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Part two of Culture and Team, and
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we have Ben Silverman, the founder of Pinterest, and
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John and Patrick Collison, the founders of Stripe.
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Founders that have obviously sort of, some of the best in
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the world at thinking about culture and
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how they build teams.
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So, there's three areas that we're gonna cover today.
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One will just be sort of general thoughts on
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culture as a follow up to the last lecture.
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And then we're really gonna dig into what happens at
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the founding of these companies.
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And building out the early team.
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And then how that changes and evolves as these
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guys have scaled their companies up to 100 plus.
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I don't even know how many people you have now,
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but quite a lot.
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Very large organizations and
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how you adapt these principles of culture.
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But to start off I just wanna ask a very
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open-ended question which is,
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what are the core pieces of culture that you found to
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be most important in building out your companies?
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>> So what are the most important parts?
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>> It's on. >> Oh, it's on.
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Yeah I mean I think for
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us, like we think about on a few dimensions.
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One is like who do we hire,
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and what do those people value?
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Two is what do we do every day, like why do we do it?
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Three is what do we choose to communicate?
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And then I think the fourth is what we
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choose to celebrate.
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I guess the converse of
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that is like what you choose to punish.
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But in general I think running a company based on
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what you celebrate,
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is more exciting than what you punish.
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But I think those four things kind of make up
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the bulk of it for us.
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>> We've placed a large emphasis on, as Stripe has
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grown and probably more than other companies is,
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transparency internally.
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And I think it's been something that's been
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really valuable for
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Stripe, and also a little bit misunderstood.
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All the things people talk about like hiring really
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great people, or giving them a huge amount of leverage.
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Transparency for us plays into that.
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We think that, if you are aligned at a high
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level about what Stripe is doing, if everyone really
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believes in the mission, and then if everyone has
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really good access to information, and kind of
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has a good picture of the current state of Stripe.
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Then that gets you a huge amount of the way there in
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terms of working productively together.
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And it kind of forgives a lot of the other things that
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tend to break as you, as you grow a start-up.
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As we've grown, we started off two people.
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We're now over 170 people.
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We've put a lot of thought into the tooling that
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goes around transparency, because at 170 people,
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there is so much information being produced,
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that you can't just consume it all as a fire hose.
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And so
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how we use slack, how we use email, things like that.
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We can go into it more later.
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But I think that's one of
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the core things that's helped us work well.
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>> I think culture to some degree is basically kind of
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the resolution to a bandwidth problem.
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In the sense that, maybe when you start out working
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on something, you're sort of coding all the time, but you
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can't code all the things that you think the product
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might need, or the company might need, or whatever, and
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you so you decide to work with more coders, right?
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And so the organization gets larger.
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And maybe, in some idealized world,
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I don't think this actually true, but kind of ideally
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you could be involved in every single decision, and
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every single sort of moment of the company, and
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everything that happens, but obviously you can't, or
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maybe you can if two people.
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But you certainly can't at even like five or
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ten kind of that point comes very quickly,
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then by the time you're 50 it's completely hopeless.
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And so culture is kind of how you kind of,
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what the strands are that you sort of want to have,
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the invariance that you want to kind of maintain,
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as you can get specifically involved in sort of
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fewer and fewer decisions over time.
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And I think when you think about it that way it,
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maybe its kind of importance becomes sort of
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self evident, right?
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Because again, like the fraction of things you
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can be involved in directly is diminishing, I mean,
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almost exponentially,
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sort of assuming your head count growth sort of is
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on a curve that looks like one of the great companies.
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And yeah that's super important.
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And again, it manifests itself in a bunch of
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different ways.
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Like for example, in hiring, I think a large part of
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the reason why maybe the first ten people you hire,
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what kind of goes to ship,
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decisions are so important is because you're not just
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hiring those first ten people.
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You're actually kind of hiring 100 people.
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Because you should think of kind of
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each one of those people as bringing along sort of
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another ten people with them, and
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sort of figuring out exactly what 90 people, you would
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like those first ten people to bring along is obviously
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gonna be quite consequential for your company.
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But really briefly I think it's largely about sort of
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abstraction.
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>> So one thing that a lot of speakers in this
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class have touched on is how hiring those first ten
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employees, if you don't get that right,
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the company basically will never recover but
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no one has talked about how to do that so.
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What have the three of you looked for
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when you've hired these initial employees,
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to get the culture of the company right?
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How, how have you found them, and
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what have you looked for?
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>> Sure. So,
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I guess this answer is different for every
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company and I'll say for us it was very inductive.
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So I literally looked for people that I wanted to work
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with and that I thought were talented.
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I think, I've read all these books about culture,
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because when I don't know how to do something,
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I first go read things and
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everyone has all these frameworks.
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And I think one bit, big misconception that someone
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said once is that people think culture is like
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architecture when it's a lot more like gardening.
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You know, you plant some seeds and
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then you pull out weeds that aren't working,
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and they sort of expand.
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So, when we first hired people we hired people that
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were like ourselves.
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I often looked at like three or
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four different things that I really valued in people.
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You know, I looked for people that worked hard and
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seemed high integrity and low ego.
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I looked for people that were creative, and
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I usually meant that they were really curious.
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They had all these different interests.
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Some of our first employees are probably some of
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the quirkiest people I've ever met.
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They were engineers but
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they also have all these crazy hobbies.
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Like one guy made his own board game
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with this elaborate set of rules.
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Another guy was really into magic tricks.
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And he had coded not only like this magic trick on
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the iPhone, but
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he had shot the production video with a preview.
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And I think that, that quirkiness has actually been
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a little bit of a calling card.
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And we find that really creative, quirky people that
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are excited about many disciplines, and are
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extraordinary at one tend to build really great products.
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They tend to be great at collaborating.
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Then the last thing is, we really look for
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people that wanted to,
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they just wanted to build something great, and
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they weren't arrogant about it, but they just felt like,
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it'd be really cool to take a risk and
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build something bigger than themselves.
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And that, in the beginning, is very,
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very easy to select for if you're in our situation.
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We had this horrible office, like, nobody got paid.
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So there was no external reason, other than being
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excited about building something to join.
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In fact, there was every reason not to.
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And that's something, looking back,
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I really, really value,
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because we always knew people were joining for
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the purest reasons, and in fact,
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were willing to forgo other great job opportunities,
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market salary, a clean office,
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good equipment just for the chance to work.
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So, to this day I think a lot of those traits have
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been seeded and
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are embedded in the folks that we look at now.
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>> Yeah the first ten hires are really
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hard because you're making these first ten
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hires at a point where no one's heard of this company,
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no one really wants to work for it.
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You're just these,
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like two weird people working on this weird idea.
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>> And like their friends are telling them not
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to join.
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For our second employee, I think
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he'd accepted the offer or he was just about to, and
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his best friends took him out the night before, and it
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was like a full on assault for, why you should not join
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this company, why this is ruining your life basically.
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And so anyway the guy subsequently
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continued to join.
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And actually one of
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those friends also now works at Stripe.
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But this is what you're up against.
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>> Yeah.
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And I mean it's also hard because no batch of
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ten people will have as great an influence on
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the company as those first ten people.
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I think everyone's impression of recruiting is,
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you open LinkedIn.
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It's sort of like ordering off the dollar menu.
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It's, I want that one, that one, and that one.
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And, and now you have some hires.
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Whereas at least for us, it was very much over a very
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long time period, talking people we knew or
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friends of friends into joining.
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We didn't have huge networks, Pat and
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I were both in college at the time.
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So there were no people that
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we'd really worked with to draw on, and so
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a lot of those early Stripes were people we had heard of,
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friends of friends, and the other interesting thing they
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all had in common is that they were all
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early in their career, or undervalued in some way.
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Cuz when you think about it,
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if someone is a known spectacular quantity,
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then they're probably working in a job and
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very happy with that.
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And so we have to try and find people who were,
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in the case of our designer that we hired, he was 18 and
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in high school and in Sweden at the time.
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In the case of our,
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our CTO, he was in college at the time.
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You know, a lot of these people,
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they were early on in their careers and
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the only way we could, you can relax when constrained.
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You can relax the fact that they're talented or
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relax that it's apparent that they're talented,
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and we, not consciously, but we relaxed the latter.
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>> Yeah, I think finding kind of people who are, or
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just think like a value investor.
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You're looking for the human capital that's
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significantly devalued by the market, you know?
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You probably shouldn't look to
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hire your brilliant friends at Facebook and Google or
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whatever, because they're already discovered.
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You know, if they're wanting to join that's great,