Missed Stripe Millions

A story about how Shaan Puri blew a job interview at Stripe in 2011/2012 that could have made him millions.

"I only applied to one job - it was Stripe back in 2011 or 2012. I would have been employee 20 at Stripe. If you stick it out for 4-5 years and work your way up a little bit, even at a junior level entry position, probably would have ended up making somewhere between $10-20 million.

My mentor was the mentor of the guy interviewing me. Mentors have a big influence - if they say someone's amazing, you listen. My mentor had written a blog post saying 'I met this kid, he's 21 years old, he's an entrepreneur, and he's got the highest bias for action of anybody I've met in the last 10 years.'

The interviewer was like 'Wow, if John thinks this about you, let's do the interview as a formality.' During the interview, he said 'Sell me a piece of software that you really like' - it was like 'sell me this pen.' I would basically just ask him a bunch of questions, and he said 'No no no, ring ring, hello, just do it.' I don't know what I said, but at the end he goes 'Yeah, that wasn't very good. I don't think sales is probably your thing. Maybe there's another position we could look for.'

I was so embarrassed. This guy basically rejected me and said maybe there's some other role for you down in the basement. I thought 'Alright, I'm gonna go for this other job instead.'"