To Grow Faster, Hit Pause

To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO | First Round Review

“A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase,” she says. “For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when you never even needed to do X before — those forces start to dictate your decisions.”

The key, she says, is pausing just long enough to be very intentional about how you approach each phase of growth. 

It’s easy to become too reactive, and when that happens, you’ll inevitably start to make human resources mistakes, execution mistakes, prioritization mistakes.

1. Have we documented our operating principles?

Stripe calls them “Operating Principles.” (Many companies have “values,” but Stripe wanted to distinguish philosophical beliefs from the concrete principles that should be applied to the day-to-day work of running the business.) Three of Stripe’s operating principles, as Johnson describes them, are:

• Users first: “We always start with what our users need or would like, and then consider things like like infrastructure, internal constraints, partnerships, product roadmap, and so on."
• Think rigorously: “We care about getting things right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We work hard to detect the errors in received wisdom. Rigor doesn’t mean not-invented-here syndrome; we’re interested in the world around us and think that other companies, industries, and academic fields have a lot to teach us. But in many cases progress comes from taking paths less traveled.” 
• Trust and amplify: “We want to work in a company of deeply good people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. People should be committed to amplifying one another: to going out of their way to help each other in both the short- and long-term.”

2. What structure is going to help us achieve our goals?

3. Who has been successful at our company so far?

4. Do we have a 5-year plan?

5. Do we have a way to measure the employee experience?

6. Are we decentralizing decisionmaking?