Earning Your Stripes: An Interview with Patrick Collison | Hacker News Reader

Earning Your Stripes: An Interview with Patrick Collison

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119 pointsridruejo19 comments

Transcript: https://s3.amazonaws.com/fs-lc/2018/Podcast/Transcripts/Patr....

I thought the

>It’s very striking to me how Warren and Charlie at Berkshire and how the folks at Koch Industries are so into a kind of epistemology, and structuring of doubt, and accounting for biases, and mechanisms for a clarity of thinking, to a very striking degree.

bit was interesting

I've always admired Stripe but the way their support has gone down is baffling. They always had the "developer first" approach but I can get better support from my legacy bank in terms of payment gateways now than from Stripe.

I second this (and I'm someone who admires stripe too). I seem to only get generic support emails from Stripe, with an emphasis on closing the ticket, rather than answering the question. This may be a side effect of growing at the pace they have. Incidentally, I got cold called by wepay a week ago to integrate with my app (https://usebx.com) and their support has been rather impressive - for me, they are winning on the customer support front.

It's long ago been observed that support doesn't scale. Small companies have an edge over large companies and it is a real pity that even Stripe seems to fall to this rule, though two comments in this vein do not yet indicate that the line has already been crossed it is source for worry. Anybody that ever manages to crack 'support at scale' will run circles around the competition.

Amazon? I've seldom heard bad things about Amazon's support. (amazon.com that is, not AWS; not that I heard bad things about AWS support either)

Do you have examples? I've not experienced that. The worst offenders I've seen on their support email was bug reports not getting fixed. I email their support very regularly.

Some of the highlights from last year:

- Applied for a specific payment provider which required some additional checks and setup. Was confirmed that everything was up and running and approved. All good in sandbox but nothing was working on production. After back and forth emailing and twitter (and a lot of besides the question/issue replies) turns out they actually did had a production setup issue for this provider and it would take another 72 hours after we were "confirmed for production usage" to actually start taking payments using that provider

- Discovered inconsistencies in documentation and expected API response results about a year ago. A lot of back and forth emailing and twitter again. Generic reply about test cards and link to docs. After insisting to have another look it was confirmed there was an issue in the sandbox

I've moved all our EU payments away from Stripe and to Mollie which seems to have a better offering for European payment schemes.

Radar is a big plus for fraud prevention (and something Stripe does very well!) but isn't that mostly based on the Israeli startup they acquired?

I'm looking to add more payment providers to my platform - how would you rate Mollie?

Stripe cofounder here.

By our internal metrics (tracking customer satisfaction and response times), our support has gotten better each of the last four years.

But I'd love to hear more about the cases in which we fell short. Could you forward the problematic cases to me? patrick@stripe.com.

This has not been my experience recently (YMMV). I recently had issues with my account, and sent a chat message to their support team. They called me within an hour, verifying the issue and proceeding to get it handled by their manager. They called back the next day to make sure it was confirmed, and sent a confirmation email after we spoke summarizing the issue. I was blown away how effective and efficient they were.

Stripe is probably the only company i am desperately waiting for them to open up a palo alto office. No brainer to work for them, except i dont like city/commute.

Great work, great company.

Really enjoyed this talk, especially the stuff about the Irish emphasis on making people feel at ease. I wish I had more of that.

He has just the amount of humility for his age/CV!

It seems like Stripe is doing a media blitz this week. They are on "How I Built This" and a couple other sites. Do they have a major announcement coming up?

Both podcasts were recorded months ago... just coincidence how they landed.

I listened to you on this and erza klein a while about (i found them both very interesting, and im a happy customer of stripe) - question about your reading habits - do you find that with the success of stripe you have had a lot less time read these days, or have you been able to maintain reading a lot regardless?

Very enjoyable episode, whether or not you like Stripe or startups in general. Lots of great pointers and ideas. Personally I especially enjoyed the segment on "optimal algorithm for reading." Thanks Shane and Patrick.

Unfortunate title; noncommissioned officers are sadly few and far between at tech companies.

Former Marine Corps NCO checking in. I'm about to start at Stripe in a few weeks. You're not wrong, but we do show up now and again.

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