from Hacker News

Stripe Home

by wgyn on 4/19/18, 5:46 PM with 151 comments

by jamesmcintyre on 4/19/18, 7:12 PM
This is a perfect illustration of a company which is obviously genuinely thinking through its own process and operations from a set of values and principles. Most companies are going to use off-the-shelf products like Sharepoint and this type of off-the-shelf solution, usually being so poorly designed to the point of unusable, signals to front-line employees "we don't actually care about you guys using this to enrich your sense of community and collaboration, we just did it because companies seem to have these things".
Now contrast that to Stripe who's actually expending cycles and real labor to solve what they've deemed a real problem or at least a tangible goal for their org.
Stripe is an awesome company, I can only hope the rest of the industry will take notice of their culture and process. But even if the rest of the industry doesn't take notice Stripe will continue to attract better talent and get higher quality output from their people because of this type of care and consideration.
by nappy on 4/20/18, 3:29 AM
I don't understand this at all. It reads like PR boilerplate:
"Used by 99% of Stripes in the last month, Home is the source of truth for who we are, what we’re doing, and why—and a platform for enabling individuals and helping them get to know one another."
If it's the intranet/homepage/directory, of course everyone at Stripe uses it. If this is something worth talking about, let's dig into the real metrics around engagement and usage. It's strange to me to see a YC company so distracted by something this far outside of their core competency, especially to the point they would announce publicly all of the time and effort they put into it. This seems like a pure vanity project at best, and at worst evidence that Stripe is misdeploying resources as they scale, which happens and is often unavoidable.
by andygcook on 4/19/18, 7:48 PM
We build a similar type of knowledge sharing tool at my startup, Tettra (https://tettra.co). It's not open source and is a paid subscription, but might be worth checking out. We charge because we want to fund ourselves through customer and remain profitable.
On a related note, my co-founder, Nelson, saw Michael's original tweet about Home a few weeks ago and reached out to speak with him. Super nice person. Reportedly Home's really transformed Stripe's already-transparent internal communication culture.
As a founder, I've always admired Stripes email transparency policy. Not sure if it's still being used, but anyone at the company could see anyone else's email from the start. Home seems like a more modern way to share, and this type of transparency really helps eliminate a lot of problems that organizations experience when scaling up.
The book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal is essentially all about how the US military transformed itself from a top-down organization a team of teams that can operate effectively in a connected, digital world. Knowledge sharing systems between groups of people that are usually siloed was at the core of that transformation. Tools like Home and Tettra really help with that. On a personal note, it's also validating for me as Tettra's founder to see Stripe investing resources into the same problem we solve. They have a culture I really admire and we're hoping to make it easier for other organizations to operate transparently too.
Anyone else using knowledge sharing tools internally? Communication is a proverbial problem for most growing organizations. Would love to hear what's working, what's not, and get a discussion going here.
by mychael on 4/19/18, 10:14 PM
We've reached peak Stripe glorification.
by orta on 4/19/18, 8:12 PM
Artsy is just getting past the 200 people mark, and I've been running our OSS team navigator for the last 2 years. I think we've got maybe another a year or two's worth of time left before it needs a considerable re-think. Was kinda hoping this would be OSS, as it's what I had in mind.
However, if you are looking for something in the order of Home but much simpler, check out https://github.com/artsy/team-navigator/
by Lorin on 4/19/18, 7:18 PM
Are there plans to open source any part of this?
by cholmon on 4/19/18, 8:52 PM
From the article,
> Under the hood, Home is built on the same technology as our user-facing products (such as the Dashboard)...
Anyone know what technology that is?
by mjocius on 4/20/18, 11:34 AM
Our team is building a knowledge sharing app Tipi (https://tipihub.com), so we understand the value of Stripe Home.
When startups start to grow, they face this problem of not knowing your teammates well, and there is an even bigger problem of all this scattered information that becomes a big bottleneck in daily work.
With Tipi were are focused on the latter problem, yet we also have people profiles, private messages, etc. It's good to see more startups working on these kinds of problems!
by hobofan on 4/19/18, 10:05 PM
When patio11 started working for Stripe, he mentioned that there was a cool (somewhat simple) internal tool, that he think every company/startup should have? Is this that?
by kaycebasques on 4/19/18, 9:35 PM
I skimmed the article but couldn't get a clear sense of what the product is about. It's a social network for companies? I.e. an employee directory?
by jamesmcintyre on 4/20/18, 12:25 AM
We're a startup building a product called Nifty that will serve a similar purpose as Stripe Home, we hope you'll take a look:
https://getnifty.io
As software engineers that have worked in large orgs on very complex projects, we know the pain of "app sprawl" and the scattering of information that comes with everyone using different apps. That's why we began building Nifty and our mission is to solve this problem for software teams so that engineers and all creators can reduce the "work about work" and focus more on their valuable, fulfilling work!
Let us know what you think! We'd love some feedback from the HN community!
by blauditore on 4/20/18, 7:44 AM
It feels like there's a Stripe blog post on HN's front page every couple of days. Are people here really so excited about it or what is going on? Not trying to blame them of a voting ring, but it's at least eyebrows-raising.
by TulliusCicero on 4/19/18, 7:48 PM
It sounds like they just made a social network?
by evantahler on 4/19/18, 7:47 PM
... I was hoping to get a trial link!
by billboebel on 4/20/18, 4:50 PM
We built something similar in 2014 for our coworking space, Capital Factory. Slightly different use case though -- to make sure all the founders at the startups working at Capital Factory know who each other are, what they're building and who's an expert at what (so you can get peer feedback/etc).
Since I was seeing dozens of large companies, like Stripe, building their own versions of this, we created a version of ours for other companies to use: https://pingboard.com
Pingboard centers around org charts, and underneath there are rich employee profiles & cross-functional teams. And now we are expanding into hiring planning -- another area that lacks optimal collaboration and transparency inside most companies.
by crabasa on 4/19/18, 9:57 PM
This looks like an amazing product. I'm stunned they're sharing this sneak peak as simply a way to encourage engineers to apply to Stripe.
Does anyone have a sense of whether they intend to ship this as a product? It's incredibly validating for what I'm building right now.
by paulie_a on 4/20/18, 3:29 AM
So yet one more source of notification I can ignore. Between work emails, sms, slack pings and the other 90 systems this just seems like another "meh" not going to pay attention to. Eventually you get overloaded and actually need to work without distraction
by bassman9000 on 4/20/18, 2:01 AM
Another step towards the feudalistic view of your-Company-as-your-everything. You can receive emails any time. You can Slack any time with your colleagues. You now know everything about them.
The moment Facebook creates the employee apartments, the serfdom will be complete.
by mzzter on 4/21/18, 12:59 AM
Great to see they launched this! Been two years since the visual designs made it onto dribbble.
https://dribbble.com/shots/2537249-Home
by chuckdries on 4/19/18, 8:16 PM
> one of our more structured approaches involves a chat bot that helps schedule lunches among Stripes who are least likely to know each other
Anyone know if this chat bot is available for Slack? I kinda want to install it for our team
by cfv on 4/20/18, 2:47 AM
I hate not being able to use Stripe here in Argentina. The only easily-reachable payment gateway is about as nice as a swift kick on the groin, and Stripe's wonderful approach at money would be a godsend.
by simplify on 4/19/18, 8:00 PM
This really shows how Stripe values people and their work community as a whole. I'm happily employed, but if I were looking for a job, stuff like this puts a company on the top of my list to apply for.
by mkagenius on 4/19/18, 8:05 PM
How Google (or other big companies) didn't think of this before? They are a much older org and a good one at that (they have google calendar etc.) , how can they not build such a nice tool till now?
by bloodfire on 4/20/18, 1:27 AM
"The facebook"
by foolfoolz on 4/19/18, 10:55 PM
another example of using dunbar’s number and employee count at a company, implying the only people you know are your colleagues at your current job
by simonebrunozzi on 4/20/18, 1:14 AM
I would love to use Stripe Home for my company :)
by dawhizkid on 4/19/18, 10:10 PM
Uber built something similar years ago...(Whober)
by 6841iam on 4/20/18, 6:09 AM
google has had this internally for a very long time.
by iguanayou on 4/19/18, 7:38 PM
Pet peeve: Software companies that name their product after the noun that their project is a giant database of. "People" is the stupidest example I've seen yet.
by wehadfun on 4/19/18, 7:32 PM
If one strip employee wants to know another one go talk to them. An internal facebook will either be filled with corporate gibberish, empty, or cause someone to get fired.