in my mid-20's, a time when about half of my friends hated their jobs (a very normal phenomenon if you're in your mid-20s), i noticed a group of people my age who looked extremely happy and actualized at work. and all of these people somehow seemed to work at stripe. i'll call out @tamarawinter and @orbuch specifically as some of the first people who made me realize that it was possible to be 25 years old and do *singular* work every day, and not just whatever garden-variety boilerplate the company demands. this podcast with @gaybrick and @DavidGeorge83 helps explain why this was, and still is, the case. will says stripe increasingly is a platform for founders internally, just as it's always been a platform for founders externally. he wants each employee to feel like an “auteur”: an engineer, product thinker, and creative person with enough context and authority to make something real. we're now seeing a new generation of this pattern, with stripe's support of stuff like tempo (a team that might have one of the highest concentrations of founder-mindsetted people im aware of? cc @gakonst @dwr @varunsrin @liamihorne etc) the embrace of teams like privy and bridge, and other incubated initiatives like minions. stripe is trying to make employees more founder-like while preserving a shared standard of quality (one of my favorite details on this point: stripe creates simulated customer accounts so teams can experience realistic UIs for disputes and refunds before exposing products to real users). this is something that's actually very tough to do well, so it's very cool to hear will talk about it on this pod.