<story><title>Lessons from Stripe</title><url>https://markmcgranaghan.com/lessons-from-stripe</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kbyatnal</author><text>The point about optimism is very interesting and I completely agree re: ambition - hard problems are more feasible than easy ones. However, I don&amp;#x27;t agree with the point about ad clicks.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I used to have a similar mindset until I actually ended up working on Ads at Google. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of small business merchants, mom and pop stores, etc that rely on ads (be that Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever) to run their businesses. In fact, these are the vast majority of ad buyers! The huge multi-billion dollar corporations are far and few between.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s what drove many of the engineers (including myself). A small increase in conversion ratio (be that through better ranking, filtering, query interpretation, etc) meant a huge deal to these merchants and in some cases, could be the difference between life and death for some of these small companies. And at the scale Google operates at, very small incremental changes = huge impact. The engineers and projects, at least in my team, were driven by exactly the same goals mentioned here - to &amp;quot;enable more businesses&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;support entrepreneurs&amp;quot; all across the world.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy to get sucked into the hype and blanket statements of &amp;quot;ads are bad&amp;quot; (I was guilty of that too). I&amp;#x27;ve since left Google, but that experience really internalized for me that things like this are never so black and white.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lessons from Stripe</title><url>https://markmcgranaghan.com/lessons-from-stripe</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vfc1</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know, this super optimism as a value might lead to situations where something is going clearly in the wrong direction, but people get afraid of pointing it out due to fear of going against the company values, and getting natural overly optimistic personalities out of their delusional high and back into reality.</text></comment>