Early Stripe employees Krithika Muthukumar and Eeke de Milliano have had first row seats to one of the most legendary companies of our time. In her role as the first (and only) marketing leader at Stripe for the first few years, Krithika has led teams across marketing and design, launched all of Stripe’s major products, and helped the company expand into the enterprise business. Meanwhile, as the leader of the Business Operations function, Eeke incubated many of Stripe’s early GTM teams, and later led the machine learning product and Stripe radar.

In this episode, you’ll hear how Krithika and Eeke: 1) viewed product-market fit beyond Stripe’s core product, including the launch of Stripe Connect that helped the company power the on-demand service economy, 2) how Stripe viewed itself as a new-age VC in the early days (and still does!) when picking which customers to build for, and 3) how GTM teams were incubated out of the strategy group, and what worked and didn’t work with that strategy.