Simon Roberts on Embodiment & Craft

Simon Roberts is an anthropologist and co-founder and Partner at Stripe Partners in London. Simon’s 25-year career has included founding the UK’s first dedicated ethnographic research company and running an innovation lab at Intel. He is currently Board President of EPIC People.

His book “The Power of Not Thinking” was shortlisted for The Business Book Awards 2021.

Stripe Partners have one of the best newsletters going: Frame. And, here is Simon’s story told in comic book form.

Here is his piece “The UX-ification of research” referenced in our conversation.

I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend—a neighbor, actually—who helps people tell their stories. It’s such a beautiful question that I borrowed it from her, but it’s also a big one.

So I tend to overexplain it, just like I’m doing now. But before we dive in, I want you to know that you’re in complete control—you can answer or not answer however you’d like. And the question is: Where do you come from?

Well, 23andMe—when I did it, maybe foolishly, many years ago—told me that genetically, I come from the Celtic fringes of the United Kingdom. A bit of Wales, a bit of Ireland, and a bit of Scotland.

And weirdly, to the extent that I know, that’s broadly true. My father’s side of the family were all Welsh. Biographically, it lines up too—I spent eight years at university in Edinburgh and five years working at Intel in Ireland. So, genetically and biographically—biologically, as it were—that’s where I kind of come from.

Yeah.

There’s probably a deeper answer, but that’s an answer.

As an American, I don’t have the nuance of Welsh, Scottish, or Irish identities. What does it mean to be Welsh—to come from Wales?

Well, the second part of the answer to that first question is that, broadly speaking, I had an extremely—extremely—I was about to say "typical," but more like typical slash privileged—upbringing as a white, middle-class male in the Home Counties. So I don’t know what it’s like to grow up Welsh, aside from having a few Welsh relatives.

But in general, I think being Scottish, Welsh, or certain types of Irish often means that England is the colonial—or pseudo-colonial—bully breathing down your neck.

Right.

Scotland has moved toward independence, at least politically in some respects. Wales, to a more limited extent. And, of course, the Irish question rolls on. So yeah, I think you’d have to ask properly Welsh, Scottish, or Irish people what it really means to be from there, particularly in relation to England. But I’m certainly aware of England’s colonial history.

Yeah. I didn’t mean to put you in a politically fraught situation right at the start. Do you have any recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? Like, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Honestly, I don’t think I have any memory whatsoever of wanting to be anything in particular when I was young. And as I keep telling my children—or others who come to me for career advice—thanks to a long degree at Edinburgh University—four years, followed by another four for a PhD, which I grant you isn’t as long as an American PhD in anthropology—I managed to delay figuring out what I wanted to do until I was 28, nearly 29.

Partly because I didn’t know. And I still really didn’t know until I finished my PhD. Then, I at least knew what I didn’t want to do. And what I couldn’t do—or, at least, some things I wouldn't be able to do.

And I’ve been making it up ever since. But I certainly have no childhood memory of wanting to be a train driver or any of the classic things kids say. You know, in Britain, they say, "I want to be a train driver." I can’t imagine Italians say that. They probably say, “I want to drive a Ferrari in a Grand Prix.”

But the British? “Yeah, I’d like to be a train driver.” I didn’t even want to be one of those. And I’m too blind to be a train driver anyway.

And so catch us up—where are you now, and what is the work that you're doing?

Yeah, what is the work I’m doing? Where am I now? I mean, in many ways, I think I’m still doing what I’ve been doing since I figured out what I wanted to do—which was to apply anthropology in a way that was neither full-throated academia nor surface-level market research.

From the start, my aim has been to sit somewhere in a Venn diagram between commercial research and academic rigor. And I’ve been trying to locate myself in that in-between space ever since.

I don’t have a long list of past roles on my LinkedIn. I did a stint in corporate—it wasn’t really for me. I’ve mostly worked in consultancy. Now, I’m 13 years into the journey—I think you’re meant to call it that—as a founder at Stripe Partners. And yeah, we’re sticking to the knitting, innovating where we can, and I’m still just trying to do good work.

I go into every project with a healthy dose of fear about my inability to learn things properly. I’m always—yeah—always on tenterhooks.

How do you describe Stripe Partners, if you're ever asked?I should be one of the most qualified people to answer that question succinctly, but I forever find myself completely unable to explain it clearly.

Fundamentally, we’re an innovation and strategy business that combines social science, data science, and design—approaches, methodologies, ways of seeing the world—to solve problems and help large businesses chart the future. We have a particular tilt toward large technology companies.

That’s about as good a description as I can give.

Yeah, it’s a cruel question, that one.I think the problem is that I always answer it while making a bunch of assumptions—about what people know about consultancy, about anthropology, whether they’ve heard the word ethnography, or what they think data science means. And because of all those assumptions, I usually make a mess of it.

Sometimes, the simplest way of putting it is: we help solve gnarly problems for people with good research. That’s another way to say it.

What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?

I think the joy is, ultimately, being given a difficult problem and getting to a satisfying resolution. That’s what’s rewarding.

Most of our projects last about three months—that’s the average, I’d say, over the last 13 years. Twelve weeks is long enough to get deep into something without getting completely swallowed by it. It’s enough time to understand the background context—organizational, cultural, political, whatever it may be—so that you can frame your findings in a way that’s impactful.

But it’s not so long that you get bogged down in the topic, or in your client’s category, or in the politics and internal dynamics of the organization. It’s a nice balance—deep enough to be meaningful, but with just enough air in your lungs so you can come back up and be ready to dive into something else.

That’s one answer.

Another is that I really enjoy being intellectually challenged. And I suspect—though I hope it’s not true, but I think it probably is—that many people, broadly speaking, in the industries we work in are often wracked with imposter syndrome.

And they’re probably at the less experienced, younger end of the community of practitioners. I sort of love and hate the continual feeling that I’m a complete imposter—that I’m not going to be able to solve the problem, that I’m not going to land it neatly, that the project is going to be a complete failure, and no one will ever want to work with me again.

I know it sounds like a slightly sadomasochistic urge, but I’m somewhat driven by that. It keeps me pushing myself. And after doing this for close to 25 years—well, whatever works, right? It keeps you on your toes, and it stops you from becoming complacent. Because complacency, in any walk of life, isn’t helpful.

You’ve referenced a few times that around 28 you discovered what you might want to do. But when did you first encounter the idea that you could actually make a living doing this kind of thing?

A very simple—if slightly niche—answer: I ended up working in a brand consultancy that had been spun out of an ad agency called TBWA in London. This was in late 1999. The rationale was to help dot-com startups build their brands, understand their customers, figure out what they were doing in the world, and then, in a sense, pass them back to TBWA to spend their funding on marketing.

I did a project for a now-defunct online toy retailer called Toyzone, which was backed by a group of high-profile investors—people like Matthew Freud of Freud Communications. I went off and did some ethnography for them, got completely thrown into the deep end, and presented what I imagine was a fairly terrible slide deck to the founders and the ad agency folks.

But they were like, “Wow, that was amazing.” And I thought, Oh, well—maybe I can do this. I mean, it was the first time I’d ever done it. But it worked.

So yes, that’s kind of a smug—and possibly complacent—answer. But it made me realize that you actually could do this kind of work. I can’t even remember what academic framework I used, but it was something clever—but not too clever. Just enough.

And it gave me this early sense that the idea executives don’t have time for thinking or ideas is total nonsense. That people do have time to be pushed and challenged. They don’t just want a page full of verbatims from a focus group. There are other ways.

You were surprised there was receptivity to that kind of thinking inside the corporate structure?

Yeah, I suppose so. Although, to be fair, it was a scrappy little startup—not exactly a corporate behemoth.

But still, the way you said it—it sounded like you were surprised they didn’t think it was all b******t.

Right. I mean, I think they were thoughtful people. As investors, they’d already made a lot of money, and they were jumping on the next bandwagon, which at the time was the dot-com boom.

And then there were planners at the ad agency. Ad agencies are full of different kinds of people—some more thoughtful than others. But the planners tend to regard themselves as the most thoughtful. There were some very friendly planners in the mix who responded positively. They said, “Yeah, this is great—you’ve given me something I can play with.”

So that gave me just enough confidence to believe there was a “there” there—something I could figure out and build on.

But then I made a pretty rash decision: I left that startup brand consultancy after only a year. I had very little formal training—even in an industry that essentially makes it all up as it goes along.

You know, I had no formal training. And—this is a true story—I basically built a little website using some code I scraped off nameless blogs. I created a web page in Microsoft FrontPage, and then I sold Google Ads—not Instagram ads—for $0.02, or more precisely, $0.002 per click, using the keyword “ethnography.”

I thought, Let’s see if anyone wants to buy ethnography.

At the same time, I did what I’ve always done: tried to meet lots of people. I’ve always been proactive about building a network and finding interesting people to talk to.

And through that, I found a really interesting, tech-focused think tank in the UK. They brought me in as an ethnographer-in-residence. It paid a few standing bills and gave me the freedom to experiment a bit on the side. And that was it—just making it all up as I went along, which, if we’re honest, is what most careers look like in hindsight.

Yeah, it’s amazing. Listening to that story, I was thinking about where I was in 1999—and realizing how long ago that actually is. A lot has changed. How would you describe the changes in that Venn diagram you talked about—between academic rigor and commercial market research—and the role ethnography plays in it?

Yeah, it’s something I think about a lot. Probably too much. It’s a bit of an inside baseball kind of question—but it’s a good one.

When I first started out, focus groups were the thing in qualitative work. There was a little bit of ethnography happening in London, but it was really at the margins. It was incredibly hard to make a case for small-n studies. Incredibly hard to justify spending half a day with a single person.

And to be perfectly honest, while the little micro-business I had was successful in its own terms, it was hard work. So I jumped ship to Intel—at a time when a wave was building, particularly in corporate America and tech companies. There was this growing swell of interest. In my intake alone, 35 to 40 ethnographers or anthropologists joined Intel. It was a wave, and I rode it.

If you want to periodize it, the application of anthropology and ethnography in business can be dated back as far as the 1920s, depending on what you’ve read—and with good reason. But I think there was a big surge from the early 2000s to around 2010–2015.

Then came the rise of terms like “UXR”—User Experience Research. And with it, a kind of consolidation—a shift, really. As I’ve written about critically, there was a “UX-ification” of the field. The focus shifted—not always, but often—toward less deep, more tactical questions.

What we had at Intel was the ability to think in extremely long wavelengths, to approach problems deeply and broadly. That’s changed. The wave crested, and then a different kind of wave emerged—this UXR wave.

Which brings us back to where we started this conversation, even before the microphone was on. We're now in this slightly strange moment—a time of relentless cost optimization, process orientation, and professionalization. In some ways, those things have taken over within UXR.

And now, of course, our new interloper: AI.

So it’s a very different environment. At this point, I think of it in three distinct phases—each of which I’ve had the pleasure (or misfortune) of riding through.

Yeah. Well, I loved that piece you wrote—the one you referenced—”The UX-ification of research.” Do you have thoughts about the acronyms? I’m always struck by how odd they are—UX, CX—this strangely robotic naming of what is essentially a qualitative interface between an organization and its users. It just feels so strange to me.

Yeah, it is. I suppose I haven’t really thought much about it, apart from just noting it. I mean, it would be interesting to check Google Trends—when did “UXR” actually start gaining traction as a label for a type of researcher?

Because, you know, Rick Robinson and Elab, and some of that early Sapient-era stuff—that was “experience modeling,” right? As far as I know, the word “experience” entered the nomenclature in the late ’90s or early 2000s.

So, in many ways, it’s fine. Everybody needs labels—labels are useful for other people. But I do think the perennial problem UXRs face is actually the “R” at the end. It signals that you do one specific kind of thing and that you occupy a particular slot in a process. It positions you as someone who provides input, rather than someone who drives an overall process.

So UXR, in service of product management, has created a kind of asymmetry. And I think—and this might be a bit controversial—but I think the current obsession with research ops, with optimization, with process, with bowing down to rules that we didn’t create but that others imposed… it’s left us in a position that feels somewhat inferior. We’re beneath the centers of power.

That said, researchers—at least since they’ve been in businesses—have always felt they deserved a seat at or near the top table but rarely got it. Maybe there’s something about what we do, or who we are, that just doesn’t quite enable that. Of course, there are exceptions—at Intel, I knew researchers who rose to extremely senior roles. So it’s not impossible.

But at some point, you do have to be willing to step back from the “researcher” part and take on other kinds of responsibilities—ones that may be more mundane, more political, less fun. I think it’s very hard to be a fully embodied, full-throated researcher and a shoulder-padded, swaggering executive.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s okay. I’m happy.

How have you navigated that?

I’ve navigated it by running my own businesses.

And I think—speaking for myself, but also for my two co-founders and the rest of the partners at Stripe Partners—what we value most about the business is, broadly, that we run our own ship. We make our own decisions. Our targets are our own. They’re not imposed by someone else. We can chart our own course. We can be nimble.

We get to decide.

And it’s funny—there are a lot of founders who peacock around on LinkedIn talking about being founders, but they’re usually in tech. I think it’s interesting that people who run research and strategy businesses don’t really lean into that founder identity—the “founder mindset,” the “habits of great founders,” all that stuff. But we are founders. We’re businesspeople.

We just tend to emphasize the research part of our identities, rather than the business part, in how we present ourselves. But we have mouths to feed, bills to pay, P&Ls to manage, profit margins to protect—all the same realities any business has. It’s just that we’re craftspeople at heart. We’d rather look at the world through a project than a spreadsheet.

Yeah, well, that’s beautiful. All those forces you just described—those are exactly the ones that squeeze craft out of research. People get flattened by the machinery of mediocrity. So I’m curious: how do you make space for the kind of work you want to do? Ethnography, craft—the parts that get squeezed out elsewhere—how do you create space for that?

I mean, I think fundamentally, by advocating for craft—right? I remember, in the very early years of Stripe Partners, we had endless conversations about, in simple terms: how do we want to be seen? Do we want to be seen as strategy people, innovation people, or researchers?

And I think the simple answer is: all three.

But research shouldn’t be seen as a dirty word. It shouldn’t be regarded merely as an input into “strategy” or “innovation”—and if you’re reading the transcript, those should be in bold, with quote marks. We’ve always wanted to lean into research and be strong advocates for doing it properly.

Because it matters.

Having a robust—if not foolproof—understanding of the world gives you the foundation to address not just the problem that brought you to write the brief, but all sorts of other eventualities too. We’ve always taken the view: let’s not be bashful about what we do. We believe in the power of research to help businesses get things done.

And if that resonates with you, you’re probably going to make a good client.

That’s not to downplay the importance of other things that make research successful. But we’re in a moment, as you know, where there are tools everywhere claiming to do incredibly complex things at the push of a button—sometimes with synthetic users or similar shortcuts.

That makes our stance more important than ever.

I read recently that the policy unit in Number 10 Downing Street was using synthetic user panels to help decide policy. And to me, there’s no greater illustration of why we have a government that promised a lot and has delivered very little of substance—because it’s not even talking to people.

There are dark forces at work, and we need to be alert to them. Yes, we need to be efficient. Yes, we sometimes need to optimize processes, move faster. But we also need to be careful about what we’re letting into our corner of the commercial world. A lot of these tools are far less useful than they claim to be.

Yeah. The synthetic user stuff—I remember someone asking me, “How do you make the case for qualitative research in the age of all these tools?” It really threw me. That was right around the time you and I were interacting around synthetic users. And it got existential really fast. These things are strange. How do you make the case for what you called a ‘singular understanding of the world’? What’s the value this kind of work brings—especially now, with all these cheap, easy replicas?

Well, I think it goes back to this fundamental question: is research just an input, or is it something more? Is it an experience? A process? A dialogic process—a kind of exchange that you go through with clients?

Very early on, we stumbled into—or maybe deliberately developed—a way of doing research that is about as far removed from synthetic users as you can get. We call it the ethnographic research studio.

It’s a simple idea: if you want to understand the world, you go into the world. That much is obvious. That’s what anthropologists, ethnographers, and good market researchers have always done.

But our twist was: do it with clients. Do it in a compressed, focused time frame—a week, maybe 10 days. Focus rigorously on the core problem you’re trying to solve, the questions you’re trying to answer. And take people on a journey—one that goes beyond interviews. It's about creating experiences: cocktail parties with experts at your Airbnb, dinners, guided immersions—anything that brings people closer to the world they’re trying to understand.

And what we quickly discovered is: it works. It delivers a strong first set of answers, fast. The team can walk away and immediately start acting while we dig deeper, synthesize, and make meaning of what was learned. So it’s fast, it’s deep, and it’s highly embodied—a word I’ve become really interested in.

It gives people—clients—verbal and nonverbal resources they can draw from later. Even subconsciously, they replay that research as they go on to do their work. It embeds.

We’ve been doing it since 2013. We still get a lot of interest in it. In fact, we’ve got a team off to Atlanta next week to do just that with some clients.

It works. It’s fun. It reinvigorates our clients. It reminds them that there are real people out there in the world they’re building for. And it’s magical. It puts a smile on my face, on our team’s faces, on our clients’ faces. I think even the participants enjoy it.

So it’s just—an all-around knockout. A great experience, great value for money, a great way to learn about the world.

And no synthetic users involved.

Here’s a lightly edited and polished version of your transcript. The language has been smoothed for readability, but all tone, voice, and nuance are preserved:

What do you think it is that puts the smile on people’s faces? What were you thinking when you said that?

I just think it's the happy, it's just….I was doing one of these with a client—who must remain nameless—in Chicago about three weeks ago. We spent a week digging into stuff related to television, and I took a UX writer and a designer to meet two women.

They happened to be living in what I think are called “drunk houses” in the U.S.—which is probably not the most appropriate term—but essentially, it was a women’s refuge for recovering alcoholics. A very different environment.

And we walked out two and a half hours later, and they were just like, “Wow. There was so much in there.” And I said, “Yeah... you haven’t seen anything yet. We’re doing this all week.”

I think it’s just that—corporate environments are very sequestered. If you live in the Bay Area, you get on your shiny white bus, you’re driven to a nice campus, you’ve got the micro-kitchen, all the amenities. You go to a lot of meetings, and you don’t have to pay for anything. You forget that there’s a whole other America out there.

Someone once told me about their brother who works at Meta—he picked something up at Hudson News in the airport and just walked off with it. Someone had to run after him. He’d completely forgotten that, in the real world, you have to pay for things. He was just on autopilot. But Hudson News isn’t a micro-kitchen.

So, I think the smiles come from that reconnection with the world. It’s the most thunderingly obvious thing to say, but it matters more than almost anything else. If we don’t do that, everything gets reduced to personas and numbers on spreadsheets—just disembodied entities we can’t truly make decisions about unless we understand what makes them tick. As humans. As flesh, blood, bones, beating hearts. That stuff matters.

You need to feel it.

Corporate strategy, in my view, is completely unfeeling. And—this is a longer answer—but whenever private equity firms buy food franchises, what do they do? They value-engineer the hell out of them. All the magic disappears. Why? Because they’re running businesses through spreadsheets, with very little emotional connection to the food, the customers, the neighborhoods. But if you're going to scale a food franchise, it's not about shaving off a few tortilla chips to save pennies on margins.

That’s always been the thing for me: businesses have a natural tendency to distance themselves from the worlds they serve. And our job is to bring them—and their people—back into the world, and use that as the foundation for doing something meaningful for their customers.

Yeah, it’s beautiful. You mentioned “embodiment,” which of course connects to your book The Power of Not Thinking. What was the origin of that? When did it occur to you that this was something people would want to talk about—needed to hear?

The simple answer is: we did one of our research studios. I write about it in the book—we took a team from Duracell on a camping trip. It was completely nuts. But it worked.

All of us—the core of Stripe Partners at the time, me, Tom, and Tom—we came out of it just going, “Wow.” High-fives all around. “That was f*****g amazing. That actually worked.”

We got somewhere incredible with that group in one week. And then came the question: Why? Why did it work?

That’s really what the book is—an attempt to answer that question. And I owe a huge debt to Tom and Tom for shaping that thinking. My name’s on the front, but the ideas were a shared effort.

It comes back to what we were just talking about. Businesses disappear into themselves. They lose touch. So how do you get people out of that?

Yes, great—you take them out into the world. But what happens then? Why does that work? What happens when your body experiences something, as opposed to just analyzing cells in a spreadsheet or flipping through PowerPoint slides?

That was really the starting point.

Then came the process of figuring out what kind of book that might become—which is a whole other story. But it was a fun experience. A difficult one, especially while running a business that was, at the time, much smaller.

I have a copy here, and I love the cover. I’m sure there are different versions, but mine has this kind of generic figure holding its own head.

Yeah. Well, I’m sure any author will tell you—when you see a cover or even a version of the cover, you think, OK, this is actually going to be a book. It’s exciting.

But yeah, I mean, I’m sure you don’t need or want me to sit here and publicize the book. I’m not very good at that. And I quickly realized that 80 percent of writing a book is actually publicizing it—not just writing it.

But I am increasingly feeling like the ideas in it are more important than ever. Even if I didn’t articulate them as well as I could have, I still think they matter—especially in the context of where the research industry is going. I think they’re relevant to policymakers and decision-makers, and their ongoing inability to really get down with people and understand their worlds.

And of course, it's even more relevant now in the context of AI. I think—perhaps with the exception of what I wrote about robotics, which is going through a really interesting phase thanks to advances in general AI—I still stand by what I wrote about AI more broadly.

Jan LeCun at Meta put it beautifully the other day: a child, by the age of four, has received as much data as the most powerful large language model (LLM). In other words, most of what we know—about ourselves, about the world, about other people—is not represented in any way inside an LLM.

And I think we need to quit this idea that these things are “intelligent” in any meaningful way—unless we actually sit down and define what we mean by intelligence. They can’t reason the way humans can. They don’t know most of what humans know.

That’s not to say they aren’t useful, or that you can’t do some things more quickly or efficiently with them. But I think we’ve slightly lost our collective mind.

So the question becomes: how do we want to respond to this?

I’d say with an open mind—but also a good deal of skepticism. Because I imagine most of the big tech companies touting these systems would love for us to believe they’re more powerful than they really are. That would suit them. But we don’t have to play along with that script.

Yeah. What do you see next? I mean, maybe a silly question—but when you look ahead, when you think about the role of synthetic research or synthetic users or whatever we want to call it—what happens?

I don’t know. I really don’t know what I see.

More broadly, with AI—there’s no doubt this is powerful stuff. It’s world-changing. But as Roy Amara said: we tend to overestimate the impact in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.

And I think that’s true here. Right now, we’re probably overestimating its short-term effects—but underestimating what it will do in the long run.

And that’s what’s scary. Not the technology itself, but the fact that we’ve welcomed it into our lives so uncritically. It doesn’t seem like we’ve done a huge amount of thinking about what it means—for us, for the value of what we do, for work.

So, in the context of research, it’s as I said earlier: be careful what you wish for. If you want to automate yourself out of existence, well—you’re doing a bloody fine job of it. And you’re doing all of this based on a technology that’s been around for, what, a year and a half? Two years? Right?

Meanwhile, we’ve got this technology called the body—which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years—and it seems to work pretty well for a lot of what we’re trying to do, which is make sense of the world.

Especially in earlier phases of human history, when the world was bigger, badder, and nastier than it is now—even if it still feels like a bit of a mess today. Our bodies are pretty good. They’re well-tested. It’s well-tried kit.

So I never cease to marvel at how quickly people will jump on the latest thing. Never ceases to amaze me how many “experts” pop up overnight. You’d think they’d been working on this stuff forever. It’s amazing.

So yeah, I’m a healthy skeptic. At Stripe Partners, we’re trying to think carefully about how we introduce AI into our work—how we do it ethically, how it makes sense for our clients legally and from a data protection perspective. And how we use it to be more rigorous, more robust in what we do.

At the same time, of course, we’re also trying to serve some of the needs of our paymasters—whether that’s doing things a bit more quickly or, occasionally, a bit more cheaply. But that doesn’t mean we throw everything out and go all-in.

It seems to me that much of the industry is just putting all their chips on red. And I’m not sure red is going to come in. Or maybe it will come in—but not for a while. And we haven’t really thought it through.

So yeah. I worry.

Yeah. That’s a beautiful spot to end our conversation. I do have one silly question, though. I’m curious about the name Stripe Partners. Is there a story behind that?

Yeah. Again—kind of like the question about what we do—what’s the good or right answer?

I think we wanted something simple. I mean, we obviously needed to find a URL—which wasn’t easy, even years after the dot-com boom. So adding “Partners” made sense; it allowed us to pick another word, then attach “Partners” to it and grab a workable domain.

There were three of us at the start. And “Stripe”… well, I think we wanted to communicate something simple, clean, and abstract—but also something that suggested structure, form, even movement.

It wasn’t meant to be too literal. We didn’t want to be called something like “Insight Co.” or “Innovation Group” or anything overly obvious. “Stripe” felt open-ended enough to grow with, while “Partners” grounded it in the fact that collaboration is central to what we do—both internally and with clients.

So yeah, practical reasons like finding a domain, but also a kind of quiet metaphor in the name. It felt right.

We wanted the name to communicate, in some sense, a degree of alacrity—efficiency and speed. Which kind of goes back to where we began, right? Academic research is obviously more rigorous, more time-consuming, and—yes—in many cases, much more thoughtful than the three- or four-month projects I’ve described.

But I do think that a certain degree of robustness and rigor can be achieved within that timeframe. So maybe it’s not the speediest research in the world, but it’s still research with depth.

So “Stripe” was meant to signify some speed, I think. I believe that was the origin story.

And you know—we’ve never been contacted by the lawyers at Stripe, the finance company, which is probably a good thing… because they’re a bit wealthier than us.

Well, Simon, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you.

And if you don’t already subscribe to Peter’s lovely weekly missive—with five excellent topics, or thematic buckets, or whatever you want to call them—you jolly well should.

Beautiful. I thank you for that.

All right.

Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe