Conner Bean

securing autonomous runtimes // prev @stripe, @awscloud // husband, father (x2), engineer, avid midwesterner

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

After 5 years, I recently concluded my time at Stripe.

I initially joined to work on core distributed systems and scale out our infra, and eventually transitioned into leading our core graph service and various enterprise offerings. When I started in 2021, we processed $600B in payment volume, and last year we crossed $1.9T

On my last day I was in the 90th percentile for tenure, which speaks to how fast the company has grown in the last five years.

The systems were genuinely interesting, the people were great, and the leadership was inspiring, which made leaving a difficult decision. But over the past year I kept getting pulled towards the security holes opening up in this newly agentic world.

I'm excited to team up with some of the sharpest people I know from security, AI, and systems, and dedicate our time to solving these problems. More to come soon!

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@aarondfrancis @dillon_mulroy How am i just now hearing about this?? Excited to spin this tomorrow

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@GergelyOrosz Yup. Cursor is poised to win this dev model race imo

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@skeptrune do you use it often? haven't looked at it in over a year. spoiler though, i'm quite bullish on cursor for long haul

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@sweatystartup Or...

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Microsoft unveils 7 new AI models.

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@timo_rf amen

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@buildwithparas Yup absolutely. Better to deploy best practices and strong security and telemetry over actions rather than pretend they don't occur

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

One of the scarier org patterns of 2026 is banning AI tools for "security reasons" while employees quietly paste customer info into ChatGPT on their phones. You didn't close the hole you just lost the ability to see it

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@jbarrieault @VicVijayakumar @WisprFlow Genius setup

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

Just trying to be more like @VicVijayakumar

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@yacineMTB yeah for a good period i ran that denormalized ruby data service for performant iam dp lookups

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@realchrisebert What life is about

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

No matter where you stand on data centers, this recurring theme is incredibly bothersome: townships overwhelmingly vote down a project, then lose to Big Globo Corp in court because they can't afford the lawyers to fight back.

[Colin Jackson @xcolinjacksonx]

Sam Altman, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer breaking ground at the Saline Twp data center project

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@yacineMTB dont

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@wellingtonajo Thanks AJ!

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

After 5 years, I recently concluded my time at Stripe.

I initially joined to work on core distributed systems and scale out our infra, and eventually transitioned into leading our core graph service and various enterprise offerings. When I started in 2021, we processed $600B in payment volume, and last year we crossed $1.9T

On my last day I was in the 90th percentile for tenure, which speaks to how fast the company has grown in the last five years.

The systems were genuinely interesting, the people were great, and the leadership was inspiring, which made leaving a difficult decision. But over the past year I kept getting pulled towards the security holes opening up in this newly agentic world.

I'm excited to team up with some of the sharpest people I know from security, AI, and systems, and dedicate our time to solving these problems. More to come soon!

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@jbarrieault 🙏

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@jeffdaniels Thanks Jeff! Looking forward to it!

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

@KobeissiLetter Gas was $6/gal over the weekend.

[Conner Bean @ConnerBean]

"Many will over-index on being the first, often it doesn't matter the way you think it would. It matters when you learn from it, because you gain advantage being the first to learn, not because you somehow automatically capture the market and can keep it."

👆

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

In grindmaxxing there are a couple of questions inside it.

First question is that whether you should do it or not, and to what level. I don’t think there is one right answer because it is situational and plays into the dynamics of the market.

Most startups the mode is either finding PMF or scaling that.

PMF is about building, talking to customers and learning from those activities. There is some level of grind involved but I think the risk of too much grind and you don't internalize the learnings enough to correct the path. The speed makes you blind.

Then at scaling, there can be grind because the business is booming, but goal should be finding leverage to scale effectively. With leadership, hiring, with processes, software, anything.

Then there can be higher urgency when you are in some landgrab moment where there is real advantage in being first. Many will over-index on being the first, often it doesn't matter the way you think it would. It matters when you learn from it, because you gain advantage being the first to learn, not because you somehow automatically capture the market and can keep it. Often in reality doesn't really matter much if someone comes later with lot better product or experience. Customer will gravitate to the better solution, not to the solution that was first.

And I think you can be fast in different ways.

You can be very fast but have a very inefficient model. Or you can have a very efficient model and use less effort to the get same speed. The latter will might be slower at first, but will be more compounding and more scalable in long run.

For example in the beginning, you might be onboarding every customer. But eventually you have to realize it probably won’t scale, your and your team's time is not leveraged well, you don't learn much from repeating that over and over. You have to find leverage from the product, or some other solution that doesn’t require as many human hours.

So many startups and teams do have to work a lot and intensively. But there will always be a tradeoff to consider. Teams will burn out. Mistakes will happen. Bad decisions will be made. A lot of the work might be wasteful if the team never stops to consider.

Sometimes it is not an option. You have to grind through it. I get that. But you as a founder can still choose the culture, the values, the operating principles. Is it based on grind, or is it based on something else? Grind is not always optional, but culture built around grind is.

--
And second questions which the most interesting part to me, which is always optional, if you make the grind as part of the narrative and the brand.

Does the grind narrative actually make your brand better or more valuable for customers? I’d argue only a few businesses benefit from the grind narrative. Most probably do not.

For example, when I joined Coinbase early, we knew that trust was the most important thing. We had to be secure and project stability and trust. That was what I was also trying to do with design. The team also did it on the legal side by trying to be the trusted option operating from the US instead of the Caymans or China or somewhere else (many of those are now gone).

In the aspect of trust, in domains where you want high trust and stability, like banking, security, databases, payments, insurance, infrastructure, etc., the grindmaxxing narrative doesn’t make me trust the vendor more. It makes me trust it less.

Because it makes me think about the mistakes that might eventually happen, or the risk complete implosion of the vendor.

I always evaluate vendors on their culture and brand. I want my vendors trustworthy and operating values that provide stability. We’ve picked vendors over others because we sensed stability and a kind of unhurried expertise. And often we have picked right.

I don’t want to buy vendors and then have them create problems for us, or force us to find another vendor a couple years later.

When you work in a high-trust domain and sell to businesses, the better story is almost how stable and boring your operations are. I want people operating in healthy way, making solid decisions, focusing on operational excellence not building cafes, sleeping at the office or other various side quests.