Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe
For those who have worked around and at Stripe for the past decade, this is not a surprise. Stripe, and especially the founders, have a quite a poor reputation for screwing over people in and around their orbit.<p>Almost every fintech startup has the story of Patrick reaching out about an acquisition, mining them for information playing along and then ghosting - same thing for candidates. They leadership team, specifically Patrick and Will Gaybrick are extremely smart but have screwed over a ton of people - be very careful about trusting.<p>You don&#x27;t hear anything about this online, they&#x27;re incredibly effective at squashing hit pieces and have a huge amount of reporters and power brokers under their control. On HN and silicon valley Stripe and Patrick are a PR machine. Patrick has almost direct control over YC and HN, you&#x27;ll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.<p>With Patrick now living in Woodside, Will on permanent vacation in Malibu and John permanently in Ireland the company is definitely a bit in chaos mode internally. Their entire people team has turned over and they&#x27;re having major retention issues - so I&#x27;m not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.<p>I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.