Pros
High growth business Rapid product expansion
Cons
At a macro level, the main issue is that leadership is generally lacking here. My personal experience of course will be very different from others, and certainly biased. I joined Stripe last year with the allure of great compensation, flexibility on work-life balance, challenging work, and an apparently engaged and collaborative team. After a couple of weeks, I got lumped into their reduction in force. that impacted 14% of the company or over 1,100 people. It was bad, but in truth, I have no "ill will" to the company as it was a large and very difficult business decision. That said, for people considering moving to Stripe, I call out two facts for you to consider. 1. Such a large move in layoffs would have been known before people like me (and there were others) moved to Stripe. Professionally they should have notified us before we left other jobs, or even drew out the hiring process. These large of a decisions are not made on the fly and take months of review by legal, HR and management teams. Candidates like me though, joined with honest intentions and trusted the employment contract. Professionally it is just poor form to not be honest. If managers did not know, then that is a much larger problem internally on how they operate. 2. This is public information available on the web: they were hitting close to $1Trillion in processed payment volume. Their reason for the layoff and subsequent private funding round (at a much lower valuation) was a lack of profitability. Anyone in payments know that to still be losing money at that level of volume, is a massive red flag. Information that unfortunately, became available after I left.
