Stripe vs Uber: Opposing Yet Effective Values
by Will Larson on January 7, 2024
Situation
In the mid-2010s, Stripe and Uber represented two contrasting approaches to organizational values and decision-making while both experiencing hypergrowth. Will Larson, who worked at both companies, observed how their fundamentally different values shaped their engineering cultures and execution speeds.
- Stripe's environment: Emphasized cross-organizational optimization and collaboration
- Uber's environment: Prioritized team autonomy and speed over organizational alignment
- Industry context: Both companies were scaling rapidly in competitive markets where speed was critical
Actions
Stripe's "Optimize Globally" Approach
- Value implementation: Encouraged engineers to consider organization-wide impact before making decisions
- Decision framework: Engineers were expected to evaluate whether introducing new technologies (like programming languages) would benefit the entire organization, not just their team
- Trade-off acceptance: Teams accepted slower local progress for better global outcomes
- Example: Maintained a Ruby monolith despite engineer preferences for other languages, focusing engineering talent on customer features rather than supporting multiple languages
Uber's Team-First Approach
- Value implementation: Encouraged teams to optimize for their own success with minimal concern for cross-team impact
- Decision framework: Teams were empowered to make decisions that benefited their specific objectives
- Speed prioritization: Accepted organizational inconsistency and potential duplication to move faster
- Example: Enabled rapid geographic expansion (like entering China in just three months) by allowing teams to make independent decisions
Results
Stripe Outcomes
- Consistency benefits: Maintained a more coherent technology stack and engineering approach
- Focus on customer value: Engineers spent more time on customer-facing features rather than infrastructure diversity
- Engineering trade-offs: Some engineers were frustrated by technology constraints but the organization benefited from standardization
- Long-term coherence: Built a more integrated platform with fewer technology silos
Uber Outcomes
- Speed advantages: Achieved remarkable speed in market expansion and feature development
- Operational flexibility: Could rapidly adapt to different market conditions and regulatory environments
- Organizational challenges: Created potential inefficiencies through duplication and lack of coordination
- Execution capability: Successfully entered challenging markets like China with unprecedented speed
Key Lessons
- Values must be honest: Both companies' values accurately reflected how they actually operated, rather than aspirational statements
- Reversible values matter: The contrasting approaches demonstrate that values should be clearly reversible (the opposite could be a valid choice)
- Values drive decision velocity: Clear values reduce decision friction by providing frameworks for common trade-offs
- No universal "right" values exist: Both approaches were successful in their contexts despite being opposites
- Values shape culture: Engineers self-selected into these environments based on their alignment with the values
- Organizational coherence vs. speed: The fundamental trade-off between global optimization and team autonomy affects how quickly organizations can execute
- Values must be applicable: Both values provided clear guidance for everyday engineering decisions, unlike vague "identity values" that don't help with real choices