Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)

They looked for first principles thinkers, so not necessarily your experience, but how do you approach problems, how do you know the right questions to ask? And then create your own framework around that.

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Dropbox also hired for people that were just really humble, collaborative and team oriented. And the combination of those two things, p... See more

We tried to hire people who were particularly nice and generally happy...instead of trying to solve the culture problem we tried to hire people who were already happy.

I’d heard the trope that company culture was up to everyone to build, but here we were actually doing it. Stripe was a Big Mood and we were all all in. On all of it.

Early on, when we were scaling Box at 20 or 30 employees, we came to this question. And I asked myself, “Do I look like these other CEOs that have scaled big companies?” A lot of times it didn’t feel like I was like them. I focus on a very different set of things. I don’t really like all the stuff that they like to do. But I ended up realizing that

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“The majority of companies don’t work in the way we do, which leads to fewer people with these kinds of skills. A conventional interview process, often modeled by large companies, doesn’t account for this. It’s challenging to assess in interviews if someone is truly a builder, has good taste and judgment, can take initiative, and approaches problem... See more