Stripe's founding designer

So, I worked at stripe for a few months in the summer of 2018. That's baby emmit, before I figured out how to do my hair. It was back when stripe was not a variable big tech company yet and we were still just a couple of floors in Lifts old office in China Basin. Even then it was clear to me that design was a big part of stripe's identity, but at the time I didn't really understand why. I thought Patrick and John were these 8D chess playing mega minds who were like, we're going to stand out from every other developer tool by building the strongest brand in the industry. And to be fair, I'm sure they did hire their founding designer with some semblance of that intention. But I'm also pretty sure that they couldn't have predicted just how much impact that one hire would have. Because the importance that Ludovic Peterson, which is their founding designer, placed on design from day zero snowball into things like stripe press, stripe sessions, stripe elements, and all of these things weren't just designed decisions. They were extensions of one founding team members's taste and passion. Without working together, Stripe and Peterson probably would have done great things, but it was that specific collaboration. And that 1 + 1 = 3 effects that made the magic happen. Ludovic Peterson stays at straight for 5 years, goes on to become the first creative director at stripe. He finds Quinn, he gets acquired by Twitter. He designs open eye's original brand identity. And then stripe becomes the $100 billion plus valuation company that we know today. And that's the thing people miss is that great companies are not just strategy. They are shaped by the obsesssions of their earliest people. And right now, we are hiring obsessed people. We want designers and engineers who think that they can be the load-vig to our stripe. And I think ultimately that's what makes people at my company special is that we don't want people to just do the work. We want people who want to create magic together.