People often worry that they’re joining Stripe, or any nascently successful startup, too late. Have all the large problems been solved? Are there still important decisions left to be made and things to be built?
The good news: it’s not too late. Many of the most important problems that Stripe will ever solve are yet to be solved. You will, within weeks of joining Stripe, work on problems that no one here has solved before. (And you’ll occasionally end up working on problems that no one anywhere has solved before.) There are a lot of avenues that lead to trajectory-altering impact.
The bad news: our success is far from being assured. Most companies that have ever gotten to Stripe’s stage have plateaued — or worse. We consider lots of things to be “broken” today — and the more successful we are, the faster things will come to break in the future. (If you’ve ever played a tower defense game… scaling a fast-growing startup feels a lot like that.)
QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK YOURSELF
The value of Stripe (and your equity) is no foregone conclusion. While you’ll have a hand in the outcome, are you okay with a substantial amount of risk and ambiguity?