The story that prompted a successful entrepreneur to quit his job and go to the Stripe Atlas team

Recently a successful entrepreneur, a well-known business blogger, founder of several of his own businesses - Starfighter, Appointment Reminder and Bingo Card Creator - Patrick McKenzie announced that he has moved to Stripe to work on the Atlas project. Managers did not enter into partnership agreements for companies, did not integrate services, as one might think. McKenzie just settled in Stripe, selling his own business and becoming an ordinary employee, of course, with a certain amount of freedom, but still. We at Wirex , a blockchain service that performs international money transfers without banking intermediation, decided to transfer his post, prompting the entrepreneur to move to another company. Next will tell McKenzie himself.

In the past 10 years, I’m in Japan and lead from here a few successful small businesses in software development and support. In my blog , as well as at various conferences and events, I talk about my experiences.

A few years ago, when I was working at a Japanese company, I had a tiny, third-party project called Bingo Card Creator. For him, I wanted to take payments online. The opportunities that existed at that time in 2006 were simply terrible. In the end, I signed an agreement with one payment operator servicing shareware software and asking for 11% from each sale for giving me the right to lease their merchant account. And I “signed” it in the most direct sense: in order to send them by international fax a document expressing my acceptance of their blatant terms and conditions, I then spent a fourth of my budget.

I was very happy when Stripe appeared in 2011 and quickly connected all its businesses to it. Apart from the fact that the company's approach offered to transform all aspects - from API to business prospects, it was also obvious that Stripe takes on the work of people like me . Startup CEO Patrick Collison then helped me with the Ruby Dependency Problem debug with git bisect. Yes, he really did it.
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The international community of small software entrepreneurs

Neither Chicago, where I grew up, nor the Japanese Ogaki, where I lived when I started my business, cannot be called the pulsating center of the international software industry. I didn’t have friends from this area at that time, and therefore I thought that the possible employment options were limited to choosing from a list of safe and boring jobs in one of the big and boring companies. When my classmate at the university was interviewed by Google, everyone I knew advised her to look for a job in a consulting company, instead of risking her career in this incomprehensible Internet company, which would not exist anymore today.

Such a social and educational background gives a small idea of ​​how it happened that I turned into a white collar, scribbling dull J2EE web applications for one “awesome big corporation”. At the same time, this prehistory does not explain how I managed to escape from this hellish existence.

The latter was made possible mainly by the sole solution of Joel Spolsky. He screwed a forum to his blog where people interested in the software business could discuss professional issues. In my free time, I read him like an obsessive person, and it was as a result of this reading that the unthinkable idea gradually came to my mind that experienced geeks like me could easily have their own software company. I thought it was illegal because, like John Snow, he did not know anything: no one ever told me that in order to “create intellectual property” a person did not need to ask for permission, and my background, therefore, suggested that this occupation was either forbidden or risky, or it was so risky that it could easily be prohibited.

I never thought that I could create my own Fog Creek , but I saw a whole crowd of other geeks developing Poker Co-pilot , Perfect Table Plan or programs for scoring skeet score and I was sure that I could certainly do something like that.

Therefore, I launched my Bingo Card Creator and, continuing to realize that I didn’t know anything, I decided to blog in real time about what I was learning. I continued to do this for the next few years. My knowledge of software development was extremely small, but, fortunately, the Internet turned out to be full of advanced people. Marketing and sales were also a dark forest for me, but forum regulars happily explained the basics of AdWords to me, and I found several quality SEO guides on the Internet. So it went.

Coming back now, I summarize: in ten years I have built three software companies, worked in some others and now I know more than nothing. My tiny blog and comments contain a total of about 3 million words, and other geeks have already informed me that they were able to take advantage of this good so that their own business or career gained momentum, which pleases me more than anything else in my commercial practice.

I also spent a lot, even a lot of time online and in real life, communicating with colleagues from all over the world. That is, hobby groups are different, for example, a tribe of “rubists” or “pythonists”, or ballet dancers who share something with other “rubists” or “pythonists” or ballet dancers, regardless of state or language barriers. We - "those who work on the Internet" - got up because of their jobs, found each other and decided that we, perhaps, like to spend time in the company of each other.

We have forums. There are professional magazines, as well as conferences. Having started to discuss purely professional topics, we eventually became friends.

Silicon Valley is full of crazy

Being in the company of my online tribesmen, I had another tribe with which I had been in contact for several years - Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who received venture funding.

When you are too crazy, you take up the creation of a social network for sharing photos of cats and say, of course, with all seriousness that it will change the world forever.

When you lack the courage to go insane enough, you find yourself in safe work at mega-corporations and remain there, even though you hate it.

But when you go insane just as much as you need, you set up a payment company, not paying attention to the fact that it is doomed, because in order to put it on its feet, you will need to shovel mountains of difficult and tedious work , while others players already have billions of dollars.

Patrick and John Collison reached the optimum level of insanity. When Patrick says “Stripe has set a goal to increase the GDP of the Internet,” this situation should not be compared with Cthulhu, who set a goal to leave a mark on the history of the universe. This implies that real people will create real businesses selling real products, and all this will lead to the fact that real, tangible changes will occur in the lives of these and other real people.

Atlas is a crazy place

Two months ago, Patrick Collison approached me with a crazy idea. He said that Stripe would like to develop a “legal entity-as-service” scheme that would allow any businessmen all over the world to get a legal entity and a bank account at their disposal with the same ease with which they can buy an E2C server .

I found this idea insane. That is, by that time I had the experience of registering four of my own legal entities and opening business bank accounts for them. The last time it took me more than a hundred pages of documentation and six weeks of negotiations to alleviate the risk department's concerns about foreign technology entrepreneurs, caused, in particular, by the recent Bitcoin-hype. No, to do such things yourself and in a couple of clicks is simply impossible.

But Stripe implemented this idea with a crazy speed: the project was at the beta stage only 11 weeks from the moment the concept appeared. In most countries of the world, this time it only takes you to simply open a single company. Stripe solved this task as well as the engineers would have done: the establishment of one company requires a tedious filling of a whole pile of papers, so instead of rolling up their sleeves and getting to work in each individual case, they simply developed a special web application that performs all the procedures for you and thus abstracted from the constant filling of documents.

And they have ambitious plans for Atlas in the future. It is not just about registration of legal entities, but also about taking on the entire amount of accompanying paper work that distracts Internet businesses from providing real customers with real products. Payments, contracts, invoices for payment, accounting, constituent documentation, taxes and much more - in short, everything you have to do, even if your real activity is just selling lottery tickets to school teachers.

As a success target for Atlas, Patrick identified the company's ability to have a significant impact on global macroeconomic indicators. This, again, sounds like madness. And yet, if you have seen how fragile freshly baked businesses are when it comes to colliding with restrictions, such as opening a bank account, issuing an insurance policy by the time you close the first transaction, completing the registration of a legal entity, to finally get the right to sign contracts about renting or hiring employees, then early intervention in this process is likely to be able to increase the number of successful businesses that have survived key stages, such as starting, reaching profitability, expanding staff, and resilient ivy economic effect. The idea that new businesses are a source of economic growth makes a considerable impression. Perhaps even “crazy” is impressive against the background of the saturation level of developed economies, such as the USA and Japan , as well as developing countries around the world.

Madness carries away

My co-founders and I recently decided to wind down our youngest business, Starfighter, and go in search of new adventures. I thought I would sell the Appointment Reminder (Saas-business, which I managed the last few years and never really liked) and start a new, small SaaS-enterprise. This will allow me to pay for housing and continue to write and communicate with other entrepreneurs, and this is the part of the work that brings me real pleasure.

And then Patrick made me a crazy offer: to return to Stripe to work on Atlas.

And I agreed. Mostly because I think the transforming potential of Atlas and Stripe is insanely great.

In the world today, there are probably about a hundred thousand "those who work on the Internet." Very soon there will be several millions of them, and eventually the bill will go to hundreds of millions.

This company offered technological innovations that changed the world forever. The Internet is a technological innovation that also changed the world forever. Firms living on the Internet are already becoming a reality and their growth, both quantitative and in terms of total economic influence, is inevitable.

There is no room for restrictions in the future.

The ideas expressed in this part of the text are to a large extent borrowed from Nabal Ravikant ’s reflections on business efficiency.

It seems unthinkable to me the future, where Internet companies will concede in the number of representatives of other industries, for example, insurance agents, whose number in the United States alone reaches 450 thousand.

It seems unthinkable to me and the situation when the creation of products for which people will be willing to pay will become more difficult than in 2016. The technology will change: Rails now represents the lowest level of software platform productivity. In developed countries, even university students today have everything they need to start producing material goods manufactured under a contract with some Chinese factory. This and other similar opportunities will become more and more common.

I do not believe in such a future where it will become more difficult to take money from people than in 2016. In 1999, the integration of the online payment system using a single card cost $ 250,000 and required six months of technical work. By 2006, it had dropped to a few hundred dollars and two weeks of work. In 2016, this problem is solved by lunchtime, and the price of the issue is commensurate with speed. We will not forget how this is done.

It also seems incredible that the web-based businesses that we use to reach our customers — Google, AdWords, Facebook, the App Store, Twitter, Kickstarter, Alibaba, and others — will all surrender to the overall scale of their work. the abundance of potential customers who can come to them.

There will not be such that the number of users with Internet access will fall sharply, and smart phones will become more exclusive products than they are now.

Everything will be in order and with the number of online transactions. There is no reason to believe that it will fall from the current rate of about 1% in the most active online economies. The number of operations around the world will grow, and by orders of magnitude.

These fundamental economic factors will continue to lower the cost of opening new businesses and increase their potential economic effect, even at the lowest levels of capitalization. That is, we will see an explosive growth in the number of entrepreneurs.

So why has all this not happened yet?

Our future colleagues today encounter a number of logistical difficulties and information barriers on their way. They have no business accounts in the bank. They do not know what accounting is. They never negotiated a main service agreement. All this can be learned, but the depth and breadth of knowledge that is required of start-up entrepreneurs produce the impression of something irresistible.

Therefore, I join Atlas to work with the community and be responsible for communication. In general terms, this means that I will “conduct large-scale training for Internet entrepreneurs around the world, remove the obstacles that newcomers face, and help the international community grow and be able to recruit even more people.”

I hope the next few years will pass for me just like the last few: coding, writing posts, communicating, giving presentations, and my work itself will be useful for as many people as possible. The most important difference is that now this criterion will be the main one for evaluating my work, whereas earlier this activity was just a third-party hobby, and my real work was the development and sale of software to increase business productivity.

Stripe’s interest in increasing the Internet’s GDP is quite obvious: the company intends to make its services a standard on the basis of which every internet business of the future will accept payments, and Atlas will be the first in the list of tools for maintaining all the accompanying documentation of the same internet businesses. If everything goes as planned, Stripe will be an incredibly successful company.

Now I work in Japan again.

I spend most of my time on the Internet, but I live in Japan and I really like it here. And if I regret about it in a professional sense, it is that my work does not bring any direct benefit to the local population.

I think with inspiration about the future of the Japanese division Stripe.

Stripe Japan has a bizarre limitation: on the one hand, it must remain true to the principles of Stripe (an entrepreneurial-friendly and developer-oriented company), and on the other, be an authentic Japanese company.

I am a bilingual "developer who has become an entrepreneur," but sometimes, when the situation requires, I can still pretend to be a "responsible Japanese employee." I look forward to helping Stripe Japan gain the confidence of Japanese companies and become a pleasant place to work for a multinational, multi-cultural team. I can also help the “center” to recognize in time those situations when they ask their Japanese unit to exceed the permissible level of madness for the Land of the Rising Sun.

We hope to turn Stripe Japan into a thriving software company on our own without assistance. In addition to the fact that we offer better positions than those that were historically available in this country, we hope to provide additional evidence of the existence of more advanced workflow management techniques than those that now dominate Japan.

Naturally, we hope to eliminate payment barriers for Japanese companies. The costs and complexity of organizing non-cash payments in Japan are simply breathtaking. In short, the bottom line is that, historically, a company that wants to accept online payments must have a capital of at least $ 1 million, although this is now beginning to change. That is why for several years in a row Japanese entrepreneurs jokingly tell me that they are jealous of American companies that have Stripe more than anyone else.

We are going to provide all entrepreneurs with the same service that American startups today take for granted. In addition, they will also have access to closed ecosystems of the state payment network.

In the country there are many obstacles for business owners. Historically, the main ones are connected with the mechanism of collecting money. We will solve this problem.

Now I'm a company employee again.

I never thought that I would ever again have to become an employee of another company and, frankly, I have very mixed feelings about this. That is why in the past I have rejected other offers.

Stripe offers a very competent combination of efficiency and autonomy. I am particularly attracted to a flexible attitude towards job descriptions, when a company does not limit an employee to a certain set of responsibilities, but gives him the opportunity and empowers himself to take certain actions to successfully complete the project. This approach appeals to a broad expert in me. It also helps that the Atlas team is now a tiny group of people and therefore it needs such specialists very much. Some people will be stunned if you ask them to write Ruby code at the same time, negotiate and come up with a series of email marketing emails. To me, this list seems to be a very fruitful way to spend any Tuesday.

At the same time, I look forward to working with other team members. One of my favorite moments in Starfighter was working with smart founding colleagues, without having to bear all the responsibility for the growth of the company itself, and this, as you know, is one of the scourges of running your own business. I would be very pleased to know that wage fund, legal issues, devops and other similar things will be handled by competent and loving professionals, and in the meantime I will be able to prove myself as a competent professional in those matters that I really understand, without worrying about that servers can fall at 2 am.

But you will have to get used to the authorities again. However, I believe that the opposite is also true, since the autonomy of my position specified by us will by no means always coincide with the momentary desires of the company.

It’s funny that I’m probably the only employee who asked me to add the following clause to my contract: “an employee is allowed to continue to criticize Bitcoin to the best of his own will, despite the fact that Stripe uses Bitcoin and promotes it ”. You will probably think that I did this on purpose to check how much the company will be true to its promises about autonomy, as in the case of the Van Halen group and its rider forbidding to bring brown M & Ms behind the scenes, but no - I just wanted to continue criticizing Bitcoin . Everyone should have a hobby.

And what will happen to the rest of my businesses?

Starfighter will gradually stop its work. His story is a classic in the world of startups. We offered excellent service, but the business still did not go. I wish Thomas and Erin all the best in their new adventures, and they too will be rooting for me in Stripe. And of course, I wish other market players and customers success in all future endeavors.

The Appointment Reminder will be sold over the next few weeks using the FEI service, which I used to sell my Bingo Card Creator last year. At the time of publication of this post, the sale process was well under way.

As for Kalzumeus Software , I will continue to periodically and to the best of my ability to write and communicate with my readers in a blog on all the same familiar topics, but Atlas will definitely provide me with more than enough work for the next few years. Most likely during this time I will not release any new products under the auspices of Kalzumeus.

Incidentally, Nick Disabato and I finally completed our conversion optimization course, which I had once worked on for eternity. This will be my last major creative work before starting work in Stripe.

Would you like to work in stripe?

Stripe is looking for employees. Atlas is looking for employees. Stripe Japan is looking for employees. See the job page .

My experience in the technology industry shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases, new employees do not come to the company through job pages. This is an important point that you need to understand and learn. The general scheme here is this: to find someone inside the companies that has the authority to hire, make a good impression on this person and make sure that he finally starts the internal process of reviewing your application.

I do not have the authority to hire employees, but I have an open invitation to all those interested in the software industry. It will be valid for several years and will not go anywhere. I work in Stripe. I work on the internet. If you are on the Internet, then I work including for you. If you are interested in considering suitable options for you in Stripe, feel free to email me. I will be happy to meet you for coffee or call you on Skype, tell you how everything works from the inside and make sure that you get a referral to some friendly and open person within the company who is able to make the hiring process a reality. And I am not at all sorry to spend my time on it.