we have Ben Silverman, the founder of Pinterest, and

John and Patrick Collison, the founders of Stripe.

Founders that have obviously sort of, some of the best in

the world at thinking about culture and

how they build teams.

So, there's three areas that we're gonna cover today.

One will just be sort of general thoughts on

culture as a follow up to the last lecture.

And then we're really gonna dig into what happens at

the founding of these companies.

And building out the early team.

And then how that changes and evolves as these

guys have scaled their companies up to 100 plus.

I don't even know how many people you have now,

but quite a lot.

Very large organizations and

how you adapt these principles of culture.

But to start off I just wanna ask a very

open-ended question which is,

what are the core pieces of culture that you found to

be most important in building out your companies?

>> So what are the most important parts?

>> It's on. >> Oh, it's on.

Yeah I mean I think for

us, like we think about on a few dimensions.

One is like who do we hire,

and what do those people value?

Two is what do we do every day, like why do we do it?

Three is what do we choose to communicate?

And then I think the fourth is what we

choose to celebrate.

I guess the converse of

that is like what you choose to punish.

But in general I think running a company based on

what you celebrate,

is more exciting than what you punish.

But I think those four things kind of make up

the bulk of it for us.

>> We've placed a large emphasis on, as Stripe has

grown and probably more than other companies is,

transparency internally.

And I think it's been something that's been

really valuable for

Stripe, and also a little bit misunderstood.

All the things people talk about like hiring really

great people, or giving them a huge amount of leverage.

Transparency for us plays into that.

We think that, if you are aligned at a high

level about what Stripe is doing, if everyone really

believes in the mission, and then if everyone has

really good access to information, and kind of

has a good picture of the current state of Stripe.

Then that gets you a huge amount of the way there in

terms of working productively together.

And it kind of forgives a lot of the other things that

tend to break as you, as you grow a start-up.

As we've grown, we started off two people.

We're now over 170 people.

We've put a lot of thought into the tooling that

goes around transparency, because at 170 people,

there is so much information being produced,

that you can't just consume it all as a fire hose.

And so

how we use slack, how we use email, things like that.

We can go into it more later.

But I think that's one of

the core things that's helped us work well.

>> I think culture to some degree is basically kind of

the resolution to a bandwidth problem.

In the sense that, maybe when you start out working

on something, you're sort of coding all the time, but you

can't code all the things that you think the product

might need, or the company might need, or whatever, and

you so you decide to work with more coders, right?

And so the organization gets larger.

And maybe, in some idealized world,

I don't think this actually true, but kind of ideally

you could be involved in every single decision, and

every single sort of moment of the company, and

everything that happens, but obviously you can't, or

maybe you can if two people.

But you certainly can't at even like five or

ten kind of that point comes very quickly,

then by the time you're 50 it's completely hopeless.

And so culture is kind of how you kind of,

what the strands are that you sort of want to have,

the invariance that you want to kind of maintain,

as you can get specifically involved in sort of

fewer and fewer decisions over time.

And I think when you think about it that way it,

maybe its kind of importance becomes sort of

self evident, right?

Because again, like the fraction of things you

can be involved in directly is diminishing, I mean,

almost exponentially,

sort of assuming your head count growth sort of is

on a curve that looks like one of the great companies.

And yeah that's super important.

And again, it manifests itself in a bunch of

different ways.

Like for example, in hiring, I think a large part of

the reason why maybe the first ten people you hire,

what kind of goes to ship,

decisions are so important is because you're not just

hiring those first ten people.

You're actually kind of hiring 100 people.

Because you should think of kind of

each one of those people as bringing along sort of

another ten people with them, and

sort of figuring out exactly what 90 people, you would

like those first ten people to bring along is obviously

gonna be quite consequential for your company.

But really briefly I think it's largely about sort of

abstraction.

>> So one thing that a lot of speakers in this

class have touched on is how hiring those first ten

employees, if you don't get that right,

the company basically will never recover but

no one has talked about how to do that so.

What have the three of you looked for

when you've hired these initial employees,

to get the culture of the company right?

How, how have you found them, and

what have you looked for?

>> Sure. So,

I guess this answer is different for every

company and I'll say for us it was very inductive.

So I literally looked for people that I wanted to work

with and that I thought were talented.

I think, I've read all these books about culture,

because when I don't know how to do something,

I first go read things and

everyone has all these frameworks.

And I think one bit, big misconception that someone

said once is that people think culture is like

architecture when it's a lot more like gardening.

You know, you plant some seeds and

then you pull out weeds that aren't working,

and they sort of expand.

So, when we first hired people we hired people that

were like ourselves.

I often looked at like three or

four different things that I really valued in people.

You know, I looked for people that worked hard and

seemed high integrity and low ego.

I looked for people that were creative, and

I usually meant that they were really curious.

They had all these different interests.

Some of our first employees are probably some of

the quirkiest people I've ever met.

They were engineers but

they also have all these crazy hobbies.

Like one guy made his own board game

with this elaborate set of rules.

Another guy was really into magic tricks.

And he had coded not only like this magic trick on

the iPhone, but

he had shot the production video with a preview.

And I think that, that quirkiness has actually been

a little bit of a calling card.

And we find that really creative, quirky people that

are excited about many disciplines, and are

extraordinary at one tend to build really great products.

They tend to be great at collaborating.

Then the last thing is, we really look for

people that wanted to,

they just wanted to build something great, and

they weren't arrogant about it, but they just felt like,

it'd be really cool to take a risk and

build something bigger than themselves.

And that, in the beginning, is very,

very easy to select for if you're in our situation.

We had this horrible office, like, nobody got paid.

So there was no external reason, other than being

excited about building something to join.

In fact, there was every reason not to.

And that's something, looking back,

I really, really value,

because we always knew people were joining for

the purest reasons, and in fact,

were willing to forgo other great job opportunities,

market salary, a clean office,

good equipment just for the chance to work.

So, to this day I think a lot of those traits have

been seeded and

are embedded in the folks that we look at now.

>> Yeah the first ten hires are really

hard because you're making these first ten

hires at a point where no one's heard of this company,

no one really wants to work for it.

You're just these,

like two weird people working on this weird idea.

>> And like their friends are telling them not

to join.

For our second employee, I think

he'd accepted the offer or he was just about to, and

his best friends took him out the night before, and it

was like a full on assault for, why you should not join

this company, why this is ruining your life basically.

And so anyway the guy subsequently

continued to join.

And actually one of

those friends also now works at Stripe.

But this is what you're up against.

>> Yeah.

And I mean it's also hard because no batch of

ten people will have as great an influence on

the company as those first ten people.

I think everyone's impression of recruiting is,

you open LinkedIn.

It's sort of like ordering off the dollar menu.

It's, I want that one, that one, and that one.

And, and now you have some hires.

Whereas at least for us, it was very much over a very

long time period, talking people we knew or

friends of friends into joining.

We didn't have huge networks, Pat and

I were both in college at the time.

So there were no people that

we'd really worked with to draw on, and so

a lot of those early Stripes were people we had heard of,

friends of friends, and the other interesting thing they

all had in common is that they were all

early in their career, or undervalued in some way.

Cuz when you think about it,

if someone is a known spectacular quantity,

then they're probably working in a job and

very happy with that.

And so we have to try and find people who were,

in the case of our designer that we hired, he was 18 and

in high school and in Sweden at the time.

In the case of our,

our CTO, he was in college at the time.

You know, a lot of these people,

they were early on in their careers and

the only way we could, you can relax when constrained.

You can relax the fact that they're talented or

relax that it's apparent that they're talented,

and we, not consciously, but we relaxed the latter.

>> Yeah, I think finding kind of people who are, or

just think like a value investor.

You're looking for the human capital that's

significantly devalued by the market, you know?

You probably shouldn't look to

hire your brilliant friends at Facebook and Google or

whatever, because they're already discovered.

You know, if they're wanting to join that's great,

but they're probably harder to convince.

John and I spent a little a while yesterday

afternoon sort of trying to figure out in retrospect,

what kind of traits our first ten or

so people had in common that we thought were significant.

And you know, in general sort of in speaking about

culture, I sort of want to caveat everything we say

with, I that sort of advice is very limited experience,

widely over extrapolated.

And I think there's a lot of truth to that.