset where some of the things we want to accomplish be it at my startups in the past or or at stripe they can't be solved in the afternoon they're going to require layers of infrastructure and services and applications and UI and Partnerships that really look like that kind of Iceberg drawing you see where you just see the top but then there's the whole thing underneath and I've had to learn over time to pay my instinct of like let's get it done today let's move forward let's let's see what we can get done let's make some mistakes let's try it out with where are we going what needs to be true over time where can we always invest what what what will we sort of never regret spending time in we'll never regret spending time making the latency of our payments apis at stripe faster we'll never regret uh making it more reliable to send 83 B- elction mails to the IRS like we will never regret those things so let's just always compound those capabilities over time then the trick is like how do you mix this go go go attitude with a long-term compounding and that's something I still struggle with but I try to purposely balance it more than I used to it's such a good way of summarizing just how to be successful in a lot of things go go go ASAP stay optimistic focus on long-term compounding growth is there an example of that in action I I know we're going to talk about Atlas a bunch but I guess is there an example of that working for you or a product you worked on I work at stripe which is a infrastructure company we build things that help businesses do online Commerce in various forms and I've had a few roles at stripe I'm in our beautiful office here in South San Francisco one of which was was the product person that helped us decide how we're going to go Global and how we're going to offer multiple ways for people to pay it turns out there's more than just credit cards in the world there's small hundreds of ways that people will naturally want to pay for things online and as a business you're going to of course just want to accept whatever it is people want to pay with and for the first seven or eight years of stripe well prior to my my being here you know the the incremental country ads and the incremental new payment methods was relatively flat over time and that was surprising to all of us who worked here because the world wanted it and we had a lot of people working on it and we were working very hard but it wasn't producing returns in the way that we wanted and so actually the optimistic as soon as possible go go attitude was not working right no matter how much energy we poured into building Thailand payment methods or UK bank transfers or uh you know an in-person payment system in Latin America we just like couldn't rack up points and get it done so we had to step back and say well what is the world going to look like in 10 years what was going to need to be true and how can we start to go go there now which meant going a lot slower building internal platforms sending people around the world to start to build these payment methods up uproot their lives pay for their Apartments get them on airplanes start using these payment methods actually in the world and so it really like our line Flatline for a while and we're like okay is this strategy working is it not working but then over time we start to see it switch to nonlinear again and go from whatever it was 10 payment methods at the time and now stripe accepts over 100 so we got to like 50 really quickly and then kind of like skyrocketed to 100 and I remember there being a meeting where we said well maybe we should just like lock everyone in the basement and see if we can get from 10 to 50 that would be you know the intensity startup go go go attitude but we looked at the individual components of what it meant to get this done and how how long we wanted this to be true for and we had to go a lot slower so that was like a very formative decision where you had to mix the go go go with the long-term compounding awesome okay so let's start to delve deeper into some of the specific skills that I hear you're incredible at and that I've seen you be incredible at on Twitter and and Linkedin and things like that so the first is craft craft and quality I'm told by many people that you have a very strong uh obsession with craft and user experience in quality and even more so I'm told that you teach people at stripe how to be obsessed with craft and quality and these your experience in a very systematic way I feel like this something a lot of people are starting to realize is really important and or are trying to get better at either personally or at their company so first of all let me just ask why is why is this so important to you why do you think craft and experience and quality is so important why do you put so much emphasis on it yourself I think I'm really working backwards from failures in the past and avoiding them and so maybe just a quick story I had a I started a company several years ago based on just a personal pet peeve of mine uh which was I was a SQL analyst many of you listening might have written sequel in the past maybe the robots write the squel for you now but still need to write a little squel yourself and every single time I wrote a squl query I wanted to run the same subsequent analysis I wanted great Version Control I wanted all the cool stuff that GitHub had for code but in a in in but for writing data code and so my friends and I built a little python tool which you know basically let you run R style queries it lets you draw uh charts and pivot tables quickly and sharing all sort of all this Mo modern SAS application stuff but applied to SQL a few years ago and we turned that into a company we got some progress but then there was this moment one day where we had maybe a couple hundred customers and we had an error where we basically by accidentally shut down the service and it was sort of bricked for 10 or 20 minutes and at the time we were all kind of hustling in our little dinky office to get the application back online and we really kind of were proud of ourselves about how reasonably quickly we did and people went back to using it it wasn't a super long outage and we didn't lose any data we're just like kind of high-fiving each other and we went about our day and about a year later I realized that that was a I missed a huge moment that I should have pounced on which is that during those 20 minutes our customers weren't Furious they weren't emailing us like crazy they weren't texting us they weren't trying to find us on Google Maps and knock on our door and say hey I need this thing back online immediately we heard a couple comments from them it was little murmur and I didn't realize at the time like that was the signal that I did not like we did not have product Market fit and I ended up wasting many more years on that project and wasting is a sort of big word we built an amazing software people liked it we were able to sell the company it it it help it helped many of us learn how to really build software but I'm I'm really trying to avoid that situation again and I think craft is kind of a dessert that you get after the meal of does your thing solve a real problem in the world and are people clamoring needing it badly and that's really my obsession is in finding problems in which people will pause their entire day to solve they will leap through the computer to to be like oh my God I have that problem do you have a solution and if you you know focus on that style of product development and we can get into just H H how do you kind of like listen for that and then turn that into product later you might get the opportunity to really provide craft and beauty and touches and moments and Delight but certainly there is no amount of craft there's no amount of beauty there's no amount Delight or touches you can add to a thing that will solve the problem we had at our at our startup which is that people didn't really need this and that's sort of like the biggest error is like picking something in which people don't really need it and then going through these practices of trying to like make it great when maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place I think a lot of people see all these tweets and messages about just like obsessed with the craft of what you're building and you can easily lose sight of nobody nobody even cares about what you're building it could the most incredible experience ever designed but if it's not something anyone ever wants it doesn't really matter people don't really get out of bed for their second problem right they get out of bed for their first problem and you have to carefully listen and not Pitch your customer or your prospective customer as you're trying to trying to figure this out and I think this advice not even advice just style applies to small companies big companies anyone which is people don't want to be pitched you know I I'm sometimes on a uxr call with a very well-meaning person or a Founder who has a new product that they want advice on or they want uh to find customers and the first thing that they start talking about when we get on the call is hi I'm the CEO of X Y and Z company we do one two and three I want to show you a demo it's like hold up uh I'm I'm the customer I have like what a wasted opportunity you you've kind of you you've just done here I have so many problems how you're sort of guessing ahead of time what is my top problem and now that you've anchored and limited to the pitch you're you're going to miss you prent very likely going to miss the burning problem that they have on the top of their on the like on the top of their mind and they're you know it's not the customer's job to interrupt you and say hey could you stop your pitch like I want to tell you about my my top problem and you could sort see this down the stream which then companies who launch things put craft uh have a have a great launch raise money are then like later gone right and it's because they built something that wasn't solving a burning need and I think you can kind of stem it all the way back to they were just pitching rather than sitting in silence and just waiting for their customer to just open their heart out about what's the most burning thing and sometimes I'll I'll prompt our customers I'll just I'll say hey do you mind just opening up your email like what what's in there or if you weren't talking to me right now what would you be working on or hey last week what what what grind what grinded your gears what like what are you not looking forward to or magic wand like what do you wish we you could just like have off your plate immediately forget forget stripe forget about thing work on just in your whole life like what is it that you do not want to be doing or a massive opportunity you wish was just one door away and it's a little awkward because they don't know why you're asking that kind of question but then you just sit there in silence and for the most part if you have amazing customers who are smart and ambitious and are trying to build their own business they're going to want to offload their hardest thing to somebody else if you've earned trust along the way and certainly not pitching is a great way of earning trust you're just listening we we've we've learned a lot at Stripe from that and that's where you can start to find adjacencies like well hey I don't know if stripe could you know really help me with this but it wouldn't it be cool if if uh we could identify if the person signing up on our site like wasn't fraudulent or is who they say they are or isn't a bot or is are they really a dog on the internet like huh we keep hearing this as the major complaint from all of our customers but like we're not an identity company it's like well I guess now we are because all of our customers who are trying to build their business like all have this problem and so so via silence you can just create your road map pretty quickly and drop a lot of the long uxr long survey long build cycle approach so I love where we're going with this this is where I was going to actually talk about next is just uh your ability to talk to customers and use research it feels very unique watching you operate on Twitter you're just like sharing your email constantly uh on calls with people constantly there's this like you're like breaking this wall between that a lot of people imagine there is between the PM and the lead of a team and the customer like you're not relying us research you're not waiting for someone else to do this work for you uh talk about just why and how you do this because I think there's so much to learn from just how you operate in finding opportunities picking problems to solve by talking to customers it's where the business comes from as customers you know it's not a long shot um hypothesis about why to talk to them it's like if they love your stuff they will tell their friends and pay fair prices for the product we're so fortunate through the internet that people kind of announce themselves as having as being interested in a topic sometimes they are interested in it by posting on Reddit a long thread or a screen screenshot of a customer service interaction that bugged them or hopeful that from their dorm room in country X someone else in the world has solved the same problem and the internet has given us all this absolutely magical Forum that you can just yell out the window and then billions of people could just like could could actually listen to what you said out the window now that's not all the time true for all people all situations but dramatically more true now than ever before in human history and so the fact that people wouldn't be listening to their customers and and really jumping through the computer to talk to them surprises me it's like they have like I'm I always sometimes think do they have some other strategy are are they so confident in what they're building that they don't need to hear directly from the people who will be using it and I think some of it is my own fear that I'm going to make the same mistake I've made in the past which is build something that people like they're using but isn't solving a burning enough problem such that they're going to stop their day they're going to tell their friends we're going to be able to sustain the company economically over a long period of time and that really just comes from hearing people's most burning problems and then the jumping through the the the just jumping through the computer and talking to them takes a little bit of of nervous G gumption you know kind of like walking up to a person at a bar Co cocktail party and saying H hi my name is Jeff it it can be a little awkward but then you get it it's kind of a rush once it starts to work and once you get the iterative loop that they're excited to talk to you they have problems they see you as a trusted not salesy not pitching not narrow-minded to just my my product and my position but I'm here to hear about your your whole Pro all of your problems and see where we can help not promising we can help solve everything but let's listen that is infectious both between the customers and internally and so I'm able to bring more people into that practice at stripe I'm able to quickly grab an engineer and hop on a call I can forward a a message over to a slack group and they know that because the customer speaking directly it somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day you know we we could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what's going to the customer wants or we could talk to them directly uh and you have to use a little bit of art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to but even at Stripes scale where we're dealing with many millions of businesses and many hundreds of millions of consumers on the other end of those businesses you can pattern match relatively quickly what are the styles of customers that represent where the world is going the most ambitious the most technical the fastest growing the most detailed and you don't need 10,000 of those people to talk to if you're text message friendly with five or 10 of those you are going to have so much direct signal about where to go that you kind of forget how you did it in the past I love so I'd love to learn more about these tactics that You' found helpful so you've shared this idea of Silence talking to someone and just being silent and I forget the phrase used but just like ideas emerge like your whole road map can emerge from that silence so let me share a few of the things you shared so far and I'm curious what else two is tweeting just like hey I'm looking to improve Atlas right now what bugs do you have here's my email address uh you talked about text messaging you just like hey can I get your number and I'll just text you when I have questions if there's anything else to add to these that'd be awesome and then what else have you found just like ways to actually get to a customer and find opportunities that are important speed is an important one which is red just reducing the time between the moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem they're busy there's snacks to eat they have families they have other things to do there's a lot going on in the world a lot your dumb product it's amazing that they would spend any of their time discussing it at all I mean most of the time if you don't like something you just move along you just apathetically silently move forward in the world and so the fact that someone took their finite time to succinctly with curiosity communicate to the world or you about your product that's a unbelievable gift that should be you know p0o alert level intensity and so I will leave a meeting I will CH change what I'm doing to just get one message back to them even if it's hey I got this I'm about to go to dinner can I hit you up tomorrow you're like oh yeah thank you awesome like I can't even believe you responded that puts us in the camp of on the right trajectory where they're going to feel that they have a almost Secret portal between this big brand of a company and another human who's just actually curious what's going on that's night night and day and it's also like fun fact tip when people are really hot on an issue and it could blow up on social or they're going to start becoming a detractor we make mistakes we have SLA breaches we have errors you're going to want to get on that stuff fast and in those situations I my bar for where like for how we will respond to those folks is not to just sort of solve the problem but is to turn them into a promoter and most of the time were able to even if there was a pretty relevant issue I remember one time in Atlas um we had this bug in which for a handful of our legal docs they were handing out let's say 25 shares rather than 25% of the shares we dropped the percentage sign and thankfully a a Founder noticed this in the docs and and tweeted about it I was like my heart like like paused you know and I was like oh no this could be a Ser really serious issue and we're able to fix it and regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone that was impacted and I was thinking to myself wow we really like let this person down we have one job to do which is to get their company right and we didn't and that person was incredibly gracious about the situation and said Anytime you want me to just read your docs be happy to I have a law degree I care about this topic I want to brainstorm with you about ways that Atlas could do more document Creations like wow I can't believe I was in this sort of Defense position and now we've gained a friend in the world who can be eyes and ears and brainstorm with us and we the team maintains a really close relationship with that person as they do with many many many Founders who use Atlas And so just again we we're so quick to put the outside world in this other camp where we need to touch it with kid gloves and treat it as a Big Blob and a and a cohort and a statistic when it is a human with a problem who likes snacks who is busy and it's fun to do and it turns out to be an incredibly easy fast way to figure out what to build there's a bunch of stuff I want to follow up here one is people may be hearing this and like oh my God I'd be overwhelmed with feedback and people to fix problems for and bugs and texting of people there's just like um there's so many people that potentially uh i' have to be interacting with how do you how do you try to narrow that down like I know Atlas is a very uh highly adopted product there's a ton of people there's probably bugs often people sending you feedback how do you pick the people to Zer and on I think there are two parts of this one what a problem to have of all the problems in the world I'm overwhelmed by customer interest is on the you know the top list of problems I I I want to have I think most entrepreneurs would purchase that problem as a state and so if you're in it I think take a deep breath and look at the sun sunrise or Sunset and just enjoy the fact that you've built something that is Meaningful enough that people would spend their time again there are amazing snacks uh that they could be spending the time on otherwise so that's a that's a huge deal and then two you need you need the the art there's an art and science to picking where to go deep you know I will happily respond to folks with I really appreciate that do you mind sending me a screenshot or a a video and some of them don't okay that's fine you kind of get a sense of quickly looking at how they wrote about it or a pattern just pattern matching how detailed they were or how much they seem that they want to engage and kind of kind of balance it that way otherwise you know you can you can tell folks this is really awesome do you mind sending me an email with three to five bullet points about the details of how you got to this issue and that's not a 30 minute meeting don't need to BL blow up your whole life to get on the phone with them it's not a huge homework assignment to them but it's enough structure that it will self- select those who want to go deep and then from there you really do owe it to them to to follow up if they're going to be that detailed and at that point you really have a sort product friend for life and you'll kind of continuously go back to them so you know you you you have to kind of tune tune it I also will bound some of these efforts so I'll just completely make up one day a program so hi uh Stripes doing a um bugfinder program I made that up as I was driving to work one morning uh tweeted it was curious if anyone would send anything we'll be taking videos for the next three days to go you know super deep and people like oh my goodness I would love to be part of the stripe bugfinder program like may I apply I'm like uh you know it's very selective uh you know of course but yes of course for you it's just you you're giving people permission through a pro program even if it is deeply arbitrary I find helps the bounding it and then later I could follow up with the world hey uh we ran our first uh program we got 65 videos which we did uh we found dozens of issues which we did um it was an incredibly valuable use of of of our time and it really came from just a a single tweet something I saw you mention somewhere is that you only pay attention to feedback from people that are paying customers and ignore everything else can you talk about that people who build things for people tend to be empathetic and interested and curious folks who have friends and then those friends want to use your stuff because they know you and they like you and they'll have good feedback but you need to figure out is that actually your customer or is that your friend trying it who is actually your Target customer exactly not a company or a segment you know not digital natives that are X big I'm talking about Sarah in this department who has these tabs open and just faced this problem and needs to solve it by 4 p.m. like that level specificity if that's your customer and I'm talking mostly about B2B which is where I spend a lot of my time as the social network B Toc stuff I have less intuition on they're very willing to exchange money for solving their problems incredibly so often times they'll if you listen with enough silence they might even say I'll pay you money to solve blah uh if if you sit there long enough in silence and so you could listen to your friendly friend who you got to play with your beta version and they'll say they liked it and they will click around but that is Extreme different from Sarah who has the actual problem and is willing to pay and it is so tempting to go down the first path with the friend group that I sort of needed a rule which was like okay rather than I was like well don't pay attention to that quite as much you know really pay attention to to like who is your Target customer and are you in a fast iteration cycle with for them and are they telling their friends but that wasn't enough because people are so drawn myself included drawn to the the friendliness that I just set a rule which is we discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero like that is not of interest to us it doesn't we don't even write it down it's not part it's just not part of what we're talking about at all we're only interested in Sarah our Target customer and can we get her to solve whatever the problem is as quickly as possible as janky as possible and go from there and it's a for and then the paying part is a forcing function because again even with Sarah because you're paying attention to her and solving her problem a bit she'll say of course oh this is great I want feature X Y and Z can it do one two and three naturally she would say that but if you said and by the way this thing is $10,000 um Phil will happily refund your money 100% the second you don't like it she might say whoa whoa whoa wait a second uh I like this thing but not not $10,000 for $10,000 it would need to solve x and you're like oh there it is right there that was actually what the thing that was of value and we were all kind of dancing around this it's usefulness it's useful we're on the right track and because I've fallen down that path myself and so many times I just set a rule this was great I was actually going to ask the this technique of using silence to help people actually practice it you just Shar this kind of quote of for you you to pay $10,000 it would have to do X that's a really cool line to use is there any other advice there just had to practice this idea of creating silence to help the potential customer share what they actually need I encourage people to take an improv training improv training class uh or two just to get people out of their skin a bit by the way this advice applies to big companies also not just small ones and we we have issues and I hear other larger companies have issues where a big company will say hey we we're an Enterprise and we're going to pay you this big contract all you need to do is build features 1 2 3 four 5 six seven 8 nine and go through security steps ABCD EFG and this siren song of the big three-year contract of your first Enterprise buyer even when you're already big it's there's always a you know you go from Fortune 1,000 to Fortune 500 to Fortune 10 to Fortune 1 you know there's always more and a there are so many stories of the rug being pulled in the middle and they never they never actually use it and the contract Never Lands same in Partnerships and and so I would say the same thing which is like if we're super serious about this send us a million dollars like w wire us a million dollars we'll happily wire it back anytime you need it but let's actually put some stake in the ground about the value you and I find that in the cases in which they're like who wait a second no absolutely not uh we can't commit here that's really good signal because you're about to spend a huge amount of time building something that might not ever be used and that's the majority case I hear or you might get the opposite which is sounds great let's make sure our teams are trained on it faster uh how can we get you to our office to explain it we need it to really work with this system we haven't talked about yet and now that we're paying we want it even faster and so I find that just it puts a fork in the road towards faster success or avoiding the non-success case and even at stripe scale I've heard our Founders somewhat push this this methodology on us where you one from the outside might think well it's a 8,000 person company sure sure surely they have just regular ways of of of building things for your customers and and and like we too need these style of commitments if we're going to go off road map so a big lesson you're sharing here is essentially make sure people are ready to pay for something that they are asking for that is the ultimate sign that they ready to pay is different than paying significantly different significantly different I've also thought of of well if as long as they're ready to pay and they said they would pay and they look at the contract we should feel good that is not the same as paying paying is an independent group of people saying my problem is burning enough that I'm willing to exchange something I have that has value for the promise of what you're going to do and now it's like a a real commitment that is extremely different than ready to so I will often be on the phone or video whatever with a founder and I will have them practice paying like have them practice charging me I'll just say hey I'm just a friend I'm trying to help you out uh is a little is a little bit self- serving because I work on stripe and I want to get feedback on our products I'll say feel free to sign up for any invoicing or payment service I don't really care which one you're welcome to choose stripe if it's easy enough for you I'd love to hear your two cents and send me an invoice or a payment link for a dollar right now like right now that way you don't when it comes time to actually charge your first customer it won't be your first time it won't feel weird you have already done this you already have a dollar in your account it'll just you already have your logo on the top right of the invoice it will feel great and I probably could go through my email inbox and just see $1 receipts to random people uh because I'm just so convinced that the difference between paying and like willing ready thought I thought they would pay is you know night and day difference yeah there's this term willingness to pay uh that I feel like should change as you're saying to just cross that willingness to and just paying paying exactly yeah no yeah and we can refund the money there's no like there's no issue at all other just other tricks on how to get people going is ask them about their regular Life as a human you know what did you do yesterday and they'll be like oh at work I'm like or or not what whatever and people just they'll start to spill they'll just start to Spill and eventually they'll get to their biggest problem pretty quickly let's talk about metrics kind of going in a different direction many people told me I need to ask you about picking metrics and the importance of metrics and how you think about metrics so let me just maybe start with a question just why do you think picking the right metric and why are metrics so important in building successful products I somewhat walk around with the belief that the product manager's responsibility is to produce product Market fit and okay how do you know you have product Market fit charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand and then tweets on the other so metrics like you know quantitative and qualitative and I really see them as deep deep siblings and equals you you really need both it's not oh okrs versus something like there are some things you want the texture of the person on video showing how complicated thing was and then also we are trying to make an economically viable system that we can run at large scale and you can't keep all that stuff in your head and need to me need to measure it and so I think metrics at their best are a numerical representation of the value we're prod providing for the for the customer one could measure anything you just like start counting events and log log lines we've made it incredibly cheap to count stuff and now we have this big privilege of choosing what to measure and I really just try to map it all the way back to well what was the actually the value that we're trying to produce for the customer and can we measure it from their perspective whereas I think it's natural both because we when you work inside of a company you're just thinking internally but also the way that the Met are collected inside your application to be more internal oriented how many people logged in okay that's a fine measure but how many people accomplished what they were trying to do after they logged in is not just necessarily sitting there as a single event in your database you have to think about it a bit another reason why I spend a lot of time CRA crafting a small number of these metrics is they force tradeoffs and decisions so we could all sit around all day and say hey I heard all these customer problems we should build X Y and Z and another person could absolutely reasonably say well I heard from these customers we should build one two and three and they're all true we could have a lot of success in both but the majority cases that we don't build either and we sit around and argue and bicker and we go slowly what are we going to do to naturally organically every day Orient a larger group of people in the right direction and see if our tactics are generating progress over time for a customer from their perspective and metrics on the left and a series of tweets uh on the right is like a pretty great combo so here's an example a couple years ago I'd been working in our our payments group at stripe for a bit and then I I started working on uh some of our Banking and and incorporation services so in Atlas when I started working on it it had had some success it had already existed for four or five yearsi prior to me spending time on it but when I started to look at the support tickets people were pretty unhappy frequently they had a docu sign stuck in their email box they needed uh co-founder address but they didn't know their co-founders address they couldn't log into the dashboard to figure out their 83b manual filing instructions and we saw this you know basically in the first week of spending time on Atlas I was just like just show me all the support tickets uh are they happy support tickets are people writing in being like Oh I love this service it's absolutely fantastic can you just do ab even more for me or they like sad support tickets like oh my God they're all sad support tickets and so we're just kind of asking ourselves well why would why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend was like well it would have to accomplish AB andc activities for them you know it would have to get their company it would have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS it'd have to handle all the downstream ammin dvia but surely if they had a bunch of support tickets at the end they're not going to go tell their friends to use this thing we could measure all of the intermediate parts we could measure the success rate and the frequency of incorporation services and and we do all those things but if you like looked at the support tickets there's just no way if you had a support ticket you would recommend do it to a friend and so we suggested metric to ourselves companies that have no support tickets through the through the incorporation service the whole process from the moment you start the application open like actually the be like the first page load at the very beginning all the way through the process waiting for the government waiting for the IRS and we give you two more weeks to write into support we give like an extra buffer two weeks and if you get through that whole thing with with no support tickets that's a yes if you have any number of support tickets that's a no and we just looked at the percentage of Founders that were going through the service with zero support tickets which is very different than looking at an average right you could you'd have the average is 0.3 but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're you know that getting to 02 is going to cause them to tell their friends more and we looked and only 15% of Founders were getting through Atlas with zero support tickets through that metric and I just thought okay well let's just drive that number way up and let's look at the support tickets decide what people are needing and we'll bake it into the product and presumably it'll fix it people like that more and then tell their friends and over about 18 months we took that number from 15% to 85 uh we basically just flipped it and you can look at the market share plotted on the same on the same time frame and it's like same shape uh and I think you have to find a measure by which it speaks directly to the to what the customer wanted and that if you by accidentally leaked your dashboard to them your customer would be ecstatic to learn that that's what you were measuring the whole time you know if we were to showcase the internal atas metrics which we often just uh screenshot and publish I think they'd be pretty happy to hear that we were spending all of our time making sure that none of them had sport tickets and it was incredibly encouraging uh and motivating to the engineers on the team because we could just assign them a topic hey here's look look at all these support tickets why don't you come up with the product spec the scope the solution oh want to learn more just reply to the support ticket email figure out what they needed what they need and so we kind of turned all the engineers on the team into PMS to go and one like one issue at a time figure out what needed to change and build products for it and that's where we push forward on a3b elections automating it sending in the mail for folks we built our own signing service we turned everything into a click we we did just did sort of the the obvious things we saw on the tickets but as the PM I was able to just sort of not on autopilot but really sit back and have contentful conversations with Engineers who are bringing Solutions and ideas for product rather than one person going through all of the potential ideas scoping them and assigning them and because it was based in what people were saying and wanted it was very motivating for everyone on the team so somewhat long answer but figuring out something in which every day we can wake up and look at the same metric and with some confidence know what to do is so much better than let's figure out what to do each month and kind of like starting from scratch I think this is amazing and important advice just the power of a single metric that everyone in the team can understand rally around and use to prioritize the work they're doing I've seen exactly the same sort of impact funny enough Airbnb one of the teams actually had a metric sort of like this basically reducing the people contacting Airbnb with support issues uh but what ended up happening is their team started just making it harder to contact support because they're like maybe they don't need to contact support about all these trivial issues so maybe let's not let's encourage them to figure it out themselves is there anything you've learned about try to avoid these kind of second order effects that are kind of perverse incentives of a metric we look at multiple metrics but we will optimize around one and you have to use your own judgment to to look at some of these counter measures and and pick them um we would also you know that would sort of be our overarching metric for a year but then we would pick specific tactical metrics about how we would accomplish it so just an example that both is is how we solved a problem but also it's just like a style of metric that was useful to us of of course some of these support tickets include included things like I'm waiting to hear back from Atlas about if they're going to approve my application because stripe is required for very good reasons to evaluate certain business types or um sanctions lists and so a worldwide product so there is some you know incred incredibly should be incredibly quick but uh there is a bit of like a review process and of course if you were not hearing back from us you would be upset you're trying to make your company immediately this is ridiculous like let's get back to us quickly and so we knew that one of the reasons that people were ready to support was like hey what's up with my review what's going on and we knew that our tactic was just to drive up how quickly we got to a final decision on folks and to reduce the number of overturn rejections where someone writes back in saying hi like come on I'm totally just making something reasonable what's up why did you reject me and so we would pick these overarching single metric which was which was the companies with zero support tickets but then we would have a specific KR that was owned by an engineer which is the tactic that we're going to do and so we would not allow ourselves the perverse tactics to sort of just casually exist we would choose which tactics we're going to do and then set a metric for it and the one the other reason I love this metric is it's a it's a cohort metric by which you're trying to drive something up and to the left I sometimes people get excited about a chart that goes up and to the right it's kind of a meme oh that's going up to the right I'm really excited about charts that go up into the left uh so you have to figure out some optimization that you're trying to maximize and so in this particular case of this risk review we would look at hey for the cohort of customers that started last month how quickly did we get them to their their final risk review by number of days since they submitted and so you want a chart that looks a lot like here we go you know right up to the top because you want 100% of your customers to get their final decision as quickly as possible and once you know it when we looked at the chart it was doing this right and so each month we would just make it a little better a little better a little up to the left up and to the left up and to the left and now basically 100ish percent of people get their risk review within an hour from you know a a long tail taking a long time and so we would constrain the tactic through a metric and then kind of like watch it through an optimization function and then when we got to a point where we were happy with the target we could put down the tactic that's another like really useful thing about metrics is just like you can decide when to stop a tactic because you get to some level of success that you're comfortable with and you can always choose to pick it back up later so there's some really cool lessons here um of just how to pick a good metric just to kind of maybe summarize what I'm hearing is you kind of work backwards from essentially NPS like how many why aren't people recommending Atlas you found okay well people that are complaining and having issues with support and running into problems most likely are going to be detractors not going to want to recommend Atlas so let's let's have this really ambitious goals eventually nobody has a support ticket slash let's just track how many people have zero issues and then you identify okay what's driving a lot of these support tickets okay it looks like this risk timeline to I get to the certain Milestone let's make that our goal for the next quarter whatever and let's focus there and then make an impact and then I imagine to move on to other levers within this uh bucket of zero contact you have to pick the right metric for your audience in I wouldn't like I wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone though it's not a terrible one to export but in in the founder Founders choosing where to get started mindset again this isn't just deeply spending time listening to your customers they all ask their friends hey how did you start your company they want to talk to an older sibling of sorts about how it went and so we decided that our goom Market strategy would be to Delight our current customers such that they would tell their friends and other businesses I mean that's always somewhat useful but you can also reach people with Billboards and Google ads and other types of upsells that's very difficult in the moment that someone is starting a company that's sort of a natural geographic can you get the picture of the bird at exactly the right time how are you even supposed to go find people about to start companies thankfully they have this practice of just asking their friends and so if their friends loved it they're going to just recommend it and that that has that the metric and the tactic and the go to market all lined up uh rather than sometimes in cases you might hear someone say well let's make the product quality better well we can all make the product quality better but why like why is this actually going to move what our customers want and the Business board and when you can line them all up it it can be quite quite beautiful just especially when you can see it month over month for a long period of time one other metric I think is I that I would export to anybody is if you are unsure what to measure we have this I don't know if we stole it from somebody else or if we came up with internally whatever is just users having a bad day where we will just emit a log line anytime we think that a user bumped into a problem so maybe they hit a 404 or maybe their payout was one day after the the the ETA or they had more than 10 payment declines you can kind of brainstorm again or just listen to customers what what would cause you to personally have a bad day and then just emit an event when that occurs and then you could just make a bar chart a stacked bar chart of all the bad day reasons and the frequency by which they're happening and is eye opening to see those frequencies and it's kind of a metric I hadn't thought about until Stripes scale in which you just don't know what's happening until you emit the log line and count it like the frequencies could be kind of mindblowing and I think for almost any scale business if you are bored one day and you're not sure what to measure just make a users having a bad day chart emit a log line and count it as a bar chart and then anybody else can add their own bar chart on top of it and so it's become a way for teams to scale their understanding of users through metric by just saying hey look anytime anybody has an idea about why a customer is having a bad day just m a log line like put it on this chart and then what we can choose over time which bad day reasons we want to burn down and hopefully just like eradicate them not just like minimize them but it it g it gave us kind of a background noise counting system for where there are problems and anytime there's an incident or some customer issue the first thing I think think is oo like I wonder if we have a bad day I wonder if we have a bad day reason for this and if we do I actually feel okay I'm like oh yeah it is a bad day for this customer I wish didn't have it but at least we're aware and we can evaluate it against other bad days that we want to burn down what what does sometimes a little bit grind my gears or gives is an opportunity is like when we didn't know about that bad day and it's a surprise to us too that is like to for me is immediate action it's like okay cool we have to figure out a way to count this bad day we got to get it on the chart that way we can make an informed decision about you know when to invest in and improving it I love this idea I haven't heard this before so the idea is just make a list of what happens to a potential customer that would cause them to have a bad day yeah what what are some examples for striper Atlas that you guys have are you a stripe customer Lenny I am I check my with my newsletters uh the payments go through stripe I check my dashboard every day cool so what would be a bad day for you oh I see I see some silence uh happening here um you know it not loading the numberers taking a long time to show up something being completely off in there um not being able to log in the silence is good I just want to keep going the question is how much you know to the audience is how much will of the silence will he edit out before before it goes live but this is what I'm talking about right right is is is I could guess them right yeah but and I I can as you were saying those I know the like I know the URL of those charts right I I I know the login one because I I feel that too so I play with stripe all the time and then you get a tofa too frequently and you know come on I have the same cookie I was just here yesterday right so we count all that stuff and try to make it better over time but I'm so excited when someone brings me a new Bad Day hadn't thought about yet uh because that's just that's like product catnet I love it and your advice here is this doesn't necessarily have to be your goal or metric it's just start watching this thing because that could lead to a lot of interesting ways of operating couple other just like quick metrics things it's a bit of a I don't know some people like cycling or something I guess I like metrics I I like people people get a really nice bike like I I want a really great metric um picking metric titles that make you feel something so we could have called that measure of companies you know number of companies that do not send a support ticket over X period and Y period you know with Min you know you see you sometimes see these charts where the metric itself like named itself this is just companies with zero support that's it and it the brevity and the focus and the customer mindset built into the chart name can become currency inside the company it's like oh I'm working on making the like this chart go up and it feels good to just say the name out loud rather than some complicated underscores and mins and Maxes and you know the database field name is like still in the chart title I these These are aesthetic choices but I think make dramatic differences in the cultural willingness for people to buy in and get excited about it and reduce the need of a product person to just remind everyone every day why they're doing it it's like the metric is motivating us because it's it's a motivating thing to talk about um and and then lastly on metrics is there's just good hygiene that people should bring to their measures percentages shouldn't have 41 bll you know significant digits if if only two of the digits are relevant uh you should keep all the measures of your dashboard on the same x-axis these are just stylistic things that increase the frequency that people want to just wake up every day and open the dashboard and look at it and that is so powerful if your whole team is looking at the same set of information that has the heartbeat of the customer every every single day in fact we can measure at stripe the usage of our dashboards by team and so we can see which teams are themselves looking at their own metrics uh and that is an incredibly useful predictor of how on the same page they are and how and how customer obsessed they are so I just think it's it's it's not an area that's sort of behind the scenes Bean Counting reliability only is the machine hot you can make metrics that mean something to the customer and you would be proud if they were to be screenshoted and put on the internet to be like wow I feel like that company is taking their promise to me seriously and I can see myself on those metrics as a customer that's that's where we we're really shooting for so it's jir back what you just said there which I think is a subtle Point potentially is just making the dashboard look nice like the hygiene of the naming conventions and the decimal points and the chart you're in your experience you find that really powerful important a couple years ago stripe did internal work to make an internal metrics kind of dashboard system and we have a special place called go metrics many people use a go/ service where you can just quickly go to a URL and again I I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy my rule is if it's not on go metrics I'm not going to look at it so if PE people can send me oneoff queries or charts or screenshots or presentations or emails of charts and data but that is in the wind you know we can't interrogate the query metrics are almost always wrong for many weeks we didn't quite get the definition correctly you have to live in the metric for quite a while before you really believe in it and so if you're always looking at some oneoff version it's just very difficult to for it to rise up to the level of importance that is a thing we should trust to help us decide what to do that's an incredibly High bar and so I I just find you have to look at it frequently enough and if you're going to look at it frequently enough it means it needs to be in a discoverable place um you almost go through a couple stages of grief about it because I'll we'll kind of put metric up in a in a place and everyone initially is like wow this is great like I was so excited to finally see this and then a couple days later huh like I don't quite understand it what does it like actually mean I saw this other metric from this other angle that kind of makes it feel you know counterintuitive that it's like this and then you kind of look into it wait a second we've been counting it wrong the whole time oh no and then you look at it the third week and it's a completely different version and then you hope that we forget about it maybe we'll go on something else nope we're not going to forget about it week four comes around you're like wait a second okay this is like then the team meeting starts hey just a reminder let's just bring up the metric again not a screenshot of it go to the URL and just that level of frequency and specificity and ritual around it is what brings it into the decision-making culture and again we treat it the exact same as we do tweets it's it's it's the quantitative and the qualitative right next to each other and because you're putting that amount of attention to it you can't have a thousand metrics we just don't physically have time the day to bring that level of care and understanding to so many things so then it forces you to Wi know so many things you could care about down to a small number of things that you really must care about and again that practice goes back to do you really understand what your customer wants and so for all these tactics it's about finding out customer once and then different versions of of how do we sort of know it's true over time and our tactics improving it sounds so simple when you describe it that way this episode is brought to you by Anvil their document SDK helps product teams build and launch software for documents fast companies like carda and vouch Insurance use Anvil to accelerate the development of their document workflows getting to Market fast is a top priority for product teams and the last thing that you or your developers want is to build document workflows from scratch it's timec consuming expensive and distracts from core work you could stitch together multiple tools and manage those Integrations or you can use an all-in-one document SDK most product managers will tell you paperwork sucks Anvil's document SDK helps teams get to Market fast incorporate your brand style and give you back time to focus on your company's core differentiated features for your users paperwork often starts with an AI powered web form styled and embedded in your application from there you can route data to your backend systems and to the correct fields in your PDFs via API complete the process with a white labeled e signature the best part about Anvil is the level of customization their SDK provides non-technical folks love Anvil's drag and drop Builder and developers love their flexible apis and easy to understand documentation build document software fast with and that's use Anvil docen to learn more or start a free trial that's use nv.com Lenny kind of along these same lines there's something that uh I've learned you started at stripe to help people obsessed with the user experience and get quality to where it needs to be and move a lot of these metrics something called study groups talk about what that is I'm very curious okay let's imagine we've we understand our customer [Music] we've understand understand their burning problem we've built a solution that's in their hands they're using it's hopefully better than their Alternatives and they're start they're starting to use it and we have some real traction you could still me measure the success you could still look at the tweets and then of course you go to pick it up yourself and you're like wait a second this thing is horrible you how how did it get so bad anyone who's built a product that has gone over the horizon of it's actually in production and being used for some you know a year or more as you go to iterate on it especially when you're in a larger company and there's multiple teams and multiple products going on there's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad uh I actually have a hard time naturally explaining it you kind of think to yourself well it's code it just must be running the same every day but somehow you do enough things in a row and what was once a smooth endtoend flow for accomplishing a task for a customer is all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated broken mall that where all the doors are busted and you have to know exactly the way to get through the dashboard to to solve your problem you're wait a second we just I thought this was great just a second ago so all I me many of us have experienced that now okay what what are we going to do about it well one is it is really difficult to take time during the day to allow yourself to even know that this is true because if you're working on one particular team you're going to have some next thing you're shipping you're going to have your customers you're going to be doing great product work Meanwhile your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world and uh decrease all the trust you've earned to build what you're building now it is actually difficult to decide well what hours during the week am I going to block like block off from my future progress to to to to see it from the customer perspective today and there are various techniques to try to incentivize or to structure a group of people to do that stripe has a thing called friction logs as well which is an a a single individual will protect to be a customer and go through a product experience end to end and write it down and that has been quite successful at stripe for very motivated people who can block off the time and have the wide enough context to go to do a complicated thing end to end and have the time to write it up and the sort of position in the company to send it out as a critique to potentially to not just your own team but but in in a whole organization so that's actually like a pretty high bar to crossover so I was kind of brainstorming what could we do to make this more fun and have the frequency by which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase and we kind of iterated through a through through few through ideas and I landed on this thing called study group which is basically a random group of people inside the company they might not work on any particular team they might not all be PMS just like literally anyone who wants to sign up a support person A salesperson someone who's you know on our events team an engineer and our infrastructure stack anybody can sign up for a study group we show up maybe four to eight people total we pretend to be some company with some outcome problem maybe we want to accept money in person at an upcoming uh farmers market or we want to run a multi-country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business like something quite quite complicated we could pick any motivating goal and there are two rules to study group rule one is you do no longer work at stripe you you're not you're not you do not work at stripe not pretend you work don't work at stripe not try to forget you do not work at stripe you've never worked at stripe you work at and we make up a name of the company you know dolphin aquarium Industries and we will pick a CEO of the company from the from the group in amongst us and okay Jenny is the CEO hey Jenny like what what do you want to do today like well I want to sell inperson tickets to the dolphin aquarium it's like cool where would you start all right so we actually embody the customer we will not break character a little bit of the Improv thing and as the kind of maestro of study group I will firmly but kindly if I hear you use any internal stripe knowledge which is natural to do you're like well because you worked on a team and you you know where that button really is and you know the docs link goes a little bit to the wrong place but if you click the other link you'll get to it if I can see you use any internal stripe knowledge I'll just pause and say hey let's re let's redo the sentence or readed what we did with with no stripe knowledge as reminder you don't work at stripe and it takes us a couple times but people really get into it and all of a sudden uh we'll start making up characters and you know the CEO will be like oh uh Tim uh you're our designer you know where are we going to get the color palette all of a sudden there's a person who's not a designer right in real life is now all of a sudden having to practice the empathy from to be in the customer's position and because we're going to be doing it for an hour hour and a half at a time you start you actually start to believe that you don't work at stripe and you you work at do dolphin aquarium Industries and you start to really feel it so that's rule one you don't work a stripe and Rule two is we're not here to solve any problems we're not here to critique we're not here to solution or suggest we're not here to file bugs all of those things is recorded we can do that later whatever this is just about practicing empathy for the customer and going through the product and we have done more than 25 of these at stripe thus far in the last just this year last few months of of 2024 uh more than 250 people uh have gone like participa in the study group and it is deeply eye openening for those involved the responses are you know sort of business emotional you know not not not like not super emotional but just wow I I I I sort of can't believe how hard it was to accomplish XYZ I thought we were amazing at blah it's like well we actually are still pretty good but we need to get back towards amazing or wow I didn't even know that internally people would know that our products did one two and three and this has become so internally popular that teams have adopted for themselves and so we've kind of franchised study group internally already where different teams will will will run it um but I think we're going to continue it because it I think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic people just want more group activities I think some of it is the slowness by which we do it we're not rushing through it um which another reason I appreciate your podcast as well it's like let's like really get into the details and not be rushed for time you you forget that you have a meeting at the end kind kind of amount of time no one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all it's a random group of people we don't even introduce ourselves about what team we worked on uh we're just all here as participants to embody the customer and then I think lastly a reason why it's it's it's work and these are many of these just been actually super surprising to me I wouldn't have been able to prick ahead of time is it is just fun it's just fun people want to make up the name of the company they're excited about what dolphin Industries would sell uh a person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO and it just there's a little theatrics to it but it it has been different enough from our our our other approaches to for a company like stripe which is already like pretty focused on this topic that we think that it's there's there's enough legs here that we're going to keep it and and kind of invest in groups pretending to be the customer and going through it painstakingly slowly rather than only demos or only writing which has other benefits but misses the participation of a larger group and and more fresh eyes so that's been it's been fun and we named it study group I guess I named it study group because I wasn't sure what it would be initially so I just came up with something that sounded cutesy uh but uh gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time and this is where we've landed it's fascinating that something that there's so much theatrics and uh uh ceremony necessary for a product team and a company to find out these things about their product you would think people are like oh we know we know how onboarding looks we know all these things but you're basically what you're saying is you don't and you need to do these sorts of things in order to really know what your product is is like these days the customer does not live in our walls they aren't they're not they're not here you know they're they're not they don't know our lingo and it is just so natural for our internal mindset and lingo to flow into the application over time and you need some counterbalance to get there and I think that's an has to be an unnatural counterbalance I it used to frustrate me actually more like wow why aren't we all like why why aren't we doing this well we're actually doing great work to move something forward and we have our our local optimizations it' be difficult to get to this level of specialization that multi-product companies are trying to do without that level of focus on a per team basis but then you need something unnatural to help us bring it back and so I'm constantly looking for non-punitive fun ways objectively to get more perspectives from the outside in if it's breaking the fourth wall to get on the phone on Twitter if it's looking at a metric of users having a bad day which is just like counting what's happening can't argue with that or a random group of people just kind of scratching their head trying to find a button those are truths those are truths in the world that we're trying to make sure are inputs to all of our teams and if you don't have those inputs I can totally naturally see where the entropy of the world like leads you to have Frankenstein bad products even when all the individual parts are like well oiled and and run by great people so you need something on natural there's an interesting Trend through our and thread through our talk so far broadly there's just like an obsession with making something great and awesome and then a layer below is just an obsession with the user experience being as great as possible and for a lot of PMS there's not a direct line between make the experience as amazing as possible to growth and revenue and success and things like that and it feels like for you and for stripe broadly there's this in innate uh implication if we're making the experience better and better and better we will grow uh you're not in your head sideways a little bit so I'd love to hear just your thoughts on just like this obsession with experience and user issues and okay but we also have to goow the business what are the metrics for moving if someone else has a strategy for moving Revenue that is getting it from customers I want to know about it because it is so hard to get it from customers if there's some faster path please tweet me and tell me about it because we work this is very hard a lot of work to do so if there's something else I want it on the table but I often find it's part of the product experience so maybe it's internal sales tools we can do a study group about our internal sales tools process and our deal desk and our uh margin structure we can do a friction log on our thirdparty vendor process or a migration service or the way um an ecosystem partner helps deploy our services and into a big Enterprise like nothing is sort of off limits from product in fact I was chatting with a friend who runs a company and they were small company on the verge of product Market fit starting to starting to feel customers starting to pull and they're like oh but our our self-service funnel is it's so leaky and we have all this support coming through self-service first of all congratulations unbelievable that they're going through your product even attempting self-service and contacting you the majority case would be no one tries or they try and fail and don't contact you so again what a problem to have and two they wanted to minimize the support in that particular case it's like well what's actually in those support tickets what's in those sales cont there's a really sales cont contacts they're like oh they want to learn more about how to get started they want to know the expertise about this is a particular company it's a healthcare related company they wanted to know their health the healthcare choices uh available they wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had to it I was like that's the product that's the product like the thing you're talking about is the product turn those moments during your self serve process into not self- serve and make the make the product experience be let's get you on the phone let when the and now when they when when they get on the phone they know the first name of the person they're talking to because they they have it from the onboarding for and all of a sudden it feels like you are still in the product but it's not software now it's a person but it's a person backed by internal software which knows as much as as they can about the customer and what they want and I was really inspired by U Fidelity which is a big financial institution where you know you many people listening might have switched jobs and had to move their 401k or something like this from job a to job B you know maybe in some Universe it'll be three clicks but not today or certainly not when I tried a couple years ago you got to call and go on a phone tree and all the shenanigans and then I got on on the line with someone from Fidelity they're like hi Jeff they knew about the old company they confirmed my address they said we by the way uh this is not a digital process yet we're going to FedEx you an envelope and inside it is going to be the thing for you to sign here's going to be exactly where to sign here's like a picture we're going to sign we've put another envelope inside that envelope ready to go and so you just take the papers from envelope one sign them where it says and put them in envelope two and like put it back to the Fest it's like wow that is product that is a product experience where I think some people would say Oh look The Product experience has to only be in software so I feel when people think oh you know product quality and craft has some limit towards business value like there's some ASM toote that you have to be like well kind of PL product playtime quality is over we need to talk about business it's like let's figure out exactly what is causing the business to happen and make it product even if it doesn't look naturally the same as our as our sort of SAS software browser mobile whatever vers vers I think we can see the entire experience as it and from there I include the sales process I include the support process I include uh you know tools that help with compliance and everything else and again if people have a way to make all those things bad and lead to Great uh increasing Revenue over time in sustainable ways like I want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than than the version that we're trying I love that and clearly it's worked for stripe just one last question I want to talk about Atlas and dive into just like what is atlas and how is it doing and things like that I know there's some new stuff coming that you're going to share but one last question about study groups who how do you decide what product you're going to pick to do a study group on and then what is the expectation with the result I imagine there's a PM sitting around like oh my God I just got this 10-page report of all the problems so initially I just made up a list of stuff that I thought would be fun to study group to kind of kick it off and now because it has a of an internal brand and it's exciting and people have gone to a study group say nice things about study group they're they actually proactively say hey we should study group blah or uh we're launching something next week we should study group it before it goes out the door or now I actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group uh based on what people want and then and now we're kind of again franchising it so we're going to have study group captains and people run their own study groups and so I can we can really scale this Behavior but we did our first study group of an internal tool recently and so that I think is going to catch on just any anything at all can be study grouped it just takes about an hour and couple people and you open up the zoom and that's it and then for expectation wise look you can it is it is so tempting to put more regulation on something okay well everything coming out of this program needs to be scored and rubric and have slas that is extremely reasonable as some of these next steps because we do notice things that are of serious issues and we you know we have some formal processes inside of stripe for elevating bugs to certain priority levels that get tagged and have slas for teams to acknowledge and review and so we kind of funnel the outputs of a study group into our already existing formal processes rather than having some new special thing that's going to bother a particular team I will say though that it is difficult to watch one of these study groups a and if you are the team you know involved in some piece of it and not want to act on it uh because seeing your fellow teammates struggle to use your thing in some way is more motivating than the customer because you can kind of always say to the customer well they didn't really know or they have some special [Music] setup you know you probably shouldn't say those things but you you can kind of rationalize it whereas a group of people incentivized to have actually accomplished it who got together to do so painstakingly slowly not being able to do so if that's not what excites you as a product person to want to solve you know it's like this thing's not not for you but then again you have your own optimization system you have your own things you need to ship that's and and study group doesn't have a mandate um that comes from it we have our own we it's more of a cultural piece of information that is very high signal and then people tend to use that high signal for good prioritization I will say though that we have added s the slas is to certain bug levels that begin to match a bit of our incident process so you know in an incident stripe like in many companies you know like pencils down fix the problem severity levels not non-negotiable slack rooms happen War rooms all that stuff you know you don't want to do that with every single bug but we have a rubric of craft related tags for our bug system and if it is a sort of a t0 bug which is not an incident right it doesn't mean to put down your pencils you do need to acknowledge it at stripe within seven days and even if it doesn't mean to fix it it's like a person looks at it and says hey we're going to like do it or not do it that's a still pretty strong Bar for a non-incident related craft issue it feels just at stripe there's this uh cultural focus on we want to make the product great we want to make the experience as great as possible a lot of companies it's just teams we have this goal we're not going to do anything that isn't driving this metric and goal that we have and I think for teams like that it's hard to hear just like oh someone's going to send you all of these problems with your experience you know there's like the negative version where the founders like goes through the product like a CEO a larger company just oh my God look at all these problems you need to fix these immediately and a lot of times those it's like completely distracting from the things they need to do the goals they're trying to drive things that act really really matter that the SE may not be thinking about and it feels like you're trying to find this balance of like here's like problems that exist you don't need to fix them you probably should here's like the most important stuff but also there's often you find a correlation between make the experience better you're going to you're going to do better there's a huge amount of trust here involved in your colleagues which is we want to provide teams great information and they the best teams welcome that information it doesn't mean that it comes with a alter opinion from the outside world that says You must do X we have a rubric on some of the craft related bugs but it but again we also allow our we let the teams relabel them and so maybe it's actually not a p Zero from their eyes and we like that's the TR that's the trust we put in the teams I think that the the failure mode is when you don't look and and so we need unnatural safe fun lore that gets us out of our chair and into the customer's mindset best is if it's you and you're your own customer okay second best would be sitting right next to the customer in the outside world and then like okay fine I'll take a third best which is pantam mining the customer and with a zero with enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge if if you have practices in those three categories I'm comfortable with the failure modes I love that this is definitely going to be the longest episode I've ever done which is exactly what I expected and I'm happy that we're doing this you know everyone go 1.75x or something I like when people are like oh this episode was really good I had to slow down to 1.75 or something what how are you even listening at that speed um no let's one 1.0 speed that's what this episode needs to be there's two more areas I want to spend some time on one is atlas we've talked a lot about on the surface of Atlas I want to help people understand what the hell it is and the stuff that's happening there and two I want to talk about getting stuff done at a big company something that you've done at stripe and I hear you have a lot of good advice on so first of all what is atlas we've talked a bit bit about it what's the best way to understand what Atlas is and who it's for in 2016 a bunch of Stripes were traveling the world uh Stripes is what we call call teammates here and they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world and you would hear this unbelievable story from incredible entrepreneurs who are have a laptop which is that they'd have to fly to the United States on an airplane to make a US company in order to get access to US Financial system to raise money from us or or Global Investors often to take you know USD or to charge us customers and you know you could have sat around in said huh is that illegal they don't live they don't live in the US you know can they have a US company absolutely the US loves this it is incredibly encouraged for people from around the world to make a US company and many people do now why did it require an airplane right and so you you you start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst someone with a laptop who has access to the whole internet and that is a burning problem right that is not a tier three issue I am not able to run my business without getting on an airplane should be sending you know alerts off in your whole in your whole psyche that you have discovered some something important and so I wasn't at stripe at the time and I'm very but I'm very thankful that I was running my own startup at the time I was very thankful that the people at stripe decided to try to tackle that problem and so Atlas is a way to start a company in a few clicks and we think that's an incredibly big deal because while there are smart humans across the whole planet the opportunity that they have is not uniform and it is but it's a little strange because it's all the same MacBooks and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and smarts and so what can we do to dramatically lower the barrier to great people solving problems and we found over and over again that increasing the ease and simplicity and decreasing the cost and and complexity tends to lead to just more of that thing and we have a fundamental belief that there should be more startups and they're not finite and that belief comes from both just a core hope because there are so many problems in the world that don't seem to be being solved fast enough by our current institutions and larger companies that we think we'll actually you know we need entrepreneurial energy to tackle them and then it's also comes from experience of seeing it happened instacart signed up for strip with a Gmail address and then Co happened and they delivered critical food to everyone when when people were reasonably uh not allowed to go to the grocery store easily so you just don't know what the next Gmail address is going to do and so in Atlas we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started and that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time and so over the last few years for those who have either used Atlas or have started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit you might have seen just a progression of of complexity that used to exist being automated um and so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83b election which is this absolutely Byzantine sillly system by which you have 30 calendar days to send a one-page document to the IRS that could radically change the economics of of how you are um incentivized as a founder and this is not one of these you know greedy loophole situations the IRS in the 1980s made this made this uh this IRS rule in order to spurm or entrepreneurship they want this and the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to accomplish you have to send a snail mail in to an IRS address in a particular format in a particular way with no verification that it happened at all and if you do it 31 calendar days there's no redo okay now again if you're a product person you hear the founders terrified all day long about this same issue just alarm bells in your head all the whole time and so I had experienced it for myself as a Founder several times and I also just heard story after Story and I just put on my to-do list for the team we are going to solve this a3b election thing and there are very good reasons not to do it uh because it comes with potential huge liability don't want to screw it up it's nail mail uh you're really going to monetize this you know is this really what the kind of is a competitive advantage to do it you can kind of argue yourself not to do it in a million ways but again back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning into a single click it was obvious to us and we and we got started on it infrastructurally we've been automating these steps and when this podcast errors I guess today uh uh it will be true that when you go to start a company on Atlas it will just be a single click you go to type in your friends names how what the name of the company will be it'll tell you if it's available automatically or not you can split the company up 50/50 or whatever you want to do fill it a few things and you click go and then like a burrito coming to like a pizza tracker we will just handle all of the downstream activities that used to be hey remember to come back in and purchase your shares why am I purchasing my shares I'm just getting started why am I writing a check for $10 and putting into a bank account that I can't even open yet and then I have to wait for that to be done to get the 83 all of those steps are now just handled in the background so that we can get you ready for business in a day or two and so you can quit your you know this is our vision is so you can quit your job on a Sunday night get the Sunday scaries I'm done with it thing and on Monday morning fill out this form and the next day be able to run a billion dollar business because we will have automatically handled getting you access to banking systems to Payment Systems to handling all the equity paperwork filing your 83b election where you can just shift from having worrying about the company starting process to just building and shipping and you'll just get kind updates in the background cool the IRS has given you a tax ID cool your 83b election is filed cool all the founders have their equity and you're ready ready to go on the cap table and we've done this by deeply integrating with the governments and deeply integrating with banking Partners at where we can get you access to the financial system before the IRS and the other governments come back with with their sort of official yeses because we have we take care of the problem in the background by which we're faxing phone calling filling out forms on your behalf and so we just want to take all that complexity and just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start that checklist that they go through we just have the robot do exactly the same thing and so in some ways it is a really big deal in a big ship because it it completely automates it's the company starting process but in other ways it's an incredibly incremental step that it's taken us three years to get to where we had to systematically automate the internal steps each one and now we've done the work to wrap it all up into one button you can just you can just watch how your company's doing the dashboard well first of all congrats Jeff and the atlas team on shipping this I know this a big milestone and it's been a long time coming yeah Atlas was actually a little reasonable before we decided to do all this work it's like why do why do this next step of completely automating it when it was actually like fairly straightforward before um Atlas has above 80 MPS uh which is quite High uh Apple is in the low 60s airpods is 75 I love my airpods uh so Atlas in the 80s with almost 50% response rate is quite high and so we still chose to do another year of work to automate all of this work behind behind the scenes because we see that companies are charging their customers sooner when they go through this automated process versus waiting and it's you know a little strange you just started your company well what does it really matter to wait an extra s days or 20 days before you can get off you before you can really get going on business those are really fragile days with your building and to some of our conversation earlier that amazing feeling of getting your first customer and being in it with them and money actually exchanging hands and getting that relationship if we can slide that forward in the world by a couple days or weeks which we we see we're seeing like half the time it takes to get to your first customer just take like shave a whole week off of your company and you can kind of see GDP being like born like sooner and you you went my whole life knowing that okay GDP is not finite and it can grow but I've never really seen it and now I've actually seen it grow faster sooner and I think anything we could do to just move that forward is going to inspire and and lower the bar for more people to be entrepreneur because they'll see how satisfying that can be and another stat which really was interesting to me recently is that we have seen since doing much of this automation work that more solo Founders are using Atlas than ever before and I think it's because you can just do a lot more on the internet as a Founder with no code tools and everything else and get going very cool to see that bringing the best of the internet and making it available worldwide can cause more people can be correlated with more people becoming Entre rurs and I think we should just keep doing that it incredibly inspiring and I think this is going to be a huge deal uh like it's hard to think about how many what sorts of changes in Tech could transform how many companies are started and how many companies not just started but actually happen because to your point you may start in like nah never mind a few days later if it's still stuck in some Q totally and then you don't know where these things are going to go we have the sort of cohort of 2024 startups in Atlas got to 50 million in Revenue twice as quickly as the cohort in 2023 and so we kind of also think sometimes oh it was the pandemic that pushed everything online that those are our best years it's like we're seeing the earliest cohort charts of new startups just like CRA cracking up and to the right and that's very exciting because you also hear sometimes well the funding Market is down and valuations and this and that the other that is much more of a point in time Capital analysis and much less of a business that just how businesses are working dayto day it's really in the revenue that that is representative of their of their Futures and that looks amazingly bright and then of course these companies go off to do pretty wild things companies that have started through Atlas there's been 55,000 of them uh to date are doing five billion dollar a year in Revenue I think it actually resets their expectations of what other tools will be in the future it's like well if it was so easy for me to get my company started well why is it so hard to do banking well thankfully there are some great services for it but I think it's if we can if we can push people towards expectations higher then they will want to make their companies better and and we just all benefit from that how much of this uh is based on you guys doing like sending faxes and sending mail yourself like I don't know how much you can talk about the behind the scenes but is there a lot of there this Ops Element to automating some of this Atlas is in total 10 people uh which is I think a relatively small group for the role that it plays in The Wider startup ecosystem and we just don't pick up work we can't automate because we know that we need the leverage and so we're not going to tackle we're not going to put ourselves in situations in which we have to compete to be the best we're going to put ourselves in situations where we can automate it and be the only and and like that's a different mindset so in terms of you know why we picked up 83b election as a topic like when we made that decision we made a commitment that we're going to we're going to do this forever like we're we're going to do this forever this a piece of infrastructure for the rest of the internet that is a very high bar to to set as the thing you're going to do and so we're happy to take our time this is part of versus like go go go versus the long-term compounding go go go was when we assigned one engineer hey it's your job today to send one piece of paper to the office with this third-party uh mail service why doesn't matter today just send a single piece of paper to the office and uh incredible engineer and she went on to lead all all the 83 V election work she sent it and the proof of just receiving the piece of paper at the office that we had just sent yesterday is incredible proof right we like well look I mean the A3 election is just sending this piece of paper to to the IRS like we just did it right that that go go go as soon as possible was extremely useful because it's just like look this exists like we can do it come on on the long-term compounding part we were extremely serious about how we picked our third party vendors and backup vendors and what promises and slas and Reporting systems and alerts and playbooks and backup processes like there's is a very intense amount of internal structure we use and but again we have to look at where the value is the value is in making sure it happens does it need to be us sending the mail does it need to be us talking to government not necessarily and we have chosen to work with third parties and many backup third parties as well because one there's expertise in the world of physically Printing and sending mail that the 10 of us are not going to today become experts in and two I think it also causes us to build better software in that we now need to evaluate if something's actually working because it's happening externally whereas when you build it yourself again you have this natural feeling well we built it it must be working oh later we'll add alerts you know later when there are problems we'll figure out playbooks well look when it's a third party building it you're like wait a second WS if they screw up like cool we better figure that out we better OCR all the results we better you know do all these check sums we better and it would be awesome if we could always treat our internal work that way but because it was external it forced us to be more rigid where we needed to be rigid and create interfaces and and kind of commitments and again we work with a bunch of great third parties uh and back up third parties to execute this and we and each year we write a document called should we do this ourselves and we look at the other nine of us around the room and go of course we shouldn't let's go onto something else so again we're just we're we're just really stitching it together but ensuring that it happens awesome okay I was imagining fax machines just there are fax machines occurring there are fax machines occurring not in theice there and there are phone calls being made and there are robots waiting on phones uh on hold as well there's oh amazing there's quite a lot going on ai ai is here uh I saw a stat that one in six new Delaware Corporations are now started on stripe Atlas that's absurd yep I'm very excited to tell you when it's one in five but I but is not today okay sounds like we're close we're on our way sounds like we're close the other stat I have here is that uh the fastest growing cities for startups uh here's what I have I don't know if you know this but Boulder shenzen and Las Vegas they're everywhere and the part one of the it's not this like stat we kind of came up with a little bit last year that I I'm just personally deeply obsessed with is founding teams in which the co-founders are in multiple countries so like kind of nickname this again it's like the giving giving things a good title uh headlines crossb Founders um wow like more than 20% of multi multi founder teams have at least one founder from another country that is astounding to me that the internet could bring people together that and I think that's going to Pro provide more perspectives more solutions will be local and Global just all perspectives are great and and again I think the atas team itself represents this we were very intentional of how we built the atlas team it's majority women and we have more more diversity to to to hire but we were just very intentional to make it a team that had diverse perspectives uh you've been on teams that don't have diverse perspectives of any type they are so much worse uh there's no real science necessary here we just enforced that as we had the opportunity to build build this team that way and it was really important to me that it repres it represented a world we wanted things to look like and and to represent and you know we just had to be very intentional about it because I've made mistakes in my career previously where my startup was all men when we sold to box one of them and it on each hire was harder and harder and harder to hire someone of a different background just naturally folks didn't want to join that type of team and that was the last time I've ever ever going to make that mistake which is that early the candidate poll must match where where you want the team to go it's not a down funnel problem it is an up funnel problem and where you have to just make sure that for each role you're comfortable with the AL like with the with the distribution of of people and backgrounds in your candidate pool and go from there and I think that is one of the reasons why that 10 person group is so effective is it has just a lot of diversity and and perspective another skill Jeff Weinstein is incredible at that I wasn't even aware of we're going to add him to the list and I actually saw a photo of the team and I noticed that and so great work is there anything else on Atlas that you wanted to share before I get into how actually made Atlas happen at a company like stripe that has a billion things to do we just want to hear about what's hard for you you know if you if you look back in your emails and and you if you've started a company recently you're starting company right now the whole world is counting on you to pick a customer solve their problem 10 times better than their alternative get it to them charge for it become economically viable and build a great business that provides great Services we are not counting on you to become experts at this silliness of administratively running your company that is you know uh imagine life without Google Docs uh and where you'd have to hire an IT person to run your it backend uh on on employee three you'd have an IT person or imagine the world without AWS for ec2 or S3 or any of these cloud services and you're racking computers yourself you're just absolutely not going to try as many things we just like we just see the company structure the the structure bringing people together to be like that and we want to automate more and more and more of it and turn into software so we're we're looking for the next things to work on we have a couple ideas but we expect to turn more of groups of people working together that Administration into software and I think it's just going to unlock huge amount more people choosing to do it interesting I'm so curious what that ends up being like if you really think about what you're doing here if you believe that on entrepreneurship and Innovation and Technology make the world better you're creating such an unlock to allow more of that and like I said I think it's it's hard to imagine and think of other examples that could be as transformative and impactful as just making this process it's funny because I I go back to again I also hear from Founders entrepreneurs like oh I can't think of an idea like ah I need a I need I need a startup idea and yet everything in the world is broken you know uh and I also recall my first startup early 2010 2012-ish I joined a friends company that was started at the same time that the stripe Founders started stripe and that is that I think about that a lot because with the same information knowing how hard it was to accept online payments I chose to work on something else uh where they didn't they worked on making it easy in seven a code to accept payments online which turned out to be really useful uh so I I really encourage people to be very sensitive to the problems that they see and just not let any any little hiccup go unnoticed uh and I think Atlas is really a manifestation of that which is let's actually look at every single thing you went from Hobby to E eally successful operation and which of the any moment along the way you shouldn't have had to had to do and we think those things are fair game to play with in any topic I think that there are many more gigantic businesses important things to be solved sitting in plain sight I can't see them always but when you hear if you sit enough silence and you hear the same people complain about problems you too might find something as big as online payments are hard which was sitting right in front of all of us and I think it's important to note it doesn't necessarily have to be a venture back venture Scale company right there are many most businesses in the world are not Venture back venture scale billion dollar companies you could build a profitable company it it's uh kind of funny we've all um put this badge of honor of giving away a lot of your company uh you know people really love owning a lot their company and being successful so you just got to pick the right capital structure for your for your business and again uh the amount of money that is been generated of the companies that started through Atlas you said5 billion basically that's the GDP of of Atlas that Atlas and that's that's like Revenue per year and that's growingly yeah and you know obviously some a lot of it would have happened anyway but still there's it accelerated it's probably growing faster uh a lot of it probably never would happened otherwise yeah we we ran a survey a little bit to go we need to rerun this where we just ask people would they have started their business without without Atlas and about 20% of people said they wouldn't have or wouldn't have had them and again these things are fragile right and it's not all it's not all Google Employees leaving their job to build something it's people from every possible background every possible role every possible job every possible age group who see problem and can solve it so it's dramatically more fragile than people think well great work Jeff and team Atlas and stripe in general fun let's talk about one last thing um there's like so many more things I still want to talk about maybe we'll have a go quick yeah we go fast make it tox speed so this Lis is basically a zero to one product I know you didn't start initially it was there but you took it from I don't know maybe took it from 0. five or something to uh to one and 100 now and a lot of people struggle with starting things like this within larger companies like strip's a large company right they it's like you know a very Innovative uh well-run company but it's also a large company and clearly you you made you made happen you and your team what kind of things have you learned actually let me read a quote here's a quote that kind of describes uh you being good at this from one of your former colleagues who will go un named Jeff is really good at cutting through the BS you hear so much about Frameworks and all this complicated stuff that people talk about in PM circles when the most straightforward obvious thing is probably right I get so annoyed after calls with Jeff sometimes because I know he's right about something I bang my head against the wall for months and so talk about just like what you've done what you've learned about getting stuff done at a large company what do you need to do right not having things be your idea I think is really powerful like I just talked to 50 customers who all yell the same thing here they are in varieties of quotes and forms and the rest of it and you put some three bullet points of strategy around why it's important and it's going to help you win more market share and the rest of it and how you can do it well cool I mean what what else could we want to do maybe somebody has something where 51 people have the same burning thing but the majority failure mode is we do nothing that's the majority failure mode and so one aligning people with deep customer stories storyboarding some solution visually with a sharpie and not a pencil not figma initially not high or low Fidelity I can never remember which one is the detailed one but just like Sharpie what is the unconstrained perfect solution to this Burning problem and that's you know Pixar style storyboard you don't need to be a designer you can just draw like stick figures on a piece of paper or whimsicle or whatever you want to do and with those things if you're not asking for you know this the Sun and the Moon on headcount and team size to make some forward progress like who could stop you you know let's get some first version working it was very motivating to get that single piece of paper in the mail with which was blank to kick us off on the 83b election and again by the time this podcast airs we will have crossed 10,000 83b elections filed and we have have done them all 100. z% on time uh with the burning use case why customers are going to need it why we can do it cheaply effectively safely over a long period of time and here's the way to get tangible forward progress quickly against the stick figure vision but with something in the browser or one one one version of it let's just get one thing working one time I find proof of existence to be an incredibly powerful proof rather than proof by Theory or proof by debate it's just like look we did it one time hey I'm holding the piece of paper uh pretty motivating uh we could you know if we just if we just printed out the right information we'd be done okay actually there's a lot to do other than just that but it it really pushed us forward so I think cutting through a little bit of the red tape is about momentum and making each step not such a big deal and asking for Less permission and then of course once you have a little bit of that under your belt you're going to naturally be trusted with taking more of those kinds of bets uh paired with the some of the things we talked about earlier of everyone's looking at the same place about the metrics everyone can watch the success we don't need to do big internal updates with long- winded PowerPoint presentations and scrambles the night before you can just go to the metric page and see how we're doing that that in that brings so much trust to the group that people start going from hey why do we have this Atlas thing that doesn't you know really produce so much money is like charging people companies when they don't have money like we're a big payments business how do you even compare these things to wow look at the progress that they are making against the mission and look at look at its impact and the curves and you start they start to like root for it more I think that's how we got it there I will say one other thing which is that making something e eally viable is extremely important and so when I I'm probably the fourth person to run Atlas and it's quite a Pantheon of people prior to me including the founder of mosy which is a compliance um uh startup uh Watershed which is this amazing climate reporting tool also um LED Atlas P Patrick McKenzie patio 11 for many folks do wow what an alumni group this we owe ourselves a dinner uh we owe ourselves quite a group and now we have a new person who's so I you know I technically no longer lead Atlas so we've hired up a whole team which is really exciting and Haley haverson who joined us uh about a year or two ago she leads Atlas now and you can find her on Twitter she's fantastic and uh we just uh we swap jobs over a course of a year just one month at a time the roles and so uh she worked for me and then I worked for her and then and she's gone off to hire some amazing people to run Atlas so it's really quite a privilege to have these people leaded over time so we but it was really important for us to communicate why we are going to run this e in an economically viable way and I think that applies to all products and all businesses it's just like look if you're a customer acquisition style product well show showcase why is this is the best customer acquisition for the dollar for the company if you are a margin generating Mo Moe creating ecosystem growing portion of the business well well then your metrics have to show it and so just you can't just have half the story of just the product quality and the tweets you have to have the economics who else is going to put this much energy into this style of of product and that gives us confidence that we should invest it in the long term because uh Alternatives can come and go and we actually I super encourage there to be more Atlas Alternatives that'd be great for Founders but I think over the long term it'll be difficult to do so just because of the business model yeah there actually was an alternative at one point angelist and then they're like no stripe is a kill in it let's just send everyone to to Atlas so I had worked on stripe payments for a while and I had just started on Atlas And I think that same month Angelus announced that they were doing incorporation and Banking and cap table all together which was exactly what I wanted to do and I was like oh shoot did I sign up for the wrong thing Angel is a such a smart group of people so customer oriented great brand and I love many of the people that work there work with some of the best uh legal Minds to and they have the ruv set up there's like so much awesomeness here I was like should we just should we really compete like what should we do here and we thought about it more and more like look in the very long term this company starting process is going to become a efficiency cost problem and there's so much longtail complexity with dealing with multiple financial institutions multiple government processes all of this legal complexity that it will be and it's difficult to charge a lot of money for it because it's hard to charge people money when they haven't even started the business yet we looked at it and said look we're g to keep we're going to keep this long-term compounding approach because we think that this is where it's going to go and it was a zero zero interest rate environment at the time Angelus built a phenomenal product I looked at it with nothing but admiration and happiness but it also kind of smarted and hurt and we just kept building kept building kept building and I got a phone call one night on my wife's birthday uh before we sat down for dinner and it was uh um Dan at uh at angelist I hope he be comfortable telling the story who I love an incredible product mind and he led product over at Angeles for startups and he said hey we're going to get out of Incorporation this is not going to be our Focus going forward do you want the business I like it was like a year and a half after after they had really gone out or two years after they gone out or something like this I was like Wow and we had kept such an open relationship with them we had paired with them on legal constructs we had discussed 83b election openly and a lot of people like oh I can't believe you're talking to the competitor you know like look we we all share the same Mission here you know yes we're competing but it's are we really all better off from treating each other at at Arms distance we had a shared slack Channel we discussed when the uh Delaware was slow on on incorporation one time is because they were playing softball and they had an afternoon off that's a real story uh and we've discussed it and so when and and Angelus was incredible in in how they evaluated it we're like evaluating different uh Partners but because of our working relationship and the quality of the of your product and they saw we were going with 83b election and the intensity of that they just put up a a web page that said to get started with Angel list if you need a company go right over to Atlas and that was a really amazing moment because it it I respected them so much and I looked up to them so much that they would mutually beneficially choose to do that and everybody was excited and happy and customers happy and it's been an incredible relationship since in which you can start on angelist go through Atlas and then all of your information is automatically populated into angelist automatically and we've since rolled that out with several other partners Mercury Carta others but Angel's really led the way there and we just maintain a great relationship with team but it's just like such a it was it took a while but it really reproved to me that they're not competitors it's Alternatives and if you care about your customer you care about their Alternatives and if you care about the mission you you need to all work together and look there's some friendly competition of course we all want to win but in the long term I think all parties are like significantly better off wow that is an awesome story I don't know if you've shared that anywhere else there's so many lessons there uh that I could like spinoff on just like not worrying about competition staying heads down just solving customer problems staying close to your competition not being afraid to talk to them sharing advice with each other just building the best possible product I don't know there's a ton there that's super interesting I couldn't really draw it up any better and I just think the world is better off with more specialization and there it's a pain in the butt it's a pain in butt to these incorporations like you really I think we can get yeah I think you want more specialization and more partnership um and I think a lot of companies are starting to do that now okay so let me let me go back to the lessons you shared on how to build something new at a big company and then we can we can wrap up so I took a bunch of and these are awesome and they actually resonate a lot with Mika who came on the podcast who's all who's had figma been the person building a lot of Z to1 stuff and so it's nice that there's these trends that are coming up again and again so one tip is just storyboard the ideal like with a sharpie draw out here's this exciting vision of what this could be if we were to pull it off without constraints unconstrained powerful Vision uh two is solve a burning use case make it clear like this is a huge problem for a lot of people there's probably stories you share there show tangible forward progress just like look at this we made this progress we made this progress sent ourselves a piece of blank paper look at this it's a huge milestone and have momentum and mahika talked about this just like keep the fire alive keep the fire alive show momentum we're making progress this metric's moving up and to the right and then and then there's like a milestone felt like you had like an early Milestone of like Le this we made a we made progress and then also have the business case basically look how much we could make and look what this could be if we were to succeed anything you'd add there anything you correct bringing the earliest customers into the room with your team as soon as humanly possible we would just invite a Founder to the team meeting we would pipe all of their feedback into a slack Channel automatically we have all the NPS scores going to a channel and any time it's not a 10 for 10 we follow up directly just like constant engagement with a customer creates the momentum where it doesn't need to be the product person or some other leader saying we need to do this follow me it's oh my gosh the world needs this let's figure out how to do it even faster and a tip that the team has tried and this is well since i' I've involved dayto day uh is literally inviting customers in to design the product which I had actually never heard of hey we're thinking about what happens after incorporation now and what can we do to help uh Founders after they've set up their company what would be magical there we just invite Founders in into a Whimsical which one of a piece of software I love at just a really easy learning curve to create visual diagrams and rather than sort of doing Au USR about it we just say hey what would what would you hope this dashboard would have and they grab a thing and they start typing and they start drawing what they want their dashboard to be like why were we guessing beforehand I kind of and now scratched my head I'm several years into you know decade plus building things and I was like I was doing this by myself why didn't I just assign it to the people who are going to use it in the first place now look that doesn't always work because not all of your customers are going to be uh you know product designers at heart but more of them than you think and I think it's it's giving your customers right access and not just read access to your company is incredibly powerful and I think I had not seen it so directly where they just actually designed what they want but I saw a diagram of something we're working on right now I was like wow we haven't even had design look at it they're like no actually the customer drew it great uh why were we guessing I think you have an unfair Advantage where your customers are founders and oftentimes have product skills and design skills uh but I love that it's true but I will really push because you don't need a hundred of them and you're you'll find somebody somewhere who know you just got to sit in a little more silence you'll some they'll raise their hand uh there's a quote you shared somewhere that I'm that relates to what you just said that your dad once said you can screw up a sentence if it begins with the customer that's true yeah my dad runs a um an IT business in Baltimore they help other businesses with their computer systems and my growing up I would literally physically clean the keyboards of his employees and you know dust dust the M dust the mice but yeah he's very very customer oriented where I get a lot of it from and my mom's a painter so I think there's some combination of tal talents or interests there but yeah he he would take it one step further and he would sometimes physically bring a chair over in a meeting and say the customer is sitting here and you'd have to like pretend and then he would kind of fake talk to the invisible customer hey based on what you've seen today at the meeting I saw him do this one time like based on what you've seen today at the meeting are you more likely to pay your bill or less likely to pay your bill based on what you witnessed uh that's a little a little intense on the pantomime but I think the point gets across that you just if you begin again because it's so natural to think internal if you be begin the sends physically with the customer and then start your sends you just have a much better shot at it that's an amazing story very steady group is like a early early prototype um Jeff we've covered so much ground I have two hours more worth of questions but we need to Let's lock we need to take a cut it off I think um is there anything else you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get there very exciting lightning round really excited about whatever you're building out there or thinking of building my email address is incredibly easy to find my Twitter handle is incredibly easy to find do not hesitate to send me cold emails uh My love language is Loom videos of bugs but feel free to send anything you have um off the top of your head I respond to good cold emails don't hesitate what's the email real quick for people oh if finding my email address is your issue okay uh it can't possibly be but it is my first initial and last name at basically everything in the world though my handle on Twitter is Jeff Weinstein but gosh if you if you can't find my email address then you got a bigger problem okay we'll link to it in the show notes as well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready here we go what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people I I know lot of people in this podcast recommend high output management but it should be you know swap the Bible out for it at all the hotels in the world and in the little drawer just like put it everywhere you just can't go wrong though uh it is just a an incredible Clarity of how to spend your time as a leader manager of other people just like a very high bar for how evaluating your work as the sum of everyone around around you that was very clarifying to me that it's just like not an individual effort it is the sum of of everything I'm involved in is how to measure it so that's definitely up there a nice pair to that book as a a mo like a moose Bou afterwards is orbiting the giant hairball a corporate Fool's uh corporate Fool's guide to surviving with Grace I think is the full exact title um by Gordon McKenzie which is the story of a illustrator at Hallmark the greeting card company and it turns out to be a again bureaucratic slow-moving organization that over time just added rules and policies and rules and policies and kind of quelled creativity and Innovation which is surprising at a greeting card company uh but it existed and so this is his incredibly well-drawn book as you'd imagine with beautiful illustrations about how he orbited the Hairball of the organiz ation to INSP others keep himself engaged and to bring creativity and excitement and trying to like pull people off the Hairball as as he orbited it and so I think it's just like a fun afternoon read with beautiful illustrations about just kind of how to stay sane at big companies and where to be a little goofy and take the the advantage and gravity of the Hairball but not to be like succumb buy it and be able to orbit it those two are really fun I will say one other one I like just because we haven't talked about strategy here this been more getting stuff done and some other tactical things but seven powers and I know you you had uh the author recently on which is awesome I uh ran in so I won't explain the book just go you just watch the the podcast of it but just walk it walks through many of the business powers and sort of Moes a a company can have I ran into the author um Hamilton Helmer Hamilton Helmer yes thank you what a cool name very cool name ill litera at the Box lunchroom one time where I worked at box uh they acquired one of our companies and I was like hey uh any luck finding the eighth power uh he's like I'm looking I'm looking as he like ran off with his sandwich another one other funny uh somewhat embarrassing moment about that book is when I was applying to work at stripe uh I was in some email conversation with our CEO Patrick Carson who quite well read enjoys books and I was you know trying to Showcase I like books a little bit though not at any level him and I just had mentioned like I just finished reading seven powers and I kind of recommended it to him but it jokes on me because he's quoted in the forward that I had skipped uh so he was very kind to let me know that he had read it and he is quoted in it uh so I was like oh shoot maybe I won't get the job but um I got through that part at least so th those those books have have spoken to me do you have a favorite Power by the way do you have a favorite Power uh well his favorite Power is counter positioning I also like that power a lot because I think it's the one you can that really changes everything about how you build your company so that's the one that always stands it I like counter positioning also and Atlas with going cheap and that audience is counter positioning but I really enjoy process um the process power because it's just like I think it is very difficult to as an organization get good at anything and if you could do that over a long period of time in a sustainable way you have a power this is the nerdiest chat I've ever had which which is your favorite seventh power I love it but uh on that power he I asked him about it he he makes a really strong point there that that's uh rarely is it actually a power for people they think like the way we execute is going to be our advantage and rarely is it actually a power usually people can kind of copy it but but when you nail it um that's even better because then if your competition thinks they have it ex won't invest in the other one so I like it even more for that reason I love it uh but I was going to say with Patrick hollon being quoted in that book Not only was he just like uh uh wrote part of the forwarder was a code he basically credited seven Powers with helping build stripe no big deal totally yeah okay the slighting round is going great this is like a very microcosm of our whole chat so far uh second question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show howto with John Wilson that's on HBO it's okay so for those who haven't seen it not really giving away anything because it's just wild when you watch it you can't give it away uh this videographer has found footage or he's just like walking through Manhattan other and other parts of the country but mostly New York with just like a camera for 10 years just filming intensely weird things and if you've spent any time in New York you know there's plenty to film and then has put together this narrative afterwards about certain topics like how to uh make risoto or how to take out the trash or how to and it's a way of seeing Life Through The Eyes of these vignettes like diving down really understanding people and he does it through this incredibly dry humor of of of stitching together this this uh this video footage to tell a different narrative and I think some of is that we used to live in New York and I love I love I love living in California but I I miss that frequency of strangeness and you can see that through that TV show fantastic movie I recently watched the quiet girl which is a film about a young Irish girl who sort of from a dysfunctional home and has this opportunity to live with a family friend who is family's more um have more opportunity for her more empathetic to her and just repres just it just showcases again like how fragile things are um it's a very intense film but I just there's something beautiful in how how much opportunity was in front of this this young this this young girl so it's it's it's a tearjerker but a great one do you have a favorite product you have recently discovered that you love I love my computer I'm fast at my computer um being fast on my computer helps me just go from intention to just out in the world I Fallen back in love with raycast uh which is a automation tool for those who have watched the Journey of Spotlight and Quicksilver and Alfred and all these automator Services raycast seems to have cracked the nut on automation nerd complexity but also UI ease and some nice touches and just like loads quickly does the basics it's fully programmable extensible just like a huge fan of raycast and then I think for product people you if you don't have clean shot install for screenshots you're just behind the curve I there's so being able to take a screenshot and blur particular things or point at stuff or have arrows and lines and just like have that be second nature fast instantaneous is so useful to be able to communicate what you're seeing so when I get a new laptop it's raycast first and cleanshot second wow I am G to download cleanshot immediately yes it's ex heard I've been I've been using Skitch as my bluring and so as much as I appreciate the sketch folks uh clean shot is is a incredible piece of software amazing I'm going to do that all right two more questions do you have favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends or family find useful and worker in life I don't even realize I say go go go a lot but I do I actually say it and write it so people I hear that they'll later say go go go back to me I'm like huh don't I say that sometimes like yes you say it a lot uh so apparently go go go is one of them I also I love that say like let's make some mistakes uh just when we're like brainstorming something or um sitting at a sushi restaurant with and talk Sushi guy guy or gal just just to like showcase like hey let's be creative do do whatever you want I'm no pretense I'm out of value anything like let's make some mistakes it's just like a weird thing they're so good I'm gonna use that for my podcast guest let's just make some mistakes like let's make some Mist don't worry about at that Point's like what okay fine sure I'm like cool I like the combo of those two go go go go let's makes a mistake you have you have to use it in certain circumstances and not for the 59s of reliability on our API but uh uh it does have its place final question you worked with Patrick cson and John cson for many years curious what the most useful feedback or advice you have heard from them or learned from them on my first month working here which I guess is six some years ago now I was they they put me in charge of our payments infrastructure services so that's all the backend systems that communicate with the financial system and all the internal apis where we build the external apis and products on top of so like quite a lot of stuff I knew nothing about Finance I knew nothing about the scale that we talking about they entrusted me somewhat insanely uh with that responsibility and so on the first month we had our quarterly Business Review where you know just the normal quarterly process and they I was like okay cool I'll do the next one I'll write the next one I've been here one month they're like no like you no you you write it like it'll be even better that you that you write it oh my God like it's just like the forcing me to have to in the fourth week have that Catalyst to understand the whole business and like with the permission because I was going to have to write this doc about how we're doing i' company been in existence for like seven years before I got here already at some reasonable scale I didn't it was just an intense it was just an intense operation and I remember writing the first draft and sending it to him because it was I didn't want to send it he had kind of pushed me to do it a bit and I figured I'd give him an early draft and he wrote back this doesn't sound like you yet the willingness to entrust a new person to provide their own perspective and and bring it into a very formalized document like that was an impressive and like that's that really spoke to me and I rewrote it completely and I made it sound like me and I've tried to make things sound like me since Jon's is more of a gut punch I'll say so I reported to John the co-founder he maybe nine months into reporting to him he I would run around with a clipboard I was a little bit manic of getting a lot done a lot going on at stripe at the time and I would we'd have a one hour one-on-one I'd be listing all the things that we had accomplished and the problems we have and where we need escalation help and where we're stuck and all this that and the other just lots of stuff I had you know checklists and physical paper flipping it over a little bit frantically and he he said you are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through 100 but I need you stuck on problem S one and two like oh man that like hurt I was like oh shoot I I am I've i' I'm I'm productive on the non-he hardest problems and I was trying to mask uh not on purpose mask but just who wants to be stuck on something so hard when there's so much else to do and from then on I would show up to him with problems one and two and not talk about provs 3 through 100 even if we were working on them we would just not talk about them and we would get stuck on problems one and two and that was phenomenal advice which I you know I was like oh shoot I'm going to be fired but just like but but was like it was really a deeply impactful sentence wow what a what a powerful great helpful like that's that's great advice he really my soul and yeah love this you know like uh Street Fighter style or something but it's your point very impactful and helpful yeah Jeff we did it cool the Archaeology is complete I appreciate the time Lenny it was fun and uh I I don't do too many of these so I'm curious to people's feedback and really appreciate the questions amazing Jeff thank you so much for being here appreciate it Lenny bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode