Stripe BYOT (Bring Your Own Team) | Hacker News Reader

Stripe BYOT (Bring Your Own Team)

stripe.com

40 pointslaurencei16 comments

This is pretty excellent. I'm sure there will be turbulence, but this at least makes explicit what many of us try to do anyway when we move through our careers... bring the best people we've worked with, with us. But that often requires all kinds of implicit backroom dealings and influence peddling. This makes it nice and transparent and to the point.

Very cool experiment. Really excited to hear how this goes some day. I hope the good folks at Stripe will post occasional updates about how this takes shape over time. Could be really transformative.

If they are successful with this, and it becomes popular, it opens up a pretty big risk for other companies that stand to lose an entire intact team.

Potentially puts some leverage back into the employee base.

Interesting. Seems like a cheaper alternative to acquihiring. :-)

Long term I'd love to see stats on this. My intuition is you'd wind up more successful, similar to how referrals make better employees. There does seem like some risk though - the team will likely succeed or fail as a group.

Very interesting and clever move.

Over my career, I've worked with quite few teams where the team was the only thing keeping everyone at a given company. The chance to move everyone would have, potentially, gotten some very good teams to go.

> Working together, ... a network effect ... Startup investors know this

Half right ... investors know that staffing the whole startup with founders is cheaper than hiring employees.

This is the first time I've seen something like this, but my hunch is that Stripe is not the first to do it. Has anyone here done something like this? I'm interested in how well this works. I could see how it would be difficult for the team to integrate well into the company.

Like another commenter mentioned, it's not entirely dissimilar from small acquihires. I think it's a smart idea.

I did it with my best friend and now co-founder. I think it probably got us working more quickly, but also wanted us to leave and do our own thing more quickly (which we did!)

Posted about an hour previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11567135

More comments there.

It beats me as to why HN hasn't implemented duplicate detection.

I think HN's dupe detection is a work in progress. I think it's currently a bit weaker, which allows good stories to get a chance when reposted.

Here's a post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645

Specifically - this link is to "/blog?=byot", while the earlier one is to the much prettier URL "/blog/bring-your-own-team"

Why Stripe would implement their URL structure that way is a question that I have.

My first guess would be backwards compatibility - the "?=" is easier to implement with old tooling, so maybe they changed their URL scheme at some point. But in that case they should have done one/both of:

1) Only generate the ugly old-style URLs for the old posts.

2) Make the old-style URLs into redirects to the new ones, rather than duplicates. This way must be hell on the search engines.

One interesting difference from acquihire here is that existing teams can be poached as a unit from other tech companies.

As long as they all can get days off to interview.

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