Interview with Stripe’s Ludwig Pettersson

It’s really rewarding to build something that’s so much better than what’s been out there for 10 years. Often, people think of [payments] as a solved problem, but it really isn’t.

Payments is one of the hottest areas in tech right now with a multi-trillion dollar market of payment transactions. The potential for changing the landscape of payments is immense, especially considering the sheer amount of poorly designed bank interfaces. Ludwig Pettersson, the first designer at Stripe, talks to us about redesigning payments, his influences growing up, and about the type of designer they’re looking to hire during their collaboration with Bridge.

Ludwig grew up in Sweden with parents who worked with computers and grew interested in design at 11 years old. Everyday after school, he would work on creating websites well before he ever knew that this was called design. Who were his influencers growing up? Designers like Daniel Burka, Ryan Sims, and Dan Cederholm.

They were on the front of just doing things that no one had seen before. They were doing crazy things.  And every single design they made had something that was unique, or awesome about it. And that’s definitely influenced me.

What’s it like to design at Stripe? To start, it’s a tightly knit group of three on the design team, so each person gets a huge amount of influence. Stripe also operates entirely without product or project managers, so it’s the designers’ and engineers’ responsibility to make things happen. And even more surprisingly, they maintain total email transparency. Everyone knows everything that’s going on.

Stripe wants a designer to join their team who has a strong eye for UI design and the excitement to tackle the revolution occurring with online payments. If that’s you or someone you know, apply to Bridge by March 10 to design with Stripe.

To read more about Stripe’s participation with Bridge, check out their blog post.

Listen to our full interview below.