#What is it you do, anyway?

Stripe’s mission is increasing the GDP of the Internet. Mine is increasing the number of successful software companies on it. That is basically the entirety of the job description. On a day-to-day basis, it’s very Choose Your Own Adventure; I’ve written code, requirements documents, strategy memos, the Stripe Atlas guides and advised Stripe employees, partners, and users.

This is… not a straightforward thing to write on a business card.

On the one hand, it gives me huge amounts of latitude to determine my day-to-day direction, and makes use of having a wide skillset. Relatively few people can solo ship an initiative which requires copywriting, React, an ETL pipeline, and a business negotiation; it turns out that is pretty valuable and decreasing the time-to-market of it (versus having to spin up a team of five people to do the same work) is useful.

At the same time, there are reasons why job descriptions exist; they help communicate one’s position to others at the company, clarify discussions about dependency graphs, give decisionmakers a handle when plans are made, etc etc. Being the singleton instance of Stripe::Atlas::Patio11 is occasionally a mixed blessing. //

Why work at Stripe when you could run your own business?

Leverage.
Leverage means things which increase your capability to provide impact. For example, writing code is an extremely leveraged use of your time; you go off to continue living your life but your code keeps running.

Kevin Kwok asked “Leverage on what?”. Fifteen years into this career thing I definitely know what my success function for the next thirty is: the product of the number of people I’ve helped in the community I serve (software people, broadly writ) times the delta in the average life that my efforts uniquely caused. If one uses e.g. income as a metric because it’s crunchy enough to keep one honest, then the most effective thing I’ve ever done (by far on an ROI-on-time basis) was writing about salary negotiation for engineers. A few hundred folks have emailed me the outcomes they attribute to that essay; this lower-bounds the impact to score of that essay at about 7,000,000 (a year). //

The company-level mission is “Increase the GDP of the Internet”; every time we increase the pace of business formation, the likelihood of business survival, or the rate of business growth, we win.

April 03, 2014

Tarsnap is the world’s best secure online backup service. It’s run by Colin Percival, Security Officer Emeritus at FreeBSD, a truly gifted cryptographer and programmer. I use it extensively in my company, recommend it to clients doing Serious Business (TM) all the time, and love seeing it successful.

It’s because I am such a fan of Tarsnap and Colin that it frustrates me to death. Colin is not a great engineer who is bad at business and thus compromising the financial rewards he could get from running his software company. No, Colin is in fact a great engineer who is so bad at business that it actively is compromising his engineering objectives. (About which, more later.) He’s got a gleeful masochistic streak about it, too, so much so that Thomas Ptacek and I have been promising for years to do an intervention. That sentiment boiled over for me recently (why?), so I took a day off of working on my business and spent it on Colin’s instead.

Tarsnap (the software) is a very serious backup product which is designed to be used by serious people who are seriously concerned about the security and availability of their data. It has OSS peer-reviewed software written by a world-renowned expert in the problem domain. You think your backup software is written by a genius? Did they win a Putnam? Colin won the Putnam. Tarsnap is used at places like Stripe to store wildly sensitive financial information.

Tarsnap (the business) is run with less seriousness than a 6 year old’s first lemonade stand.

That’s a pretty robust accusation. I could point to numerous pieces of evidence — the fact that it is priced in picodollars (“What?” Oh, don’t worry, we will come back to the picodollars), or the fact that for years it required you to check a box certifying that you were not a Canadian because Colin (who lives in Canada) thought sales taxes were too burdensome to file (thankfully fixed these days), but let me give you one FAQ item which is the problem in a nutshell.

Q: What happens when my account runs out of money?

A: You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7 days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored.

Yes folks, Tarsnap — “backups for the truly paranoid” — will in fact rm -rf your backups if you fail to respond to two emails. //

The darkly comic thing about this is I might even be wrong. It’s possible Colin is, in fact, not accurately stating his own policies. It is possible that, as a statement about engineering reality, the backups are actually retained after the shot clock expires e.g. until Colin personally authorizes their deletion after receiving customer authorization to do so. But even if this were true, the fact that I — the customer — am suddenly wondering whether Tarsnap — the robust built-for-paranoids backup provider — will periodically shoot all my backups in the head just to keep things interesting makes choosing Tarsnap a more difficult decision than it needed to be. (If Colin does, in fact, exercise discretion about shooting backups in the head, that should be post-haste added to the site. If he doesn’t and there is in fact a heartless cronjob deleting people’s backups if they miss two emails that should be fixed immediately.)

Capitalism, sometimes called “Corporatism”, is not the same thing as free enterprise.

Both are certainly preferable to socialism or communism, but free enterprise is considerably more conducive to freedom and widespread prosperity than capitalism.

History has proven the following: 1) Under capitalism, the divide between rich and poor naturally increases; 2) In a free enterprise system, the prosperity, freedom and dignity of nearly everyone in the society inevitably rises.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out that while modern American capitalism was clearly better than Russia’s twentieth-century communism or Europe’s contemporary attempts at socialism, the U.S. implementation of capitalism left much to be desired.

For example, he noted, under American capitalism the question of, “is it right?” became less important to many people and companies than, “is it legal?”

Likewise, the culture of capitalism frequently asks, “is it profitable?” before (or instead of) asking, “is it good?”

American capitalism, Solzhenitsyn said, created a nation more materialistic than spiritual, more interested in superficial success than genuine human progress.

Note that Solzhenitsyn was adamantly anti-communist and anti-socialist.

But he also found capitalism lacking. //

Isn’t it time for an end to the outdated debate about socialism versus capitalism and a national return to the free enterprise system which made America great?

During its first century-and-a-half of application, free enterprise brought us major wealth, a standard of living for most citizens that rivals or surpasses the lifestyles of history’s royals, world power, major technological and medical advancements, and the end of slavery.

It also brought the repudiation of racism, male dominance, religious persecution and a host of other ills that have existed for millennia.

With all these areas of progress, imagine what we could do if we re-adopted the free enterprise values and culture in our time.

Laws that give special benefits to wealth and capital while withholding such opportunities from the rest can never bring the progress, advances, freedom and prosperity that free enterprise will.

It’s time for a change, and the first step is for all of us to start using the phrase “free enterprise” a lot more.

When you follow American Airlines' logic, you reach a chilling conclusion. //

American sees things a little differently.

It's removing seatback screens. Kerr again:

We looked five years down the road and said would we invest in screens on the back of the TV [sic] or would we invest in the best Wi-Fi of anybody?

Kerr is convinced everyone comes on board with at least one device and that customers simply want to have "an in-home experience."

There's a slight drawback to this. The Wi-Fi isn't good enough. Oh, and you also currently have to pay for it, unless you choose to watch the airline's entertainment on your own device.

Which still means the customer experience is rather degraded. (Kerr also happened to mention that the airline doesn't make money on free Wi-Fi, which added a blissful myopia.)

On Delta, on the other hand, the airline is working hard on free Wi-Fi. In the meantime, it doesn't want you to sit there entirely without entertainment because you have no seatback screen or you're using your device for, say, work.

Delta has a reputation -- at least currently -- for thinking through human issues a little better than American. (Oddly, it's doing better financially, too.)

Who would be surprised if an element of American's decision to rip out screens involved making planes lighter, thereby saving on fuel? Oh, and there's the saving on screen maintenance too.

Airlines have to make big decisions a long way out.

Behind those decisions, however, is often a very particular view of how the airline sees its brand and its customers.

Currently, Delta sees itself not so much as an airline, but as a brand that seeks to engender higher, more pleasant feelings in its customers. Said Bastian:

Eventually we want to be seen as a brand that consumers love because it has such impact on their life, like other great brands that they love and pay a premium for.

Currently, American Airlines has no brand purpose.

Gumroad helps
creators do more of
what they love.
We have sent over $208M to artists, designers, educators, writers, influencers and more.
Super-simple e-commerce and
audience-building software for creators.

Can you tell which is which? I can’t. We had a sales team for a few years, then we didn’t. Can you tell when we made the switch? I can’t.

It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that’s how quickly the market determined we would grow. //

I am now more focused on creating value than capturing it. I still want to have as large an impact as possible, but I don’t need to create it directly or capture it in the form of revenue and valuation.

Startups have been founded by former Gumroad employees, and dozens more companies have been massively improved by recruiting our alumni. On top of that, our product ideas, like our credit card form and inline-checkout experience, have proliferated across the web, making it a better place for everyone — including those that have never used Gumroad.

While Gumroad, Inc. may be small, our impact is large. There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators. But then there’s the impact of the impact, the opportunities that those creators have taken to create new opportunities for others.

For years, my only metric of success was building a billion-dollar company. Now, I realize that was a terrible goal. It’s completely arbitrary and doesn’t accurately reflect impact.

I’m not making an excuse or pretending that I didn’t fail. I’m not pretending that failure feels good. //

I failed, but I also succeeded at many other things. Gumroad turned $10 million of investor capital into $178 million (and counting) for creators. Without a fundraising goal coming up, we’re simply focused on building the best product we can for our customers. On top of all that, I’m happy creating value beyond our revenue-generating product (like these words you’re reading). //

I consider myself “successful” now. Not exactly in the way I intended, though I think what I’m doing now counts.Wealth can be a measure of being able to improve the well-being of those around you, as seems to be the case for someone like Bill Gates, who has invested heavily in philanthropy. But it’s not the only way to measure success, nor is it the best one.

This isn't really what it looks like. It's more. Far more. Why would an airline do this? //

Why might Delta, in an era where airlines entertain themselves by competing in the Nickel-And-Diming Olympics, suddenly come over all generous?

This isn't merely about differentiating its brand. Although when you've built a reputation for uncommon customer service, this clearly fits right in.

What Delta is acknowledging -- and not enough airlines do -- is that there are actually more Economy Class passengers than any other kind.

Treat them well and that's more mouths that can offer more positive words to others.

Moreover, an Economy Class passenger on a long trip might also, on another occasion, be a Premium Economy or First Class passenger. Perhaps when flying alone on business, rather than with family on vacation.