On building of All Trades

the power of imagination and optimism is an amazing and essential part of innovation. But over the years, we’ve become so enamored with the unicorn valuation as the goal, that we started valuing the wrong things and overlooking the fundamental physics of business.

Problems also arise when you pursue risky paths to income. When startups become your deferred life plan, you can invest years of your life into projects that never pay of

Very, very many people at Stripe today are doing a quite different job to the one that they join for. In order to do that they've often had to learn a lot and stretch themselves into new areas.

Beliefs are more about belonging than they are about truth.

I started this company in one of the recessions and had seen suppliers and customers go to the wall in droves. To me, getting more customers and more orders meant safety and security.

To the people who worked for me, growth meant change.

Stop trading time for money, start trading value for money.

“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.”

How can I maintain my creativity, optimism, intellectual vitality, and sense of agency in the face of the stress that comes from building a company and the endless forces luring towards conformity?

We start raw, then our hearts and minds get boiled by constraints, pressure, feedback, and challenges. How do we keep our head up and maintain our... See more

Stories that resonate are the ones that sit with the stories we already believe and value.