Back in my time at Stripe, we had an email alias (crazyideas@) and a Slack channel called #crazyideas. Anyone in the company could post anything they thought Stripe should build. No filter, no template, no permission needed. You could just do things.
Greg's 2014 post on email transparency mentions crazyideas@ in passing as a long-tail list, "ideas for things Stripe should try". That single line captured one of the best cultural mechanisms I've ever seen inside a company.
The thesis behind #crazyideas was clear: For an idea to earn the label "crazy", it must carry the real possibility of being wrong. Without that tension, it isn't bold; just obvious.
Some of the ideas were nonsense. Some were one-line feature requests. Others were multi-decade moonshots. What mattered was that people would react, comment, riff, build on each other. It was a firehose of the collective hivemind in action.
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 products, like Stripe Link and Identity, but most didn't. That ratio was the point. Most companies kill the long tail through process — review boards, planning cycles, OKR alignment — and end up with a much narrower aperture for what they could become. In other words, most companies create too much friction for big ideas.
#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. The same company that ran memos and decision logs also gave you a place to fire off a half-formed thought at 11pm and have a thread on it by morning.
I'm not sure if #crazyideas still exist at Stripe today, but the pattern is almost free to replicate. Create an alias, a channel, and provide the cultural permission for anyone to post.
Most companies have the tools. Very few have the permission.
To the #crazyideas and the collective hivemind.
/k