Stripe's hiring strategies, focusing on talent acquisition, unconventional hiring practices, and building a strong team.
Stripe's hiring strategies, focusing on talent acquisition, unconventional hiring practices, and building a strong team. Ryan Wang, founder of Assembled and former Stripe engineer, shares insights on finding smart, driven people.
I'm wondering what what would you say were the key ingredients that allowed for that level of success to happen? I think a couple things I think um number one talent density you know I kind of alluded to it but uh you know those were just the people that I had you know direct uh uh you know experience with but I I also remember my my first week one of the onboardings was with this guy Greg Brockman and he had just been named CTO at Stripe and then went on to co-found open AAI so it wasn't just an accident you know that there were some people who were really talented it was up and down all across they were looking for really really talented people and um you know I think number two was it wasn't just talent density in the classic you know point of view of the world um they really had something kind of differentiated in terms of people would come from all sorts of whack like my background
was super wacky now I never studied engineering and yet they gave me a job you know offer that says software engineer [laughter] at the top so they saw something in me and I think it was like the creativity um Greg Greg dropped out of college and they recruited him uh you know to drop him to because it was like hey this is the smartest person at MIT that moved to Harvard um you know I think they had my brother who was uh just not even out of college at the time who they were recruiting they had Mike they haven't talked to Mike Morates you know uh um why is Mike Morates talking to somebody who hasn't even graduated from college yet well because John had worked on Ruby on Rails and um you know it was a Ruby shop and it was they'd rather hire super high trajectory young people with weird backgrounds um then just go for experience. And then like you know later on as Stripe became Stripe it
was you bring in all these people with incredible pristine backgrounds but even in the early days there's some weird weird bets and and and um so I I think really those two things you know it's like um amazing talent density knowing what great looks like but then also taking a lens to to to great that that that you know it's like looking past what's what was on the piece of