Back in my time at Stripe, we had this thing called #crazyideas. It started as an email alias (crazyideas@) and later became a Slack channel (#crazyideas), where anyone in the company could pitch ideas they thought Stripe should build.
I haven't seen many other stripes talk about #crazyideas, but I found Greg's 2014 post where he talks about email transparency, and mentions crazyideas@ in passing as "a long-tail list, ideas for things Stripe should try", but to me, that single line captured one of the best cultural mechanisms I've ever seen inside a company, because it enabled bottom-up innovation.
Bottom-up comes with a lot of noise, so some of the ideas were nonsense. Some were incremental feature requests, and others were multi-decade moonshots. What mattered was that people would share, react, comment, riff, build on each other's ideas, in real time, with no permission. It was a fire hose of the collective hive mind.
With #crazyideas, we had one rule: For an idea to earn the label "crazy", it must carry the real possibility of being wrong, because without that it was just an obvious to-do.
What made it work wasn't the channel. It was the underlying belief that anyone, regardless of seniority or function, could see something the company should build, and it was their job to say it.
A support engineer in Dublin could pitch a new product. A new hire on day three could surface a strategic gap. The signal got mixed in with the noise, and the company collectively did the sorting.
A handful of those ideas became real things, like BYOT, Link and Identity, but most didn't, and that was the point.
Most companies block bottom-up ideas through process (review boards, planning cycles, OKR alignment) and end up with a much narrower aperture for what they could become. They simply create too much friction for big ideas, and a concept like #crazyideas cuts through all of that.
#crazyideas worked because people weren't precious or protective of their domain. Someone could pitch something related to a separate team, and if it was great, the cultural norm was to get that person transferred to the team to help build it.
I also think writing culture played a role here, because we already ran the company on written communication, memos and friction logs, so another channel with a half-formed thought felt like a natural medium for a firehose.
I'm not sure if #crazyideas still exists at Stripe today, but the concept is almost free to replicate. Create a channel, and provide the cultural permission for anyone to post. Your job as a leader is to commit to the concept and provide the permission to experiment.
Most companies have the tools. Very few have the permission.
Thanks to Dmitry Alexeenko, Dave Nunez and Anthony Kline for reviewing drafts of this post.
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