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Comment by dperfect | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but where would you draw the line between spending time/money on projects like this and needlessly reinventing the wheel?

I see a lot of startups creating internal software themselves (e.g., CRM's, email marketing systems, etc.) with a similar rationale based on "values and principles", where an off-the-shelf solution would be a much better use of resources.

Ironically, Stripe's core product is one of those off-the-shelf solutions that seems to be a good fit for a lot of startups, yet some still choose to do things the hard way.

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I would argue that the product you see on the outside (Stripe) is a reflection of the work that gets put into internal only projects. In many ways, this sort of "build the things that people want to use" culture causes people to experiment, to hone their skills, and to develop.

Stripe landing pages almost always get tons of support on Hacker News. This isn't because they're just a good payment processor -- it's because their landing pages are unlike anything else in the industry. They could have slapped together a static site in Jekyll with custom styling and called it a day. Instead, they labored over a landing page that feels well designed with immaculate attention to detail.

Did they have to do any of this? Not really. But it shows on the outside -- and it works. Given that the world is filled with design that just copies Apple and Google, supporting creative R&D is a huge plus for them.

Internal tools are the best way to do that -- they let people experiment and learn without fear of consequences on the outside.

> ..."build the things that people want to use" culture causes people to experiment, to hone their skills, and to develop

Maybe it depends on the size/stage of the company to some degree. In the startups I've been involved with (< 10 people), developers have little - if any - time to experiment with things that fall outside the core product.

Company hackathons (as mentioned in Stripe's case) can be a good outlet for that kind of creativity, but the kind of quality you mention ("immaculate attention to detail") doesn't come out of hackathons. The company's leadership still has to make those things a priority (which, by definition, deprioritizes other things).

Yes but at the same time, like they said in the blog post, this particular problem reared its head when they were approaching and passing 150 employees. At that point, yes, people can take some time off to work on a truly nice solution to a problem that, like others have said, mostly receives half-baked solutions.

It's interesting, we've talked to a LOT of companies about this as customer research for our SaaS product (https://carrot.io) and 150 is actually where this problem become unbearable. We see this problem first come up consistently at 30 people, become a major problem at ~100 people that starts to get lots of attention inside the company, and becoming a real hindrance and burning issue if not addressed at ~150+.

It's not at all surprising to us that both Stripe and Square have spent a lot of time and money on this problem to support their quick growth past 1,000 people.

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number if you aren't already aware of it.

I see a parallel here with Square in its early days. They would do some finely polished internal projects like this, like beautiful information dashboards, and redesigned their website like every other month.

I don't want to be too cynical but it can function as a kind of elaborate PR and recruiting tool, as well as generally support the impression of the company being the Next Big Thing. As Square had to open up their finances and work on profitability, they got more focused on core product. I wonder if Stripe will follow.

I also wonder if there's something particular about payment processors.. maybe overcompensating? Is it part of the business model to kind of puff up a company around what should otherwise be a commodity-priced core service?

Good point. It really is a commodity service: treasury services and risk management.

And most of that should be fairly autonomous. The fat will eventually be trimmed. Just like at Etsy.

> I don't want to be too cynical but it can function as a kind of elaborate PR and recruiting tool, as well as generally support the impression of the company being the Next Big Thing.

Whether or not this is intentional, it's working that way. I've heard more guests on techy podcasts that work for stripe than google, maybe just because they're so enthusiastic about the culture that they always seem to bring it up.

In a company of “knowledge workers” building (or operating in) complexity the “wheel” is how you do collaboration and sensemaking.

“Reinventing” implies this has been done right for Stripe (or any such company) elsewhere.

better use of resources

Effectiveness in complex environments is not necessarily efficient.

> I see a lot of startups creating internal software themselves (e.g., CRM's, email marketing systems, etc.) with a similar rationale based on "values and principles", where an off-the-shelf solution would be a much better use of resources.

I've also seen companies drown themselves in custom ERP systems to the extent that it actually impacts their bottom line.

Point is - if these types of projects can produce an ROI and improve the bottom line, then by all means do them. But know what you're good at - and better, know what you're not good at.

I've also seen companies drown themselves in custom ERP systems to the extent that it actually impacts their bottom line.

Possibly OT, but heck, they do it with AWS bills that coincidentally often track pretty well what it would cost to colocate bare metal and employ sysadmins.

If the costs track but you don't have the management overhead then I'd consider that a win for the company.

Calling people "resources" and looking for the cheapest way out tells something about values and principles.

I know what you're trying to insinuate, but just to clarify, as the OP used it, resources seems like money, and cheapest means you are thrifty, you know, that things that a site like YC espouses in startups.

It's a gamble. But, there are other examples of this: the company that created Slack was trying to make a successful game when they realized their internal comms tool was more interesting. Will Wright was making a helicopter sim when he fell in love with the game's city-building tool.

Which he later went back to, Sim Copter

Nah, he finished the chopper game that Sim City grew out of.

"Wright continued to develop the editor for [Raid On Bungeling Bay] as a personal toy because he enjoyed it so much. He researched urban planning and realised that others might enjoy constructing and building cities themselves. The result was a more advanced simulation that eventually became SimCity."

- the Wikipedia page on RoBB, which also notes that it selling about a mullion units in Japan was a large part of what gave Wright the financial freedom to build Sim City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay

They also created Flickr. Both Flickr and Slack were detours to market internal tools to outside customers on the way to making a game which never actually got made.

Why can't Stripe do the same thing? It's got this gigantic customer base of fledgling businesses; why not start building internal tools and then, once they're mature and battle-tested internally, offer them publicly to the growing businesses they already work with? It's an ingenious move.

Stripe is so profitable that anything else they make will look like a joke for the first few years. It is easier to pivot from an unsuccessful product.

We're in the HR business and we don't offer a cool off the shelf app like this (we should! I took notes!)

I don't know if you would find a good off the shelf product that meshed with Stripe's vision. Some of the discrete pieces, document sharing and search, maybe.

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