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.