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Eeke de Milliano

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2023-02-02
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2023-02-02
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  1. “I'm pretty sure Patrick wrote them. Yeah, I think they came from Patrick and John wrote them. The other value that I love, I don't think they have it anymore, but it's so good, the operating principles, micro-pessimists, macro optimists Yeah, I was just like this idea that in the long term we expect the curve to go up. Like we believe we very much believe in the upward trajectory of just about everything. But on the sort of day-to-day decisions, on the minutiae, we're like, we're quite sort of critical. Like, we'll, like, how do we make sure this thing works? And we think about all the ways in which it doesn't work.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It was just really this idea that your kind of compatriot and your biggest enemy as a startup is time. So you have to move really, really, really fast on it. Customers first was the other one or users first isripe would refer to customers as users. So those are some of my favorites.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think rigorously was one. And I think they might have actually sort of updated these on the website recently. So my recollection is very likely out of date. And Stripe would call them operating principles, actually, which I think is actually better because values is almost like you can't really tell people what to value. Like everyone has their own value set, but you can tell people like, hey, here's how we operate. Another one that I loved was move with urgency and focus.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Assumed like that's what it took. And of course, John and Patrick were like, well, it doesn't actually make that much sense. Why it should take that long.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I definitely think it's founder top down. They were really good about hiring people who thought that way too. So it's just all that stuff. It just really, really trickles. And actually, to this day, when I'm preparing a memo or a board deck or something, I imagine in my head I'm like, what if I had to present this to Patrick? And my ideas just get so much better because it just like sort of I know you can kind of think about sort of the questions they would ask. So I think that was one, you know, I think the other one was just to surf this writing culture piece. Like people would just like once you start writing things down, you realize like, hey, that actually doesn't make a lot of sense. And then I think the third thing actually was there was just always a lot of questioning about like the status quo. So if something had been done in an industry for a long time, people would always be like, well, why was it done that way? And I think this is kind of actually how Stripe got its start, right? Like, I think when Stripe started, if you want to set up a merchant account, it could take weeks. And everyone's.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But actually, it's really easy to grandfather your existing users into some existing pricing model and change pricing for future users. And if you believe that the product's going to be successful, your early users are only going to be a fraction of that pricing model. And if the product's not successful, then who cares if you change the pricing model? So I think that's a really good example of people think that's a trapped decision, but actually you can move much more quickly on that decision than you think. And then decision that was definitely felt to us like very much like a trapped decision. I think Stripe took a long time being really rigorous about was titles. I think Stripe's kind of famous for not really having titles. And I think it was right to be rigorous around that decision because you can't, like, once you've given someone a title, you can't really take it away. So you better be damn sure about the title you want to give someone.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And if you couldn't write well, I think it was actually pretty hard to be successful at Stripe, at least in the early days. So I think Stripe just cultivated a lot of really good writers. And by sort of by sort of input into that, a lot of really good thinkers. And then I think the last thing that Stripe is really good at was not overthinking decisions because that's kind of the flip side of this sort of like really rigorous approach is that you lock yourself into a room can't come out for five days. And you have to be good at making a lot of decisions and write decisions quickly. And one of the things that we would always sort of kick around a lot was this idea of is it a trapdoor decision, which I think is an Amazon concept. It's like the, if you make this decision, is it like one door or is it two doors? Like, can you come back from this decision? And I thought Stripe was actually really good at being rigorous, you know, back to the rigorous point about what actually was a chapter decision. So I think a lot of people, for example, think pricing is a trapdoor decision.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Much like, hey, how do we think about this thing from first principles? No one would ever say, for example, it's a best practice to do X. People be like, well, why? You have to kind of go a few levels deeper. So that was, I think, one piece. The other piece, and a lot has been written about this already, is Stripe had a very strong writing culture. All communication was long-form writing, business review, strategy memos, product reviews. It was just, there was a lot of writing that happened. And I very strongly believe, I don't think you can be a good writer.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Or decisions for Stripe that really set it on its path to success. And I don't think there are actually. Like every time like, well, if this hadn't happened, I can always sort of like reason my way into like, I think these other things would have happened and stripe would kind of ended up in the same place. So I think what Stripe was actually particularly good at, and by the way, you should take all this with a humongous grain of salt because I haven't worked there since 2019. But at least my experience when I was there was Stripe was really good at was just making not just like one or two big decisions, good decisions was like making a lot of really good decisions all the time, big or small. And that, I think, was quite cultural. Like there was this just humongous respect and enthusiasm for thinking. It was just like it was such a part of the culture that was one of the values was think rigorously. Like every meeting was very”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, that quick guide to Stripes Culture. I think we wrote it. Maybe when we were around 150 people or so. And we actually wrote it to share with candidates. Yeah, the idea was like, look, we have like, we're kind of opinionated about how we do things here. Most companies struggle to describe what their culture is. Like, how does a fish describe water? But it's worthwhile getting a sense of sort of the things that we feel opinionated about and that you might like or you might not like. And actually, when we put out the guide, our metric of success was that more of the right people would apply to Stripe and fewer of the wrong people. And there was, you know, there was a whole section in there. I was like, hey, we work pretty hard here. And that is certainly not for everyone. And, you know, hopefully you're excited to come and work really hard with like really with colleagues who really care. And that's kind of the reward. But so it's maybe one example. On stripes culture and what's made it so successful, I've really been thinking a lot about were there one or two pivotal points.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Sue's often actually to folks who are thinking about going into product management, that's awesome. Just be really, really sure about what you're signing up for. It's kind of the same. I think a lot of people want to become a manager. But just so you know, like being a manager is like, hey, you're doing performance reviews a lot and you're like, you're in one-on-ones a lot. And like you have to really love that kind of work and I think the product management case is also like you're just constantly working across a lot of different teams. You're trying to influence a lot of people who don't report into you directly to do a bunch of stuff. And if you love that, that's great. But like, you know, you've got to be sure you know you're signing up for it.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Countries, it's different financial infrastructure. How do we think about the legal side, the compliance side, et cetera? And I think PMs could really kind of bring that whole story together and make the whole machine move. And in addition to sort of understanding the customers and the value prop and what the overall strategy was.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think we actually had our first PM at, I want to say at about 100 employees. But yeah, no, it was late in the game. And actually, maybe just sort of to pattern match, Retool also didn't really have PMs for a while. And I think actually both in the stripe case and the retool case, the thing that both of these companies have in common is you're building for developers, the people who are building the product are the customers in a lot of ways. So they get it. There's really no reason why you should have sort of some in some ways like a middleman trying to figure out like, hey, who's the customer and what is it that they need and whether their pain points? And I think the moment at which it became clear, like we really do need PMs at Stripe. And I think we felt the same way at Retool is, your customer base starts expanding. You start having different kinds of customers. You need to understand sort of the whole market, all of the ICPs that you're going after. And the organization gets more complex. I think Stripe, gosh, in particular, it's just an extremely matrix organization in business because every time you launch your product, you're having to think about, well, how do we do this in other countries?”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Try and predict when a payment was fraudulent. And then we built a product on top of that to help custom All the kind of complicated product questions around how humans should interact with AI and models. And AI, I imagine a lot of the folks in the sort of latest movement in AI are thinking a lot about that too. It's like, how do you explain a model to humans? How do you let them interact with it? So both those things were really, really neat.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think of very fondly during my time at Stripe is this product Stripe Radar. So Stripe obviously processed a lot of payments wherever there was money. Fraudsters will kind of follow. And there were certainly some merchants who were just particularly vulnerable to payments fraud. So someone's using stolen credit card information to essentially purchase the good. And if you're not in payments, this is going to maybe sound kind of shocking. If a merchant processes a payment from a customer and that customer used a stolen credit card, the merchant is ultimately on the hook for those funds. So it can be detrimental. The merchant who's trying to run a real business is just losing all this money because there are all these fraudsters who are buying stuff from them online. So I really liked working on that product. So the product of Stripe was essentially we built a bunch of machine learning models.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Where you get the subscription and then it gets paid out to a bunch of studios. So, and then on top of that, all these platforms and marketplaces started having all these pretty complex regulatory and compliance requirements that were pretty different country to country. So it's just this like really complicated financial infrastructure problem. And Stripe actually didn't really have the right solution for it and no one else in the market did either. So at this time, this stripe engineer Brian Krauss started poking around at this problem because I was talking to so many of these customers. We started talking about this problem together and poking around and that actually resulted in us launching this sort of evolution of this product that we had at the time called Stripe Connect. That was easily, I think, one of my favorite products I worked on, not only it ended up actually being really quite significant for Stripe's business, but also because it was the first product. And I think that's always pretty special. And then the second product that”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Might do that. So to this day, when people ask me, hey, what's your advice for going into product management? I'm like, well, you should go get a sales job. I think it's pretty valuable. But it's kind of a long story to explain that at the time there was this one sort of business model, the two-sided marketplace business model that was really, it was just becoming huge. And you can even really sort of imagine that now, but back then, like Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, all those marketplaces, it was quite a new way of doing business. And so I was talking to all these customers and they had pretty complicated payments needs. So, you know, like one pair putting in funds and it's getting paid out to recipients or an Airbnb guest and an Airbnb host or multiple payers putting funds in and it's getting paid out to one recipient like a GoFundMe campaign or one payer putting in money and it going out to multiple recipients like, you know, with class pass.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah. So when I drink Stripe, I drink Stripe in 2013. It's pretty small at the time. It was around 50 people. And Stripe didn't have any product managers at that time. And I think Stripe was kind of famous for that. And it really wasn't because we were anti-PM in any way. It was mostly just because we were building this product for developers. We had a lot of really talented engineers who were essentially doing the PM job. I actually joined Stripe as the first account executive, which I think is pretty funny now that I've seen real account executives do their jobs because I really just had no business doing that job. But it also really wasn't your typical sales job in that most of Stripe's volume was inbound. So I was really just spending all of my day talking to customers, helping them figure out how Stripe might work for their particular business flows and payment models. And a lot of it was, I think, what PMs do. It was just like talking to customers, understanding their pain points and really helping them figure out how the process.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Process by definition is variance reducing. You're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. You want people to sort of meet a certain standard. And the cost of that is obviously while you're reducing the standard and bringing folks up to the average, you're also bringing other folks down to the average. And oftentimes the folks you're bringing down are your highest performers, your most creative thinkers, the folks who like, you know, I think actually don't really need process to do their best work. And so that, I think, is always the tension that you have with process. And obviously like one of the reasons why companies introduce process much more and more companies get bigger is because it's just it's harder to sort of like get all these folks who kind of don't need processing. You actually want to reduce the variance.”

    2023-02-02 · Lenny's Podcast · How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source