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John Collison: Internal Transparency at Stripe Scales Trust

By John Collison · Leadership · 1 min read

If everyone believes in the mission and has really good access to information — that gets you a huge amount of the way there. It forgives a lot of things that tend to break as you grow a startup.

Key Points

Transparency plays into hiring great people and giving them leverage
If everyone is aligned on mission and has good access to information — that gets you most of the way
At 170 people, you can't consume information as a fire hose — so tooling matters

If everyone really believes in the mission and has good access to information, that gets you a huge amount of the way there.

More Than Other Companies

Collison: We've placed a large emphasis on transparency internally — probably more than other companies. All the things people talk about — hiring really great people, giving them a huge amount of leverage — transparency plays into that.

If everyone is aligned at a high level about what Stripe is doing, if everyone really believes in the mission, and if everyone has really good access to information and a good picture of the current state of Stripe — that gets you a huge amount of the way there in terms of working productively together.

If everyone believes in the mission and has good access to information, that gets you most of the way there.

It Forgives a Lot

Collison: Transparency forgives a lot of the other things that tend to break as you grow a startup.

We started off two people. We're now over 170. As we've grown, we've put a lot of thought into the tooling around transparency. At 170 people, there's so much information being produced that you can't just consume it all as a fire hose. So how we use Slack, how we use email — that's one of the core things that's helped us work well.

Transparency forgives a lot of the things that tend to break as you grow.