Your first sentence is likely the conversation that was had. The only thing I'm suspicious of is people claiming corporate benevolence, which is the way I read danielmarkbuce's comments. Corporations, for better or for worse, will always bias towards pragmatism. When you have distributed and varying levels of complicated power that's just how things shake out. There's no soul or real culture at the center of a corporation.
The cofounders also care about their reputation very much
Their reputation has literally had monetary impact on Stripe by bringing in talent more easily because people “like” the cofounders, and it also has turned the company into the default payment platform for many startups.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a professional PR consultancy for boosting their individual images
Retaining that rep and goodwill is probably literally considered worth a couple billion to Stripe
