Inside Stripe: Stablecoins, AI, and (not) Going Public | Will Gaybrick

Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital.

Today's guest is Wil Gabri, president of technology and business at Stripe.

Stripe builds financial infrastructure for the internet. And if you've ever purchased a product online, you've probably used Stripe. In this

conversation, we'll talk about what Stripe's doing in crypto and stable coins, how AI is changing commerce and payments, how they're thinking about going public, how they build products internally, and interesting data they're seeing around AI native companies, like

how they're growing three and a half times faster than SAS companies. A quick

thank you to Claire Hughes Johnson and Josh Kushner for helping brainstorm topics for Will. A reminder, I publish episodes of the Peel every week and check out the back catalog of over a 100 episodes exploring the world's greatest

startup stories just like this one.

Let's talk to Will after a quick word from Numeral and Amplitude.

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Will, welcome to the show. Thanks for

having me. excited to be here.

>> So, I think a good way good place to start, you have a very specific title at Stripe. Can you just explain what it is

Stripe. Can you just explain what it is and what you do, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah. So,

president of technology and business.

Agree. Pretty specific. We already have a president. That's John Collison. And

a president. That's John Collison. And

so, we've given me a somewhat more specific title to be more descriptive of what I actually oversee, which is technology and business. Broadly that

means I manage product engineering so across all of our product development areas and infrastructure security things like that [snorts] and then the business

side teams like partnerships risk GTM operations core company operations support and the sort of JD is deliver

the business and deliver the road map and that's what I'm focused on every day >> make the chart go up >> exactly [laughter] charts charts yeah many charts but it used to be instead of technology was product. Yes,

>> that was like a change a couple months ago. What's the significance of the

ago. What's the significance of the change? Like did you do more product

change? Like did you do more product related things before?

>> Well, still spending just as much time on product, I guess, you know, more hours per day on Stripe total, if that's even possible. Uh, but we decided that

even possible. Uh, but we decided that it would be more efficient if we brought some of the infrastructure teams closer to product teams. It wasn't like there was some sort of huge disconnect between

how they were executing, but we're always looking for ways to create new efficiencies and how we run the company.

>> And is that like infrastructure related to product like moving faster like being able to bring the product closer to like the rails of financial services kind of a thing?

>> Well, there's sort of several layers of infrastructure at Stripe. There is cloud infrastructure and the services that product teams use to build products.

there is sort of product infrastructure like you said rails integrations with banks integrations with payment networks and so on and

stripes you know one of our number one selling points and you know top focus areas will always be top focus area is

reliability and security and so infrastructure focuses basically on that and then accelerating product

development Hm. How do you accelerate

development Hm. How do you accelerate product development with better infrastructure?

>> So, in so many ways, we uh spend a lot of time on developer productivity. So,

one of the sort of principles that we think about a lot at Stripe is what are the non-speculative forever compounding investment areas. And I think developer

investment areas. And I think developer productivity is is one of those like you make your developers happier, more productive. that's just going to make

productive. that's just going to make you a better place for engineers to work every year and just make your engineers more effective. And so we are constantly

more effective. And so we are constantly thinking about new ways to empower developers. Built something cool

developers. Built something cool recently called minions which is basically using large language models to automate a lot of the run load that's coming to our product teams. So you can

actually sort of click a button in a Jira ticket and just a minion will go off and fix the thing or update the thing. You'll see the PR click a button

thing. You'll see the PR click a button to approve and you know that's actually getting a ton of use internally.

Interesting.

>> Is this a something that you built internally or is like a external product that you use?

>> Built internally. Yeah.

>> Interesting. So why did you decide to build that internally versus you know buy it from somewhere? Was it

was there nothing like that on the market that existed or >> you know there's probably things like it. I can't think of any services off

it. I can't think of any services off the top of my head which that do exactly what it does. But in a lot of cases, you know, build versus buy for us is dictated by just how strategic something

is to, you know, the long-term arc of the company and, you know, creating value for users. And for developer productivity, we often find that our systems are so specific that sort of

building on top of them is a lot more efficient than trying to bolt things on.

>> Interesting. So yeah, I think you you actually you kind of broke the internet maybe with the bridge acquisition. I forget

when this was. It was maybe a year ago, maybe eight months ago.

>> Yeah, 10 months ago. Yeah,

>> 10 months ago. So I was in the middle or you know right right around it.

>> So then how did you approach deciding that you should acquire versus build start to build that internally?

>> Yeah. So I think with acquisitions the adage that you don't acquire companies, you acquire founders and sort of founding teams has always rung true to

me and to us at Stripe. We had highly convergent road maps. Uh they were building things sort of right as far as we could assess and we just thought Zach

and Sean were extraordinary founders and we could go faster by working with them.

So then how do you convince such capable founders that are probably they could probably do it without you right in theory how do you convince them to join you know it's sort of interesting I

think their calculus was very similar to ours we can go faster with stripe than going it alone when we announced the acquisition

it was almost like you know the gun at a starting line for the stable coin industry it was already a lot TVL or a lot of stable coins uh in

circulation at the time, but in terms of the idea of bringing stable coins mainstream, it was still just sort of an idea. And I think one of the things that

idea. And I think one of the things that you know Zach and Sean would tell you is as soon as we announced the acquisition, you know, the inbound was sort of, you

know, their very small sales team and just creating that demand, seeing the new use cases has been really powerful in driving our road map, their road map.

Um, [snorts] and I think also just a lot of the competencies that Stripe has, you know, around navigating global regulatory landscape, working with banks, you know, existing partnerships and things like that was attractive to them.

>> Yeah, because that's an interesting just component of crypto stable coins as a whole is like you have to interact with the the fiat system. As much as as much as you want

system. As much as as much as you want to say we don't need it and like its own world, which it is, it's like its own economy, but also like the real world does exist and you got to interact with it. Totally. So, can you actually just

it. Totally. So, can you actually just real quick explain what stable coins are for somebody who doesn't >> actually know and also for for my benefit because I feel like you're probably you know 100 times more than I

do. How would you explain to someone who

do. How would you explain to someone who doesn't know but is really smart.

>> Yeah, they are digital assets onchain that are backed by real world like fiat assets not real world but fiat assets.

Uh obviously today the most popular stable coins are backed by USD.

Typically, these are custodied at major financial institutions and their US treasuries or other liquid instruments.

The um what what this basically means is that stable coins allow you to start thinking about running your business on digital assets. Why don't you just use

digital assets. Why don't you just use like USD? Like why do you need to use a

like USD? Like why do you need to use a stable coin in the first place? Is it

because the underlying currency in certain markets are just as volatile as Bitcoin?

It's actually not really about volatility so much as how money moves globally.

So, Stripe's mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. What that means tactically is that we're very often just trying to make money and financial

services work the way that we all would expect them to. Um, so [snorts] you would think, oh well, it's easy using just uh uh electricity and computers to

move money all over the world. It really

isn't because just the global financial system is so fragmented. And so you are thinking about stitching together all these disparate rails. You're thinking

about correspondent banking and moving money is often very expensive.

you know, wires cost dozens of dollars or very slow. And so we have always been extremely excited about crypto less

because of you know the opportunity to make a quick buck on on trading across coins and more about the underlying

financial platform that allows you to move money globally via just one protocol that you know sort of all developers can sort of it's like a

shelling point for developers. It's

here. If we all just use, you know, Salana or if we all use ETH and there's stable coins sitting on both on top of both, then, you know, money can just

move seamlessly.

How complicated is it under the surface running the sort of financial network that Stripe runs? It's like on a scale of one to 100 or 1 to a,000. What would

be surprising about it to people that they just like, "Wow, that's a lot more complex than I would have realized."

>> Well, on Stripe, you can use a single API to get access to, you know, on the order of 150 payment methods. uh if you were trying to integrate each of those

individually, it would take many hundreds of person years, thousands of person years, maybe even more. And so finding a way to

even more. And so finding a way to normalize the underlying components such that we can create that unified um experience on

the front end, that's pretty hard and it's been something we've been investing in now for for 14 years. [snorts]

You know, one of the things that I've always found interesting is that a lot of times you'll find in the early days that users

will say, "Hey, we would never do X."

Uh, so we heard from a lot of enterprise users, we would never, you know, give up the sort of core interface of our checkouts. That's too important. That's

checkouts. That's too important. That's

our IP. we have to own that experience every pixel [snorts] because we've been able to uh via single API allow you to get access to these you

know 150 payment methods uh we now find that 72% of enterprise customers going live on Stripe sort of delegate the front end to us you know it's all

brandable they can you know sort of express their brand and it's all configurable but there's just so much complexity behind these PMTH integrations that they're sort of happy

for us to take that load off of them.

>> Interesting. Okay. One maybe like slightly different question but maybe sort of related deciding to that stable coins was like worth going after. How do

you at Stripe build conviction around knowing what to do? Maybe this is like will personally maybe this is Stripe like as a team. What goes into those

decisions? users. You are on this

decisions? users. You are on this infinite journey of discovering customer needs. Uh I'm sort of in awe of this

needs. Uh I'm sort of in awe of this because it had truly has guided every epic of Stripe. In the early days when Stripe launched, it was a a single API

to start accepting payments nearly instantly. And the state-of-the-art back

instantly. And the state-of-the-art back in the late 2000s was, you know, you would have to work with banks or legacy merchant acquirers. it would take days

merchant acquirers. it would take days to to get going. And so Patrick and John, you know, years before I joined the company with the the sort of founding team sort of solved this problem by just saying, hey, how can we

make this instant developers expect instantaneous self-s serve experiences?

How can we enable that?

We then started to see the ondemand economy and the platform economy emerge.

So this was like Instacart, Uber.

>> Exactly. That's sort of in the on demand side. And then the platform economy, you

side. And then the platform economy, you had companies like Shopify or Squarespace, Wix, Woo Commerce, which was like enabling mass long tale of new businesses that you probably wouldn't Stripe wouldn't go in and like acquire

the the the seller on Etsy that's like knitting some scarves and they make a couple thousand dollars a year.

>> Yes, it's it's it's certainly not our core competency to go serve that user directly, >> but we can be the infrastructure backing the platforms that do that. And so you know as we started to see that emerge it

gave rise to what we call strip connect which is infrastructure for multi-party money movement and allowing you know platforms to embed payments create their own payment solutions. You

know then in the late 201 rise of fintech you know suddenly everyone wanted to build a consumer or merchant financial services platform. So we built

products like start treasury issuing to give them sort of the core building blocks to build their own financial services.

Then most recently you see this boom in customers looking for stable coins and global money movement infrastructure and then of course all the AI companies and

they have you know very particular and interesting needs. Um uh one of those is

interesting needs. Um uh one of those is just serving customers globally because most AI companies are providing digital goods that can work across borders

>> which probably unique compared to some of these other previous waves.

>> Exactly. Yeah. In in most cases, you know, making money work well in a single market is actually not that hard, but as soon as you cross borders, just everything gets a whole lot more complex.

>> Is it just like regulations, laws, like uniqueness, like everything's different kind of a thing?

>> Exactly. And money tends to move slower and you have to move it passes through several financial institutions [snorts] and by being a unified platform on money

movement we can speed it up we can you take the complexity off our users plates and so on. But yeah the median AI company

the median AI company among the top 100 on Stripe sells into 55 countries. But

when you look at, you know, companies like Lovable, which, you know, is Vibe Coding Platform, actually the fastest company ever to $100 million in revenue

on Stripe, it took them six months. It's

pretty u pretty amazing. [snorts] Uh

they sell into over $150 markets today. And you know, for them, they just want to create a

a seamless experience for their customers. every payment method that

customers. every payment method that customers want, you know, in markets from Japan to Australia, you know, to anywhere in Europe. And then for the long tale, this is where sort of AI and

stable coins come together. Um, you have places like Vietnam or Argentina where, you know, the the preferred payment methods may actually be, you know, paying directly to stable coins. Do

>> you think like do these people ultimately want US dollars probably and like the stable coins is like the way that you go from Vietnamese dong or Argentinian peso? I hope I got that

Argentinian peso? I hope I got that right >> into being able to converge to USD like is or dollars like is that ultimately kind of what stable coins get at? Yeah,

I'm guessing the sort of need behind the need is just a stable currency and one that they can use uh you know with any counterparty because they will accept it

but and what that amounts to typically is is USD >> because I have a lot of friends who you know they're in like Brazil or you know like what you maybe consider an emerging market but they they kind of have the

institutional knowledge or they behave just like your friend in San Francisco or New York but they're kind of trapped in like I earn my my my wages

are in Nigerian naira or something and like the government is like deflating the currency or I guess inflating the currency 100% every year and I can't use it.

>> So there's like the desire to get out.

>> Yeah.

>> What other interesting thing are you seeing in the data on all the AI stuff that's happening on Stripe?

>> So the companies are growing incredibly quickly. We look at that top 100 again

quickly. We look at that top 100 again the median company among top 100 AI companies on Stripe is

reaching $10 million in revenue in 10 months. If [snorts] you look at the top

months. If [snorts] you look at the top 100 SAS companies on Stripe, the median reached 10 million in revenue in three years. So they're just monetizing

years. So they're just monetizing faster. So it's really like a little

faster. So it's really like a little over three times as fast, three and a half times as fast. So just monetizing incredibly quickly. Do you know what it

incredibly quickly. Do you know what it is? Like what are they monetizing

is? Like what are they monetizing faster? Is it because there's this like

faster? Is it because there's this like selfs serve easier to like get value quickly type of thing? Yeah. Listen, I

you know in many ways just LMS is almost like just this alien technology landing on Earth being able to create experiences that you just never thought

were possible. And we're seeing a lot of

were possible. And we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs leveraging that to create new types of software, new types of products that we all find very very useful.

>> The It's interesting because these companies have a bunch of new needs >> like what are you seeing specifically?

So inference is expensive, you know, and so with SAS, you know that you could have just subscriptionbased pricing models, super high margins. It's pretty

simple, too. Just right, me and Will are both going to sign up like two seats.

It's 20 bucks a month or whatever.

>> Exactly. [snorts] Whereas the most popular business model we're finding for this new cohort of of uh AI companies is this hybrid business model where you

have a SAS subscription. Say you're

buying $100 a month of you know whatever service level cursor so on and then that SAS subscription gives you an entitlement to a certain amount of

usage.

uh you burn down that entitlement. In

many cases, you go over it and so you need to think about how you calculate overages. And [snorts] so this hybrid

overages. And [snorts] so this hybrid subscription and usage model and then you think about adding new products and how that sort of factors into, you know,

your existing entitlements and your existing subscriptions. And so the

existing subscriptions. And so the combinatorics of like commerce complexity here is is really interesting. So what we're seeing and

interesting. So what we're seeing and what we're focused on building is um uh and maybe give a bit of background.

Stripe billing is one of our major product areas. Um over half of startups

product areas. Um over half of startups going live on Stripe use stripe billing and stripe billing is sort of a layer on top of the core payments infrastructure used to orchestrate payments to model

your business.

>> So this is like if you have fixed recur or like any kind of like customer relationship, it's like how you know what to charge them essentially.

Exactly. Subscriptions, invoicing, how you model your product catalog, how you assess taxes, how you do revenue recognition, all of that. And this has

always been an impediment to just uh customer growth. Like one of the addages

customer growth. Like one of the addages we have internally is that every company has a billing system and [snorts] very few companies are enthusiastic about their billing system. So with billing, we're really focused on changing that.

So they historically use like a different billing system than stripe like was it like Google Sheets usually or >> the the real competitor is the in-house build.

>> Basically everyone ends up building this whole Borgum infrastructure. Stripe

itself has this whole Borgum infrastructure a big team on it. We're

actually migrating onto billing ourselves service by service by service.

>> Yeah.

>> It's very meta like billing the billing infrastructure for the billing infrastructure company.

>> Exactly. Yeah. And you it's interesting you can see the billing revenue for Stripe billing in the Stripe dashboard using billing >> but you really do see with these AI companies the complexity of their

business models because this usage subscriptions hybrid is slowing them down. So browserbase on Stripe

down. So browserbase on Stripe uses billing and usage based billing and by experimenting with things like free trials and discounts they were actually

able to increase their growth by about 17% in relatively short order. Uh and

it's just giving you that business model agility is is something that these AI companies are looking for.

Another sort of related point on the note of free trials is you're seeing new fraud vectors.

>> Yeah, I was going to say because you obviously want to enable your customers to go live quickly, but there is a cost, you know, unlike SAS, there's a cost to people using your

product and then disappearing. And so,

you know, we have Stripe Radar, which has always been focused on mitigating fraud at the time of transaction. Now

we're looking upfunnel with users and saying, "Hey, is this customer coming to you before they even, you know, process a payment, are they fraudulent? Are they

likely to convert to a paying customer?"

Uh, things like that. Are there any common, you know, things that that is currently capturing now, like common AI scams, I guess we could say, or like most common

that you've seen of like ways people are, >> you know, making a quick buck.

we [clears throat] see sort of fraud rings where um fraudsters are creating a ton of free trial accounts and then

selling them. So it's sort of you know

selling them. So it's sort of you know here's here's an account with this service. it gives you this much usage

service. it gives you this much usage and we're packaging these all up and here now you can you know test a bunch of your AI workloads on

shade form or cerebrus or any of these types of companies not speaking about any of them in particular but that type of business model where you're hosting models I think we're seeing you know a lot of fraudsters sort of basically

aggregating usage models and then selling it >> interesting so that would basically be if you me or to go and sign up. There's

you hit the limit and you have to start paying. But we could go and say, "Oh,

paying. But we could go and say, "Oh, wait a second. This person has a hundred or a thousand extra additional free trials that we can just tap into."

>> Exactly. Yeah.

>> Interesting.

>> Yeah.

>> And you can see how they would lose a lot of money on that. Yeah. Yeah.

>> Yeah. The the the four major areas we're focused on in AI at Stripe are one building economic infrastructure for AI.

So this is everything we're just talking about, you know, uh the economic the commercial infrastructure to implement AI business models. these hybrid models, subscriptions and usage.

Two is the infrastructure to enable agentic commerce and I think everyone is really excited about this.

>> Yeah, you guys just did something.

What's the what's the thing that you just kind of announced?

>> So, a couple weeks back we announced that we were partnering with OpenAI on chat GPT instant checkout which for anyone who hasn't used it, it is a great experience.

>> I should have actually tried to use I have not used it yet. I should have before we did this, but >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's it's

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's it's fantastic. It's uh uh incidentally the

fantastic. It's uh uh incidentally the day before we announced it, I was on Etsy buying a

new dog collar for my dog and the next day the demo was shopping in Etsy in Chachi PT and they're both great experiences, but I was just struck by

how I really do think this modality of the iterative shopping within a model is going to work. you know, there's a lot of hub and promise to social commerce

and, you know, it's it's had some mixed success. I think Tik Tok is having some

success. I think Tik Tok is having some good success there, but I really do think chatbased commerce in uh mediated by LMS is going to be powerful. So we

announced uh uh instant checkout chat GPD and the other thing we announced is what we call the agentic commerce protocol which is

you know relatively thin protocol but just a way of standardizing how agents should interact with checkouts.

So checkouts have a lot of logic built into them. Which payment methods can you

into them. Which payment methods can you use? What discounts are there? How are

use? What discounts are there? How are

shipping rates calculated based on basket size? Um you know is this

basket size? Um you know is this fraudulent or not?

And so we had done a lot of experimentation with pure browserbased automation and we found that you know the technology just sort of isn't there yet. And we thought the world would

yet. And we thought the world would really benefit from an open protocol. So

it's not just a stripe thing but an open protocol to just enable the ecosystem to grow a whole lot faster.

>> Is this the shared payment token? Is

that another word for it or >> Yeah, that's how it's implemented on Stripe.

>> Okay.

>> And yeah, basically [clears throat] a shared payment token is a way of securely passing credentials between the point of purchase.

>> This would be Etsy or >> Exactly. So passing it from the point of

>> Exactly. So passing it from the point of purchase, which is say CH GPT to Etsy.

And you know the point is that you don't actually have to expose the underlying credentials to the merchant. Okay. And

this is and I know there was a specific reason that you did that which I feel like I should know. I think in a lot of cases when we're designing these things, we're thinking not only just how do we

very approximately solve a problem for just this use case, but also over time what's good for the world. Um, and we felt like the idea of uh agents just

slinging underlying payment credentials to every merchant on the internet >> didn't, you know, dangerous.

>> Yeah. really pass like security and privacy muster. And so that's why we uh

privacy muster. And so that's why we uh designed it to allow for this secure processing where you can collect the credentials in the chat interface and

then use them to process without having to vault them with all merchants.

>> So like does does strip doesn't actually like own the payment then with the underlying merchant, right? Is that

fair?

>> Yeah, we don't you know against open protocol you don't have to build a com's protocol on top of stripe. We don't have to process the payment. Um, uh, you can

use Stripe for it and we make it very turnkey and seamless. But we were pretty inspired by MCP model context protocol

that Anthropic released. I guess it was last year from

released. I guess it was last year from the standpoint of it being a very simple protocol, something that everyone could get behind and again create sort of this

shelling point for how we're all going to work together on what we think is very big opportunity across the industry. And that's sort of how you

industry. And that's sort of how you think about product as Stripe 2 is like very modular. Like you don't to your

very modular. Like you don't to your point, you don't have to use billing.

You probably don't have to use Stripe issuing. You could use something else if

issuing. You could use something else if you want. Why do you do that? Like don't

you want. Why do you do that? Like don't

why doesn't if I'm company come to Stripe, I'm a startup. Like give me everything Stripe. Like why is it so

everything Stripe. Like why is it so important to be modular?

So I'd say this is a big inflection point in our thinking about how we develop products at Stripe.

There was a time at which we sort of thought, hey, it's going to be the best experience if we are relatively closed and Appleike and just everything will be tightly stitched together and then we just learned from our users.

So that's not what they wanted. I

remember a conversation I had with, you know, one of the largest retailers in Europe when I was in Paris [snorts] and they were looking for help in decreasing

the size of their payments team because they had a couple hundred people on it >> on a retailer in France.

>> Yes. And they were >> That's like a stripe at a series D stage, right? Like a couple hundred

stage, right? Like a couple hundred people like >> Yeah. And and just on Yeah, exactly. And

>> Yeah. And and just on Yeah, exactly. And

just on their payments.

>> Yeah. Just on the payments to you. Yeah.

They have like a whole stripe internally.

>> Exactly. And and actually we've seen this, you know, I think the this was what people would build and one of the things we try to do is say, "Hey, listen, we can take a lot of that off your plate."

your plate." >> Yeah.

>> And I remember them saying, "We would love help like um uh decreasing the footprint, the number of payments processors we work with, and some help in sort of, you know, orchestrating

across them." And so I asked them, well,

across them." And so I asked them, well, how many processors do you work with?

And I expected them to say something like six. They said 83. [snorts]

like six. They said 83. [snorts]

>> Okay.

>> So, who are 83 payment processors?

>> So, you have, you know, a bunch of big names. I listen, I didn't ask them for

names. I listen, I didn't ask them for all of the names. We have a bunch of big names who are offering sort of card processing across the world. And then you have a bunch of local players because they're selling all over the world. And so,

they're integrating to sort of local processors in uh Indonesia or the Philippines or or Malaysia. And so

navigating this the logic across all of these is just a huge workload for them.

>> Yeah.

>> And so for us, we could either sort of ignore that and say, "Hey, what you really want is just to run everything on Stripe." Um, you know, I think they

Stripe." Um, you know, I think they would just say, "No." Or you could say, "hm, interesting. We really think we can

"hm, interesting. We really think we can help with that." And so we've we've been leaning into how do we help you uh orchestrate your commerce infrastructure? Like you said, you don't

infrastructure? Like you said, you don't have to use Stripe payments with billing. You can use billing to run

billing. You can use billing to run subscriptions, send invoices, and then process them with a third party. And I

think we've just learned particularly as we go market and work with more enterprises, you know, now more than half of the Fortune 100 uses Stripe that users want to be met where their systems

are today. And that's what we're focused

are today. And that's what we're focused on.

>> Yeah. And they probably have different pace of adoption, no different things.

Like there might be some companies that like for the first time we are accepting payment online. Yes.

payment online. Yes.

>> And they are not ready for everything else that that you can do.

>> Yeah. You know, it's interesting because the S&P 500 like the average 10 years like 15 20 years and so you could say well 10 years

hence is you know are all these people just sort of processing only on Stripe or many of them processing only on Stripe. It's possible, but we also do

Stripe. It's possible, but we also do see companies growing up on Stripe needing to add, you know, other payment processors because our coverage in a given, you know, geography isn't good

enough yet or they have a board mandate for for redundancy.

We see that some that that latter one has been sort of waning. Um, you know, last year we had

waning. Um, you know, last year we had 99.9996% of requests on our critical APIs succeeding. [snorts] It's actually less

succeeding. [snorts] It's actually less than 1 minute of downtime for the entire year.

>> I was going to ask you how much how much time that was. Yeah. This is pretty pretty interesting because was it all at once or was it like seconds spread out?

>> Yeah, it's it's sort of it's it's actually not like hard down for the API overall. It's just looking at like

overall. It's just looking at like individual fail requests and then sort of imputing a time from that. But the

fascinating side, the other side is we're actually also deploying about 1400 times a day. So you're actually pushing to production like roughly every minute and you're down for less than a minute

the whole year. This has been, you know, just a concerted investment in reliability over the years.

>> What are you updating 1400 times a day?

That's right. Like what's changing?

>> Any number of services, you know, and a lot of them are internal services. A lot

of them are bug fixes and then of course some of them are are bigger bigger pushes.

>> So this might be an interesting time when you're talking about like updating bugs, fixing things, pushing so many times. Are you guys using AI internally

times. Are you guys using AI internally at Stripe? Like to to what extent are

at Stripe? Like to to what extent are you are you using it?

>> Yeah, we're we're using it a lot and we're using it in, you know, targeted ways where we are really focused on getting real value out

of it. you know there's the

of it. you know there's the Jim Collins good to great framework of I think it's crawl walk run in terms of adopting new technologies and um he I

guess his his framework is the best companies are first discovering how this can really advance how they operate and create value for the customers then they start to scale that and they sort of you

know go allin there was the HBR paper recently around work slop I don't know if you saw that it was in September I don't I think I did. What was it?

did. What was it?

>> Yeah, it's a a study that asserted that 95% of companies are actually getting negative ROI on using AI internally.

>> I saw that that headline headline.

>> That was like the bear like it's always funny. There's like these like es and

funny. There's like these like es and flows of like, >> you know, it's over like AI's done. It

was all a scam.

>> Yes. Yes. That's certainly not what we believe, >> but we're, you know, we really don't want that to be the case, right? So,

we're not just sort of like, hey, everybody, you have to use an LLM now for for everything. And so we have found you know some very powerful targeted use cases. So I mentioned minions before but

cases. So I mentioned minions before but also just writing code in general and particularly for our most senior engineers giving them leverage to go faster because they're often thinking a

lot about architecture and you know keeping them from needing to write every line of code instead putting them in a position where they're sort of you know we think about

new grads and one level up as doing a lot of the actual code writing at Stripe. just like empirically they do

Stripe. just like empirically they do write the most lines of code at Stripe and now senior engineers almost have a dedicated team of you know level ones and level twos at Stripe because of LMS

which can assist them in actually code creation and then they're almost in a position of code review of the code that they've created themselves via an LM.

So, you know, depending on how you how you measure it, you could say, you know, more than 50% of code at Stripe is written by >> LMS or you could, you know, say it's less.

>> What's the highest you've seen? Didn't

Salesforce say like 75 or 90%. What was

his number?

>> Yeah, I'm always I think Google recently quoted or maybe was Amazon 70%. I'm

always interested into how as to how people like count this because [snorts] we do you know again a lot of bug fixes

and easy deploys via you know tools like minions internally uh and then we do a lot of code writing that's edited by people internally and so did the write

that code it was more of a collaboration yeah because a lot of times you just think it's like AI agents just running wild like adding a new field to Salesforce or like whatever and That's the kind of I feel like when some of the

CEOs go on like they'll do a CNBC clip and like that's kind of what they make it think. They're what they make the

it think. They're what they make the audience think is happening but it's still there's very much humans that are involved in this like yes very much humans involved.

You know there's sort of a a dynamic where LM are doing a ton of work supervised by humans. So a good example would be actually um uh risk mitigation.

So not just anyone can process payments on Stripe. you need to be a bonafide

on Stripe. you need to be a bonafide business. There's certain categories of

business. There's certain categories of business that are prohibited or deemed highly risky. Those need, you know, some

highly risky. Those need, you know, some stepped up review with which with partners um financial institutions, banks and uh you know, so

there's a a very long, you know, document that if you are a human risk reviewer at Stripe, you need to deeply understand around whether or not a business is supportable for given use cases.

LMS are incredibly good at ingesting rules and then applying them. Uh so we have seen incredible returns on assessing supportability on Stripe both

in accuracy and in efficiency by saying you know hey model uh take a look at this website take a look at all their product pages take a look at you know

everything that's said about them on the internet and let us know like how confident you are that this business is supportable [snorts] and if things are flagged then you sort of humans get involved and can sort of provide that

last 10% oversight that can sort of be dispositive. So [snorts] that's been

dispositive. So [snorts] that's been incredibly powerful. The other

incredibly powerful. The other application that we're really excited about is augmenting our sales development team, our SDR team. Just you

know the early signs are that outbounding uh which is sort of a new motion for Stripe. Like so much of our go to market motion has been driven by inbound but outbounding is going to

become not just more efficient but also more effective when we let LLM go deeply understand a business on the internet and then craft a message about how

Stripe might be useful to that business and then you know SDRs get involved to edit that send it and then sort of track track the lead from there.

>> So when you say that that might be interesting are you indicating that like it's not quite there yet? Because I I mean I think everyone listening to this gets those like really bad AI generated sales emails.

>> Yeah. Yeah. We're actually seeing so far that they are getting higher response rates.

>> Really? Okay. Is there anything specific that the higher response rates get? Like

are they shorter emails? Do they like use numbers? They have misspellings like

use numbers? They have misspellings like do do you know?

>> You know I don't know offhand. I was

actually reading some of these last week.

>> Oh really? Okay. what what seems to be like the general vibe of like these good AI.

>> They seem very personalized, you know, so they seem like I really deeply understand what you're doing. And again,

I think this is because they've been able to go, you know, leverage the the base model that, you know, OpenAI or Anthropic or other has has created that is sort of

compressed the internet. Um, and so they can, you know, take that compression, go look at a website and come back with a lot of really interesting facts about that company that would take a long time

for just a human to aggregate.

>> Yeah. It might be interesting in nontech related or even like none denominated jobs.

>> Yeah. So like if you run a manufacturing firm or something and you get AI generated really good email about some like manufacturing related software or something. I'm actually maybe this is a

something. I'm actually maybe this is a terrible example because maybe they get a ton of emails >> but when I think about like as like a VC I'm constantly getting emails and like a lot of them are AI generated. So I

wonder if there's like in those like >> less email denominated industries or something where there's like or even like actually this might be illegal but like texting I actually don't think you can text people like there's a lot of

rules on that. Yeah,

>> but even Yeah, I don't know. LinkedIn, I

think there's a lot of like LinkedIn automation that people do.

>> Yeah, I've seen a lot more inbound texts. So, illegal or not, it seems to

texts. So, illegal or not, it seems to be happening.

>> I get a lot from like loan companies. I

think it's cuz like if you have a credit card balance, you like show up on a list and they're like, you know, you qualify for a personal loan like $63,000 like consolidate your debt. Like, I'm not interested. Stop calling me eight times

interested. Stop calling me eight times a day.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I get a lot of the fixedterm employment offers.

>> Oh, that'd be nice. Yeah. Like, hey, we heard you're looking for a a job. Here's

Exactly.

>> Do you ever get those like they're like I get a lot from like Indeed recruiters like we found your resume on on Indeed or LinkedIn and like I'm, you know, Patricia from, you know, Geico or

something and like we're hiring remote workers.

>> Yes.

>> I've actually heard that there's some shady stuff that goes on with that. like

you're they pitch you as like you're running payroll for a company, >> but you're actually like a >> almost like a drug money mule in a way >> or like you're facilitating those funds.

It's actually a pretty common um tactic that a lot of people use for that, which is it does that show up on Stripe at all? Not that I know of offhand, but but

all? Not that I know of offhand, but but broadly, you know, some of the best advice that I ever received and I think just as a company have ever received

came from Robin Vince, who is the he's the CEO of BNY Melon at the [snorts] time. He was the CRO. Maybe this

time. He was the CRO. Maybe this

actually was back when he was the treasurer at Goldman Sachs. Uh, and I had recently joined Stripe. I joined as a CFO and I asked him, you know, among other things about being a CFO, like what is the single most important thing

that you think Stripe needs to get right? [snorts] And this is way back in

right? [snorts] And this is way back in 2016. And he said, you all will need to

2016. And he said, you all will need to become conspicuously good at risk management.

And it always stuck out to me as, you know, plausibly the case, but I wasn't so sure why.

>> Yeah. Because you probably think we need to build a beautiful product. Exactly.

>> That's the most important thing.

>> Exactly.

And you know I think now Stripe is processing you know a lot more than uh uh >> yeah what's the last public number

>> actually I guess the last public number is 1.3 trillion and 1.4 trillion of payment volume per year. So you know

you're between 1 and 2% of global GDP.

>> And so at this scale you're becoming an actor that is sort of systemically large.

>> Yeah. someone takes you down, 2% of the economy doesn't run.

>> Exactly. Yeah. And so that you know the investment in reliability is so critical. Investment security is so

critical. Investment security is so critical and also you become you know a huge target for not just fraud risk but you mentioned a second ago you know sort

of scams or transaction laundering.

You'll see a lot of times on Stripe what looks like a very bonafide merchant. you

know, here's the domain and you know, you can actually place purchases, real looking products, and it is in fact sort of a mule for you to buy guns on a different website.

>> Oh, interesting.

>> You go to the other website, you see what the gun costs, you buy a product that costs the same amount on here, >> like you're buying a makeup kit or something like completely unrelated.

>> Exactly. But this is actually where um AI is again extremely powerful. Um we

have we've we've always had a bunch of ML models in production stripe about 150 models in production at Stripe and some of these are DNN's like deep neuralats

some of the more sophisticated ones are but we launched mid year this year the first ever payments foundation model and basically what the payments foundation

model is is these giant vectorzed embeddings where you take just a ton of stripe data, you tokenize it, you throw it

against the transformers, and you then end up with this clustering. You know,

it's it's a it's encoder only model. So

you're not actually saying that we're then going to sort of decode it and sort of, you know, make a lot of extrapolations about exactly what the data means, but we're able to see the

clustering of different merchants and these transaction laundering merchants just show up together in in the in the sort of giant embedding space. And so

it's it's been fascinating to see and I think one of the great discoveries or or revelations the past few years in AI has been that you take less opinionated

model less opinionated model architecture a ton of compute a ton of data and that tends to work better than you know sort of the really minute

architectural thinking around models. That's sort of only partially true because there's still a lot around model architecture that has been the unlocks you think things like inference time um uh yeah

inference time compute but what we've seen is that we had a lot of handcurated features in our models in the past and by just creating a really big model with all of our data were able to mitigate

risk a whole lot better than we were able to you know by sort of using our intuition around how you would discover these companies >> and it's just because you keep getting a bigger data set or more tests and then

that it solves itself. Like is that how it works?

>> Yeah, it's sort of the magic of DNN's.

They discover their own features. And so

the features that you may intuitively think will lead you to whether or not a customer is laundering firearms transactions through what looks like a

kids toys website. Um may not be the most telling features and a giant foundation model can discover those.

>> Interesting. So, do you do you use you said you don't really use it necessarily, but you like made it to like see things. Is that a fair way to describe it?

>> We do use it. Yeah,

>> we do use Okay.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And and primarily for risk mitigation. Yeah. Okay.

mitigation. Yeah. Okay.

>> So, card testing again like card testers show up, you know, as a cluster or transaction errors show up as a cluster.

>> What's a card tester? Is that like you're testing to see if the card will work if you want to like just run a bunch of money through it?

>> You've stolen a ton of of cards, other payment credentials. You want to resell

payment credentials. You want to resell them. you need to know which ones like

them. you need to know which ones like you can actually are actually usable.

Maybe you want to use them yourself.

Yeah.

>> Yeah. I think the surprising thing I had a guest probably about a year or two ago, her name was Natasha. The company

is called Cable. They do like they help just financial institutions fight crime basically financial crime. And it's it's like a couple percentage points of GDP is just like people >> totally

>> doing crime which is like Yes.

>> fraud, drugs, >> other even more horrible things.

>> So it's pretty interesting just like how big that world is. It's kind of scary.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the pillars of our company strategy for the past three years running is to become guardians of the global financial ecosystem. And that

has meant, you know, by turns getting even better at mitigating risk on Stripe while creating, you know, a surprisingly great user experience. And in the back end, how do we create tools and

platforms that we can actually sell to other financial institutions or to our users to make it risk on their side?

>> I think you were pretty involved in this product that's kind of it's connected to chatbt right now and how you do payments. It's called link. Is that

payments. It's called link. Is that

what's like the story with link? like

what is it? And it's like what's the scale of it? Now, at this point, >> it's it's our only sort of consumer product and it's effectively a very thin

layer that we created um to increase conversion and broadly improve online payments. Um it now has over 200 million

payments. Um it now has over 200 million consumers in the network. It's growing

very very quickly. And it was predicated upon the belief and now I think sort of confirmed belief that we could create better payments experiences by having

the ability to set this little cookie with consumers and have a thin relationship with them than we could otherwise. So for example,

otherwise. So for example, our customers have you know for Stripe's entire existence wanted bank account driven payments. So

AC you mean >> AC SEPA in in Europe, you know, backs in other parts of the world in Australia, New Zealand, so on or backs I guess in the UK and the backs in Australia, New

Zealand. And the problem is bank account

Zealand. And the problem is bank account payments are they don't have a lot of the sort of magic of credit card payments. You know,

I think um uh the the schemes Visa, Mastercard, Dynamics have built some really powerful infrastructure. you

know, they have kind of root access to program the money in your bank account.

They can say, "Hey, you just bought this coffee. I'm gonna hold $5 or New York,

coffee. I'm gonna hold $5 or New York, $8, whatever on in your bank account, uh, and I'm going to then settle it to to the merchant at the right time."

You don't have that with AT. So you

actually see that it's something like 4% of transactions fail 5 days after the the the transaction happened. And so we

built Link for many reasons, but one of them was, hey, how can we actually make a bank account payment method that works the way you want it to? So one of the things that customers want is instant confirmation that they'll get the cash.

>> So they don't want to wait 5 days to know whether or not it went through. is

a a merchant that is using Shrek.

>> Exactly. So, you know, if you actually go into Uber and you can see that it's supported right in the Uber app, you know, Uber, you know, wants to know at the time of booking the ride, is this payment going to go through or not? So,

if you use instant bank payments on link, you get instant confirmation uh that it's going to go through. And so,

there's a whole lot of things we have to do to enable that, but you know, one of the biggest ones is just the underlying ML model to say, well, we know all of this about you and your transaction history, and you've linked your bank

account to Stripe. Um, and so we can, you know, automatically confirm that payment. There's also sort of, you know,

payment. There's also sort of, you know, just the pure convenience of link where you're showing up at a new merchant and you can pack in, you know, your 16 digits and your your zip code and

everything else. Or you can just get a,

everything else. Or you can just get a, you know, a quick OTP on your phone to say, you know, I'm at a new AI service.

Um, I say that because Link is overwhelmingly popular with AI services and I would rather not have to go through the whole checkout flow again. I

just want to, you know, get started quickly.

>> Yeah. And you started pretty quickly, right? Like it was kind of this like

right? Like it was kind of this like initially just like a I think it was like the remember me feature like you click a button or something like that.

>> Yes, that's right. Yeah, we

>> did. You not expect it to just keep growing? Like what's the story there? So

growing? Like what's the story there? So

we technically launched link wasn't called link back in I think 2014 and it was a ability to remember your payment credentials on what we was then called

stripe checkout and then when we launched the new version of stripe checkout which was in 2018 it didn't have remember me built into it.

>> Oh you removed it.

>> Yeah but we removed it.

>> Oh okay. And there were millions of of consumers that were using remember me, but it didn't have a name. There was no sort of identified consumer thing. It

was just a feature on Stripe. [snorts]

And then we woke up one day, we're like, why did we get rid of that? Like that

was really useful to merchants. And so

link was the sort of reincarnation of remember me. Started only a few years

remember me. Started only a few years ago and as I mentioned now over 200 million consumers and >> nice becoming a big deal. And we

actually see that for a lot of merchants, particularly the new cohort of merchants joining Stripe, it's 50 60% of their transactions are linked transactions.

>> Oh, interesting. Is there a benefit to them? Whereas like speed, cost, any

them? Whereas like speed, cost, any anything like that or is it just like higher conversion because people are saved?

>> That's the principal one, higher conversion. Customer experience, just

conversion. Customer experience, just consumers love link. It's a very subtle experience today. So actual brand

experience today. So actual brand awareness is relatively low. We're going

to be changing that in the near future, but you know, you'll see just go through Twitter, you see people say, "I love it when I see link."

>> Yeah. Yeah. It's really sick. My my

favorite link story personally is I uh when I first signed up, I put the wrong phone number in. Like I think I put like a six instead of a nine at the end of my phone number. And so it like didn't work

phone number. And so it like didn't work for me for a while. And every anytime a checkout had link, I like I couldn't use it because I couldn't change my phone number in the thing, which I think you guys have since updated and I can like

use it again. But I just remember thinking like ah it's like the only time I ever put my phone number in wrong. I

couldn't use the product.

>> Yeah, it definitely was a launch and iterate quickly um experience on the consumer side. So, thank you for bearing

consumer side. So, thank you for bearing with us.

>> But, you know, it it it goes beyond cards and banking account payments. You

know, we're always thinking at Stripe about, you know, obviously our users and they are the the primary focus for Stripe, but also just other constituents in the payments ecosystem. And so we've

partnered with CLA recently to create, you know, what I believe is the best BNPL purchasing experience on the internet, which is sort of link xcler.

They stood up a bunch of custom APIs for us. And if you use by now pay later

us. And if you use by now pay later services, you'll find that they're incredibly powerful for increasing conversion in some ways, but they're also very frictionful. like you actually

have to get bounced out to CLA a firm or otherwise put in a bunch of information wait for a spinner for a while to say whether or not you're eligible to make the purchase. We do all of that

the purchase. We do all of that underwriting in the background in link.

So by the time you actually get to link checkout if CLA appears it's just one click to check out.

>> Oh interesting. I didn't realize that cuz you always see those like you probably seen the memes. Do you remember back probably like it was probably 2021 there would be like literally 10 options of like there would be there'd be like a

Stripe type check out button and there would be like Amazon pay there'd be like shopy pay fast there's like a couple of these startups that were doing one click check out and then CLA all the there's

like four BNPL auctions >> is that I [laughter] don't think I have like it's just a funny observation of like but I feel like we're we've moved past that right like is there like

consolidation in sort of that checkout button, >> you know, space.

>> I don't know that we're in a sort of I mean, there's been some consolidation, you know, cash app bot, Afterpay, but there hasn't been a whole lot of consolidation. And this is actually one

consolidation. And this is actually one of the areas that we really focus on for consumers, sorry, for for customers is when one of your shoppers hits the

checkout page, like for that particular shopper, which payment method should you show?

>> Oh, yes. You like source the certain one higher. Yeah.

higher. Yeah.

>> Yeah. And we we see this this drives conversion a lot.

>> So, one question, there's probably people have been listening to this. I

don't know, we're like an hour in.

There's probably like people that are like kicking me like, "Dude, you got to ask them this question. Why haven't you asked this yet?"

>> Stripe going public. I know people always people always comment on it.

Anything to say?

>> Not a ton to say. I think maybe the I think the sort of incumbent perspective is why aren't you going public?

>> Yeah. or why are you staying private?

>> Yeah. And

I think the way that John Patrick Stephan, our CFO, and I think about this is why are you going public? Uh, you

know, it's a bunch of work. It's the

whole different way of operating. You

know, you know, we already operate with the controls, the rigor, the time to close of a public company. And so it's like what's the incremental benefit of going public?

I you know when I joined as CFO a long time ago um uh we had this principle of we always wanted to operate cash flow positive

and to this day we have actually never burned a dollar of investor money. Uh

there were a couple years in the early 2020s where we burned cash but we we didn't burn sort of below the amount that we had accured on our balance

sheet. Uh so just you know stripe has

sheet. Uh so just you know stripe has always been sort of financially independent in that sense. Um Stripe is now extremely profitable and so there's a question of like what like what is the reason to go public?

>> Yeah.

>> It seems like a lot of people like you need to give retail investors the ability to participate. Yeah. Like

that's a common reason that people give.

>> Yeah. And I guess is I guess that's sort of a belief in like creating like equity between institutional investors and retail investors.

Yeah, maybe that's Yeah, I'm not sure that that is the thing that should guide our decision- making here so much as >> there's billions of people that need Stripe equity in their retirement portfolios.

>> Yeah, I I I would say, you know, being a missiondriven company, it is how do we grow the GDP of the internet as quickly as possible? How do we stay just

as possible? How do we stay just resolutely focused on our users? We're

already a highly regulated global financial institution. And so, you know,

financial institution. And so, you know, the day comes where we say, "Hey, you know, there really is a good reason to do this." And I suspect we will.

do this." And I suspect we will.

[snorts] >> Yeah. I feel like some of the benefits

>> Yeah. I feel like some of the benefits of being public is like you have a your stock is more liquid. So, in theory, there's like a you have like a lower cost of capital,

but then you can argue it like on a on a company per company basis like how much of a benefit does a specific company get from sliding into that? Like you may not get much of a benefit.

>> Yeah. I think another interesting thing when I think about this is just like the incentives of your investors. So if

you're managing like a public public market assets or funds when you think about like how do you make money you charge management fees and you get carry and you get paid carried quarterly if

it's public you get get paid on the exit if it's private but typically I mean there's been a lot of fee compression in public markets. So if like you're

public markets. So if like you're managing public market money you might be getting like one and a half% management fee maybe less. you may be charging on average like 15% carry versus in the private markets 2%

management fee. Some some people do like

management fee. Some some people do like two and a half or 3%. And then also you get the carry that percentage is also higher. So there's like there's a

higher. So there's like there's a certain element of like certain investors are like I think it's just perpetually continue to shift from public to private because why why wouldn't you?

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. And there's clearly a blurring between public and private investors at at this stage.

>> Yeah. I think in the u in John's podcast, Cheeky Pint with Dan and D1.

>> Yeah.

>> He's like a public market investor, but I think he said like 70% of their AUM is private. I I may be getting this number

private. I I may be getting this number wrong, but I I think I remember him saying that more was actually on the private side, more AUM.

>> Yes.

>> Which you wouldn't wouldn't have thought about that.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Yeah. I think the principal reasons you know why companies go public besides just inertia and the idea that you're supposed to do it [snorts] are one access to capital you know

stripe has issued bonds investment grade company you know highly highly cash flowing just that's not an acute need today creating employee liquidity we've been able to run tender offers can't

promise to always run those but we've returned many billions of dollars to investors to employees and so on and then the third is you know maybe something around marketing and branding

where you know by being public you're sort of more trusted or seen as more enterprisegrade uh that may sort of linger around in certain corners but I think we've mostly

crossed that transom you know half of the Fortune 100 using stripe stripe being you know one of the major processors for companies like Amazon

Stripe moving you know $1.3 trillion in in in money per year So just none of those three really seem to be pushing us down the IPO river.

>> I think there's [snorts] another element too of early people with illlquid stock want liquidity and so if you just kind of go public it's like just get your liquidity and just kind of deal with it. But

there's you definitely see this with some larger private companies where they just do like I think SpaceX does like quarterly liquidity or every six months.

It's just like a planned like you know you can sell whatever you need to sell.

We do this event. So I think like that's something that's kind of evolved too.

And then some of the well some of the business models of some of the private market funds also is like we are on the cap table. We will we will give you some

cap table. We will we will give you some of our like access to our shares that we have. Like that's another model that's

have. Like that's another model that's emerged. Totally. Yeah. Listen the the

emerged. Totally. Yeah. Listen the the the the market I don't mean the stock market. I mean just like the the market

market. I mean just like the the market changes quickly. You know every year we

changes quickly. You know every year we write a consolidated company strategy.

And you know I you just can't overinvest in strategic clarity for for yourself and for your team.

>> You said you cannot overinvest.

>> You can't overinvest in it. You know

it's it's one of my biggest learnings as as a leader is that what may seem obvious to you just is not obvious in all the minds of the company. And so you just you you really want to emphasize

strategic clarity. Actually it's

strategic clarity. Actually it's fascinating. In 2021 it was you know we

fascinating. In 2021 it was you know we do an internal stripes sat and we asked about you know a bunch of different things. One of them was like Stripe has a clear strategy. I

think something like 50% of respondents agreed with that. We're now above 90%.

And it's just a concerted investment in sort of, you know, encanting the most important things what you're focused on and why.

This year with these sort of, you know, twin revolutions in stable coins and AI, it's not that we've thrown the strategy out the window, but we have had to be very, very nimble in thinking about deploying, you know, internal resources

and some of our best people against new opportunities.

And so being private, having the flexibility to think about doing that without like wondering about, you know, the any major like knee-jerk reactions that might

happen from investors and activists and so on. I think it's a luxury and, you

so on. I think it's a luxury and, you know, again, it it may be that at some point there is, you know, a good reason to go public, but today we ask ourselves

why do it uh versus, you know, why not?

There's also kind of to your point about like activist investors, there's just like annoying component is like if you've got $2 billion or like your company is worth x amount and you can like get a percentage of it

and like make demands and it's like I think I had Aaron from box on the podcast and he was like they had to deal with some stuff where like people were trying to kick him out and force him to sell and they got through it but it was

just like not what he wanted to do.

Yeah. and all these attractable problems and Aaron is amazing and he navigated that so well but and it probably wasn't the way he wanted to spend his time and probably wasn't the highest and best for how he spent his time. His hair's a little more grayer than it [laughter]

was if you like you age for sure.

>> Yeah.

>> So I want to ask you so back in college you did this thing called hack Yale.

>> Um what was it?

>> Actually was I was in law school in in law school. Yeah I

law school. Yeah I >> was in law school. It it was this very fun sort of incidental mission where I was

at Yale Law School. I was actually also working in the city as an engineer at the time and you know I had been an undergrad at Harvard and had seen this

incredible culture.

>> What what year was this like 2010ish >> for undergrad? Yeah.

>> Uh I guess I graduated in 2007 so it was in the you know early to mid 2000s. This

is the, you know, the Facebook Meta, you know, gestation era.

>> Did you have like a like a hot or not account? What was the original one

account? What was the original one called? Were you a real member?

called? Were you a real member?

>> Was I honestly can't remember.

>> I know there was Friendster, but that was separate.

>> Yeah. But you were a member of the Facebook.

Okay. Back in I was on the Facebook when it was Harvard only, right?

>> And there's this incredible culture of like entrepreneurialism as an undergrad. And I was actually really struck when I got to law school that there just wasn't. And the

curriculum for computer science was like sort of OpenGL and some like legacy technologies and and and learning about

like how computers worked in a sort of, you know, backwards looking way versus just like, hey, how can you build things quickly? There wasn't really this

quickly? There wasn't really this builder mentality. And so Hackel was

builder mentality. And so Hackel was about how do we create this builder mentality on campus? [snorts] And so I decided to just I had all these these

undergrads coming to me I guess through word of mouth saying I have this idea like can you work with me on it can you build it with me?

>> Oh because they knew you knew how to code you were an engineer. It's like

that classic I got an idea like I build it and the answer was no I I can't I have you know a lot to read for law school and I have a job

>> but maybe I can teach you. And so it started with you know just a handful of kids the first week and I was just thinking okay I'm going to teach like JavaScript end to end so that you know

you can think of server side and client side and single language. This was early days of Node.js [snorts] and just going to get people like you know from zero to one you know they can just start building their own

at least sort of demo apps. Yep.

>> So it started with probably like nine kids the first week or something like that. Second week it was sort of

that. Second week it was sort of standing room only but in like a 30 person room. Third week it was over a

person room. Third week it was over a hundred and just there was no fourth week. I shut it down and said okay let's

week. I shut it down and said okay let's see what this could be. So we just postered around campus that we're doing this and allowed students to apply um

and in a week a third of the Yale undergrad student body applied for the class which was pretty amazing. But this

wasn't actually a class. Like it wasn't an official class.

>> No. In fact, the computer science department hated me for doing it.

[laughter] Um it was it was actually quite controversial.

>> Really?

>> Yeah. Um and so I ended up working with some amazing people on it. Uh uh Miles Grimshaw, who's an incredible partner >> at Thrive at Thrive, >> Yeah.

>> was one of my TAs. uh uh be roast who's you know runs a great startup and was at Google before was sort of a co- teacher

with me and and so you know we sort of turned it into a proper curriculum. I

was all, you know, pro bono and it like lives on to today. Um, and actually sort of went to multiple campuses, but it was

really um really rewarding and fun just sort of trying to sort of change culture on campus and actually find as a leader

just culture is one of the hardest and most fun things to work on. Um, I I I often find that companies have too many operating principles. Uh, and this was

operating principles. Uh, and this was even true of us until recently where it's like here's the 15 things that we sort of, you know, reward and think about prioritizing as a company. And,

you know, we've really distilled ours to just a handful. When I think about the people who are the most successful at Stripe, they are the most user focused.

Um, they are the most impatient and fast. They are most demanding of quality

fast. They are most demanding of quality in what they do. So, we say like be meticulous about your craft. Focus on

craft and beauty.

They're the most humble, the most collaborative. And it's really, you

collaborative. And it's really, you know, that handful of things that makes, you know, people successful at Stripe. And so, you know, just always thinking about

culture. How are you modeling it? How

culture. How are you modeling it? How

are you messaging it? I think is one of the most important things you can do as a leader.

>> And then around like this same time you I can't remember if you joined Thrive when you were at school or if you had graduated, but how did that come about?

because that was a pretty big pretty big move back in the time.

>> Yeah, I was I was still in school.

Josh Kushner, who's Thrive's founder and and runs Thrive, reached out to me cold. We didn't really know each other. And I was working as an engineer at one of his portfolio

companies. At this point, Thrive was a

companies. At this point, Thrive was a really really small fund. It was Josh and and and Jared and a little bit of, you know, I think individuals money. I I

don't know actually. I think it was some of the the general catalyst partners were involved and he reached out because he wanted a CTO for the fund. And so the idea is that I would join the fund as a

CTO and actually I remember you know hacking together like a CRM in the early days so we could track conversations and start thinking about tracking information about companies. And then it turned out what we really needed was

just people to do deals. And so I started doing that and [snorts] was fortunate and very uh excited to be on the journey from

Thrive being about a $5 million fund to being a few billion by the time I left for Stripe about 5 years later.

>> And so I I think Claire asked me to to ask you this. You wrote a memo to do the investment.

How was that memo played out? Like I I don't know if there's like significance of what was in this thing, but she wanted me to ask about it. How does how does that all kind of happened between >> Oh, I see. like the investment memo at Drive to Messenger.

>> Was was there like a like a legendary memo that she's mentioning or maybe she's just wondering like what what did you think about Stripe at the time, what it could be and like what how it's evolved.

I always think that in B2B, you really want to focus on problem areas that have an enormous market size, like some degree of universality, like

everybody needs the mousetrap you're building, and then a notion that people really care about the quality of the mouse trap, like they want the best one.

I sort of think of this as it's being core to uh to the purchaser. like they they really will care about their choice. So, an

example of a company I invested in that is universal um but maybe not core was a great company, a company that Stripe uses called Greenhouse for applicant

tracking. Everyone needs an applicant

tracking. Everyone needs an applicant tracking system, but it's a few on the market and people don't necessarily agonize over which one. [snorts] Uh part of the reason I was so excited about Stripe was it's such a macro

opportunity. You could just see the

opportunity. You could just see the focus of the company, mission of the company being to grow GDP.

That was the that was the mission back at >> that was the mission back then. Yes. To

accelerate the base of globalization. So

quite inspiring. John and Patrick are very inspiring people.

>> Yeah. That's great marketing at the time. Yes. From like getting people

time. Yes. From like getting people excited to join, invest, etc. >> Yes. Um had the right customer base,

>> Yes. Um had the right customer base, right? You know, you have, you know,

right? You know, you have, you know, back in the day, I'm not actually sure that people thought of the merchant acquirer they were choosing as being super core so much as just which one's the cheapest. And, [snorts] you know,

the cheapest. And, [snorts] you know, developers as customers really wanted the thing that could help them move the fastest.

Growth was extraordinary. I felt a lot of um I had a ton of respect for John and Patrick and really liked working with them uh as an investor.

And yeah, I think uh in terms of the question of like how how it's played out, you know, I don't think I projected Stripe out 10 years. It's been almost 10 years. I could go back and look, but

years. I could go back and look, but last I checked, Stripe was ahead of my projections on volume and slightly below my projections

on margin. And I don't mean OPEX margin,

on margin. And I don't mean OPEX margin, but just margin in terms of like gross margin, >> like the take rate essentially.

>> Exactly. Yeah, the take rate. Net of uh net of network fees. So, Stripe did not turn into like a big corporate behemoth like extracting value as fast as you thought they would. Like you're still

like [laughter] very much you're just you're giving a lot to the ecosystem.

>> Okay.

>> Yeah. One one belief I have that >> maybe is a bit contrarian is that it is great to be a low margin business and that people overindex on margins.

>> You know, for example, public market investors will really care like what your gross margin is. uh to a large extent that depends on how you report your revenue. So a lot of payments companies report net revenue

and then off of that their gross margin will look really high. That's they're

pulling out all the payment systems costs. If you look on gross gross

costs. If you look on gross gross revenue then they're a lot lower margin.

The reason why I think being a low margin business is great is it just keeps you obsessively focused on customer needs. Uh there's so much

customer needs. Uh there's so much leverage in the next thing you can build for customers that they will you know fervently enthusiastically

adopt because you know the core of what you're selling them you know is a low margin business if you build that additional service you might be able to

augment your margin by 20% by 10% so on >> but if you're already super profitable the new thing might just not even move the needle you're saying or might actually decrease your margin or something like that.

>> Exactly. And and so I I I think if you did some sort of, you know, regression or PCA or something like that, you'd probably find that for the most part

companies that have lower margins, at least to begin, are the most customer obsessed. Amazon obviously being a great

obsessed. Amazon obviously being a great example.

>> Yeah, I think Amazon's an interesting example, too, because there's such a long period of time where just the general consensus was Amazon is not profitable. So just like internet

profitable. So just like internet commerce isn't profitable. work. Yeah,

exactly.

>> Yeah. And I think there's like a a crazy story with the way Walmart ran the business and like compensated people like as a store GM, you were compensated based on how your store performed. And

so like if somebody in a customer of your store were to like order something online, it would you you were incentivized for that to not happen because you get paid less. So like

Walmart itself because of this like almost like meme of like, oh, Amazon's not profitable. We don't need to worry

not profitable. We don't need to worry about e-commerce. It's got to the point

about e-commerce. It's got to the point where it's like 2014 you're like, "Oh, wow. We have never focused on this and

wow. We have never focused on this and Amazon kind of beat us."

>> Yes.

>> And we we'll never fully recover like we we kind of lost our footing that we have. So I I think it's an interesting

have. So I I think it's an interesting way to like continue to operate with >> Yeah. you know, under the surface maybe

>> Yeah. you know, under the surface maybe in a way too like people just don't fully pay attention because another example is like you just look at >> what you ask someone what's the most interesting thing right now and it's like AI

>> what's the fastest growing most profitable thing it's like chat GBT all right we need an AI strategy so everyone is like attracted to this light yes >> and they like forget about oh there's like a low margin also really good

business that just that no one cares about because AI is the thing >> yes >> yeah it's there was definitely a consensus in in the early days that like

Stripe wasn't a good business because >> because margins were low actually it wasn't a consensus but there was a there was a cohort of people who who sort of

felt that strongly and I think others who saw more potential but you know on the note of just how it keeps you focused on on users

stable coins are I think an incredible opportunity for our customers who have low margins because if you think about you know

marketplaces maybe they take three five 10% off of the transa the the GMV that they're creating [snorts] you know if you're looking at then the payment method costs you know be that

cards or BMPLS or otherwise or wallets you know that can chew up you know twothirds of the take on on those payment methods >> instantly like boost your profits

>> 50% yeah if If if you can create a high converting global payment method using stable coins that is you know uh really going to boost the margins of these companies.

>> So then how did you decide to join like you had been at Stripe or sorry you were at Thrive and you probably were pretty happy as an investor I'm assuming. How

did it kind of come about that you join also you join you joined this one as CFO? Like it's probably I was I would

CFO? Like it's probably I was I would probably not have you pegged as like the top on paper choice of like a CFO of a company at the time. [laughter]

>> Yeah. So I think I think I was an accidental VC and then sort of an accidental CFO in a way. I loved working at Thrive Thrive. It's an amazing place.

So I love the team. I don't think that being a venture capitalist was the thing I wanted to do when I grew up. just I

technologist want to have my hands in what we're building.

>> Y >> be very close to it.

>> Uh one night I got a text from Patrick saying, "Hey, do you want to come be CFO?"

CFO?" >> That was it. Yeah, that was that was it.

And I think I replied, I probably have the text way back somewhere, that seems like a really bad idea. And

Patrick being very convincing said something along the lines of, "Well, John and I think we could do it." And I was sort of like, "All right, challenge accepted."

And um I wasn't planning at the time to to to leave Thrive by any means. I think

my sort of incumbent plan was, you know, this is great. I'm going to do this for a while longer. I'm going to go start a company. I think that's always a journey

company. I think that's always a journey that that I had expected to be on.

But it was Stripe and you know John and Patrick are just incredible people. I

was really motivated by the mission. I

thought the product was excellent.

And then in terms of CFO, you know, we we talked earlier about going public at the time. We were

certainly nowhere near that. And so

there was, I think, the ability to bring in a CFO without public market experience.

And and you know, I think there were a lot of ways I could contribute as CFO.

I'm not sure that I would have been the the sort of best CFO to take the company public. And a few years in, you know, I

public. And a few years in, you know, I talked to Patrick and just CFO wasn't really the journey that I wanted to be on. Um, so today we have an incredible

on. Um, so today we have an incredible CFO and Stephan Tomlinson who's worked at a lot of public companies and I think he's a better profile for Stripe at CFO than I would have been. Yeah, that's

fair. And then how do you think you earned their trust? Like as somebody sort of from the outside like because obviously there was like a reason that he texted you this. It probably wasn't like Hey, what do you think about this idea?

It's like probably made up his mind and was like, come come do this. Like, what

do you think was the reason that they trusted you? That's a good question.

trusted you? That's a good question.

We all believe strongly that just by far the most important input into hiring is back channels and references. I think

people really overindex on the several times that you spend 30 minutes with a highly consequential hire >> and just like how well can you read them and like you look in their eyes and like this guy's a killer or something like

that. Yeah. Okay.

that. Yeah. Okay.

>> Yeah. I tend to look at sustained performance at excellent companies as being a key indicator and then back channels and references. So

Patrick and I knew each other pretty well at that point. We'd known each other for a couple of years and I think he had talked to a lot of people and felt like it was a good bet to make.

>> Interesting. Yeah, that's fair. And then

Claire also mentioned you put a really high sort of priority on the strategic finance function.

>> Um I I guess I think I sort of know what that is, but some people might not really know what that means. So what is strategic finance and why was that such a big deal to do at the time?

Yeah, I think the maybe the industry term for it would be, you know, uh FPNA, but the part of FPNA that is closer to product development and and go to market.

>> Okay, >> there's sort of corporate which is consolidation and closing the books and so on. And

then there's the part of it sort of partnering deeply with the business and with product development teams. When when I joined, I think we had five

people on the finance team and most of those were certainly the accounting side. We didn't even have a treasury

side. We didn't even have a treasury team. We had a small tax team. And we

team. We had a small tax team. And we

really just didn't have a good understanding of the business. And so in the early days just wanted to get to having a baseline model for Stripe's trajectory and how we make money today and how we can expect to do so tomorrow.

>> [snorts] >> I remember like one of the early inflection points that doesn't sound like an inflection point but it actually was in our thinking was when we launched Radar. Radar is our fraud mitigation

Radar. Radar is our fraud mitigation tool. It was the first time that we

tool. It was the first time that we launched a product that was not payments. And again, this probably

payments. And again, this probably sounds incredibly obvious in retrospect, but the incumbent perspective to that point was Stripe would be the product and it would be you buy Stripe and

Stripe processes your payments and does a bunch of other things for you and you're going to pay for Stripe. And this

was the first unbundling of products.

And I think that was guided significantly because of sort of the some of the early investigations we were doing and seeing that as our customers were getting larger, they wanted to see more unbundling of value and they wanted

to see well I'm paying this amount for payments. and getting competitive bids

payments. and getting competitive bids from others saying we'll give you lower payments rates but we knew our fraud product was really really good and so okay well let's give you a better rate

on the core payments but let's also sell you fraud mitigation and sort of demonstrate that value as being sort of uh two dimensions opposed to one [snorts] so it's an interesting kind of

like evolution then like so then how how do you think about the the go to market of the stripe enterprise of products today like when You said you're seeing results on SDR, AI, outbound or

whatever. Like

whatever. Like >> do you like figure out a specific pain point you try to have like as the entry point? Is it always payments?

point? Is it always payments?

>> So it's not always payments. And I would say just you know a big learning for me and I think just something I would advocate to founders, CEOs, product leaders is just

get incredibly close to go to market and to sales. Um because like you know when

to sales. Um because like you know when you step back sales is reality. You

know, it is that moment in front of the customer. Are they interested or not?

customer. Are they interested or not?

Why are they interested? What can you learn from that? That is just so viscerally educating as to where you

should be going as a company. Um, and so today I think we see a bunch of different entry points into companies.

One is around core payments. You know,

you have for enterprise customers in in most cases like a pretty significant enterprise uh sorry payments infrastructure they've built and you might have more of a land and expand motion there where it's like okay adopt

stripe for part of your payment stack see how we perform off rates tend to be a very key part of the calculus or you know you want to add a payment method that you don't have today you can use

stripe for that the really interesting thing that we've been seeing on the core payment side is customers using what we call our optimized checkout suite which is the hosted interfaces I I referenced

earlier and there was this incumbent perspective that people would never outsource their checkout to Stripe or to any third party

and now we see that selling in the optimized checkout suite and saying you can use any payments processor you want behind it but it'll convert better and you'll have a better customer experience

has worked very well but we see billing as being a huge sort of independent sale at Stripe. Uh connect which is our

at Stripe. Uh connect which is our infrastructure for marketplaces and platforms. Uh stable coins a really really big one at this point particularly for companies that have a

very global footprint.

Increasingly radar and and fraud tooling as an independent sale. So we have, you know, we we have our our our go to market machine sort of structured as a

frontline of a few hundred account executives, which is is still very very small, and then an overlay of specialized sellers, technical sellers for these individual product

areas. Um, and you know, one of the the

areas. Um, and you know, one of the the really valuable learnings for me over the past couple of years is just how impactful it is to think about

how you organize your sales team as almost a chipset. [snorts] You know, you have to design it really, really carefully. You ship it, you can't really

carefully. You ship it, you can't really change it that much for a year. And so

being so intentional about how sellers are compensated, what you're pushing, what your sales plays are, you know, do you have hunters and growers or is it all just one type of AE? Um has been.

>> So hunter is like new customer, grower is like, hey, here's some more stuff you should try that'll help you help you grow as a customer >> and and just, you know, here's how we're just making you successful even on your current product side.

>> Did you mess that up at some point? It

sounds like maybe there's like some scar tissue around like how you designed or >> I would say less scar tissue and more just didn't pay enough attention to it.

>> Oh, so maybe you got luckyish that it kind of worked or >> Well, we we've been really underinvested in in sales and marketing. You know,

even today sales and marketing together are under 10% of the company, which is like well below >> 110% of like of headcount or revenue you're saying?

>> Of headcount.

>> Headcount. Okay. Interesting. And so the one thing you mentioned maybe an interesting topic just semi-related. You

mentioned like Stripe we like the lower margin is like we're totally okay with it. Why are the margins low? You just

it. Why are the margins low? You just

have like a lower take rate than competitors or like what's because that's probably another question that people like come on you got to ask this question.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. It's it's funny because you'll sometimes see in in startup board decks, you know, the margin bridge where there's this big chunk that just says stripe, you know, this [laughter] uh and it's like I promise you we are

not taking, you know, 3% of your revenue. um we would be a very

revenue. um we would be a very differently shaped business if we were you know the vast majority of that is going out to payment systems and you know in particular to banks via interchange to visa Mastercard and

Maxmax for for scheme fees and so particularly in the enterprise your you pricing that is sort of the underlying payments cost plus you know a small

number of bips basis points on top of it that's what Stripe takes but then in that small number of basis points you're paying your infrastructure costs, you're paying a bunch of variable costs related to serving customers and so on. So core

enterprise payments is not a very high margin business.

>> Do you do anything differently than other people that like adds more value to customers that like ends up having lower margins? Like is that a fair thing

lower margins? Like is that a fair thing to say?

>> I think we do a lot of things uh differently that adds adds value. I mean

I mentioned earlier reliability just being a critical one and I do think that some of our infrastructural workloads are are pretty fat in order to enable that. um

that. um >> you spend more on your own infrastructure to have higher up time.

>> Yeah. And I'd say both in terms of operating expenditures and in terms of just like core compute consistency promises in our API are are

pretty expensive meaning that you know the data is updated atomically in the API across a bunch of different services. Um

we for for startups we give away fraud protection for free. Um we think about this as you know being a core part of our value proposition but also critical

just to the overall ecosystem like you sort of have to buy fraud from Stripe at at some level because otherwise you know just fraud rates in payments are going to be too high.

>> Yeah. And plus, if I'm like a a fraudster and I'm thinking about who's the best company to go after, is it a big corporation or is it like a small startup that doesn't have capabilities?

Like they're probably my first target if I'm thinking through that.

>> Totally. Yeah. You see, fraudsters are infinitely creative.

Card testing used to be a matter of taking a bunch of cards, choosing one merchant, and attacking them. Just

running a ton of transactions through them via via scripts.

A couple years ago, we saw this new type of attack where card testers were using Stripe Checkout, which is the fully hosted payments page we offer. So, it's

actually hosted on Stripe.com.

>> So, they would they would make their own check out page.

>> Actually, they wouldn't make their own checkout page, but they found a way to identify thousands and thousands and thousands of checkout pages, okay? And

then they would dribble their tests across all of these. So you'd see, you know, a few transactions. Uh they were they were using very generic names. I

can't remember what they were, but it was like Jack Smith or something like that. And you would then see on Twitter

that. And you would then see on Twitter these startups saying, "I have this Jack Smith customer who's clearly fraudulent like Stripe. What are you doing?" And it

like Stripe. What are you doing?" And it was just very hard to detect these.

There's only a few transactions on each.

It's actually pointing back to the foundation model um uh by sort of aggregating so much data into one big model and then sort of clustering in

this like very highdimensional space.

It's super easy to solve that today. But

yeah, there's fraudsters are very entrepreneurial and clever.

>> Yeah, I mean you have to you got to evade you got to not only evade the customers and the merchants, but like law enforcement, you got to stay on top of a lot of stuff. One actually probably one of the last questions. I feel like Stripe is pretty easy to use. Just like

generally speaking, it's probably one of few financial services products where you can maybe this has changed a little bit over time, but go to the website, sign up. I think you can just start

sign up. I think you can just start using it right away if I'm remembering right. Why do you think so many

right. Why do you think so many financial services products are just hard to use? Like you got to talk to a salesperson, you got to wait so long.

It's hard. You know, one of our core strategic principles is to make our products and just stripe generally instantly self-s servable.

Uh it's, you know, what customers want.

They don't want to wait. Some of them do. Some of them want to do a deep

do. Some of them want to do a deep assessment, but you know, startups in particular don't. They just want to get

particular don't. They just want to get going as quickly as possible.

And to the point of becoming conspicuously good at risk management, there's a whole lot you have to do to enable that. Um, and so we are as you're

enable that. Um, and so we are as you're going through onboarding the Stripe, we are underwriting you in the background.

We're running a bunch of different models. We're deeply understanding your

models. We're deeply understanding your site. We're looking at our foundation

site. We're looking at our foundation model to see, you know, is there anything that's sort of popping up there and a lot of customers, not the majority, I actually don't know

what percentage off hand, but probably 20% or so are stepped up for review, meaning we'll do human review before you can move your first dollar. Um, but even then we can get you live within a day.

>> But you can still probably get the API have stripe in the product but you can't use it yet. But you can like you can get it you can start you can start using it but you can't transact yet.

>> Yeah. More majority of users can start moving money within minutes. Some

percentage of users it maybe takes a day and then then some percentage it takes longer because we need to do some back and forth.

>> Yeah. So this is just an element of the you've built the risk management fraud detection using AI and LMS to automate that stuff. So, it's like when I first

that stuff. So, it's like when I first sign up, the first page of the application process is a couple pages. I

enter my company name and click enter.

And then you're immediately >> the we the spinning wheel that I might be seeing at the end of the application, you're like doing it throughout.

>> Yeah. A core dimension of product development at Stripe is finding a way to responsibly, you know, as a steward of the ecosystem bend like partner and

regulatory spacetime. [snorts]

regulatory spacetime. [snorts] like this notion that partners will always insist upon this data or you know the sort of the consensus is that you have to do these things. If you [snorts]

step back and say what are people solving for they're tend to be solving for trust and safety risk management on their side and what we found is we really started investing in risk

management was that it wasn't that others were really good at it you know in many cases they were like printed PDFs being reviewed in basements it was they were just taking a

much more conservative stance than we were in thinking about what it would require to be good at risk management and so say they idea was you have to do

this and the fact of the matter was with the right technology you don't so I actually feel like in most cases we are better at managing risk than a lot of the partners

that we work with uh but we you know have taken a different route together yeah do you have last question do you have a favorite CEO founder business that you just like learned from over

time or gotten inspiration from over time this could even be like you know going back to like Roman Empire your type or like you know more recently just

like any any time throughout history it's a guy named Alan Mali who was CEO of Boeing and then Ford

and I think his system and his operating model and his way of thinking has always been very inspiring to me. Uh it is you

know this focus on what he refers to as relentless implementation but in the context of sort of egoless collaboration

and and um clarity for like everyone in the team.

>> I think what he did with Ford was incredible um >> because he he like turned around during the the financial crisis if I'm remembering. Okay. I think he joined

remembering. Okay. I think he joined Ford in 2007 or something like that. And

I think this the share price bottomed out I think, you know, should look this up. It's somewhere around $2 a share.

up. It's somewhere around $2 a share.

And I think when he left order of eight years later, maybe something like $22 a share, something like that. So I think just an incredible

like that. So I think just an incredible operator and very inspiring people leader.

>> Yeah. This is a lot of fun. Anything you

anything you want to plug on your end, people follow you on the internet anywhere. Best way to follow me is to

anywhere. Best way to follow me is to follow everything we're doing at Stripe.

There's a lot more coming. You know,

just in the past month, we've launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol, Insta Checkout with Chat GPT, launched something called open issuance at bridge, which is a platform to issue

your own stable coin. So, you know, for example, Phantom, maybe the most beloved crypto wallet in the world, is is launching Phantom Cash, which is their own stable

coin. Open Loop, you can buy it in DeFi

coin. Open Loop, you can buy it in DeFi pools built on top of open issuance. Uh

we've launched, as I mentioned earlier, Clara in link, a whole lot more. So, you

know, stay tuned to everything coming out of Stripe. Always eager for feedback. You can slide into my DMs or

feedback. You can slide into my DMs or email me. I'm WG at Stripe. And thanks

email me. I'm WG at Stripe. And thanks

for having me. It's been really fun.

Yeah. Yeah, this is awesome. Thanks for

doing it. Thank you. And thank you for listening. A quick thanks again to

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