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Comment by danity | Hacker News Reader

Sad to see Stripe fall to the bean counters instead of staying focused on customers. They were coming out with some cool innovations a few years ago. Even "don't be evil" Google is moving in this direction. Not sure why companies always evolve this way. Boeing is another prime example. Apple has maintained its focus on the customer and thrived, bucking the trend, which seems like it would be motivation for others to stay focused on the customer. Especially given when Apple hired the Pepsi guy to run things in the bean counter way, the company nearly died.

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I would only have to assume you haven't ran a business with over $2M ARR. Taxes, VAT, etc is a HUGE pain in the ass.

It's been a long time for Stripe to introduce a solution for taxes after it was requested by lots of customers (and recently acquired TaxJar because of it)

Maybe the taxes in my country are simple, but it’s never been particularly onerous to me.

The US just has a convoluted tax system.

You're making some huge hand wavy statements based on this single anecdote...

As someone who has used Stripe over the past 5 years for large scale e-commerce and marketplace startups Stripe has dropped the ball quite significantly over the past two or so years. Their customer support has gotten worst, their communication to customers has faltered quite a bit and they're starting to nickel and dime their customers for basic features (like support that responds within a day or two).

I wouldn't go as far as to say they've fallen to the "bean counters" but they definitely aren't as customer obsessed as they have been in the past and quite a few gaps in their armor are becoming obvious.

We send satisfation surveys after support interactions, and consistently over the past year, 8+ out of 10 businesses have rated their interactions highly.

But it does sound like we did drop the ball with you, and I'd like to figure out what happened if you could forward me an example at edwin@stripe.com.

Maybe off topic, but what % of surveys are answered? We get survey requests from our main vendor. Generally the experience is not great, which I consider is systemic to the company. So replying negatively to a survey seems like it will bring down blame on the engineer who handled the case. When an engineer does a great job, it feels like I should fill out a positive survey. But then I'd expect the vendor would feel '8+ out of 10 businesses have rated their interactions highly'. So I never reply to the surveys. I do try and provide constructive suggestions on our regular calls with our vendor.

In a game of Russian Roulette, 5 out of 6 outcomes are also 100% satisfactory, but those are not the ones that matter.

> Apple has maintained its focus on the customer and thrived, bucking the trend

They are arguably best in the industry doesn't mean they are as good as they once were. Apple Retail experience, App Store curation. Butterfly Keyboard? If if it trend we are talking about then Apple is no different to other company you mentioned.

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