Interview with Benjamin de Cock, early designer at Stripe

I think people with sane, knowledge-based optimism and the ability to uncover opportunity where failure is more evident are indispensable.

I’ve worked on teams with and without these people, and the difference in velocity and overall achievement is starkly contrasted. So much of what teams accomplish is based not on some rigid parameters determining concrete outputs, but what teams individually and collectively believe they can do together. When failure inevitably occurs, they respond by yet again uncovering opportunity and optimism. Other teams often reel and suffer major hits to morale.

I suppose this is true in personal life as well. So much of what you do in life is a product of what you believe you can do and how you respond to obstructions and failures. On a team, leadership which handles this particularly well seem to have a cumulative positive impact by contagion I suppose.

> His early work on those Stripe landing pages, like Checkout, was ahead of the time.

In what way? Is there an example of this?

> You can see his latest work at https://increase.com, another finance API.

Interesting how they achieved the three gradient blocks with the angled corners. And the mockup of the app isn't an image - it's actually done in HTML.

Newbie challenges on frontendmentors are better designed than this.

you'd be surprised how many people are in the right place at the right time and still eff it up

I find that to be a pretty reductionist view of somebody with a lot of talent who was early at what became a massively successful fintech startup. Given that, plus the context of the intended audience of that website, I don't feel like this is just a "random guy who was in the right spot" throwaway puff piece. I've been a designer for 15 years and BDC's work is one of only a small handful of modern designers I personally cite as an influence.