Stripe Email Transparency

As we build Roote, I'm trying to use best practices from the best startups.

One easy heuristic is What Would Stripe Do?

The one I'm most interested in right now is email transparency.

• Here's their blog about it at 31 employees
• At 45 employees
• At 164 employees (and 428 lists!)
• And here's Patrick's answer for why email transparency never led to public leaks

Here's my summary:

• Stripe's strategy is "hire great generalists and give them leverage"
• Leverage is gained through shared context throughout the company
• Which is operationalized as email transparency with Google Groups

We'll start by trying Google Groups, though it's been ten years so I'm not sure if there's a better way.

Email transparency solves for shared context inside a company.

What about shared context outside company walls? We build open-source software, so want to excel at this.

Our first experiments are:

• Public Discord
• #buildinpublic on Twitter.
• Open Github

Long-term, we want to have what Ryan Petersen calls "Conway's Law for parallelization." Max leverage, minimum blockage.

We're hiring: https://www.roote.co/careers