#define CTO
I joined Stripe as an engineer in 2010. I began by working on the backend infrastructure: designing the server architecture, creating our credit card vault, and producing internal abstractions to make people’s jobs easier. I loved writing code, but I also spent a bunch of time on other things: figuring out our recruiting program, shaping the culture, or making our first T-shirts (which have been banned since we hired our first designer). I wasn’t doing these things particularly because I preferred them to coding: instead, I had a very strong vision of the environment I wanted to be a part of, and I was willing to go out of my way to make it exist.
As time went on, I accumulated more and more responsibilities which were not strictly writing code. As Nelson Elhage liked to put it, my job became full-time “early employee”. My days were filled with writing cultural guides, acclimatizing new...