<story><title>Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe</title><text>Recently I interviewed with Stripe for an engineering MoM (Manager of Managers) for one of their teams. I interview regularly, so I am used to many types of processes, feedback mechanisms, and so on. I won&amp;#x27;t go into details about the questions because there&amp;#x27;s nothing special about them, but I wanted to share some details of my experience for people thinking of interviewing there.&lt;p&gt;1) About 35-40% of the interviewers started their questioning by saying &amp;quot;I will only need 20 minutes for this&amp;quot;, while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify &amp;quot;important, critical leaders&amp;quot;? What a strange thing to say - also a GREAT way to make candidates feel important and wanted!&lt;p&gt;2) There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.&lt;p&gt;3) For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.&lt;p&gt;4) Of all the people I spoke to, the hiring manager was the one I spoke the least with. The phone screen was one of the &amp;quot;I only need 20 minutes for this&amp;quot; calls. The other one was quite amusing, and is described below.&lt;p&gt;5) After the loop was done, the recruiter called me to congratulate me on passing, and started discussing details of the offer, including sending me a document described the equity program. Recruiter mentioned that the hiring manager would be calling me to discuss the position next.&lt;p&gt;6) SURPRISE INTERVIEW! I get a call from the hiring manager, he congratulates me on passing the loop, then as I prepare to ask questions about the role, he again says &amp;quot;I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this&amp;quot;. Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he&amp;#x27;d be calling in a week to discuss the position.&lt;p&gt;7) I get asked for references.&lt;p&gt;8) After passing the loop, have the recruiter discuss some details of the offer, have the hiring manager tell me they&amp;#x27;d be calling me after a week, I get ghosted for about 3.5 weeks. References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive.&lt;p&gt;9) I ping the recruiter to see when the offer is coming - it&amp;#x27;s not coming. They chose another candidate. I am fine with it, even after being offered verbally, but the ghosting part after wasting so much of my time seems almost intentional.&lt;p&gt;10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t come. It&amp;#x27;s a mess and a revolving door of people&amp;quot;. I was shocked with the response.&lt;p&gt;11) I get called by the recruiter saying that another director saw my feedback and is very interested in talking to me and do an interview loop.&lt;p&gt;Guess I&amp;#x27;m not joining, then.&lt;p&gt;I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I&amp;#x27;ve seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc</author><text>I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)&lt;p&gt;All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.</text></item><item><author>temp7536</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t hear anything about this online, they&amp;#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&amp;#x27;ll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;re having major retention issues - so I&amp;#x27;m not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.&lt;p&gt;I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>temp7536</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sorry but no. Patrick, we met with you once, Gaybrick and Claire multiple times and opened up a data room to you all. I then emailed you (and the others) three followups over a couple weeks only to see them opened but never replied. Your team then sent targeted cold emails to multiple people on our team. I&amp;#x27;ve validated this experience with multiple founders.&lt;p&gt;You also had Moritz and Sequoia renege on Finix&amp;#x27;s term sheet after they already had it signed and wired (I guess props to Sequoia for branding it as &amp;quot;giving it away&amp;quot;)[1]. You&amp;#x27;ve also had your team get diligence materials from Sequoia and nuke deals.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ve clearly crushed it in the business and developer brand space, hats off to you. You want feedback - I (and the broader founder community) just wish you stop the dance of pretending and just admit you all are sharks, and it works for you! Just own it.&lt;p&gt;But I will admit, the HN comment was a bit trolly and written in frustration. But you have to admit - you are documented as proofreading every one of PGs posts, are a huge LP in YC and are friends with a lot of people there. You can&amp;#x27;t believe that the conspiracy theories are purely in &amp;quot;bad faith&amp;quot;....&lt;p&gt;And yes - this is out of place in HN comments, I&amp;#x27;m sorry. But sadly there aren&amp;#x27;t very many other options.&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;sequoia-is-giving-away-21-million-to-a-payments-startup-it-funded-as-it-walks-away-from-deal&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe</title><text>Recently I interviewed with Stripe for an engineering MoM (Manager of Managers) for one of their teams. I interview regularly, so I am used to many types of processes, feedback mechanisms, and so on. I won&amp;#x27;t go into details about the questions because there&amp;#x27;s nothing special about them, but I wanted to share some details of my experience for people thinking of interviewing there.&lt;p&gt;1) About 35-40% of the interviewers started their questioning by saying &amp;quot;I will only need 20 minutes for this&amp;quot;, while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify &amp;quot;important, critical leaders&amp;quot;? What a strange thing to say - also a GREAT way to make candidates feel important and wanted!&lt;p&gt;2) There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.&lt;p&gt;3) For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.&lt;p&gt;4) Of all the people I spoke to, the hiring manager was the one I spoke the least with. The phone screen was one of the &amp;quot;I only need 20 minutes for this&amp;quot; calls. The other one was quite amusing, and is described below.&lt;p&gt;5) After the loop was done, the recruiter called me to congratulate me on passing, and started discussing details of the offer, including sending me a document described the equity program. Recruiter mentioned that the hiring manager would be calling me to discuss the position next.&lt;p&gt;6) SURPRISE INTERVIEW! I get a call from the hiring manager, he congratulates me on passing the loop, then as I prepare to ask questions about the role, he again says &amp;quot;I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this&amp;quot;. Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he&amp;#x27;d be calling in a week to discuss the position.&lt;p&gt;7) I get asked for references.&lt;p&gt;8) After passing the loop, have the recruiter discuss some details of the offer, have the hiring manager tell me they&amp;#x27;d be calling me after a week, I get ghosted for about 3.5 weeks. References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive.&lt;p&gt;9) I ping the recruiter to see when the offer is coming - it&amp;#x27;s not coming. They chose another candidate. I am fine with it, even after being offered verbally, but the ghosting part after wasting so much of my time seems almost intentional.&lt;p&gt;10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t come. It&amp;#x27;s a mess and a revolving door of people&amp;quot;. I was shocked with the response.&lt;p&gt;11) I get called by the recruiter saying that another director saw my feedback and is very interested in talking to me and do an interview loop.&lt;p&gt;Guess I&amp;#x27;m not joining, then.&lt;p&gt;I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I&amp;#x27;ve seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pc</author><text>I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith. (We obviously don’t control HN or YC or journalists. If or when my comments on HN are ever ranked highly, it’s because they’re upvoted. The internal claims about Stripe are also inconsistent with the data around things like retention. Etc.)&lt;p&gt;All of that said, I’d appreciate hearing from any founders who feel mistreated as part of an acquisition process. We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.</text></item><item><author>temp7536</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t hear anything about this online, they&amp;#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&amp;#x27;ll notice that every single Stripe post automatically has pc as the first comment, regardless of anything else. Everything negative gets buried.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;re having major retention issues - so I&amp;#x27;m not super surprised that stuff like this is starting to leak out.&lt;p&gt;I run a $XB fintech, and am afraid to use my name given the backlash.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donkleberry</author><text>When you’re in top position on a Stripe-related post, that has nothing to do with your karma score. It’s because dang has a pin button that he usually uses for himself, but very often is used for exactly the situation you describe when it comes to YC portfolio or celebrities showing up or something (without visual feedback of such a pin, as every single other website with the capability provides). It’s pretty obvious if you keep an eye out for it&lt;p&gt;This can undoubtedly be spun as “HN just trying to bring the right voice to the top of the discussion” but the alternative take is just as valid. It’s not bad faith feedback, it’s HN UX and practices confusing readers as usual</text></comment>