Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.

People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.

There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:

- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal

- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)

- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely

- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer

Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.

That said, with threads like this, there's also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there's any sort of pattern; any such patterns can then inform future interactions with the people or companies involved.

My own personal experience over the last year as a manager of managers that may be relevant to both pc and barmstrong: seeing a surprising number of security resumes on the market from current Stripe talent suggests there may be a bit of impending brain drain (for reasons I can't put a finger on as I'm not inside). I've seen less of this with Coinbase talent.

The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.

Some context: I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.

It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?

Adam Smith, on his work on competition, took many ideas from the Muslim Caliphate. Where markets can only work on trust. That nobody will do business with someone they don't trust.

Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.

The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.

I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.

As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

The only kind of sense this could make is as a tautology. If the commenter is a "victim" then you've already decided to believe him or her. But what evidence do you have to support this belief?

Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.

Genuine question.

Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.

Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.

Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).

If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.

Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.

To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).

I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.

Anyway, I sent this to the comment author via email, but the best I can do in public is link to https://www.blackburncenter.org/post/on-believing-victims

Context: I run r/Relationship Advice.

No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you'll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.

There's even a PG blogpost about it. http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

Side Note: I'm always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I'm interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :D

Small world.

Thank you for this. This sentiment applies to so much online, especially in the field of online content, social media posting and conversion rates.

What feels like it should work is not the same as what actually works.

This site was posted on here at some point and it made me mad because everything the guy recommends sounds awesome, but where is any proof that it actually improves sales? https://examples.roastmylandingpage.com/

Humans are complex beasts and sometimes the exact opposite of the obvious is the right solution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-11573666

That's a result of actions taken not some kind of theoretical argument.

Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226

> I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this.

You must be new here.

Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...

Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.

Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2703771

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707385

> also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer

All reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.

I accept all outcomes - all except ghosting.

Personally I have became from poor ass bootstrapping startup founder to rich and successful retired entrpreneur (now investor) and it is ridiculous how people will treat you wildly differently as you get wealthier. And at times the exactly same people.

- “Did Patrick request that you write this post?”

- “Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?”

Is a pretty direct question and barmstrong gave a direct answer. It's possible that temp7536 and barmstrong simply had different experiences with Patrick.

It seems to me that barmstrong wanted to share their experience.

Note: I wasn’t completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.

Obviously we're not talking about the legal system here.

I do think this whole idea has minimal relevance to the thread as I really don't think the PC qualifies as a victim. Just wanted to clarify the idea of "believe the victim" as it's extremely important in potential cases of sexual assault (which, again, not relevant here).

> As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).

I'm not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn't have to tell you, he probably shouldn't. He runs a private company and that's what he should care about.

Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?

Is there a name for this pattern?

1. Observe that a human is taking some action to more effectively do their jobs… but in a way that has some risk of being unevenly applied or also self-beneficial.

2. Conclude that this action is itself malfeasance.

3. Conclude that this person merits generalized distrust.

I see this all the time in comments on (for example) youtube. I struggle to see how social cohesion could survive in a world where more people do this: If you lose trust by doing your job well, then its harder to motivate yourself to maintain others’ trust that you’ll do your job.

This [0] story criticising Gitlab resurfaced on a day of Gitlab IPO and quickly disappeared from the frontpage within an hour or so.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28857073

I have seen this type of behavior before even though I am not rich or successful. These people act like they never behaved the way they did or simply pretend it never happened, while they continue to do it to others. Its disgusting how people can be so fake.

Sounds like a recipe for a successful forum.

Unless you have more information than I do, I really don't understand how that is an example of divisiveness. Picking sides is a great way of being divisive.

If they picked a side, people would've also left the company because they disagreed with the side that was picked. Which would mean that the company culture will become that side. People who think differently will be discouraged to join the company because they don't want to work for a company with stand points they disagree with. A company like that will possibly end up blind to whatever the 'other side' thinks. That's how you end up with Juicero.

I don't think every organization should be apolitical by default. But there really is a point to being apolitical as an organization, especially in the Crypto market, since there are so many different reasons for people supporting Crypto, any political stand point might cause you to lose customers.

He’s helped me a couple of times to make my posts more appealing to readers, providing great insight into what HN readers are looking for.

I launched a company that has grown into a mild success because of dang giving it another chance and it making the front page.

What about "assume bad intentions"?

If you don't expect repeat interactions with an agent, or expect the agent won't remember / weigh these past interactions strongly, you do what's best for you in the moment.

Which happens to be taking the counterparty's current situation into account – including their wealth/power, AKA how much they can do for you. Entirely pragmatic, if selfish ("disgusting" in your words).

The way to combat this fake behaviour is to increase its cost, forcing the "fake" person to interact differently.

But I wouldn't hold my breath:

1) To "increase the cost" you need something of value in the first place. If you're poor and powerless, you are… powerless. Your only strength is in numbers: social pressure, `∑ little_power * lots_of_people`.

2) This "fake" personality is likely something learned in early childhood. A person would probably need to experience lots of negative feedback to readjust later in life.

3) Have you considered that their strategy ("fakeness", taking into account extrinsic factors like wealth or fame) may be superior to yours ("integrity", interacting based solely on a someone's intrinsic traits)? You know, it is not a physical law that being nice and consistent to people pays off. It's a pretty wild social dynamic, evolved only recently.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/mean.html

[1] http://paulgraham.com/safe.html

[2] http://paulgraham.com/relres.html

[3] http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html

dang rules

I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.

If the features looked similar then they 'copied' if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you're following best practice UI/UX guidelines.

I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.

Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone's lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.

PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.

Just as a thought experiment: if there was little social cost to it, killing your competitors would probably be a very successful strategy. Would you go: "sure, he kills people, but it makes him very successful and we should give him kudos for that"?

Regarding your last statement, that "being nice and consistent" is a recent social norm, I call bullshit and citation needed.

But please note morality is an evolved collective strategy as well, a survivor in an extremely competitive landscape. It's not "above" evolution (unless you're into religious metaphysical arguments).

If all its proponents "were killed" – your words; an unlikely proposition in my estimation – then yes, that would be it for morality. Something else would take its / our place, but the world would still go round.

But seeing your visceral response, I'll offer one advice now: don't let your biases blind-side you.

That’s Hanlon’s razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

See “Fundamental Attribution Error”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

...I gave up on my first.

As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB's pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).

These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.

You have revealed your preference of evaluating morality as a choice.

I think morality is a basic assumption for pretty much all human interaction. If someone chooses to be immoral, then why would I want to interact at all with that person? If being fake and untruthful is a choice for that person, I don't see how any interaction made sense. Just the only sensible choice is to run away from that person and if you have business going on just try to close them as quickly as possible. Even online discussions like these would be totally pointless with a person who has selected to be immoral/fake.

1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.

2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.

3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.

At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.

Bitcoin will never lock your funds, suspend your account, and since it works perfectly, you don't need support at all.

Your post makes it clear you’re very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. I’ve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. It’s draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.

I don't fancy a debate right now, but I feel I should point out for observers that this is a minority position in the philosophy of ethics (for atheists and religious philosophers alike). At the very least it is possible (and common) to be a moral realist without making "religious" arguments.

If your job is forum moderation and you do that well great. But if the same people use those same accesses to give some forum users help over other forum users without any transparency then there is no illusion of neutral moderation and this whole forum just may be undisclosed pr/ brand management whole people are discussing companies/jobs/tech in a way that might bias others.

I haven't read anything on the site providing brand management to some users. Was that disclosed somewhere? How could you trust any post talking about a new company or having to do with companies in general if some are getting assistance to boost their reception and others aren't?

Seriously. I am a fan of some crypto coins because in contrast to bitcoin there is actually future-proof concepts, but this "you will never face any consequences" advertising is delusional and would only work in a perfect alternative reality where everone acts in the interest of society.

Also https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html

This is probably the crux of the problem, the scenario you're describing is based mostly on assumptions of your own - like 'brand management' (whatever that is) and 'secret'. See for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231229

As with any online thing made mostly of people, there are lot of not entirely obvious things about HN, both good and bad. It's not the Brand Management (whatever that is) Shadow Council you seem convinced it is.

> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.

So there are two categories:

1. Helping clarify each others messages.

2. Letting people know when something is happening that concerns them.

Why do they not disclose this? Suppose you have two friends Alice and Bob. Suppose Alice tells you that about something Bob said which really upset her. Would you:

A. Commiserate with Alice by telling her about something ambiguously untrustworthy that Bob said.

B. Reply to Alice by comparing Bob unfavourably to Frank.

C. Listen empathetically to Alice and then when she's vented, offer another more charitable interpretation of Bob's words.

D. Later, let Bob know that Alice is upset with him and he might want to chat with her.

I bet most folks would advocate options C and D. Yet that is is basically doing "undisclosed pr/brand management" on behalf of Bob. It is pretty much the same as what dang says he does for HN. I don't think HN discloses this for the same reason that they don't disclose a habit of holding doors open for people -- I assume they don't remark on it because it seems unremarkable to them.

----------------------------------------

Your words like "neutral", "give some forum users help over other forum users" imply a strict duty to avoid cooperative behaviour in favour of competitive behaviour. I don't think that duty is nearly so strict.

I wasn't even rich or successful, I only got promoted to a senior position, and their faces changed the next day. Those a-hole faces still makes me want to puke.

That was a long time ago. But I still have vivid memory of it.

Me neither. That sounds like hell!

At a certain valuation (namely, well before yours or Patrick's), ignorance becomes malice. With the resources Stripe has, it is outrageous that there have been a non-zero number of cases where for example references haven't been checked before an offer letter was sent. That Patrick is ignorant about this, as you claim, is even more damning, as it suggests no one knows what is going on at Stripe.

So I guess thank you for your scathing review of Stripe's hiring process, and for giving us the notion that Coinbase is probably an equally toxic workspace?

You're able to do that only to the degree that you hold power over them. That is what "power" is.

Which is precisely what is being discussed here. Not the personal preferences and animosities of human X (Radim, repomies69, whoever), but how social interactions evolve over aeons. It is a pretty complex dynamic system with feedback loops that span individual interactions (the repeated prisonner's dilemma from my OP), generations and even civilizations.

Let me try another way: You can be perfectly happy with your strategy Y and die content you did what you thought was best. In fact, it's probably the best anyone can hope for. Alea iacta est.

But if you're the last person believing Y, that strategy dies with you. It is not a personal attack on you to observe that there are people who do not follow Y, and evaluate relative merits of strategy Y vs Z. You can wish everyone followed Y (was more like you), and still do that.

Interestingly, lashing out at people who observe other strategies than Y even exist is a strategy in itself. Proselytizing, ostracizing and zealotry are a form of social pressure, and humans evolved to be quite susceptible to that.

On a technical note, "if A then B" is an implication, a form of logical reasoning. An implication doesn't mean that A is true, or that the person proposing the implication believes A (or B). For example, you could say "if everyone is dead, money will be worthless". An implication is an observation about relationships, trying to make sense of the world.