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“There are two gaps that I think are really hard. One is people who can’t stop being victims, and the other gap is, I call it self-awareness gap, where they think they are the best in the world.”

— Claire Hughes Johnson

Claire Hughes Johnson (@chughesjohnson) currently serves as a corporate officer and advisor for Stripe, a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the Internet. Claire previously served as Stripe’s chief operating officer from 2014 to 2021, helping grow the company from fewer than 200 employees to more than 6,000. At various times, she led business operations, sales, marketing, customer support, risk, real estate, and all of the people functions, including recruiting and HR. 

Prior to Stripe, Claire spent 10 years at Google leading a number of business teams, including overseeing aspects of Gmail, Google Apps, and ultimately consumer operations, as well as serving as a vice president for AdWords Online Sales and Operations, Google Offers, and Google’s self-driving car project.  

Claire holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and an MBA from Yale University. She currently serves on the boards of the renewable energy company Ameresco, the multi-platform publication The Atlantic, the self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation, and the customer management software company HubSpot. 

Her book is Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. 

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.

Brought to you by AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement, LinkedIn Ads marketing platform with 1B+ users:, and Momentous high-quality supplements.

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#724: Claire Hughes Johnson, Building Stripe from 160 to 6,000+ Employees — How to Take Radical Ownership of Your Life and Career

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Want to hear an episode with Claire’s colleague, the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison? Listen to our conversation here in which we discussed the importance of giving ideas time to fail, succeeding in a seemingly saturated market, the siren song of high praise, organic traction, growing up as a “free-range” child, learning ancient Greek from a local monk, developing a unique worldview at any age, how to make speedier decisions, and much more.

#353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Connect with Claire Hughes Johnson:

LinkedIn | Twitter

SHOW NOTES

  • [07:51] Say the thing you think you cannot say.
  • [13:24] Detoxifying your left-hand column.
  • [19:59] Victim versus player.
  • [29:49] Recommended reading.
  • [36:53] The case for reading fiction.
  • [44:18] Crafting a working-with-me document.
  • [52:07] Make the implicit explicit.
  • [57:29] An Irish Goodbye.
  • [58:34] Email policies.
  • [1:03:58] Renegotiating the terms of expectations.
  • [01:06:05] Listening for the quiet no.
  • [01:08:27] Money versus time.
  • [01:10:14] Good rules can be liberating.
  • [01:12:59] Leadership and disappointment.
  • [01:17:59] Renegotiating past disappointment.
  • [01:37:05] Asking a question versus stating an opinion.
  • [01:40:58] Training wheels for a “no.”
  • [01:42:26] Time, talent, treasure, and testimony.
  • [01:46:37] Spotting bad apples while hiring.
  • [01:48:37] If you’re not self-aware, how would you know?
  • [01:51:08] Work style assessments for self-awareness building.
  • [01:58:38] Paragons of no.
  • [02:00:51] No more boards.
  • [02:04:58] Pushers and pullers.
  • [02:11:50] Parting thoughts.

MORE CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“There are two gaps that I think are really hard. One is people who can’t stop being victims, and the other gap is, I call it self-awareness gap, where they think they are the best in the world.”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

“How do you get results? You get super clear and transparent about anything implicit — you make it explicit and you’re clear. This is a process. We’re going to go through it to get to this outcome. And what is the outcome we want? Make it explicit.”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

“I am just honest about, ‘I can’t do this well, and I think you want someone at their best. It’s not going to be my best.’”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

“My personal trap is I think I’m being an empath, giving them 30 minutes. ‘Let me hear your story.’ And in fact, the empathic thing to do is to say, ‘I’m going to do a probability assessment. The chance that I’m going to invest/make a donation are sub five percent. No. No for you, no for me. And you don’t have to think about it ever again. You don’t have have to email me tomorrow and ask me again.’”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

“There’s a reason these people are leaders. Most of the time they’re 80 percent of the way there. They’re just not confident in their instinct. And so my job is not to tell them what to do or how to do it. It is to build their confidence in their instinct and then yeah, we can brainstorm the last 20 percent.”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

“People do not learn by being told answers. … What you’re going to do if you’re a good leader, a good teacher, is you’re going to lead them through learning with you and they are going to get to the answer and you are going to celebrate them doing that.”
— Claire Hughes Johnson

PEOPLE MENTIONED

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than 900 million downloads. It has been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it’s been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.


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