First, the product we’re building is a service that I strongly felt needed to exist. Before joining Stripe I’d been building things myself. I’ve always had side projects, and there was one in particular that I’d been working on for a couple of months, and I started thinking: “Maybe I can turn this into a side business and live off of it.” I remember looking into how to charge for it, and it was really difficult. There was all this arcane technology and APIs that were really bad, and I remember thinking, “I’ll figure this out in six months.” But I just stopped working on it before then. And so, working on something like Stripe that removes those hurdles — that was a big part of it. There should be nothing standing in the way of starting a business or selling something online and charging for it. I liked seeing that someone was fixing it.

Second, joining early was a big creative opportunity. Having the ability to set the direction and visual style was exciting, and definitely a big part of why I joined.

How does design fit in with Stripe’s organizational culture?

Very early on we all saw the value of design. I tend to think of design as something that amplifies things that already exist — it can hit the turbo-boost button on a product, a launch, or whatever it might be. It can make something get more attention or be better-received, and will just be an objectively better thing that you create.

Ludwig Pettersson, Creative Director of Stripe

Companies saying that they value design has become a platitude in the past several years — it’s the cool thing to say, because you can’t not say it — but I don’t necessarily think that was obvious a couple of year ago. I think it’s true that most companies in tech today value design, but when we got started that wasn’t obvious.

What we got right, or lucked into, was investing a lot of energy into design very early, and when we launched, everyone at the company got to experience why it’s worth investing in design. One of the worst things is coming into a company that doesn’t inherently value design — not having that trust. I think you should always be able to defend your reason for being at the table, but having the trust of the people around you goes a long way. Not having that trust would break my heart, basically.

Being able to prove the value of design very early on has meant that everyone has bought into it and sees why we should continuously invest in it. You want to have that as a reason — to be able to point back and say, “Oh right, that’s why we care about it.” Otherwise, when you’re hitting up against a deadline and things aren’t as good as you want them to be, you’ll start bending all those principles.

Having proved it very early has done us very well in keeping design as a core part of everything we do. It is very important at Stripe, and everybody sees the value of it.

Expanding on that, how has the design team influenced the direction of the company?

The fact that design is core to everything we do — we’re always there, always working — is important for a couple of reasons.

Say you’re working on a product, or whatever it might be. The magical touches that make something really good don’t tend to happen at a meeting with Post-It’s or with everyone brainstorming ideas, but rather tend to happen when you’ve got an engineer or a designer or someone who’s been tirelessly working away and testing their ideas in their own time and their own space. Having designers positioned so early on in everything, we’ve been able to have a lot of impact on everything we’ve built because we’re there working on the products from Day One. If you don’t have that early on, it’s hard to have any impact.