00:02:06 · Jonathan Brebner, Anurag Goel
[00:02:06] S0: Stripe is better. [00:02:06] S1: Stripe is better. Stripe is better. Yeah. I integrate the thing and it's not PCI compliant, mind you, at the time. And I just couldn't believe how easy it was. Even back then, suddenly, I had payments, and I was like, that's it. [00:02:22] S0: There's like a magic to the infrastructure, the ease of like this kind of infrastructural [00:02:25] S1: environment. Yeah. Like, it was just like, okay, is that it? And it was. And I accepted my first payments for this thing in January 2011. And then I started running into Stripe's API issues, and I gave them a ton of feedback about it. I was like, this doesn't work. This is broken. You should do this other thing. And that's how I got to know the team a little bit. And then one fine day, Stripe... Well, Patrick, the CEO emailed me with a list of the most accomplished thing everyone at the company had done and telling me, well, these are all the people. Here are all the great things they've done. You should join. And I was like, nope. I don't think I should because I have this other thing going on. [00:03:12] S0: Yeah. I have this... I really think the future is Seer to peer vision. Video game rentals. [00:03:18] S1: Disgruntles. When everything is going online, mind you. Yeah. Right. [00:03:20] S0: I get it. Exactly. Yeah. Like, Netflix has just started releasing their own kind of, like, original content streams. Yeah. You're like, no. No.
00:03:20 · Jonathan Brebner, Anurag Goel
[00:03:20] S0: I get it. Exactly. Yeah. Like, Netflix has just started releasing their own kind of, like, original content streams. Yeah. You're like, no. No. [00:03:26] S1: Yeah. This is fad. No. I think... Yeah. This payments thing... I mean, I don't know. I don't... You guys... Like, I gave you so much product feedback. I don't know, man. And then something else happened, which is, again, completely fortuitous, which is my wife decided to go to grad school, and I didn't want to work... I was working from home, and I don't wanna work from home by myself. And I was like, well, I don't really wanna interview anywhere. And and I need a new job that doesn't involve me working from home. And I kind of like the vibe that these guys have. And so... [00:04:00] S0: Yeah. Why don't you... And you have some opinions about the product already. Yeah. Not going in, like, totally blind. [00:04:06] S1: No. And and I like the vibe in the office. I... I'd I'd gone to the Stripe office, and they were all sitting around one big table, and I genuinely enjoyed the vibe. I was like, yeah. This could be fun. And so that's how I ended up in Stripe in August 2011.
00:04:06 · Anurag Goel, Jonathan Brebner
[00:04:06] S1: No. And and I like the vibe in the office. I... I'd I'd gone to the Stripe office, and they were all sitting around one big table, and I genuinely enjoyed the vibe. I was like, yeah. This could be fun. And so that's how I ended up in Stripe in August 2011. [00:04:21] S0: Yeah. That's funny. From like waitlist on the product to, yeah, joining what, like six months or eight, nine months later. It does sort of speak to... I mean, obviously, we always... I mean, this is true on the investing side. It's true on the founding side. There's a lot of, like, retroactive myth making and and, sort of, like, aligning of of things in a way that sounds like, oh, it was based on all these dissidents. But a lot of these things are just like... Oh. Just... Totally conditional and and... You know, arbitrary.... [00:04:53] S1: Arbitrary by chance. Yeah. I mean, I think most startup successes that are outsized have to have a series of things that happen that are usually not likely to happen Yeah. Right. For those forces to come together. That's why they're outsized. Otherwise, everyone would kind of be average startup success.
00:04:53 · Anurag Goel, Jonathan Brebner
[00:04:53] S1: Arbitrary by chance. Yeah. I mean, I think most startup successes that are outsized have to have a series of things that happen that are usually not likely to happen Yeah. Right. For those forces to come together. That's why they're outsized. Otherwise, everyone would kind of be average startup success. [00:05:11] S0: Yeah. You can definitely create more surface area for luck to accumulate. Right? That's definitely true, and and it it is... You know, it's it's not the case that it is all just purely arbitrary in luck. I do wanna ask you about the concept of myth making a little bit more because it's it's something I think a lot about, especially seeing people here in a period that is... It's very often messy. Right? Mhmm. And a lot of times, founders don't like talking about it later in part because they're trying to build up confidence and a sense of competence Yeah. Right, for their customers. Right? There are obviously certain industries where this is even more acute. And so there's there's this sort [00:05:49] S1: of like massaging of the of [00:05:50] S0: the like messy beginning or or... I mean, the joke version of it is like, you know, I I always knew from the age of three when my mom break down crying after a check bounced in the grocery store aisle that I wanted to build b to b SaaS for, like, payment verification. You know, like some Exactly. Some version of that. Right? Yeah. It's made. Like, you have seen this. You saw that Stripe. Right? Very early process there. You went through it yourself. Like, you saw a lot of it at SPC.
00:05:50 · Jonathan Brebner, Anurag Goel
[00:05:50] S0: the like messy beginning or or... I mean, the joke version of it is like, you know, I I always knew from the age of three when my mom break down crying after a check bounced in the grocery store aisle that I wanted to build b to b SaaS for, like, payment verification. You know, like some Exactly. Some version of that. Right? Yeah. It's made. Like, you have seen this. You saw that Stripe. Right? Very early process there. You went through it yourself. Like, you saw a lot of it at SPC. [00:06:18] S1: I saw a lot of it [00:06:19] S0: at SPC. Totally. Like, you were a part of... Like, making it the culture of embracing that. Right? That was the point. It was actually just like lean into that. Don't be afraid of it. Yeah. How do you think about it after the fact as like [00:06:29] S1: Yeah. [00:06:30] S0: Like the myth making side of it? [00:06:31] S1: Yeah. I think it goes back to the values that you want to espouse both for yourself and for the company. And for me personally, I don't want to spread a falsehood about the company just because it'll help us be more successful. And there are ways to run a company that that help you feel good about what you're doing and help you sleep well at night. And they might not make you the most successful company ever, but they'll still make you pretty... Plenty successful. And so it... Again, it's it's a personal choice that everyone
00:06:31 · Anurag Goel, Jonathan Brebner
[00:06:31] S1: Yeah. I think it goes back to the values that you want to espouse both for yourself and for the company. And for me personally, I don't want to spread a falsehood about the company just because it'll help us be more successful. And there are ways to run a company that that help you feel good about what you're doing and help you sleep well at night. And they might not make you the most successful company ever, but they'll still make you pretty... Plenty successful. And so it... Again, it's it's a personal choice that everyone [00:07:11] S0: makes. Yeah. Yeah. It's not one that I I, like, look down on. It feels very human to me. It's vulnerable to talk about the times when you're very uncertain or something goes wrong Yeah. Or we don't naturally like making that part of our persona, or or, like, public story. I... You do have to kind of become a public figure in many ways as a as a founder, right, as it grows.