We've finally learned our lesson and printed more advanced copies this time 🙂‍↕️ If you're a founder, sales leader, or like me, are just weirdly attached to our galley design, shoot us a note stripepress@stripe.com. I have ~30 copies up for grabs!

Newest addition to our turpentine collection is one that we've been asked about for years: a guide to building a robust sales organization. Built to Grow, by the inimitable @she_travels, available for preorder now, & out October 13th in all formats:

I’m starting a new show with @Quartr_App. It’s called Ordinary Business, and somehow I’m the host. I met @haris_chc and @oliverhamrin here earlier this year through a shared interest in old annual reports, business history, and design. They were looking for someone to make a show. I was looking for my next project, and some new collaborators. I didn’t know they’d be in Sweden. Here’s the first episode.

I’m fascinated by the auto/biographies of great Asian founders for a v particular reason: they often double as histories of their countries’ economic development. Chung Ju-yung’s autobiography might be my favorite so far (also cool bc I knew nothing about Hyundai). Highly recommend.

thinking about one of the silliest lines here, that this "saves you time writing and allows you to focus on your ideas", which is similar to something i've heard often now, that LLMs allow people who are bad at writing to express themselves. but (and i'm sure this is not a rare experience) it's happened many times to me that i have an idea that seems brilliant at first but as i write it down i realize it's actually quite simplistic and unoriginal. or, just as often, that as i write it (and in the process examine it, test it, think through it, flesh it out) it actually becomes a worthwhile idea and not just a passing fragment of a thought i mean - even the people who created these technologies and believe most in their potential write extensively: famously, dario amodei is always writing long documents to explain his thinking (and has been doing so since the early days of OAI). this is not to say that if you use LLMs to write your ideas have no value (though I am inclined to doubt they do). rather I believe that if you don't write them down yourself you'll never know what their value is

Just landed in Sydney w/ @_theplaza! Very excited for Stripe Tour Sydney & this meetup. I also have a few copies of our next book that I’d love to offer to some startups that could use a GTM handbook 🤭

Cambridge and the other universities bear huge responsibility here. Jason Arday never should have been credentialed, hired, and elevated. And after everything was revealed (with very little help from them) those same institutions more or less abandoned him. Horrific.

In 1843, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend after seeing her first daguerreotype: “The very shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever! … I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced.” Our lives and homes are filled with things that once inspired similar awe. I tried to collect those feelings, in quotes like the one above, from people for whom what is now ordinary was brand new. A friar who met the inventor of eyeglasses, a founding father on the new smallpox vaccine, a woman in Iowa on her family’s first indoor bathroom. To look at a modern apartment through their eyes:

A bad pattern I see people falling into at work is starting with an AI generated [document/slides/artifact] and then saying they'll refine it from there. If you start with slop you just end up with more slop, and it's very hard to fix. The first version matters a lot.