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Thanks! This is also an area we're working hard to improve. The scale is pretty substantial (we recently handled our millionth support case of 2019), but there are plenty of ways in which we want to improve, and we have a lot of in-flight work to make it better.

Thanks! We still have a lot of work to do. (Making our integration experience simpler -- now that Stripe's functionality has grown so much -- is an area of current focus. If any HN readers happen to have specific suggestions on this front, feel free to email sebas@stripe.com.)

Stripe cofounder here. Quick comment to say that we're excited about the move. South San Francisco is a cooperative and open-minded city. In being an infrastructure company, we have to take a long-term view, and we think this can be a good for many years. And while the Bay is tricky from a commuting standpoint no matter what the location, the the presence of a marina right beside this site opens up a lot of interesting new transportation options for us throughout the Bay.

> Yeah their API is a little bit... bloated for simple needs since they're covering for many different use-cases

You're right. We're fixing this. Stay tuned.

[Stripe cofounder]

Thanks to everyone here who took a chance on us in the beginning and shared helpful feedback over the years! How to serve startups/developers more effectively at scale is still the main thrust of our product focus. We've fixed and improved a lot of things since we launched here in 2011, but we also still have a lot of work to do. (Both "obvious things we want to fix" and "new functionality we want to build".) I always appreciate hearing from HN users (even if I don't always have time to respond): patrick@stripe.com.

For anyone thinking about what they should work on: I started building developer tools when I was 15 and "tools for creation" is still, IMO, one of the most interesting areas to work in.

[Stripe cofounder]

Thanks! We're always paranoid that we're too slow, for whatever it's worth.

We're still iterating on the supporting models and frameworks. We think a lot about pace layering -- how do we have teams that think on multi-year horizons (infrastructure, security, etc.) alongside teams that are rapidly iterating at much earlier stages of development. I think a lot goes wrong when organizations insist on too much consistency in their operating approach.

We've now identified a few semi-formal mechanisms that have helped substantially. (For example: larger companies tend to want to aggressively standardize roles. This makes sense when operating at scale but less so in the early days. So, we've made it easy to hire for ill-defined roles in nascent product areas -- we figure we can codify those roles later as needed and that doing so sooner is a premature optimization.) We'd certainly consider writing a blog post once we feel that they might be generalizable.

(If anyone reading this is interested in helping us figure things out, please do apply. We're particularly interested in hiring engineers who are interested in these questions.)

Interesting idea!

Yeah, we've iterated a lot (and done a lot of customer interviews) to try to figure how to make the presentation as simple-to-understand as possible. It's hard to show a (de facto) APR precisely because it will depend on your subsequent sales. (And showing it could even be confusing because there's no compounding with our fee structure.) All that said, one of the key questions we care about when speaking with customers, prospective and current, is "Are the terms clear?". And if coming up with some kind of APR-equivalent modeling thing helps achieve that, we'll do it!

Yes, but much of it is simply taking the problem more seriously. In principle, others could build this by leveraging bank account data. (Or by using Stripe Connect.)

We were so struck by the extent of the problem reported by Stripe users, and by how that remained constant over time, that we decided to go tackle it directly.

[Stripe cofounder.]

> Based on the amount of junkmail I get offering my small business loans, I have a hard time believing the "filling a niche no-one else is offering" narrative.

Leaving aside questions about how good those lenders actually are to work with, it's still a surprisingly inefficient market. Businesses built on Stripe still report that access to capital is one of the _very top_ limiting factors on their growth. The uptake rates we've seen in the Stripe Capital beta over the past year corroborate this.

Our hypothesis is that existing lenders are disproportionately ineffective at detecting and underwriting internet businesses, since they have such different capital and growth dynamics.

[Stripe cofounder.]

> But one thing strikes me as odd about this whole arrangement. The better a business performs, the quicker it is able to repay the loan, and the higher its effective APR becomes! It's essentially a prepayment penalty in disguise. So you'd better make sure the loan doesn't help your business too much, or you'll end up getting hosed by the loan fee.

Yes, this is right -- if your business suddenly starts doing a lot better, your effective APR will be higher.

What we heard overwhelmingly from customers, though, is that the downside risk of credit obligations they can't meet (liquidity problems are asymmetrically damaging!) substantially outweighs the theoretical "risk" of a higher effective APR caused by significant outperformance in the business. (Stated differently, we're taking the risk of your business underperforming, in return for you paying us back somewhat faster -- but still at a capped rate -- if things go better than you expect.)

I think the model we have makes more sense for most businesses. But there's no dogma; we'll certainly revisit this over time if we find that a lot of customers seek a different risk profile.

Stripe CEO here.

We're very sorry about this. We work hard to maintain extreme reliability in our infrastructure, with a lot of redundancy at different levels. This morning, our API was heavily degraded (though not totally down) for 24 minutes.

We'll be conducting a thorough investigation and root-cause analysis.

For now!

This is an ad hominem attack that doesn't really help us understand whether the core substance of her argument is true, which is what really matters.

I think it's very reasonable for someone to raise an eyebrow at this, though I'd love to know where I'm wrong rather than just lacking in relevant experience.

More importantly, though, the article I was being interviewed about is one I cowrote with Michael Nielsen, who does have a lot of first-hand experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nielsen. (And, as part of writing it, we spent time discussing the questions with many practicing scientists across a lot of different fields.)

I’m sorry to hear you’ve encountered some issues. Rest assured that core improvement remains our primary focus. On support, our metrics (primarily, responsiveness and customer satisfaction) show substantial improvement over the past two years — and we actually just launched free, 24x7 phone and chat support for all Stripe businesses. https://stripe.com/blog/phone-and-chat-support

For whatever reason, those stories don’t get upvoted as much on HN :-).

I think we first used “increase the GDP of the internet” in early 2012, a few months after Stripe launched.

Stripe cofounder here. It's a very fair question.

> I must admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that Stripe seems to be spreading themselves out into areas outside their core business

The vast majority of Stripe employees (and there are now more than 1,000) work on our core functionality today. But we see our core business as building tools and infrastructure that help grow the online economy. ("Increase the GDP of the internet.") When we think about that problem, we see that one of the main limits on Stripe's growth is the number of successful startups in the world. If we can cheaply help increase that number, it makes a lot of business sense for us to do so. (And, hopefully, doing so will create a ton of spillover value for others as well.)

As we grow, we have to get good at walking and chewing gum -- just as Google or Amazon have. However, while we go and tackle other problems, our aim is not only to continue to improve our core payments infrastructure, but do deliver improvements at an accelerating rate.

I'm definitely a fan of this project but it'd be a mistake to attribute too much to me... it's led within Stripe by a team of very talented people.

That’s a good point; I should probably add it.

It was published today.

Advice is to visit, not to move!

This is slightly off-topic (I'm going to be that "this is sorta more a comment than a question..." guy for a second), but I just want to say that Scott's blog is one of my favorite blogs on the whole internet. If only there were more like it!

Stripe cofounder here.

By our internal metrics (tracking customer satisfaction and response times), our support has gotten better each of the last four years.

But I'd love to hear more about the cases in which we fell short. Could you forward the problematic cases to me? patrick@stripe.com.

Both podcasts were recorded months ago... just coincidence how they landed.

I don't mean to take any stance on whether it's the singular outlier in magnitude, but https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/the-global-housing-cr... makes a strong case for it being broader than a West Coast issue.

That's not CA YIMBY's ED. CA YIMBY was not involved in that protest.

> There is massive opposition within the poorer, non-white bay area community to the political group that Stripe is funding here. CA YIMBY literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest.

While no group is homogeneous in beliefs, polling very clearly shows that minority groups strongly support increased housing construction. (As does an overall majority of Californians.) On the micro level, groups like The 200 (community leaders of color) and experts like Richard Rothstein (author of Color of Law) have endorsed CA YIMBY's pro-housing policy work. See more at https://cayimby.org/endorsement/fair-housing-advocates/.

CA YIMBY was not involved in the protest you mention. I think you're confusing them with other groups.

> If you believe housing prices are a core problem to the growth of your business why continue to grow in the bay area rather than try and move to a less expensive region of the country?

We also do that! Stripe is hiring engineers in both Seattle and Dublin, and for other roles in many other cities. Please apply :-). https://stripe.com/jobs

That said... this issue isn't just (or primarily) a Stripe issue. It's a broader social and economic problem. Even if Stripe is okay, we want to help fix the larger issue around us.

Stripe cofounder here.

This is an issue that I know a lot of HN readers care about and I'd encourage anyone interested to get involved. (Feel free to reach out to CA YIMBY, your local representatives, or any of the other organizations doing good work in the field.)

Bad housing policy is one of the biggest impediments to overall economic growth[1] and to individual economic opportunity[2][3] in the US. Our current restrictive policies disproportionately hurt poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white[4] people. I really hope we can change them.

[1] https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chang-tai.hsieh/research/gr...

[2] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/83656/...

[3] From the Obama administration: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...