
Stripe Hires AWS' Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer - simonebrunozzi
https://stripe.com/en-au/newsroom/news/mike-clayville
======
pc
We're excited to hire Mike in part because AWS has been one of the very best
examples ever of _simultaneously_ selling to the largest companies in the
world while not giving up on a strong self-serve product. So many B2B
companies end up with homepages for which the only CTAs are annoying variants
of "read case study", "download whitepaper", and "request a call". All stock
photography; no product imagery.

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.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Congrats, Patrick. The VMware + AWS experience is certainly a big plus for a
company like Stripe.

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.

~~~
pc
Yes, the world certainly hasn't yet nailed this playbook. AWS _has_ , I would
contend, objectively done an incredible job in this synthesis. (How many other
businesses have grown to $40B+ of revenue with self-serve product adoption
front-and-center?) But I'm sure Mike (and anyone else at AWS) would be among
the first to agree that they also have things to learn and improve.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only
marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest
ever).

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.

~~~
thoraway1010
The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that
I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not
saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up.

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.

~~~
fragmede
AWS has clear upfront pricing, but they're a large enterprise company so if
you're a large customer, and you're not getting a discount, you're
_definitely_ getting screwed. No one talks about that because it's all covered
by NDAs covering backroom deals, but you can be sure Netflix isn't paying list
pricing for EC2 instances.

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?

~~~
donor20
I've never felt tricked by RI. Is there some value to a cloud provider if I
commit to three years of an instance type that might night have much new
adoption after 1 or 2 years? I suspect so. They seemed to price based on that.
What's the "trick"? Standard a1.medium instance for 3 years runs $7/month. Not
unreasonable

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.

------
xoxoy
Just me or does anyone else think there’s going to be a reckoning in
interchange regulation in the US like Europe soon?

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.

~~~
thoraway1010
My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so
explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie,
merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card
holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have
to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.

~~~
xoxoy
there’s probably very little fraud with touchless payments like Apple Pay -
most issuers require some verification to add the card to a phone in the first
place. if that becomes a growing % of in person payments i don’t see the
justification for high card present rates.

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

~~~
thoraway1010
I wonder if Apple and Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Stripe had just
done something "anti competitive" and entered the payment space squarely
themselves if rates would come down. They seem more consumer experience
directed than other players.

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?

------
fblp
Hey pc I love your engagement in the comment threads. Few leaders at billion
dollar companies hop on the comment threads with such care.

Thank you!

~~~
xoxoy
taking 2.9%+ of every sale is a lot though, no?

~~~
elcritch
It is a fair bit, but for any credit or debit card transaction they’re
actually taking on the risk of essentially fronting the cost of the
transaction. Well really their partnering bank does, but if something happens
they’re left covering that cost. They also have to split the profit with their
collaborating bank and possibly the credit card companies. Nowadays I suspect
the risk isn’t all all that high, or at least not 2.9 less slim profit margin
high. So in the end 2.9% isn’t highway robbery but they’re also not working on
slim margins.

~~~
xoxoy
costco offers payment processing for 1.99% + 25c (vs 2.9 + 30c), so quite a
bit cheaper.

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](https://www.costco.com/merchant-account.html)

~~~
stu2b50
Your point is a complete non-sequitar though? How'd it go from "Patrick is
very active on HN/with developer communication!" to "yeah but Stripe is
expensive"?

AFAIK they see themselves as a "premium" processor, not as a cheap one.

~~~
xoxoy
just a reference to the company’s valuation - and how lack of regulation
around interchange fees and payment processing fees has meant very high costs
that would be a lot lower if the US were more like EU

~~~
stu2b50
I don't see how that's a problem? There's no lack of payment processors, as
you have noted, many with lower fees.

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.

~~~
xoxoy
there’s a high floor due to interchange fees that are set by the networks that
processors have no control over.

------
graton
I wonder if Amazon will sue based on a non-compete?

Since they did that earlier this year: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-
case-against-worker-who-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-
worker-who-joined-google-reignites-non-compete-debate.html)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Very unlikely. They could if you go to MS or GCP or VMware. Note that some
people might know stories about it, but most of these people wouldn't be able
to talk about it.

------
andy_ppp
So can we expect stripe to move to the most complex pricing system ever
invented?

------
polishdude20
We migrated from stripe to paddle in the last month due to stripe not having
any built in tax functionality. They do have a separate provider to calculate
taxes but then you need to work with multiple services and worry about all
those working well. We went with paddle since it's all built in because
technically they are the ones who get paid, take off a bit off the top, charge
taxes and file them.

Has anyone done this with stripe successfully?

------
swyx
in case this was news to anyone (seems to have not been picked up on HN which
is strange) TIL that Stripe raised another 600m as recently as April.
[https://stripe.com/en-sg/newsroom/news/stripe-extends-
series...](https://stripe.com/en-sg/newsroom/news/stripe-extends-series-g-
funding-round)

------
catsarebetter
Thought it would be patio11, guess charging more isn't in their roadmap

