Making Media · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

The Story of Stripe Press with Tamara Winter

·59 min·3 clips

Bono got Where's My Flying Car?, read it, and later flagged the book in the New York Times.

1. Making Media focuses on Stripe Press and Tammy Winter’s role as commissioning editor for Stripe Press. 2. Tammy Winter matters because she oversees a team of fewer than 10 people and describes the press as a “donut rather than a pyramid.” 3. The episode asks why Stripe, a payments business founded by John and Patrick Collison in 2010, would create a publishing arm and what that arm is for. 4. Tammy says Stripe Press exists because founders and operators need clear, actionable information that is not locked behind private access to people like Elad Gil, Claire Hughes Johnson, or Charlie Munger. 5. She frames the audience as founders, investors, researchers, students, policymakers, operators, and “tinkerers” with a very short feedback loop between idea and execution. 6. Tammy says Stripe Press is not a content arm of Stripe, but it is interested in helping people build companies that last. 7. She contrasts “turpentine” books with more idea-shaping books and says the catalog should stay balanced between them. 8. On the practical side, she names High Growth Handbook, An Elegant Puzzle, and Scaling People as books that provide specific guidance on scaling, engineering management, and hiring. 9. Tammy says the team looks for world-class experts whose knowledge was “mostly wasn’t really written down anywhere.” 10. On the ideas side, she says Stripe Press wants to “meme into the minds” of readers ideas about growth, nuclear energy, and business conduct. 11. Tammy points to Where’s My Flying Car? as an example of a book that helped shift public thinking about abundant energy. 12. She says Bono received Where’s My Flying Car? from John at the Dahlke Book Festival in Ireland. 13. Tammy then says she later saw Bono mention the book in the New York Times and describe it as meaningful to him. 14. She uses that example to show how Stripe Press looks for influence among founders and policymakers, not just sales. 15. Tammy also discusses The Big Score, which starts with Stanford and runs through Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, Intel, and the introduction of the Mac. 16. She highlights Richard Hamming’s The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, including Hamming codes, the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, and the essay “You and Your Research.” 17. The conversation turns personal when Tammy explains that her background is in policy and economics rather than tech. 18. She says she studied economics at SMU, worked at Mercatus on cronyism, occupational licensing, certificate-of-need laws, and scope-of-practice laws, and later worked on charter cities before joining Stripe in 2020. 19. The interview feels conversational and specific, with long answers that move between publishing, economics, career history, and examples from Stripe Press’s catalog. 20. People interested in startups, books about business, or charter cities should listen, while people wanting a quick entertainment segment may skip it.

As heard by us

A Stripe Press conversation about mission, editorial taste, and how carefully made books get produced.

Tammy Winter, Stripe Press's commissioning editor, anchors a conversation about why a payments company would back a publishing house built around physical books and big ideas.

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Why you'd press play

You want the origin story behind Stripe Press, Stripe's publishing arm that makes beautiful physical books.

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