The old version of this was even worse for performance.
Stripe has had an internal dashboard like this, open to anyone on the VPN, for at least 15 years: Started on a hackathon IIRC. One, serious view had a month-long by-the-minute chart, letting people see the growth. A typical first-of-the-month tradition was to try to predict where the total volume was going to end up, and celebrating when the daily processing record was beaten.
But the real problem wasn't that one, but a far more expensive variation that instead of giving you a number, represented the processing volume with little characters that would dance around the screen: The higher the volume, the more characters would come in. The problem was that this was created when Stripe's total volume was quite small, and Stripe was growing exceptionally well. So if you opened the dashboard on black friday (Or even worse, ten years ago, when black friday was on December 1st, and therefore also got many customer's subscription volume), then the number of flying Totoros would just overwhelm anything and everything any laptop would throw at it.
While the totoro-based performance was not up to Stripe standards (we should have gone in and added an extra zero or two to the threshold for every character), letting the entire company see that side of the financials live was a great move. So many startups out there just aren't candid with their employees regarding the economic state of affairs, while early Stripe let everyone see the processing volume, and thus whether growth was accelerating or slowing down.
It's also what is surprising of seeing this visible outside: At the same time that finances were very open internally, Stripe was very secretive of the data for the outside. Every time a major business news outlet made an estimate of the real processing volume, they were hilariously off, and that's because there were very few leaks, even after launching a new round where investors definitely were handed the real numbers. Based on this data alone, I'd expect people with some practice would be able to get a reasonably close estimate of what Stripe processed this year.
>Based on this data alone, I'd expect people with some practice would be able to get a reasonably close estimate of what Stripe processed this year.
Stripe recently started publishing their yearly processing volume in user letters (see, e.g. 2022: https://stripe.com/annual-updates/2022). I assume they will publish the 2023 numbers as well.
Stripe has had an internal dashboard like this, open to anyone on the VPN, for at least 15 years: Started on a hackathon IIRC. One, serious view had a month-long by-the-minute chart, letting people see the growth. A typical first-of-the-month tradition was to try to predict where the total volume was going to end up, and celebrating when the daily processing record was beaten.
But the real problem wasn't that one, but a far more expensive variation that instead of giving you a number, represented the processing volume with little characters that would dance around the screen: The higher the volume, the more characters would come in. The problem was that this was created when Stripe's total volume was quite small, and Stripe was growing exceptionally well. So if you opened the dashboard on black friday (Or even worse, ten years ago, when black friday was on December 1st, and therefore also got many customer's subscription volume), then the number of flying Totoros would just overwhelm anything and everything any laptop would throw at it.
While the totoro-based performance was not up to Stripe standards (we should have gone in and added an extra zero or two to the threshold for every character), letting the entire company see that side of the financials live was a great move. So many startups out there just aren't candid with their employees regarding the economic state of affairs, while early Stripe let everyone see the processing volume, and thus whether growth was accelerating or slowing down.
It's also what is surprising of seeing this visible outside: At the same time that finances were very open internally, Stripe was very secretive of the data for the outside. Every time a major business news outlet made an estimate of the real processing volume, they were hilariously off, and that's because there were very few leaks, even after launching a new round where investors definitely were handed the real numbers. Based on this data alone, I'd expect people with some practice would be able to get a reasonably close estimate of what Stripe processed this year.