Stripe isn’t novel, they’re just out executing everyone in a crowded space. Here’s what entrepreneurs can learn from an insider

The compounding impact of doing little things fastNo less than Paul Graham said if it’s him reading the signs he thinks Stripe will become the new Google (perhaps the only Google by that time), and as a former tech executive I can say that when building a product that requires payment processing, it’s all but a foregone conclusion that you’ll use Stripe.Things are going well for the payment processing company not because they are particularly unique, but because they are out-executing everybody in a crowded space. As such, there are many things entrepreneurs can learn from them.That in mind, I really enjoyed this account, written by a serial-entrepreneur-turned-Stripe-employee, of what life is like at Stripe. The whole article is worth the read, but from my perspective one factor of the Stripe culture stands out as particularly relevant and worth emulating: the compounding impact of doing little things fast.From the article:“The returns to pushing your cadence to faster are everywhere and they compound continuously, for years. Don’t send the email tomorrow. Don’t default to scheduling the meeting for next week. Don’t delay a worthy sprint until after the next quarterly planning exercise. Design control and decisionmaking structures to bias heavily in favor of preserving operating cadence.I don’t think Stripe is uniformly fast. I think teams at Stripe are just faster than most companies, blocked a bit less by peer teams, constrained a tiny bit less by internal tools, etc etc.A stupendous portion of that advantage is just consistently choosing to get more done. That sounds vacuous but hasn’t been in my experience. I have seen truly silly improvements occasioned by someone just consistently asking in meetings “Could we do that faster? What is the minimum increment required to ship? Could that be done faster?” It’s the Charge More of management strategy; the upside is so dramatic, the cost so low, and the hit rate so high that you should just invoke it ritualistically.”There are layers and layers of depth to implementing this, but it’s also the type of thing you could start right now.———From Second Mountain Startup, the weekly newsletter for conscious see hubwealthy.com/wealthy