00:08:40 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:08:40] S1: Very interesting. You know, while all of that was happening, you also and I saw this talk that you gave in Stripe sessions I think where you gave a very profound story about the London fire and use that in reference of reliability. So we talk about exponential growth but you're like, look, all of this is great but none of this matters if, you know, it's not reliable. So and you saw that with the payments infrastructure. You also can now do that with AI, which is, you know, probably, I mean, it's non probabilistic. I mean, it's not deterministic, but there is a certain level of reliability and trust you need to build here. How do you think about that, and how is your experience with even something like payments led to that?
00:09:22 · Rahul Patil
[00:09:22] S0: Yeah. Great question. So there's two things. Right? So being part of the exponential... Like, my mission statement for my personal life is I want to build the fastest improving technology or product. Like, the product itself should feel like it's the fastest improving compared to everything else. Second, I want it to be the most dependable. Dependable has many axes. One is reliability. Second is, is the company dependable? Is the roadmap dependable? Can I bank on, if I fast forward three months, are they going to come through on their promise? Is the company going to be holding true to its values, which is we're going to be building a platform, we want to do it safely, we want to do it responsibly. All of those things, some things are not perfectly measurable. API reliability, can measure. But some things are not measurable. Trust is not measurable. Because it's not that you're available most of the time, all the time, but those ten seconds that something went wrong and it happened to be the most critical thing in your life, those ten seconds, people don't remember you like on averages. They remember you when you needed something the most. Was it there for you? Right? And it's not just about it was there, but did it give you the correct advice? Did it give you the correct answer? Did it help you get unblocked? And, you know, those are the ways I think about dependability. And so my mission... My personal mission statement is I want to keep working on things that are improving the fastest rate, and I want it to be dependable at all times.
00:11:03 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:11:03] S1: It's interesting because, you know some of the things you talk about reliability and dependability actually and more importantly this is Mehta I think you message you were sharing there where you know can I expect you to give me what I want and what I need? You know a lot of folks here are also very early stage founders or, you know, they're building startups in very early stages. That's something I know that they also try and figure out. What is advice that you would... Because you've now seen company scale, startup scale, Stripe became... You know, what did you see Anthropic go through its own journey? What is advice you would give to founders and, you know, technical leaders here, which is to do with how do you manage the trade off? Right? We'll be moving fast at that early stage and making sure everything is dependable or is it really a trade off?
00:11:51 · Rahul Patil
[00:11:51] S0: There's two parts of the question, which is when you make strategic decisions, what is the framework that guides you? Okay. So I'll start on that. So it's a slight tangent, but I will definitely come back to the trade off question. So in life, many times you have to choose between a lot of imperfect answers, right? That's like the hardest part when you're growing really fast. It isn't like there's a path that has all upsides and has all correct answers, and you can't say we'll be free of criticism if you choose this path. So when you're working on a very critical strategy, there's always this thing about what is the goal that I'm trying to maximize for, And what am I willing to give up or be criticized for? So when I choose the upsides, I choose the downsides that come with that specific upside. And most people, especially in early stages, especially when you come from large companies, the tendency is, I want to protect from downsides. Know, people say, you know, people want to pursue happiness, but actually a lot of people want to pursue avoiding pain, right? And so people tend to build to avoid downsides, but at that point you're giving up upsides in pretty much all dimensions. So the number one advice I have for people is know what you really want. Know the upsides that you want and what are the downsides that you're willing to accept. Now, we will get criticized for those downsides, and that is okay. But test it back with, Is this the upside you chose? Those are fundamental tradeoffs you make, especially as a fast growing company. I want to say that you should always be a fast growing company no matter what your size is. You should always have that urge and that curiosity that you want to be on that exponential line. Then when it comes to trade offs, you're like, Hey, do I ship fast? Do I break things? And you know, what, none. There is a philosophy, there exists a philosophy where these don't have to trade off. So one of the things over multiple years that I built at Stripe was like, you build systems such that the automatic thing is also safe and fast. So I think many of you are developers here, builders here. You all have CICD pipelines, right? These are the things that take code and deploy. So very simple.
00:14:16 · Rahul Patil
We built touchless deploy, which means as soon as you write code, it automatically runs unit tests, automatically merges, automatically goes to preprod, automatically runs something, rolls back. Like 80% of all the deploys that happened were touchless. So not only was it fast so I could ship more, not only was it safe because then it would continuously test against whether it's working as intended. It also asserted all the global properties we cared about, safety, security, and all that stuff. And every time you feel like there's a trade off, Hey, I can go fast or safe, I'm like, No, zoom out. There has to be a system. There has to be a mechanism where this is not a trade off. And so I urge all of you to build what I call the pit of success. You know, you've all heard of pit of despair. It's so hard to get out. I say build the pit of success. Pit of success is your team and your developers feel so successful. They don't want to do anything else that trades off velocity and dependability. So the mindset of building something dependable is not to make it a trade off. The automatic thing is the fastest thing, is the safest thing. So that's how we should be thinking about building systems.
00:15:34 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:15:34] S1: I'm gonna just pick on that because the reason I think a lot of people talk about pain and despair is because startups are hard. Yes. You know? Building is very hard. And and more often than not, you know, breaks, like things go wrong, stuff happens that you can't control. I'm sure you've had those kind of moments, you know, with your team. How do you, at that moment, still bring in that culture of Prate of Success?