SaaStr 196: Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson on How The Best Leaders Inspire with Confidence and Stability, The Key To Successful Decision-Making & How To Hire Quality Teams At Scale

Claire Hughes Johnson is the COO @ Stripe, the new standard in online payments that handles billions of dollars of business every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world. To date, Stripe has raised over $680m in funding from some of the very best in the business including Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Thrive, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins and Tiger Global. As for Claire, prior to Stripe she spent over 10 years at Google in a range of different roles from VP of Google's self-driving car division to VP of Global Online Sales to VP of Google Offers. At Stripe, Claire has helped take Stripe global in February 2016 with the launch of Atlas, a toolkit that enables any business, anywhere in the world, to incorporate in the United States. If that was not enough, Claire is also a Board Member @ Hallmark Cards.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Claire made her way into the world of SaaS with Stripe following her leading of Google’s self-driving car division?
• What does Claire mean when she discusses “founding documents”? What is the right way to go about creating them? What element do they need to contain? How can one optimise internal decision-making process with these documents? What question must one always try and ask when making big decisions?
• How does Claire define a truly special COO? What does that truly great look like? When is the right time for founders to hire that COO? Where do the majority of people go wrong in their assessment of when and what they need in a COO? What is the optimal relationship one can have between CEO and COO?
• How does Claire think about what Stripe have done right to hire so effectively at scale? What does it take in terms of benchmarks and standards to do so? What does Claire mean when she says you have to step function up your capabilities with scale? What are the core challenges in hiring at scale?  

Claire’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What would Claire say are her biggest strengths and weaknesses?
2. What does Claire know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
3. A moment in Claire’s life that has served as an inflection point and changed the way she thinks?

Read the full transcript on our blog.

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Claire Hughes Johnson