At This Startup, Everyone Can Read Each Other’s Email

From left, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

After the Sony mega-hack, protecting email privacy may seem paramount. But at digital payments startup Stripe, email isn’t kept all that private in the first place.

Recently, Stripe openly detailed the internal system it uses to achieve what it calls “email transparency,” saying “almost all” messages inside the company can be read by all employees. Private emails at Stripe aren’t forbidden. But they are the exception.

No, these emails can’t be read by people outside the company. But it shows that privacy isn’t always as important as we think it is. Stripe’s system is part of wide-ranging effort to build services that seek to make our communications more public, not less—an effort that includes everything from familiar consumer services like Facebook to business tools offered by the likes of Slack and GitHub.

As far as the technology goes, open email at Stripe isn’t that complicated. Employees are asked to CC any work-related emails to topic-specific mailing list archives managed through Google Groups. Project lists are the most common, but categories range from individual countries to a “crazyideas@” list. Via the lists, all email becomes public and searchable inside the company. Stripe now has 428 lists in all.

If everyone already knows everything that’s going on, they won’t have to wait for someone else to tell them what to do.

In a blog post last year revealing Stripe’s approach, CTO Greg Brockman said email transparency arose out of a desire to keep the company’s management structure as flat as possible. “So far, our experience has been that an ambiently open flow of information helps to provide people with the context they need to choose useful things to work on,” Brockman wrote. “It doesn’t eliminate the need for other kinds of structure, but it does make emergent coordination much easier and more likely.”

In other words, if everyone already knows everything that’s going on, they won’t have to wait for someone else to tell them what to do. They’ll be able to see what needs doing and do it.

Civil Inattention

More complex than the mechanism for email transparency are the cultural and behavioral adjustments needed to get comfortable. To help new hires adjust to the idea, Stripe has a detailed internal wiki describing best practices and how to handle common scenarios. A sample: “Don’t be afraid to send ‘boring’ email to an archive list—people have specifically chosen to subscribe to that list.” But also: “Overall, threads on an archive list merit a level of civil inattention—you should feel free to read it, but be careful about adding your own contributions.”

One of the most important guidelines—but the one that also sounds like it could be the hardest to follow—is not to change how you write emails just because you know others might read them. “The only change between how you write emails for email transparency and how you would write them privately to other Stripes should be that one has a CC,” according to the wiki. “That is, if you feel a need to rewrite your emails for the audience, then that likely indicates a bug in the organization we should fix.”

As described, Stripe’s system in theory doesn’t leave everyone drowning in email, because recipients can control the flow. They can subscribe and unsubscribe, and it’s assumed they will set up filters to send list traffic to straight past their inboxes into their archive, where they can read it on their own time. Still, the guidelines can get granular. Small jokes are fine, for example, but not at the expense of derailing the main conversation.

But ultimately, Stripe’s approach feels like it’s about process more than policy. Engineers live to optimize, and “email transparency” seems like an attempt to apply an engineering mindset to communication in an organization: the fewer hops from one node to the next, the more efficient the group. But it’s also a human-powered algorithm, a system that runs on fuzzy logic, not hard rules. People get to decide what’s public and what’s private, not the machines. And that might be the smartest hack of all.