YouSaid · the spoken record

David Singleton

lines on the record: 98
first: 2023-05-04
most recent: 2023-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Cool. Okay, well, I am at DPS on Twitter. That is definitely the best place to get hold of me. But you can also check out my personal blog at blog.singleton.io. And useful. Honestly, please send me stripe feedback. You can do that on Twitter. You can discover my email address on my blog as well. I would love to hear why we could serve you better.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frameworks for thinking about how to translate what's really going on for users into great sets of metrics that you can then use to kind of get the right action happening. As I described before, that's super important. And the second person would be Michelle Boo. So Michelle, Join Stripe is an engineer in the very, very early days and has been with us for obviously a long time. She's really our principal product design architect in terms of the actual abstractions that we use to model our users' businesses on Stripe. And I think she has very deep insight into how to think about getting those things right. And I think you would enjoy talking.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see how this works. This isn't how this works. I think you should have on. Emily Sands is our chief economist and leads our information org, so I think that's data science, but also the teams that build all of our, or a lot of our internal tools. And I think Emily just has great.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we talked a bit about this already auto deploys and that auto merge feature, but probably the most profound thing is we put a little button in every single developer tool, it's right. It is an emoji of an octopus that is crying. If you click it, it makes it possible to just type in what's gone wrong. And then we have our developer productivity team read all of those and use them to prioritize what they're up to. So just like frictionless problem reporting turned out to be really valuable. We call those paper cuts.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting the wolf out of one image and putting it onto the other, we use the new Apple image segmentation, copy and pasting, which worked great. So it's also fun combining these AI tools, but that one has been pretty good.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We made a cover for a book that my daughter is writing. My daughter is nine years old, by the way, so we're talking here good children's stories. She made an image of a wolf wearing a purple velvet cloak sitting in front of a campfire with a shack in a forest and a nebula behind. It's beautiful. And we actually built that by combining two images, the wolf and the shack.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I find it very confusing at the beginning is like this is not the right interface for this tool. But actually, it's very smart because you learn from other people on Discord how they're prompting the AI in order to get the kind of results that they're looking for. And I find that made it possible for me to get a lot more power and value out of the tool. So I definitely subscribe to Midjourney and have had a lot of fun playing with it.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The product that I have recently discovered and definitely love is midjourney, also building the business side of their business on Stripe. So for folks who don't know, midjourney is an AI tool for generating images using stable diffusion, but it's really pretty awesome. I've been using it a lot with my daughter, so we'll come up with stories and we'll generate beautiful looking images with Midjourney, and then she'll drop them into books and she'll write the prose. The reason I think it's pretty cool is I was very surprised and skeptical at its UI to begin with because its UI is Discord. They drop you into Discord and you're in a channel where you have to prompt the artificial intelligence.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it sounds like a softball and then it's not. I often ask people, especially for leadership hiring, which leader that they've worked with they admire most and why. So sounds like a softball, right? But it actually tells you a lot about what this person really cares about in leadership. Sometimes I'll follow up and ask, like, how does that manifest in your own leadership style? But then, and this, I think, is really quite telling. I always ask folks, I'm going to spoil my interview question by revealing it in your podcast, but I always ask folks, okay, so imagine you were their manager. Tell me the performance review or the development feedback you give them to help them be more effective. And I think everyone always has things that they could improve. Certainly myself included. And so folks' ability to think critically about someone that they kind of admire or lionize and how they could actually be more effective, I find quite, quite telling.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe recently gone to OpenAI but was doing this kind of on his own for a few months and has produced a bunch of great YouTube content.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I want to cheat here because I'm going to interpret that as what's the best video content you've seen recently. I have fallen in love with YouTube for learning about the really fast moving AI space. So it has been remarkably valuable in Andrei Carpathy has a bunch of really good seminars, but not just that across the whole spectrum. I think there's just so much gold on YouTube if you want to learn a new skill these days.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So most means that you have to integrate under the curve. So I'd say high output management by Andy Grove is definitely the book that I've recommended the most. It was a book that really opened my eyes to how to get the most out of Teams over the whole course of my career. So definitely check that if you haven't read it already. Recently, so we talked about being meticulous in our draft. I've really enjoyed build by Tony Fidel. Tony worked on the iPod and then the iPhone and then was the finder of Nest. And he puts a tremendous amount of thought into his users and how to build really great crafted experiences. I had the privilege of working with him very briefly at Google, but I thought the book was excellent in terms of helping provide some practical. And then, if I may share one You've got it too. It's”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our product for platforms and marketplaces. And one of the things that we've done over the course of the last year or so is actually taken a lot of the features that we built in the Stripe dashboard to help folks manage things like gathering the right documents from their users or handling refunds and so forth. And we've actually made them available as embeddable UI components that are also completely customizable, which these platforms can take and put inside their own dashboards. So they can present a lot of the power that Stripe is enabling to their customers without having to do a ton of engineering work themselves. Look, generating engineering leverage for our customers is just very frequently the main thing that we can do to help their businesses. We're going to show a bunch of that stuff next week, which I'm excited about. And then finally, we touched on it already, but it'll be great to show some of the innovation we've had around AI and large language models, because again, I think it's going to make a big impact over the coming years.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Showing how you can do that in the dashboard at Stripe Sessions next week. So it's not going to general availability for all Stripe users. So it's giving all of our users from the very small to the very large the same power that any of the world's best SaaS platform might have. Excited about that. It's also the case that we didn't talk about it in this call. Stripe Connect is our product for platforms and marketplaces. And if I may actually just take one second, it's a really good example of how focusing on the needs of our users in one area kind of took us into a really valuable space to solve for many users in other areas. So the ideas behind Stripe Connect came from working with companies like Lyft and Shopify in the very early days. They were using Stripe for pay ins, but we realized, oh, these companies are operating these multi-sided marketplaces. And there's a ton of heavy lifting you have to do to make that work really well. You have to have a bunch of regulatory licenses in place. But also there's a lot that you need to do to actually make the money move and kind of account for it in the right way.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we touched on a few of the things that we're sharing broadly for the first time at Stripe Sessions on this call already. Per our development process, these have been in the hands of some Stripe users for a significant amount of time and we've really kind of crafted them with them. But I'm super excited about a number of the things that we're going to be talking about next week. One is I've mentioned our revenue and financial automation suite. We've really been crafting the features there for some time. And really nice example actually of how building with closely with users really, really helps kind of build things at scale. We've a set of features that we work with companies like Atlassian and Cloudflare to enable their businesses on stripe billing. So they have relatively complex models. For instance, you might sign a deal where it has a discount in the first year and then there's another product that's being used in the second year and then something else happens in the third year. You can now model all of that in strike billing and we're going to be”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. Okay, maybe we can email about that quite genuinely at Stripe, anytime we talk to a Stripe user, we are always looking for feedback. That goes for any occasion. We often bring users into the beginning of our Friday fireside I already mentioned, and we're always asking them for their feedback. And we really, really want to act on it.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies, African One companies, I guess. There's a very different set of user needs across those businesses. So for any given area, it's very important for each team to be clear about who are they serving. And then we run a kind of inverted W process. So we typically have teams surface, their immediate thoughts are on the most important things to do. We'll then have a group of product leaders get together and try to synthesize the most important parts of that into a kind of draft overall company strategy and take that back down to teams to figure out, well, how does, if that's where we're making a big push, should that tweak my plans at all? And we bring it back up for synthesis and then back down for everyone to really distribute with a lot of context within their orgs. And we find that at our current scale very, very effective.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something once a year and you're growing rapidly, you're gonna want to revisit exactly how you do it. And so I think for anyone who has the privilege of running the same planning process again and again, you can really iterate it and tune it. We've had to make more deliberate and more sweeping changes as we've gone along. But there are a couple of things at the core of how we do this. So one is it's really important to focus on who are the users that we are seeking to serve for any given product area that we're working in and kind of holding their needs front and center in your plans is important. Again, at Strike, we do something that is, it's not unconventional, but it's like not the most common practice in the industry, which is we work very hard to serve companies from the very, very small. The folks that are literally just starting their company on Stripe with Stripe Atlas, all the way up to multinational, Fortune 10, Fortune 5.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also talking to a bunch of folks that we have the privilege to work closely with because there are businesses building on Stripe or they're at a similar stage or scale to us. I mean, a good example of this is Amazon. Amazon is a Stripe user. Because we work with them in my first couple of weeks at Stripe, I was actually able to meet with Charlie Bell, who then ran operations at Stripe. And a lot of the things who then ran operations at Amazon, a lot of the things that we actually now do at Stripe have come from learning from that experience. But it wasn't just, oh yeah, we'll take this thing because Amazon did it, talk to him and lots of other companies to learn. So the point is like we care about learning from others and then we apply it. So bringing this back to planning, because we tend to think a lot from first principles and we've been growing rapidly, the right planning process for us as a company has actually changed quite dramatically and quite significantly over the years. And so we do planning in a relatively deep way once a year and then in a slightly lighter way halfway through the year. So if you imagine”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was funny you say that. I would say planning inside of Stripe does not get the highest Netpromoter score that you might imagine. I do think it is actually quite effective. And by the way, the reason I think that planning, the way we do planning at Stripe doesn't always get the best internal rep is we have grown very rapidly. And that means that almost every time we come back around to planning, we actually, and this is kind of a theme, we think about a lot of the ways that we work internally from first principles. We will tend not to by default just pick a system off of the shelf that some other company has run or that we've used before, will think hard. Considering what we're doing for our users, how should we do this? And when we're thinking for us principles, we'll often go out and talk to a lot of other companies and try to learn from their experience. It's actually something I've really appreciated and enjoyed at Stripe. A lot of the learning I've done here has come not only from folks that are at the company.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be not the most important thing, but I know that I get a lot of joy and energy from them. And then that carries over into the other stuff that also needs to get done.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Encourage everyone to think that way throughout the organization. And I think it does letter up to more impact over time. I think the final thing I'll say here is I mentioned how important operating principles are to the culture. I think for any manager and any leaders, that includes ICPMs as well. But for any manager, any leader, how you show up really does set the culture that is around you. So I try very hard to show up very consistently every day, even though there will very frequently be things that are going wrong and are bad and are hard. It's actually very important to show up quite consistently. Certainly, you know, in line with all the values that we have in the culture that we want to set in order to really kind of model that at scale. And different days that can be easier and harder. So the final thing is, I think it's quite important to manage your own energy. There are some tasks that I do that are”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conscious about managing your own time. There are hundreds or thousands of people who quite legitimately might want to get some time with you. And if you just let the places that you spend your time and energy be controlled by the stuff that comes into your inbox or the stuff that gets put on your calendar, that's going to be random. So it's quite likely that that's not laddering up to the biggest impact. So I personally have been running a loop for, I don't know, maybe like 10 years where on Sunday evenings, usually, well, it usually starts on Sunday afternoons. I read a lot of what happened last week. And then a Sunday evenings actually write a list for myself of, you ask me a question at start of this podcast, which is like, what would be great success for this podcast from your perspective? I basically think about that for my week, every Sunday night. I make a list of if we got these things done this week, that is a good week. And obviously we need to be dynamic. Like things will surprise you through the week. But honestly, then that drives.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I find is you do actually just have to be generous in giving trust and assuming trust by default at the beginning, but then you do need to hold people accountable enough that they are proving that they can handle that trust. So sometimes that means hiring someone who you think quite plausibly can end up in a very big role into a smaller role to begin with. Other times you just have the big role that you need to fill, in which case it's important to be quite conscious about really trusting and delegating to them with a lot of support. So I'm always working hard to delegate sometimes like a little bit more than I'm comfortable with because that's the only way to really operate at significant scale. I think something else, and sorry, this is really a smorgasbord. Perfect. Something else I realized as the organizations I work with and being responsible for have grown is that you have to be extremely”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we've described already what our hiring process is. I really lean into getting to know folks very well as we're hiring them. By the way, something I didn't mention earlier that is, I think, important here is we pay a lot of attention at Stripe during the hiring process to references. This is typically later in the process. But if you put someone through an interview process, you probably spent, what, like eight hours total with them. If you talk to people that actually have worked with them before, you're probably benefiting from thousands of hours of direct experience. So like we take this very seriously and we try to ask smart questions that will help get real signal out of that. And I certainly find when it comes to hiring folks that have then gone on to really make a transformative impact that references are often the time that you get the best conviction on the hire or not. So hire the right people. And then you have to trust them. Now, trust is interesting because it's actually quite challenging to trust people that you've just hired, right? You've got no stake really on you yet.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big question. There are so many different directions we could take that. So I'll share a few observations. They don't necessarily all have a particular theme to them. I think as I've been responsible for bigger and bigger teams over time, one of the things that just repeatedly learn is I personally will not be involved in really any of the decisions that matter and happen. There are thousands of decisions that an organization of any scale is making every single day. Every individual engineer or PM is making hundreds of small decisions and some big ones every day that affect the kind of general trajectory. So the most important thing is to really focus on hiring the right people. And that means like hiring people that you can trust with a tremendous amount of autonomy. Like if I try to get involved in lots of decisions, everything will grind to a halt. So how do you do that? It is important obviously to be rich.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is part of it. I mean, I'll speak from personal experience. I love writing code. I really love writing code. It's pretty much what I do for fun. I also love writing code with copilot because, as I said, it means that I can focus on the parts that really matter. And I think that's been a fairly consistent experience across Stripe as well.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's honestly too early to tell because we've only recently made it available at scale. What we're typically seeing is that the kind of tasks that it accelerates are, remember I mentioned how much energy we put into having comprehensive test suites. It's actually using co-pilot to generate your test cases turns out to be extremely valuable. There's a reasonable amount of boilerplate that is kind of like repeated code and concepts that goes into writing good tests, but you also have to reason very carefully about is this actually testing exactly what I want. So Copilot takes a lot of that boilerplate generation out of the way so that you're actually thinking about the stuff that really matters. And I think that is going to have a profined impact on quality of code that we write as well. But it's a little too early to say because we literally just rolled it out what kind of actual measure will impact this having.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're excited about Copilot. We've made Copilot available to our engineers internally. We ran a fairly rigorous trial to make sure that we felt good about its actual impact on our ability to write code and the code it was actually generating and found that it was very effective for us, both in productivity, but also just in helping our engineers feel like they could direct their energy towards some of the bigger problems like how should this stuff fit together rather than some of the micro problems. And so because we had such great feedback in that, we've made it available very broadly internally and we'll be very excited to see where that space develops over time.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing prompts is something that's accessible to folks across lots of different job families, not just engineers, folks in our marketing team, folks in our user support team have been able to use this as well. But you can put a lot of care and attention to getting a prompt that works really well. We now make it possible for those to be shared across the company. So I can grab the preset to help me write a blog post with the right kind of tone. And I find it extremely valuable in helping me and many other people across the company. So I think there's a lot of innovation in how companies serve their users and operate is possible right now. And we are working hard to employ all of that on behalf of our users.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we could apply that to many use cases inside of Stripe. But as you can imagine, a lot of the data that we are dealing with on a daily basis is very sensitive to our business, to our users, and we care a lot and we have a lot of governance around this. But we wanted to make that technology available. We couldn't say, hey, Stripes, go and use ChatGPT. So we stood up an integration to GPT-4 and an internal UI to use models like that. But here's the thing that I want to kind of relate to all of your viewers. We find that we built presets into that. So when you work with large language models, you want to write a prompt that then helps get the model into a state where it's going to be able to solve the particular problem at hand. And we find that”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sales, which segment in which country has particular attributes to it? Very powerful product, but it's one that is potentially challenging for non-developers to adopt. You do have to know how to write SQL queries, unless you just use the ones in the menu in order to get the full value out of the product. Well, it turns out with large language models, we can apply this technology where you can ask questions in natural language. And our engine will actually write the SQL query for you. And we've had to do a lot of work to kind of tune that to make sure that it's reliable and understandable, and it's going really well. And we also see great applications in actually applying these technologies to make us more efficient internally, answer users' questions faster, help each other out more quickly. And so we're doing those things as well. One concrete thing that we did, which I'm pretty excited about, is not long after we saw ChatGPT come out, we realized it would be really awesome.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing we thought of was we have a lot of documentation on Stripe. We put a lot of care and attention into making it good. But if you want to achieve something with your Stripe integration, you're typically going to spend quite a lot of time reading docs and kind of synthesizing them as an end user. We realized we can have GPT-4 read all of our docs, store them as embeddings, and then answer questions for developers. And so we now have that available in kind of early stage release inside of our documentation. It's turning out to be pretty valuable. We've also been able to apply these techniques to other areas of our product. So something that we're going to show an early version of at sessions is we have a really powerful product as part of our revenue and financial automation suite, which we call Sigma. It allows you to write SQL queries across all of your stripe data. So you can interrogate your stripe data to understand your business in really fine-grained detail. Which country has the fastest growth?”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other products, but they don't just stop there. We're actually helping power all of their subscriptions and revenue tracking and financial operations around the business. And the point about that is we've been putting very large engineering teams on this stuff for years. And that means anyone who wants to build a reconciliation product and a subscriptions business model, if you want to do that yourself, you have to put big engineering teams on them. But if you can use Stripe instead, you can actually focus those really precious engineering resources on keeping up with the rate of breakneck innovation in this space. So we're excited about that. But we're also really excited about the applications of these AI techniques on our own ability to serve our users better. And so, for instance, at sessions, we'll be talking about a few of these. We started working with OpenAI when they had the beta. It was a kind of private beta of GPT-4 available at the beginning of this year.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems at some point more than a year ago. And it's proved to have a very profound impact on our ability to solve those problems for our users, which is great. But we are also excited about the applications of large language models. I mean, there's really two dimensions to this. Number one, we feel privileged to be able to help serve and power a lot of businesses getting started in this space. One big difference between AI startups and others is it's actually quite expensive to operate an AI startup in terms of the compute resources, like running this stuff in these GPU machines is quite expensive. So typically these companies need to have a monetization model from day one. And I'm really excited to say most of the AI economy is running on Stripe, and we're working very hard to make sure we serve all their needs. Open AI, for instance, is using us for monetizing chat GPT and all the”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're very excited about AI. Now, just take one step back. Stripe has been using machine learning and advanced machine learning techniques at the heart of our product since the very early days. Radar is our solutions for payment fraud. And it has used, I mean, the very core of our product and has used machine learning since we introduced it. We also, if you think about the nature of Stripe, we operate in an environment where we have to do a lot of work to kind of catch bad actors in the system, fraudsters, or fraudulent businesses. So we've been employing a lot of machine learning techniques there again for years. And we couldn't operate the company without them. So the difference between ML and AI, I think when we think about AI today, we're mostly talking about the applications of large language models, but those are really based on this new technology called transformers. It was a paper that came out at Google a while back, about four years ago, five years ago. And we put transformer technology into those.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've touched on a couple of these already. That auto deploy mechanism definitely had a very significant individual impact. So before we introduced that, sometime within the last five years, each deployed to production required an engineer to actually babysit it, to watch it as it went out, make sure all the charts looked good. And it was a bit of a kind of game of roulette because you always wish that your change would get bundled in with someone else's so that they were paying attention to it for you. So literally being able to be like fingers on keyboard at something else while your change is going out and it's going to automatically monitor that was a big improvement in our productivity. Also like very small things, this is just like optimizing checkout. Very small changes really compound in a big way. So for instance, about eight months ago we made it possible, we use a tool for code review. It's quite popular as GitHub Enterprise, but we've built a bunch of our own experiences and”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes constant effort to hold those numbers, by the way, are important. Those are about the right numbers, I think, for a company operating our kind of scale. Of course, as you add more stuff, you add more tests. So we've had to work on, we've had to invent mechanisms to make it run more in parallel. I have a thing called selective test execution, where we figure out for the, not the battery that runs before it goes into production, that we run everything and just run it in more machines to make it parallelized. But for the changes, the tests that we run for individual changes, we actually have systems that figure out, well, which tests are the ones that might be material for this particular thing. And that's been a real source of innovation. In fact, our distributed change and test environment at Stripe is the biggest distributed system that we actually run. And so running that requires just as much energy and effort and rigor and craft as everything else.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, yes. So that battery of test that I described that gets run on every change, that gets run in parallel to when you send it for review by another human. So it's run once typically takes about 15 minutes. And then once the changes merged into our code base, we run that same test suite one more time, so another 15 minutes. Then typically takes about 30 minutes for the systems to automatically deploy it in production. That's why we run. And think about establishing that tight feedback loop with users. That means you can get feedback from a user in the morning. You can figure out how to address it, and you can actually put something back in their hands by the end of the day. And that loop running inside of 24 hours, I think, is pretty important.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to do how important it is, and if we don't do that well, we can't move quickly for our users. So that's how we do it. By the way, I don't want to kind of come across here and sound like we've got it all figured out. Of course, all of this is always entirely in flux. We're always anxious to figure out how we can make it go better. For instance, in recent years, we realized that we could get a lot of benefit from what we call chaos testing. That's like injecting errors and making sure that the systems respond in such a way that it doesn't cause any impact on users. So it's constantly evolving and we really enjoy learning from other companies and learning from our users as well. But it's something we care a tremendous amount about and think very rigorously and systematically about.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A particular kind of network audits out of our control or whatever. So things will go wrong. So it's important that we have the right systems in place that minimize the damage that any individual thing going wrong can cause. And we work hard on that. We have redundant systems in a bunch of places. We think hard about how something that breaks for one user wouldn't kind of carry over into other users. And then we actually very actively work hard to put things right when they are wrong. So that's called instant response at most companies, including Stripe. I actually think Stripe is very, very good at instant response. We've got very good tools for both declaring incidents and then pulling the right people together to put them right. But we don't stop there. We really obsess about reviewing them carefully and identifying not only what would have stopped this thing happening, but how could we prevent this whole class of issues in future? And as I said earlier, we prioritize working on that stuff ahead of anything else on the roadmap. That's because of remember what it is.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a number of things that we had to do to make that all possible. So, for instance, every change that Stripe Engineer submits once it's master's test, it actually ends up in production automatically over the course of the next 45 minutes or so. And I don't think there are a lot of financial services companies, at least not until maybe the last few years, that have operated that way. And so that takes a certain mind shift. You actually have to assume that that's going to happen and put the right systems and processes in place. And then the other thing that's important is to recognize that we have to obsess about getting very systematically good at addressing anything that can go wrong. So I mentioned earlier it's really important to me that we are a continuously learning organization. And I mean, something else that matters, of course, is things will go wrong. Sometimes there is a downstream partner where something breaks. Other times there is, you know,”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes this possible. One of those is we really care a lot about having really good test suites. So we believe in automated testing. We don't have manual testers because manual testers couldn't possibly cover the vast array of API endpoints and configurations that we offer. But automated test cat. So we work hard to have a lot of automated test coverage. And then every single change that an engineer produces gets run through this battery of tests before it can even possibly go towards production. And then we work very hard as changes end up in production to put them through increasingly realistic and then more broadly expose environments. So we have a bunch of staging environments where we'll send a battery of more realistic end-to-end tests. Then finally something actually goes to production, it starts at a very small percentage of the traffic and then ramps up to the hole. So we can detect problems before they become huge problems.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we do think about that a lot. Now, there's one way to be very reliable, which is to try to change things as infrequently as possible. Like, never change anything. Then you have many fewer opportunities for things to break. But we don't take that approach. The needs of our users are evolving so rapidly. The number of ways that we want to serve them and can serve them is evolving rapidly enough that it matters a lot that we can operate in a kind of constantly changing environment. Hopefully I've explained why that matters. Only possible if you can actually get something in their hands. So we choose to design the way we work to hold those two things true at the same time. And it does take a lot of care and attention. It takes a lot of systems. So maybe to kind of build this up. First of all, there's a lot in our development process and the ways that we take changes into our product.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's worth saying at Stripe, we are trying to do something, I think, relatively unique, which is what we power for the businesses that build on Stripe our users, it's really business critical to them. We're literally talking about money coming into your business to help you run your operations or make it even possible for you to run your operations and maybe pay your employees and so forth. All the revenue automation that we do around billing, subscriptions are”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a team who work on our dev tools, and they actually run exactly the same product development process that I just described for our external users internally. So understand your users really well. Talk to them a lot. So for instance, we do a monthly survey. We operate enough scale now where we can ping enough people once a month that we get a statistically significant sample of the entire organization without having to get everyone to respond, every individual new response once every six months. And we asked very directly, what's the experience you're having? And then we use that to prioritize the roadmap of our developer productivity team. We also measure everything. So we know where people are getting stuck. And when we compare both the free responses and the data, it helps us invest in the best places to make everyone else more productive.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the most interesting things that I think I've run into is there are a lot of places that as we scale, we know that it makes a lot of sense to invest in automation. And there were a bunch of places in our development process where while we've done that, we were working hard to help each other out and actually saying, hey, please come talk to this other team if you want to use this thing. And if you're working, for instance, a different time zone from someone else, it's often the case that actually it would be much better just to document it well and automate it and then maybe make the consultation available async. And so running into those kind of pieces of friction and then having a good conversation about it has really helped. But one good thing about Stripe, I think, is that kind of change doesn't depend on me doing anything. So we really care about making Stripe a place where engineers can do some of the best work of their careers. And that means being enabled with good tools and good developer productivity. So we invest a lot in developer productivity.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tell them this is an important part of the process. Please don't treat me any different to anyone else. And obviously, to make this work well, you have to set the expectation that you're not going to take immediate action if something isn't exactly what you want it to be. It's more kind of longitudinal process.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things move so fast. The process is literally to help you do that. I guess maybe something I left out in explaining it is we'll often identify a buddy on the team who's going to help you through. So for what it's worth, at strike, we write a lot of code in Ruby. We write a lot of code in other languages like Java and TypeScript as well, but our kind of core infrastructure is mostly implemented in core product infrastructure mostly implemented in Ruby. When I started, I had never written a line of Ruby in my life. And I knew I wanted to do this thing. I'd actually done something like it before joining. And I was really scared. Like, what kind of, how much credibility might I lose if I show up and I can't write a line of Ruby? But my first buddy was a guy called Xay, who's still trapped doing great stuff. And he helped me learn Ruby during these three days. And yeah, they rubbed me a little bit, but ultimately everyone really appreciated that I've done it.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's what you do. The meme is often the hardest thing about these is finding the time to clear your calendar for that many days. So the reason I think about it is like a vacation is, of course, people go on vacation. By the way, I work very hard to use all my vacation days every year. I think that taking a break and recharging your creative juices is valuable. So the point is like, when you're on vacation, the world goes on and it's all fine. So I treat it like I'll decline every meeting in order to clear my schedule and have a maker schedule in order to do that. And so I've done this many times at Stripe. I advise engineering managers at Stripe that they should do an engineer occasion sometime in their first quarter to six months at the company. It gives you a tremendous amount of context for what your teams are actually experiencing. And then for folks who do it once a year on an ongoing basis, and it provides a tremendous amount of context.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source