“Imagine if your friend is an air traffic controller and they show up to meet for you to coffee and they're saying like, I've had the most exciting day at work. You'd be like, no, I don't want excitement from my air traffic controllers… I think you want the same from your banker. I think you want your banker to, in fact, enjoy uneventful days.”
The Peel with Turner Novak · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Stripe's first employee, who now runs a bank, on why he prefers boring, proven technology and an uneventful temperament in banking. Engineers can get their fill of hard puzzles from the Sunday crossword, he says, rather than leaving their team a complicated system to maintain for years.
Transcript
it's almost like there's sometimes some like the glamorous of building and trying some new hard thing. There's like more social status internally, like you get more joy from like, I figured out this really complicated thing versus like sometimes it's the beauty of the simplicity of like not
actually complicating it.
Don't get me wrong. I can admire arduous intellectual pursuits, right? It's okay that those, you know, but we can, we can do that by answering the hard crossword on a Sunday, not by obligating our team to maintain a thing for years, right? Like choosing the uneventful thing. And I especially think this is true in banking, right? Like if imagine if your friend is an air traffic controller and they show up to meet for you to coffee and they're saying like, I've had the most exciting day at work. You'd be like, no, I don't want excitement from my air traffic controllers, right? Like it's so boring. Nothing happens. I will make the statement. I think you want the same from your banker. I think you want your banker to have an uneventful day. I think you want your banker to, in fact, enjoy uneventful days. There to be a quiet satisfaction of that, you know, reliability, regularly getting the things done as expected. Yeah, I think that personality works well in banking.
Yeah, because when I think about what are the biggest events in banking, like they're generally not something that you want to see happening
on a daily basis.
Indeed. So, yeah. Interesting, huh? Yeah. Yeah. In much the same way that, you know, the kind of underlying utilities of society, electricity or water, et cetera, like it's okay that these things are uneventful. It's in fact good that they're uneventful. Yeah.
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