Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer
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Stripe's growth thus far has been fueled by individual developers and founders signing up and growing with us to billions of revenue. As we scale, the "impatient developer" will remain the focus of our product development.
Over time, however, we've been increasingly finding that large organizations (like Zoom/Atlassian/Maersk) want to adopt Stripe -- Stripe now has a lot of functionality that they can't get elsewhere. So, we're very eager to continue to grow this side of our business with Mike.
...is hiring not usually an event where employer and employee both benefit?
I would dare to disagree on, or at least to challenge, the "simultaneously" that you mention, though - in my experience (ex AWS, ex VMware) these two are completely different sales motions, made possible simply by the product itself and how it's discovered and consumed... Despite (yes, despite) what enterprise sales wanted to do. In a way, it's as if AWS self-serve were one entity, and AWS enterprise sales were another one.
In many cases, sales teams were completely not aware of certain things happening, or certain accounts becoming huge overnight, or certain developer behaviors. Some salespeople were handsomely rewarded for having been randomly selected as the sales rep for accounts like, say, Dropbox or AirBnB.
It's hard to describe properly, I know, but it's not as harmonious as one might say at first glance. And I think that the sales team still hasn't a good idea of the other side of the coin.
In a way, AWS' merit is to not have let Enterprise Sales screw up the self-serve part, and I think that's mainly because AWS was, and still is, so much more metric-driven than any other business I'm aware of. Enterprise Sales happened gradually, without interrupting a very addictive self-serve machine.
Anyway, this could be a long conversation with lots of platitudes, so I'll stop here and try to think of better ways to explain what I have in mind.
One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful.
Think of your answer.
My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing).
Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.
So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.
I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.
Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.
So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.
Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?
If you don't want to do that use savings plans.
If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts.
You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.
Uploading source code to your provider and letting them figure out how to serve HTTP traffic from it was also a dominant pattern, but was called "shared PHP hosting" instead of "serverless."
I'm not even old. But I guess most people my age probably did not have HostGator accounts when they were 11...
My girlfriend got a traditional CPanel hosting setup a couple of months ago. Being so caught up in my tech bubble, I kind of forgot such quaint things existed.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I’m bothering to write a service with JavaScript, fiddling with webpack, or deploying to Digital Ocean or Heroku or some other overpriced tech-hype VPS service, when I could instead simply drag and drop a .php file into FileZilla and get on with my day?
As you acknowledge, there are few companies that have made the transition from growth to growth+sales in the way AWS has. If Mike can help Stripe chart that course and avoid the shoals along the way, that's hugely positive for customers, employees and owners of Stripe.
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
the fire hazard and pollution issues and till a while back child labour concerns as well is why it is regulated
The permanent year around sellers are few and serve as dealer than retailer . During the season they do both .
It was more sourcing a dealer on the fly and pretty common for fireworks .
Price is very fluctuating and there are huge markups due to the nature of demand .
Discerning buyers go to largest shop/wholesaler to get best price.
I knew a wholesaler/ early e-commerce player in this space (bigger players do not this due to regulatory challenges ). He will make his orders in January for delivery in august for season starting in sept/oct and typically paid 10%-15% list price at most.
I always imagined that flexibility was a key part of selling to enterprise while competing on something other than price. You also see this in other verticals: Salesforce in sales, Netsuite in finance, Twilio in comms, etc.
Stripe has already launched a few new products over the last few years. Is this hire a further indication that Stripe is shifting toward being the provider for everything payments? Is the Stripe dashboard going to be the next to fall to the curse of having a thousand buttons?
(I don't think it's a bad thing, it's been making everything a lot easier for us. But wow it's hard to get students up to speed on AWS compared to when I started using it :-))
I do think that software complexity lifecycle management (and how that pertains to organizational considerations) is one of the tough problems in our industry. AWS has done an amazing job in terms of their pace of development and innovation, but, yes, it's also become a pretty complicated suite. I think we all currently face some kind of "fast development", "cohesive integration", "broad functionality" trilemma and how best to surmount it seems a big open question to me.
Some developer user stories may remain simple (e.g. making a charge, sending an SMS) but a lot of the value will be created by systems integrators / service partners who understand the platform's products deeply.
Having good self-service products and documentation for the impatient developer is a necessary (but not sufficient) step to create this integrator ecosystem. Much of the work is on the business side to convince integrator managers that there is a viable market opportunity on your platform. This comes with all sorts of other considerations, like certification, co-selling agreements, reseller pricing, etc.
For all of their faults in product, Salesforce, Microsoft, and AWS have achieved their dominance through successfully building the integrator ecosystem. Hoping Stripe's service partner program takes off in the same way as the platform grows.
I don't remember if they answered exactly what you are asking, but my memory of the episode is definitely positive!
Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.
AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.
Having had to jump into a Stripe project recently, I think you may need to 'level' up on the experience as the number of features and products expands, it's getting more confusing.
'Everything is there' in the docs, it's just that there are so many now.
I don't remember the mappings of all the product names to 'what they do' (I should not have to) and I find myself getting confused whereas years ago I was not.
Everyone fails at this basically, but because you have a mission focused on this, it'll be interesting to see how you handle it differently.
There is not a single documentation search solution that seems to work: Apple apis, MSDN, Google Assistant, Stripe, Shopify, they generally can't answer basic questions and often don't point you in the right direction.
A question such as 'Can Stripe Checkout Client-Only Version offer Individual Discounts' - is a question a client had. It took too long to find the answer.
I suggest someone will some along perhaps with some AI and totally re-invent helping people find simple answers to simple questions, maybe you can lead the way.
Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace.
The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi-partisan action sooner rather than later addressing this very question eg Durbin Amendment Part 2.
also some data suggests people have moved to more debit transactions during Covid over credit which are cheaper to process anyway and usually means less fraud - so maintaining a fixed processing rate means margins for processors are probably even better right now
The security they can deploy (apple pay seems pretty good now as long as card onboarding isn't broken) seems like they could drive down to basically low interchange?
If consumers feel the credit card fees more directly, they will likely revolt.
maybe just allowing a discount for cash and pin debit
Visa/MasterCard/amex are a huge tax on society, and they won by anti-competitive processes. Society wins very little by a 2-3% tax on all transactions.
I think the problems with credit card for businesses in the US are almost solely cost. There are other minor issues, but until Stripe works to bust up the interchange, they really aren't working on the true problem with payments.
(Fraud is a distant #2 issue for most merchants and for most people I've chatted with Stripe's radar is more expensive than the fraud itself).
just like in Europe the government would regulate interchange, which they’ve mostly failed to do here outside of the Durbin Amendment
But Durbin has raised red flags about excessive swipe fees just this past week, and my bet is that a recovery plan for small biz will very closely scrutinize interchange, and possibly payment processing as a whole https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin...
This is an incredibly hard problem, we are learning and don't have all the answers, but it's about time someone tried to disrupt it. Businesses and consumers are suffering, and they should not be charged in this way. Our network is rolling out over the next few weeks and would love to gather feedback from those who want to get involved in changing this industry!
http://www.gotimagine.com/merchants
Feel free to reach out to community@gotimagine.com to get involved.
Thank you!
I much prefer a company that takes a slightly higher percentage and provides a great service
than the @#$# at Paypal who will freeze your accounts for reasons like 'your earnings are growing too fast' or 'you compete with our fellow silicon valley company'
That's not surprising. But they seem to do what they do well, and have a lot of happy customers.
my point is that it’s entirely possible to offer the same thing for cheaper if your main concern is cost, especially for higher volume merchants, and not optimizing for developer experience https://www.costco.com/merchant-account.html
AFAIK they see themselves as a "premium" processor, not as a cheap one.
If you choose Stripe, you're doing so for the dev experience, their ML whatever, better testing suite, integrations, etc.
And you're doing that consciously.
Since they did that earlier this year: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...
Has anyone done this with stripe successfully?