

Leaving Stripe - geetarista
https://blog.gregbrockman.com/leaving-stripe

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tptacek
Congratulations on what has by all available accounts been an extremely well
executed tenure as engineering leadership for one of the most significant new
tech companies in the world. Will be avidly watching whatever your next move
is!

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shubhamjain
The general advice is - "Don't force it! It won't get you anywhere." However,
I feel, smart ambitious people, can't avoid the anxiety to do their own thing.
Leaving a high-paying job on a vital position might not make a lot of sense
but I believe, when you are surrounded by people making multi-million dollar
enterprises with almost-similar skill-set (maybe, with a better business
sense), you can't avoid that feel of not finding a single reason to not to
replicate the same level of success.

~~~
gdb
Starting a company because "everyone else is doing it" sounds like a bad idea.
For me, it's been something I've wanted to do since my first side project got
1500 uniques via StumbleUpon, and suddenly I realized how much _fun_ it is
creating something new that has real users.

~~~
wenbin
Same feeling when seeing side projects that went to front page of hacker news
:)

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krat0sprakhar
Gdb had a critical role to play in popularizing Stripe's CTFs and making them
interesting as they are. I really hope that his departure from Stripe this
doesn't change the CTF.

Wishing him the best with whatever he's planned!

Edit: Typos

~~~
danellis
While he did promote them, they were all built by Siddarth Chandrasekaran, who
is still at Stripe. So hopefully he'll keep that up.

~~~
siddarthcs
This is said Siddarth Chandrasekaran. :) I proposed the first Stripe CTF,
inspired by SmashTheStack
([http://smashthestack.org/](http://smashthestack.org/)), but the resulting
Stripe CTFs are the result of many, many hours of several folks' work (Andy
Brody, Carl Jackson, Christian Anderson, gdb, Jonas Schneider, Jorge Ortiz,
Ludwig Petterson, Nelson Elhage, Philipp Antoni, Steve Woodrow, and myself).

And yes, it's certainly a tradition that we hope to keep up!

~~~
dencold
Siddarth, any word on when the 2015 edition of CTF will be out? I check the
stripe blog every week or so hoping for some mention of timeline. I loved
CTF3. You guys do a fantastic job on these. THANK YOU.

~~~
tptacek
What'd you love about CTF3?

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grey-area
Not the op, but it had great docs including links to interesting papers,
referenced real world problems (git, cryptocurrencies, consensus), had a set
of levels organised around the theme of consensus nicely graded from easy to
quite hard, and was doable in about a day of solid effort. Even if you didn't
complete it probably felt like a learning experience for most people. Also, it
was fun. Finally, the meetup afterward run by Greg explaining their
architecture and issues encountered was interesting.

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mderazon
Congrats and good luck.

Their api is truly a piece of art and one of my favorite software projects to
look at. I always find myself taking example from it when building an api.

Reading the preceding post to the one mentioned here, his decision suddenly
seems not so surprising. Like his role in the sprint of building a company is
done now and not all people make the transition once the company grows up to
the next level

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brandonb
Congrats to Greg on everything he's accomplished! Stripe has always chosen to
think different about culture and organization, and as a result have built one
of the most interesting companies around. Greg is a huge part of what makes
that work.

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captn3m0
Ever since I've participated in the first Stripe CTF, I've had a massive
respect for Greg. It has been great to read his blog posts and insights over
the years, and see the great work he has been a part of at Stripe.

A few days back, I actually realized that I had never seen a talk by Greg, and
actually googled for one, and found one about hiring at Stripe[0].

I can't wait to see what comes next.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zoq085zVhA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zoq085zVhA)

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leothekim
Best of luck to Greg. I find this poignant but not surprising. His previous
blog post was very thoughtful, if somewhat existential. I was actually
watching for updates to see if he had successfully evolved his role into
something meaningful and productive. In the end, and no offense to him, it
seems like some variant of the Peter Principle just played out here.

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grandalf
Greg is a super smart, super nice guy. Can't wait to find out what he ends up
working on next.

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ilikerashers
Dear Greg,

Please fix the payments industry by building something that just plugs into a
site without having to care if it's Stripe/Datacash/Paypal/Sagepay et al.

The costs of switching are too high in this industry and a "nicer API" isn't a
good enough feature for any of my clients to want to switch. A product which
lets customer failover and chase competitive pricing is what's needed.

~~~
jonathancordeau
Well put. Greg and the Collison's have built an amazing product, helping to
pave the way for innovation in the space. However, we agree that there's a
larger fundamental issue that can't be addressed by the processors themselves.
That's why we're building [http://accepton.com](http://accepton.com) I'd love
to hear the challenges your clients are facing: jonathan <AT> accepton DOT com

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gxespino
Stripe was the first API I ever hooked into and it was a breeze. I've since
tapped into a dozen other APIs and I've yet to find one as simple as Stripe.
Kudos and good luck in the future. Would love to tag a long whenever you start
hiring!

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bachback
I'd be curious to learn more about this mentioned S-Curve and possible
institutional inertia. Stripe is an inspiring company - but ultimately a kind
of mixed company in that it bridges the Internet to Credit card companies.

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Yadi
Congrats Greg, You ROCK! time to start a new chapter!

The codebase you have contributed to (built), is just incredible.

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afarrell
Congrats Greg!

I still owe you a 50lb bag of rice!

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yinyinwu
Good luck with your next steps!

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tonyspiro
Congrats and happy trails on your new adventures.

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endlessvoid94
Congratulations, Greg! Onward!

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foobarqux
What does it say about the question "Why do you want to work on this company
for the next 10 years of your life?" when it turns out even the founders of
the most successful startups in the world don't want to?

~~~
sama
Greg isn't a founder of stripe.

Larry and Sergey have been working on Google for 17 years. Mark has been
working on Facebook for 11. Drew and Arash have now been working on Dropbox
for 8 years. Brian, Nate, and Joe have been working on Airbnb for 7 years.

Things change, of course, and you shouldn't work on a company that isn't
working for 10 years. But I think it's a reasonable question to ask.

If you go into something with a plan to do it for only a couple of years, you
are unlikely to create anything important.

I don't buy public or private equities I don't want to hold for 10 years (I
have held some Apple shares 17 years now!), and I don't do jobs I can't see
myself doing for 10 years (I ran my company, which was an ok but certainly not
huge success, for 7+ years).

I think more people would benefit from taking a long-term view on where they
decide to spend their time and money--it's a really useful way to think about
opportunity.

~~~
rezistik
Personally I think founders should plan to do it for at least 5 or 10 years.

If a founder doesn't think a company will be worth running in 5 or 10 years
what does it say about their long term plans for it? Are there many examples
of successful start-ups where the founders left within the first few years?

~~~
foobarqux
PayPal

~~~
rezistik
PayPal was founded in '98, they sold in '02\. About 4 years. I guess that
meets my criteria. I'd think PayPal was a special case though.

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zimbrato
A no-name executive leaving a failing startup. He knows well that the blood
sea of insolvency is his responsibility.

He's trying to escape his failure. DO NOT TRUST

~~~
danoprey
What are you on about?

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zimbrato
"I haven’t yet placed myself in a new critical role, and I’m confident that
Stripe is being left in great hands" i.e., I was fired or quit, and, things
are bad. Any other questions?

