In December 2025 we pulled every publicly visible role change from Stripe employees going back twelve months. 312 people. We expected them to end up at Ramp, Mercury, or starting their own companies. The actual pattern is more interesting.
The three patterns
First, roughly 40% went to non-fintech companies outright — Anthropic, OpenAI, Linear, Vercel. That's a bigger infra drain than the fintech-to-fintech churn narrative assumes. Second, of the founders, more than half started outside payments — dev tools, AI infra, vertical SaaS. Third, the "competitor defector" story (Stripe → Ramp → Mercury) is real but small: under 15% of the cohort.
What this means for sourcing
If you're recruiting out of Stripe, the talent pool splits roughly into "wants infra scale" and "wants AI-native". Both groups move to companies where the engineering leadership is visible on Twitter and the codebase is modern. Mapping the 40% non-fintech destinations is a better signal than counting the fintech-to-fintech moves.
The dataset is available on request for recruiters — email info@linkfetch.io with the cohort you want next.