🟣 The Collison Brothers LIVE on TBPN

You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. [music] Dismissed information clearing [music] order inbound. Let's just roll. Hold your position. [music] Get up. Trust the expert. [music] [music] We are founder. I see [music] multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. [music] >> UAV online. Blaze. [music] Double blaze. Triple blades. [music] Double kill. My go [music] [music] team deathmatch. >> [music] >> We are [music] triple blade [music] roll right [music] clearing order inbound. >> [music] >> You're [music] surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike [music] two. Activate [music] golden retriever mode. Clear here. Clearing order inbound. [music] 5. [music] founder. >> You're watching TVN. We are here live at Stripe Sessions. We're joined by John and Patrick Collison. Thank you for having us. How is it going so far? >> It's incredible. We have 10,000 people here. 000 people here. Yeah. Yeah. And it is just the center. The economy is replatforming around AI and I think that's the theme of the conference. >> Which economy is that? The global economy of which you control 1.6%. >> That is the we talk about the internet economy but you know yourself everything is in the internet economy these days. There's very few companies that are not interesting at being at the center of the internet economy. So it's increasingly the whole thing. >> And when we spoke back a couple of weeks ago which in singularity time is, you know, a couple months ago or exactly. Yeah. Um we said that we're seeing a significant surge in new business creation. that has roughly doubled again since then. Uh and so as of um >> and wait are you tracking that through Stripe Atlas specifically or through just new companies that are onboarding to Stripe as a payment processor? >> Both both. So uh March was an all-time record for new incorporations with Stripe Atlas. And then in Q1 overall for just new businesses joining Stripe that was up 71% year-over-year. We showed the chart at the beginning of our keynote yesterday. It is uh it is parabolic. It is exponential. I'm, you know, running out of mathematical terms, but it's it's really very striking. >> And do you like the I guess my colors all ruffled. There we go. >> Someone's ruffled. Yeah. >> And and and and do you like the idea that uh this is driven by AI? This is driven by democratization of more tools, smaller companies, that there's more sort of like lifestyle businesses popping up. I so initially I thought when I saw these charts that it's um that's about new vibecoded uh businesses that are more abundant in number but on a on any in any given instance uh maybe not as significant or not growing as quickly or you know whatever. What we're actually finding is not only are there so many more businesses but the average revenue per business is also increasing. Okay. Uh and so it's not just more new tiny ones uh somehow um the uh the median business is also doing better. >> Yeah. I think even the term lifestyle business, you know, like a bit pjorative. It betrays a worldview. Whereas what we're seeing is there's tons of business now making more than a million dollars a year. Uh uh like that number is really inflecting. And in general, like we think about it in ah you got the little collar service. I mean I just been doing my color myself. Um so uh you also have to look at it almost in coian terms where what we're seeing is more >> citizenship revoked for drinking this. >> I just want to clarify that these are full size. These are full size plants. We're just very large humans. >> I just want to clarify that it's Guinness 00, which is very good, but given that it's 11 a.m., it's a little early. Yeah. >> Um, yeah. >> Coast. >> Oh, just Yeah, we're seeing thanks to AI, you now have more small businesses able to do million dollars plus of revenue and be really impactful. And so, we think you'll probably see smaller firms have a big impact. And and and what's driving this is you think AI is making every little step of entrepreneurship slightly easier, like slightly easier to incorporate, slightly easier to create a contract or to hire somebody, slightly easier to create an ad, and then you add all of that together. >> It's the merging of all the functions. It's the fact that you can do your design and your PM and your engineering all yourself as one really effective person. Sam Alman was here yesterday on stage and he was talking about the the return of the idea guy. The fact that Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. the fact that if you uh the long maligned idea guy but now if you have really good ideas you can actually go execute them and you have so much more capability to do so and again we are seeing that born out in the stripe data where I think this phenomenon shows up as 71% year-over-year growth in in businesses launching >> so I mean it feels like you could do nothing and win Stripe's in the right place at the right time but you're probably not taking >> we are not doing nothing I'll tell you that yeah so tell me what you're actually doing how are you accelerating these businesses like what are you changing about Stripe what products are you adding what functionalities are you So all the commerce is going agentic. Uh we think that people will like people will still be doing stuff but they will do it through their agent. So what does that mean on the consumer side of things? Like we've all had the experience of you know you're in chat GPT and you're re like I was trying to buy a case for my bike and I was going back and forth and I was you know asking questions about you hard versus soft things like that. But anyway at the end of that you just want to uh be able to hit buy rather than like no one wants to fill out web forms. It's not a value ad activity. And so we just announced that Google is joining our agent commerce suite. So now we have Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and um Meta all working with us on this agent commerce modality where you can just buy there. That is the consumer side of things. Do you want to talk about the developer side of things? >> Well, I'll give you three other things. So first we're seeing a a change across the economy and business models uh where with inference cost with tokens and so forth and so many businesses, you know, in some way taking advantage of AI in their products. We're seeing a shift from SAS from seatbased business models to usage based business models. Uh and I think this is this is pretty profound. So, we acquired a company called Metronome back a couple months ago and we're now integrating that cohesively throughout the Stripe platform. We demoed yesterday something that I think is very cool and as the intersection between crypto/stable coins and usagebased billing where basically you can have streaming payments uh where you're paying for each token as it's delivered in real time. >> Yeah, exactly. Today there's a kind of credit extension that implicitly happens with any uh you know token token billing when you're when you're build at the end of the month and so forth which is actually pretty tricky because if you've token thieves if you've you know some failed billing after somebody's racked up a million dollar uh uh credit card tab or something you know that that that's a real problem for the provider. So anyway we're doing a lot around usage trace billing and this economywide structural transformation. Then secondly to this fraud point we're seeing I mean conccommittent with the enormous increase in new business creation we're also seeing a lot of fraud um and um there's >> a lot of fraud attempt. >> Yeah. So uh you know when you um you can't resell access to software and so if you got illicit access to some SAS tool two years ago there wasn't much you could do with that to monetize so to speak. There wasn't much incentive to steal SAS. >> Um but you can resell tokens. It's very lucrative to do so. Uh and so all these new AI companies and all these new AI products, growth is not really a problem for them. They have a surfet of growth, but they're also a lot of people um token pilferers uh looking to uh to near do well. >> Exactly. Looking to uh run away with these uh these, you know, this precious value >> and and and walk us through how that would work, how that works in practice. Is that somebody spinning up a bunch of free accounts and then like hitting them with just kind of the bare mining motivation distillation or actual reselling? So, it's really both. >> Yeah. So, so there's definitely just straight resell, but there's also more sophisticated attacks of distillation. So, anyway, like we've seen that one in six new accounts across this ecosystem are fraudulent. Um uh and for many providers, it's actually difficult now to offer free trials uh because you know the uh um the illicit accounts that set up for these free trials, they drive so much expense that it's hard to make the overall economics work out. Anyway, we're extending Stripe Radar to use the intelligence of the Stripe network to help any of these companies not only score payments, but score customer signups, to score trials, and we're, you know, turning Stripe Radar into this um into this uh sort of um X-ray vision uh for the AI economy to try to prevent these new and more sophisticated attacks. I think this is really important in that we're not going to have an internet with self-s serve access unless so uh just to repeat it back to you the the >> if if somebody signs up and they can basically pay for tokens streaming with stable coins that would enable like let's say a big AI company to be able to offer a self-s served product and not worry about come someone coming in running up a big to token bill and then saying like see you I'm not even in the country. >> That's exactly right. But we're also going to try to protect the regular signup flows as well and the kind of more straightforward consumer access. >> If you run any physical store, you have to worry about shrinkage and you know no one wants the direction of travel where you know you go to a CVS and everything is locked up behind a painting you know good uh uh you know upstanding people suffer from you know the small percentage of crime that happens. It's the exact same in the AI land where similarly they are selling a you know product that has you know real value real resale value exactly real cost associated and so therefore they need to prevent fraud not just for financial loss for themselves but also so they can continue to offer a great experience to all the good users >> I I want to go way deeper but I know you have a hard stop do you have something else to say >> well I was going to say one thing before I have to scurry away which is um uh you know so we're we have this usage based billing stuff we have the agent commerce stuff that John just described we have these this new fraud functionality and then The other thing is Stripe started out of course as a payments company, but we've, you know, over the last couple of years, Stripe has uh been becoming uh a uh a broader programmable financial services platform. And that's a bit of a mouthful, but what it means in practice uh is that not only should you be able to get paid with Stripe, but you should be able to hold money in Stripe, be able to pay people around the world, to be able to orchestrate your entire financial services business. uh sort of be an operating system for for global money movement. And so we announced Stripe Treasury where businesses can hold balances in Stripe. They can dispatch money to more than 150 countries. The instant free Stripe Stripe account transfers and so forth. And so rather than stripe this sort of conduit where money ephemerally passes through, Stripe is becoming a home. And this is very valuable we think because Stripe's expertise in building programmable tools and APIs and CLI functionality and all the rest. This is obviously much more important in the tech era. >> Was sorry to cut you off. Was this in the seed pitch deck? >> None of this was in the seed pitch deck. [laughter] >> No, but but I imagine like you're in the fund. You're you're telling people we're in the funds flow at some point or another. We won't just pass this back to their bank account. We'll actually be able to unlock the value of the >> That wasn't in the seed pitch deck. And in general, you know, the secret to being a Silicon Valley founder is you have to like get lucky for many many years in a row and then you go back and you pretend that that was, you know, your plan all along, you know, resell. Exactly. Yeah. You do a lot of recconing. That's that that's very important. However, what I will say is interesting is >> we did focus from the very beginning on developers. Uh, and we thought developers were very important under serve. I mean, Stripe's original name was SLDev/payments and you know, payments for developers was that you can go back in the wayback machine that was the tagline on the uh on the website. I think what's interesting now obviously is that the you know all the agent coding tools need something with well doumented APIs with everything being available on an API basis and so I think we have always thought that companies should take developers more seriously I think we're now seeing just industrywide companies that took developers seriously are now really benefiting from this AI moment because they built their stuff for the agents >> also everyone's a developer now going back >> and and agents feel like they are developer shaped at least >> agents want good DX developer experience even more than humans do. And so if you don't have it, I mean, it's it's a real problem. I think you're going to kill me if we keep you any longer. We'll let you get out of here. We did want to sign this plaque. Can you explain to us what this is and what it what it stands for? You familiar? This is the original print that went into How did you get that? That's >> it was given to us and we want you to sign it here and here. We have a museum of business where we try and uh accumulate signed objects of historical. >> This is the new poor Charlie paper cover. >> Hey, this is the paperback paper cover of poor Charlie. >> It's heavy. It's this is how we made the original hard cover if you have it of poor Charlie's almanac. So, sorry. And we'll have right over there. >> Yeah. >> And this will live on the literal gold master of business. And we will let you get out of here. Uh and we will go way deeper. Stay with us. We are going to continue our interview with John Collison from Stripe at Stripe Sessions here in San Francisco. Uh, thank you so much, Patrick, for taking the time to come chat with us. Really appreciate having you on the show. It's always a pleasure and congratulations. We do want to hit Have you Can we have you hit the gong? >> What is the headline number? Let's >> Is it 1.6? Is that the headline? >> That is the 2025 number. Stay tuned for the 2026 number. >> And smack that gong. >> There we go. Powerful, powerful hit. Powerful hit. I see what you can tell. He's been lifting. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh well, thank you. Have a great rest of sessions. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Uh I want to just shift over to another Stripe Press book. This is uh Maintenance of Everything by Stuart Brand. And in here, the general thesis is uh what what maintenance of everything. I I mean, I'd love to know what you took away from this, but uh maintenance is what keeps everything going. It's what keeps life going. and he gives a ton of really interesting anecdotes about cars and repairs and weaponry and sailing and there's so many interesting anecdotes and I'm wondering about your thoughts on maintenance in the age of AI and what you feel and see in this like we're in this maybe there's like this job replacement thing AI does everything but then there's so much that goes on in the maintenance >> acceleration of technical debt >> and so I was wondering if you could just reflect on like brands work in the age of AI >> so Stuart Brand is obviously amazing and um uh you know is maybe famous for the uh the whole earth catalog originally which you know Steve Jobs talked about in that uh that famous commencement speech but Stuart Brand has been around for the entirety of Silicon Valley history. Like if you go back and read the uh the Tom Wolf book, the electric Kool-Aid asset test. I don't know if you guys are big Tom Wolf fans, but was talking about like the early LSD culture of the 1960s in the Bay Area having these parties. Stuart Brand is in the book, you know, he's like there at those early parties and everything like that. Yeah. when like the uh you know the Grateful Dead and everything like that and so he's just been like there for everything all along. He was the uh he was the manning the computer at the mother of all demos. You know the angel famous demo. So >> is where the the original mouse was demoed. >> Exactly. Where where the mouse was shown. Exactly. >> Among among a ton of other things. >> Exactly. So and Stuart Brand is still you know he just published this book. And so Stuart Brand is so intertwined with the uh the history of technology and Silicon Valley technology and obviously what this book is getting at and also uh the whole earth catalog is this passion for tools and taking care of your tools and kind of thinking about tools and it's interesting you bring that up in the context of AI because one thing that I get excited about in the current moment is this idea of individual empowerment and you know you could have different visions of AI and I definitely have an adverse reaction to this, you know, very passive uh, you know, I think the term slop is, you know, the term we use for this just, you know, being a passive recipient of AI generated stuff and no one wants the, you know, brave new world soma uh, kind of vision and instead h if you look at something like um, like OpenClaw, I get very excited about that because you are giving computing power and the ability to do stuff with programming and tinkering with technology. It's the homebrew computer club all over again. It's this tinkering energy that's back. And so I just get really excited about how I think tools and passion for >> surprising how much negativity there's been towards the entire like Mac mini open claw movement when it's like >> for how how long how long has Silicon Valley been like I missed the days of like the hacker era and then the hacker era comes back and then and then people people are quick to mock it. I agree. And okay, I was reflecting on this. I think there's something interesting where people maybe have an adverse reaction to early adopter enthusiast culture. Uh the early open claw um enthusiast uh group really reminds me of the early Bitcoin enthusiast uh group who also got people's backs up in a way. Like you remember that famous New York Times article with like the guys with the sweaters? Like those guys are presumably big into OpenClaw uh right [laughter] now. Uh, so there's something about the maybe because people tend to overhype stuff, you know, they say my open claw does this like maybe it doesn't quite or something like that. >> But the tinkering is back and I think that's really cool. So I agree with you. It's crazy that um, you know, people have this skepticism because it's easily like the most fun you can have with computers. >> Yeah. People on people on X, you know, see an openclaw meet up in some place like Tokyo and they're just like mocking it, right? And it's like, >> isn't this isn't this isn't this like core to the culture? >> Exactly. Yeah, I'm totally with you. >> Like that is the optimistic uh take on open claw tinkering. I love that. That's what I believe. But there is the other side which is the not just the tools but the tool-shaped objects. You've heard of this criticism that uh you wind up I I've I've had this exact experience where I've gone to codeex and built a whole thing and been like that could have just been a prompt and like I didn't actually need to have it instantiate a Python script. I could have and and and I think there is a risk in some enterprises of having 25 people vibe coding dashboards when you could have just had one. There is some managerial dduping and overhead and management and I'm wondering how you've grappled with that side of AI. >> Yeah, I mean a few thoughts here. One is uh I I think it's just awesome that software is becoming so accessible. I think we should really um celebrate that. like I'm writing much more software even just from a kind of a fun perspective because it is so fun and it's this kind of addictive feeling. Mhm. >> I think we're also very clearly in a transitional state where it just doesn't feel to me that the way we do things in 2026 where you know you uh need to prompt it to you know make no mistakes or you know you saw the caveman token efficiency thing where it's like if you talk like a caveman and ask a talk like it just uses fewer tokens and so uh but gets the same result you know it's as effective and so if you want to kind of economize in the token budget every prompt was no six fingers and I haven't seen an AI image with six fingers in a year. Exactly. It just we just crossed that chasm. >> Exactly. You know, if you're doing anything with financial data, you know, you need to prompt it to uh do not make up any numbers and then it's much better at, you know, not making up numbers. Right. So, like where we are in 26 is clearly not where we're going to be. The models are getting much better, but I think right now we're in this interesting transitional period. There is this software fatigue as you say where you know from software maintenance things like that. I think we'll we'll get there. And like all these things, you know, there's puts and takes. People are talking a lot about the offensive side of security, which is true with, you know, the very powerful new models. But of course, you also have the defensive side of things where if you ask your uh, you know, uh, uh, 5.5 to audit, go take a look at this application, take a look at this, just like go putter around this server and give me a security audit suggestions to lock it down. It'll do a great job of that. And so again, I think we just haven't figured out what the end state is. >> Yeah. Yeah. It it does feel like as we move up the layers of abstraction, we go from, you know, pair programming alongside an AI to uh being more of a product manager to almost winding up more in a build versus buy mentality. And yes, you could vibe code that, but if it already exists or it's open sourced already or there's something you can pull off the shelf and it's going to be cheaper than the token cost, cheaper than the maintenance like maybe >> but again, we'll end up in a new equilibrium where uh you know the I think exporting your data will become more important because you'll get back to the Unix philosophy of you know you have individual tools that are much easier to interoperate between each other. you can kind of pipe your data conceptually between applications. If I can also bring this back to payments for a moment, a very important angle on all this stuff. You guys have probably had the experience of um when you are doing something in codeex when you're vibe coding away, >> you are the adult that needs to reach for things on the high shelves for it. And so it is much better at writing code than you. It's able to architect an application. So what do you need to do? you need to go uh sign up for an API key for >> get a PDF of a website that I can't access. >> Exactly. Log in and please get me API keys is like something you end up doing a lot. And so uh one of our biggest announcements this year was something called Stripe Projects where you are able to agentically do stuff in the wider world. And so you can hook up your codec to stripe projects and if you want to we've done this if you want to uh deploy a website it can go sign up for Versell for you and it can pay for it. And so now what was previously a multi-step process where it could kind of do some of it and it could like orchestrate Versel but it couldn't sign up for it. Now it can pay for Versell, it can pay for Cloudflare, it can pay for browser base if you want to, you know, do uh uh uh headless web browsing and things like that. It can do all this stuff. And so we think the agents are going to get so much more powerful because we're we're giving them the ability to actually go buy what they need in the wider world and then it can do way more end to end. And so that's Stripe projects which is kind of the second side of agentic commerce is your your agent needs to be able to go do stuff on your behalf. And you're exactly right agentic coding agents are not just for coding. They're for doing stuff. You know we demoed today write a research report for me buy some data in the process of doing that research report. But again that's not I happen to use a coding agent for it. It is not a coding task. It's a it's a research task. >> Yeah. Yeah. This happened. I on the show I used codeex. We vibe coded a a a beautiful web page for some joke we were joking about and I was like I it's on my local host. I need to send it to Jordy and actually deploying it was the harder part which supposed to be so easy and that's that's >> right projects is the only way you can agentically buy a domain like you don't need to have anything. You don't need to have an account with any of these providers. You can just go buy a domain. It's super cool >> and I feel like that's really important. >> How is how is recruiting how has recruiting changed over the last few years? Because I feel like so much of of what made has made Stripe such an incredible company is convincing the smartest, most ambitious people in the world to work in payments, a place that they historically maybe wouldn't have been excited to work. And then now I imagine the job of any any person that that could get a job at Stripe, can probably also get an offer at at OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, some of these other labs. And so I imagine you you find yourself having conversations with folks uh and uh helping them make a decision. >> Yes. So I mean so many place you go there. One as you say uh I think we have always encouraged people to think bigger than just payments and I think if you know Stripe was just about payments fewer people would have been interested in joining but I think they understand that going back to tools and the importance of them. I think people understand that the infrastructure that we give people for entrepreneurship actually changes the outcomes. You know removing the supply demand curve and so we can encourage there to be more entrepreneurship. Again Patrick talked about 71% year-over-year growth in the number of businesses being created on Stripe. That's not all Stripe, but we definitely contribute to it by making the whole entrepreneurship journey easier. And then when those companies scale, you know, OpenAI sells Chat GPD, I think, in more countries than it otherwise would have because all that infrastructure is just super available and on Rails. And so it exists that kind of the small getting started end of the spectrum and for you know the biggest companies in the world, the Amazons and Herzes and Metas and everyone like that that we work with on uh on projects like this. You probably saw like the stablecoin thing. We'd answer them. Okay. So that's one part of it is like you have to genuinely have a mission that's interesting and uh I think we believed and believe that this stuff actually really matters and you can change the the end equilib that's one. Second thing is that it has always been uh the most competitive time I can remember [laughter] to compete for talent. It's just like I can never remember a time when it wasn't the case. It was easy when you were competing with Mark Zuckerberg >> and then it was easy when you were competing against Elon Musk. >> I never forget when we're like no man steps in the same river twice because you know he's not the same man. It's not the same river. Like I remember, you know, when we were recruiting Greg Brockman, who's our second employee, who, you know, we're going to have a speak um yesterday, but with Sam instead, h because there's a lot going on this week, but >> [laughter] >> um h but I remember recruiting Greg to join Stripe as our second employee, flying across the country to Boston to go meet with them because like, you know, why would you join this like no-name company that you've ever heard of and that's the kind of stuff you do then? And like you stuff and so it's always the most competitive time that it's ever been with recruiting and this is certainly no exception. And you know, people have a lot of um uh great options. That kind of gets to I think you know, people are talking about the death of software engineering and honestly the closer people are to AI the more they're like oh you know software engineering is cooked you know it's got two years left. I think those people are all high honestly like [laughter] um just you have you have so much you have you are able to work with AI so much better if you understand the underlying concepts and you're so much better prepared for that and I'd almost analize it to you remember in the '9s people had this view that like okay you know the cloud or like a protocloud back then is coming along the network is the computer all this vision and people tried to have these leaky abst abraction or like abstra, you know, they thought they had a beautiful abstraction where you would have uh, you know, a folder that just happened to be on the network in the cloud and h, you know, you still have that on the Mac today, you know, your iCloud folder and things like that and same on Microsoft Windows. Those never work that well because it turns out the network exists and you know, it can sometimes be down in a way that your hard drive wasn't and things like that. And so it was always important to understand disio and RAM swap and all these kind of things even if you had useful helper abstractions over them. I think with AI similarly to be really effective working with AI you need to understand what it's doing and what's going on underneath the hood you need to understand that the model and then the memory and then you have your harnesses and you've you got your skills and everything like that and how they all interact and so I I think all these people calling the death of software engineering yeah are are smoking something. >> Yeah. I mean there's also just the software engineers are dynamic and intelligent creative and can operate at various levels of abstraction and there have been transitions If you want to make the argument that that AI will will transform every aspect of the economy, but that engineering like core understanding of engineering and software engineering will no longer be valuable. That's that's and and and and obviously some some of the people that are are more bearish on on the practice of software engineering have um you know uptime issues and like Stripe is a category where you guys can't really afford to have um you know uh reliability issues. There's two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now I think will do incredibly well over the coming 10 to 20 years. Firstly, high agency people. We know this at Stripe. The people who are like, I've been talking to customers. I know exactly what we should do. We got to go fix this. But the people who have that pep in their step and they want to go make Stripe better. Um they are now so much more empowered thanks to AI. The second is double majors. I think if you understand software and understand finance or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company. And one person can do what would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems previously. >> Famous Paul Graham quote about that too. Yeah. That typically an entrepreneurship team, a founding team has a collection of like five or six skills between two founders, three founders. >> Charlie Mer talked about the importance of being multiddisciplinary and multi-disiplinary thinking and implied was that like he thinks getting a a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books now. You know, you can talk to your AI about it. And so I think multiddisiplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well. >> Yeah. Uh do we have a minute to talk about stable coins? >> We have one minute. Yeah. >> Okay. One minute. Uh the uh in the economist in Buttonwood there is uh there there's a lot of doom and gloom about the stable coin winter. I put a ton of money in stable coins. Didn't make a dime. >> That's [laughter] good. >> They're saying it's too stable. But they are saying that the market uh grew 30% in the six months up until late October. But sto total stable coin assets have barely bunched since. Are we in a stable coin winter broadly? Are you seeing adoption? >> This is the economist not processing that there there can be a correction there [laughter] can be there can be a correction in crypto asset prices and yet more adoption than ever and actual the utility of stable coins and and the two things are not not not the same. >> We're always trying to point out to people like the difference between price curves and the underlying activity and like those are very different things. uh and you know we're talking about that in the SAS apocalypse in the context of you know SAS growth has been really good companies are still growing top lines >> exactly topline growth is really good and everything like that and so uh kind of a similar story with stable coins where we see volumes continue to grow and again we had this in a lot of our demos >> with aentic pay-peruse payments or streaming payments or things like that you actually have to use something like tempo you have to use stable coins because economically speaking just like what else are you going to do and so we are as bullish on stable coins as I've ever been. >> Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks for having us at the Cheeky Pine. >> Cheeky Pine. You guys are the perfect setup. >> Uh, have a great rest of Stripe session. Grab your headphones headphones off and we will bring on our next guest. >> All righty. Tap out. Cheers. >> There we go. Goodbye. Uh, and we will bring on Henry next. Welcome back to the show. >> Last time we were in person, uh, we'll let you put those headphones on. I think last time you were in person, uh, didn't you help us translate something in French? Something random. Do you remember that? >> Yes, I do. This is my second audition. It was about, uh, >> it's fantastic. Here, you can sit here. >> Meta's acquisitions. >> Oh, yeah. >> Of the >> That's right. of Yeah. Yeah. Because we were interviewed for French TV and we didn't know what they were saying and you helped us understand it. That was fun. Uh, what a wild time. I mean, I guess it's only getting wilder. Have you been struggling with any of the the talent wars or have you been recruiting for your team? Are you growing your organization now? >> All of the above. I mean, so when we were acquired, this is coming up on uh 9 months, we were about 30 people at Privy. We're about 60 now. >> And then Stripe generally is doing so much more. [laughter] >> The board made it incredible. Uh and then Stripe is doing a lot more in the space. Um so generally I think the talent wars are real. >> Uh but also the reality is is is twofold. first you had to be a little bit damaged to go into crypto and stable coins to begin with and so we're seeing these people who are still you know coming in >> and then actually we're seeing a lot more uh merging of the two which is to say uh yesterday was a good demo on like streaming microp payments like there's a lot more that I think stable coins and like >> you know internet native money is going to enable for agentic use cases it's still very much in its infancy but it's like >> yeah we just spoke with the colison around you know the all this issue around AI fraud people signing up for a bunch of free accounts to get access to tokens or people signing up for an account, running up a bill, and then basically stiffing the the provider >> and uh and how stable coins could effectively be a solve for that, which is like, hey, if you're if you're if you're going to just sign up and use this tool, >> that's fine. We don't necessarily know who you are. We don't need to KYC to use like, you know, a language model, but >> you might need to use stable coins uh >> to pay as you go as you go. So there's no so there's no risk. >> For sure. I I think a lot about it in terms of like, you know, tier one, tier two, tier three ISPs where you'll call between call it Verizon and AT&T and then at the end of the month you'll settle the bill across the tier ones. Like I think there's just such an interesting design space for managing token spend payments and so on uh using programmable money in in in the era we're coming into. >> Uh are have you been tracking the showdown between the the uh stable coin community and the banks? This was in the this was in this this economist article as well. And I and I want to know if you think that this is a true collision course, if there will really be a showdown. Uh the the concept here as uh as put in Buttonwood in the in the economist is uh the prospect of uh stable coin growth spooked America's banks. This is because a loophole in the law let stable coins offer deposit-like yield without bank-like regulatory burden. The American Bankers Association warned that a $2 trillion market for stable coins, if it was all dollar pegged, could lead to a 10% decline in bank deposits that would raise average funding cost for lenders by about a quarter of a percentage point, they said, crimping their profits and driving up interest rates on all manner of loans for everyone else. Is this a real issue? Is there a logical solution? Is there going to be some sort of uh unification where uh the stable coin community and the bank industry >> did we not get did they not get a solution with the Genius Act? >> I think it's Yeah, please. >> I'll follow you. >> Oh, well I I mean in here it says bankers and stable coin issuers have since been locked in a fight over the final shape of a follow-up bill, the Clarity Act. And so that's where we are right now. But I want to know where you think it goes from here. So poly market last I checked has it around 45% that the the clarity uh bill will make it out of committee and actually pass. Um and I think the reality is genius was basically as button down as uh it could be on this specific issue and this is why clarity needs to exist to set uh standards and and procedures for actually doing this. I I think it's a really >> they were such a genius should have provided more [laughter] >> more clarity. Uh, it's very good. Uh, but this is this is why um >> this is why the show exists. >> Exactly. [laughter] >> I see this crowd doesn't like say it flopped. >> It flopped. >> For those of you viewing, I see this as the acoustic set versus the Ultradome. This is your guys coming in unplugged. Totally. Um [laughter] >> but but I no I think it's an essential issue and I think right now you're seeing also a twin thing around um tokenized deposits versus stable coins and like two different formats for how digital assets I guess can impact finance and fintech generally. Um the the reality is I think more competition >> say more about tokenized deposits. I I can imagine what that is which is like I go to a bank I give them >> an actual dollar >> and you get tokenize it but then they're keeping the dollar there. They're lending against it. >> So it is it is >> maybe they maybe they give me some yield even >> and they'll run all of the same infra in the back that exists today but you have a digital representation of your deposit that you can use. And so in a sense it is a >> it is akin to being handed a a code check ticket. uh and you get to walk around with your ticket and at some point you can redeem it at the code check or another code check potentially versus the stable coin where you're actually holding the asset itself. Um and I think those are the two pathways that are getting a lot of exploration in the space. Um ultimately I think you know a lot of these rails will merge and I think more importantly the question is one of like competition for the consumer. the consumer should have more ways of actually earning on their uh on their assets. And so the idea that we need, you know, greater clarity as it were with [clears throat] uh issuers and institutions that are putting out stable coins is still absolutely clear. >> But I think we should view it first and foremost from the question of like what benefits the companies that are using stable coins or you know the internet generally. What benefits the users not how different is this from the current infrastructure that we have because that is you know not a way to build new systems in the world. >> Yeah. And then I guess there is also the sort of the uh like additive outcome where yes you get to$ two trillion dollars in stable coin assets but it's for new use cases that are not uh competing with like the traditional credit card lending mortgage lending uh asset back loan industry and so it's it's not putting that downward pressure necessarily on the traditional banking system. And so I'm sure the banking industry is sort of like cautiously optimistic. This is all like net new dollars that are being created and used around the globe and for different purposes. But if it's but if it does directly come after well this company used to just use credit cards for everything and now they're not paying us then that's maybe has some negative effects. >> And I think the two things you'll see as run-ons is basically how does stablecoin deployment evolve worldwide? To what extent is it a western thing versus a rest of the world thing that probably has impact on you know USDT versus USDC market share? Like there's a lot of interesting runons to this exact question. The second thing is, at least this is why I'm excited to be at Stripe and and you know, Stripe isn't doing any crypto things for crypto's sake. They're doing, you know, how do we build better rails for our users, no matter what the rail is under the hood. >> Yeah. And >> there's less ideological and more pragmatic first principles. >> This is a very good tool. Exactly. And we should we should put it to use in ways that that betters the experiences. Um, this is where I'm interested in some of I mean, DeFi has had a very complicated few months with uh basically a lot of exploits and and things like that. This is still an industry in its infancy and yet we're seeing a very interesting merging of the rails with for example vault curators on Morpho like you know folks like Apollo and others uh taking part in it and so we're seeing again just a merging of of traditional finance and online finance uh in a way that I think is going to continue to >> recent exploits is that more social engineering for the most part this is not not AI >> in those specific cases my understanding is it is not AIE. I think it's very much uh social engineering uh you know bad setups in various places that have led to to to unfortunate outcomes. Um and I think it's just the space maturing. Um I think we are seeing as a side note this is very interesting. We use uh at privy a number of basically uh AI tools to do like constant pent testing to review every PR that goes out to do a lot of this and we're also seeing uh quite a bit of uh just better uh uh bug bounties coming in uh much more sophisticated but the baseline basically on the bug bounty has gone much better and you're now able to string together like more complex attack vectors that you couldn't do before. So that evolution is like mega clear and one of our engineers uh Andrew McFersonson uh used uh Chad GPT to find an exploit in React. >> Uh it was a zero day in React and the fact that you know React is a 15-year-old library put out by Meta, it's open source, it's been beaten to death because it basically backs every web every product on the web. Uh the fact that we're finding these now uh is is insane. And do you have more clarity on like a zero day? Does that allow someone to potentially get into someone's computer, their browser, or is it more just like like cause the browser to crash in a certain or it be strung together? Because there's like a wide range of like what you can do once you exploit something. You can just like you know take the service offline which is bad or you can like get into Yeah. that get into the database steal like like there's a wide range of like negative outcomes. >> Yeah. I'm not actually sure what the what the ramification of his was, but you know their price there's a very good economic market for buying zero days and and the price will depend on what it allows you to do. >> That makes sense. Um, has there been have you have you been tracking any movements in the stable coin community to do interesting non-dollarbacked stable coins? I'm thinking of like Peter Teal back in like 99 sort of proposed like a Vanguard total index like a VTI backed stable coin where you have one dollar but the dollar is backed by basically a massive basket of assets that includes gold, oil, real estate, a slice of stocks and bonds. And so it's sort of more diversified than even the US dollar could be. and maybe it's less stable relative to the dollar, but it's you're bought in on the global economy. >> So, I think first we're going to see a rise of non-dollar stable coins as you know more people embrace it, especially you know >> and that would just be foreign currencies. >> Yeah, foreign currencies. >> Second, I've heard of a few projects that are trying to basically have a inflation uh stable coin which is the the stable actually grows with inflation so that you're on a purchasing power parody like standpoint are the are the famous uh assets you can buy from the treasury. Treasury inflation protection something securities. I I forget >> that one. But that that's the idea of of one of them. I think they're really hard to instrument and get quite right, which is why I don't think they've taken off just yet. >> And then I think the the the third piece is uh this is not a stable coin, but I it was a project I heard about recently I thought was very interesting. There's a company called Pearl that is uh finding a way to do like fast matrix multiplication and back a blockchain on this. So you can issue tokens based on how much compute you've got ready to do useful inference. That's interesting. >> Uh and so there was a question for me of like what other useful work could you back the currency on? >> Yeah, that uh I mean we've talked to Prime Intellect a few times. They've been doing early on some crypto tokenbacked compute and interestingly the the 3D rendering community. I don't know if you're familiar with the render token, but uh basically uh you know most 3D artists if they're rendering a CGI for a movie, TV show, something like that, animation, uh they will typically have an like onremise uh rack of GPUs that they use to render the graphics or the the final uh output. And the render network was an an effort that I think was pretty successful to basically well I'm not rendering my project I'll render yours and I get tokens that I can put back on the network cuz do because each frame is deterministic and separate. So you can render you know if there's 24 frames a second you can render thousands of frames across a whole bunch of different machines they all will look the same when they come together. And so that that was the first example of like oh a crypto project that's being done for useful work marshalling computer around and now you can imagine like a thousand times more uh like ways to >> these are hallowed times while crypto prices are down and there's so much interesting thing happening in tech can actually build very useful things in a way that's that's uh prediction time when we look back on 2026. >> Yeah. What what what's your price uh for USDC price target for 2030? >> This is John. This is John's favorite [laughter] joke. Um uh but uh I hope it's $1. [laughter] It's a disastrous outcome. Um uh what do you think the story will be around the intersection of of uh AI and crypto specifically agents and and um stables? You know, >> it's a great question. I >> because everyone everyone keeps saying it, right? But I feel like we need to have like massive it's very clear that when when an AI tool has product market fit, adoption is like extremely rapid, right? You just immediately hockey stick. And so I'm like sort of like waiting for a hockey stick moment like that at the intersection of stables and um and agents. So So here's my first we're seeing so much activity like 35% of new privy signups today are for people building aic wallets. So they're using the wallet, they're like giving agents, for example, like some allowance and then they're like, you know, they have an ability to claw back assets that the agent doesn't spend it. They can control spend in a very like particular way. So uh we're seeing so much tinkering happening here that I think is going to lead to emerging behaviors that are really interesting. My my prediction is first uh great use cases are going to happen in the background. There'll be a lot more about like business model innovation things like what you were talking about earlier which is how do we get you know payments in a streaming sense so that I can get paid on a you know per token basis much more easily. >> Yeah. Exactly. Without risk. >> Yeah. >> Um so I think that's where we'll see the first few and then over time we'll see a much greater pickup of basically agents actually running their own wallets and that'll be across both fiat and stable coin rails. >> Mhm. >> Very cool. >> Red button or blue button? What' you push? Are you familiar with this thought? >> I have no idea what you're talking about. We'll get to it. locked it in. Didn't get the discourse. [laughter] >> That's incredibly bullish. >> Uh it's a thought experiment. You can go check it out online. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic. >> Uh we'll talk to you soon. Pop those headphones off, put them down right there, and we're good to go. Jeff, welcome to the show. We are here live at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco. Great to see you. >> Great to see you. >> Throw a headset on. Sit down. Introduce yourself again. Yeah, you can sit here here with [music] that headset. >> Hello. Hello. >> Uh, introduce yourself for the the fans, the viewers, the chat. >> Who are you? >> Howdy. >> I'm Jeff Stripe on the product team. >> Yeah, [laughter] >> Jeff Weinstein. Good to see you all. >> Good to see you. >> This is the first time I've ever met you in person. We've been talking on Zoom for 10 years. >> Have we met in person? >> Wait, is that is that actually true? >> I don't think I've ever met you actually in person. It's like one of these things where you've met so many times through the computer. It's like true. >> That's crazy. That's crazy. No, I Yeah, I I I I I assume we had met multiple times. Great to see you in person. >> Yeah, this is amazing what you all have done. >> Uh how have you do you ever visit Delaware? [laughter] >> Do when you show up in Delaware, do people just start do people just start cheering when you walk out of the airport? You're like you're basically like an athlete that you know wins a World Cup, they're coming home and they they do like a parade, I'm assuming. >> I got to meet >> So so so before we get into this, Jeff uh Jeff runs Atlas. He created Atlas. You're responsible for like a quarter of all >> new corpse. Atlas is now incorporating about 26% of the new >> gong moment. >> I think it's a gong moment. >> I think it's a gong moment. Oh man, this is% this is a live. >> But there we go. >> Fantastic. Yeah, it's got a really good ring to it. >> 26% of all new C corps, right? That's the focus. >> Correct. Yeah. And today we celebrating our 100,000th new Atlas business was incorporated recently and we brought the founder and she runs this incredible business for AI software to help power plant owners run batteries in a better way is like fantastic. So it's been a great thing. I've been recently focused on all this crazy agentic stuff we're doing. >> Yeah. What what is actually changing about Atlas? Because I've used it several times. I think I probably used it five years ago or something. I don't I don't even remember how old it was. >> We used it for TBN. We used it for TBNN a couple years ago and it was like fine and I didn't really have any product requests. So >> it's not it's not fine. >> No, I just beautifully like the point the point is that you don't think about it. You're like that is how it should have worked. >> Exactly. And I'm always fascinated by products that are like okay yeah thumbs up. It did my job. Like what >> I'm going to make you go back and use legal zoom. [laughter] >> I'm going to make you go use legal zoom. Hey, that's a >> it's one of these products you just want it to work like electricity under the ide. >> So So I want to ask you about is there an do you think there will be an incorporation apocalypse because theoretically I could just have I could tell a smart agent that can use my computer that can use the internet, hey do you like go I need to create a corp in Delaware. It turns out that the agents want to use Atlas. They'll use Atlas. Yes. And uh you know, not not to preview too much, but coming up, Atlas CLI. Okay. >> Agents. And another exciting >> generate me 10,000 C corps. [laughter] Generate me 1 million C corps. >> I think that would be a lot of money, but >> yeah, Vive Vibe Incorporation coming. Uh another exciting Atlas update is now that you can do full safe fundraising through Atlas. and uh coming soon you'll be able to move the money from investors directly into your treasury account and just have these amazing little fundraising links to be able to quickly raise money along the way. So we think it's another way we can help entrepreneurs get going. Um though my recent focus has been all this great AI stuff we're doing to help commerce businesses succeed in the next wave yeah >> of the internet all the link CLI work so you can have your robot help you shop along the way safely across the internet machine payments protocol to have robots send stable coin to each others in small bits it's been really a whole new world >> you see the the the c customer segmentation customer target customer ramp are you rerunning the stripe playbook like stripe was adopted by a lot of startup ups. It was very sold through developers which was uh very unorthodox at the time. You used to sell through the CFO. Now you're selling through the CTO or just some developer who chooses Stripe. Um are you trying to be the the incorporation platform for every tech company, every startup, every software small business, and then you're going to go into restaurants, you're going to go into Fortune 500, the next Fortune 500 companies. I mean, I guess it doesn't quite map to uh to Stripe because uh the big companies are don't necessarily need Atlas if they're already up and running, but uh how do you think about uh like landing and then expanding? >> Yeah, I think that we're trying to get all the technology businesses in the world to start on Stripe. >> Yep. >> Start with, you know, just as a project, use Stripe projects to be able to configure your entire stack. I mean, do you remember having to go and make >> a hundred little accounts for to test a database here or test a CDN provider? Oh, should I use this particular thing for email? And then you'd have to go, you know, type in password and be like, no, you need $2 signs or one dollar sign and you go get the secret keys and like put in the wrong place and then you got to rotate. There's like a whole mess. >> Uh, and so, so we're excited to take >> make basically continue to make everything programmable, making corporation programmable, make selling online programmable, and now we're making provisioning entire new stacks. So, we think we're going to see, you know, we did 100,000 Atlas startups over about eightish years. I can imagine doing the next 100 thousand in, you know, in another year, another two years, we're just seeing the curve of new businesses grow so quickly. I think it's tools like this agentic provisioning of an entire stack quickly, which is going to really ignite the next wave of founders to go from just Vibe coding to like an entire Vibe business. >> How much attention are you paying to how Atlas shows up in LLM results? Because there's a lot of companies, Profound is one. uh James the founder's been on the show that that help help you, you know, optimize that, understand it. Uh I think it's helpful to just create a product that's loved by everyone that uses it and ultimately gets talked a lot about sort of naturally. Uh is that something that you're putting time directly into or is good awareness and LLM's a byproduct of just building a great product? >> You have to make your business legible to the agents. you need, you know, what what if you want your checkout page to have bright colors, like that's not what the agent wants. If you want your homepage to uh have a crazy JavaScript thing that like loads only in certain browsers with with the GPU turned way up, that's also not what agents want. Agents want perfect information about what your offer is, what the tool is, what the skew is, what the service is, what the shoe is. And we're basically helping businesses just make their entire checkouts, their entire skew offering legible. And Atlas is actually part of that too. You know, it itself is a business. Atlas actually runs on Stripe. Uh and so we, you know, make sure that the agents have access to the full LLM formatted markdown text. We bake it into all of the places where agents can self-s serve and learn about our products. And then we make everything at Stripe a programmatic primitive such an agent can use it directly. And so we've seen that the CLI, the command line interface for interacting with Stripe, which had, you know, not like a side project for Stripe, but kind of an advanced tool for developers who never want to touch the dashboard, like sort of a terminal purist. Uh, this has become this incredibly fast growing part of Stripe. Uh, because the agents are like, "Yes, I love the fact you have perfect information about all the things I can do on Stripe. Of course, I'm going to do so versus uh try to >> computer use around the website." >> Yeah, it's it it's a little clunky. At some point it feels almost like a Dilbert uh style of using computer where whereas the agents can just use it directly. >> Can you uh take me through maybe like day in the life today is probably pretty different than like two or three years ago. I'm sure AI has seeped in a bunch of places but maybe if you go back to like you know a little bit earlier like how have your daytoday changed over your career and what is it like now? you know, we're really just following what customers want and they're coming to us. I mean, I've worked at Stripe for eight years. They are coming up to us with a veracity of new needs. You know, before it was like, >> hey, let's kind of put a meeting on the calendar next week to talk about how to grow your business in the next country. Now, they're >> I need to launch in 50 countries this afternoon. >> Yeah. >> Sorry. What is sales tax in all all those places? how how can I mimic all these fast growing startups that are going at light speed? And so basically we're taking everything that we built at Stripe and turning it into sort of a managed service. You have managed payments so that you can sell in all these countries. >> We have the machine payments protocol where you can say hi I've been using I you know I spent 20 years selling to consumers now I need to sell through agents. Take all the tools we have and make make things available to agents. But my day-to-day is basically almost a whiplash of like customer meetings where they're coming to us with either a new type of fraud vector they're seeing through AI. Uh they want to expand into new countries and we're just trying to take the pieces the programmatic primitive pieces we've built over the last 15 years and turn them into these sort of CLL CLI tools. Normally we would we would put out a beta or we put out some weight list and we'd wait for a couple people to sign up and then we'd email them. Then we'd send them the docs. Then they'd be on vacation, you know, or like get busy and then like you'd hear from them the next week. Now we put out a beta, they developers send their agents after our beta page, they will go around our weight lists to use it. They'll give us feedback from their agent logs of how how the developer about how the agent was using our developer tools in like minutes. And and so the development cycle at Stripe is just increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing because the customer feedback loop from the the highest taste developers is so now agentic that >> Yeah. We don't even have basically have time for meetings. It's just like putting these betas out there and getting fast. >> So you think like less meetings now? >> I think it's less meetings. >> I was wondering if you were Yeah. If it was like I imagine that you're a fan of like talk to your customers, right? Like that's a big piece of what you do. That's your that's very much your job. Of course, you have internal meetings, but you're probably talking to a lot of customers. But the but the shape of the feedback. >> I was hoping that with AI you wouldn't have to talk to customers anymore. You would just throw like 10 companies and then just say like you know I I don't I don't have time. >> We're we're very fortunate slash um cursed with that our customers are not shy. [laughter] >> You know they they are extremely happy to hop in Slack with us and just >> bombard us uh with their their needs but now they're pasting the context windows from their agents along with them. And so sort of this back and forth between our agents and their agents trying to like wi wow our way to the best product and you know so again I think that just like the clock cycle on Stripe has just dramatically increased which is why you saw so many of these announcements recently and and I'm and we're really proud that a lot of this stuff we're doing is just like GA you can use the link wallet today to delegate transactions to your agent a super safe way. It's very slick and a push message. Oh hey time for my agent to you buy me that gift like fantastic thank you agent. Um, and so we're just we're putting this all out there and really encourage people to try it. >> Are you are you forcing yourself to constantly uh use agents to buy stuff [laughter] >> because like right now I feel like a bunch of people want to and there's certain instances when where they can uh but it's not exactly easy everywhere yet. >> Yes, it's a two-sided it's sort of like a three-sided marketplace. You know, you've got on the seller side, they need to be able to accept payments from agents. That's why we have the machine payment protocol or all our APIs are being upgraded so that you just use you can agents can check on >> and I go through this all the time where I will like see a product that I'm interested in. I'll be on my phone. I will click add to cart and then I will get to the cart and I'll see they're not on Shopify and then I'll just churn because I'm like I don't I don't have time. I like I don't have time to go through fill this out punch in my credit card. And so I'm really really excited for this moment where it's like I want to buy this thing. Please buy it for me. >> Totally. it. Yeah, it's in some ways we have this incredibly modern world in which everything's available at our fingertips, but then it's like unfortunately overly available only on our fingertips where I'm sitting there typing in 16-digit numbers like trying to like peck my way through a check check out page, even the Stripe check out page, which like pretty high performing. I'm still like, I can't believe they don't use link. I can't believe I can't just like have my agent go buy this. So, on the seller side, we're making it incredibly easy for any of the 5 million business on Stripe to just accept payments from agents. That's like one side. Another side is on the consumers. They need to be able to have a way to super ergonomically on their phone slick mobile app and link say, "Hey agent, I approve $50 transactions for the next 30 minutes in the following topic. Go agent go." Bam. With, you know, 2FA, Face ID, whatever. I can now approve an agent and it can safely shop for me on the internet. Like giving like a rambunctious intern like a perfect uh card that can only be spent where I want. And so the third side of the marketplace is the agents themselves where we're working with you know co-pilot and meta and chatbt and gemini so that baked into their services they have access to all of the buying and the c the customer mandates so that we can make a commerce this super slick super safe way to buy online and I think we're now finally getting all the infrastructure in place we can get this flywheel starting to spin and with the model progress I think you're going to see amazing new applications in agent commerce >> is there a sentiment internally that the company got kind of lucky by focusing so intensely on developers and then accidentally getting the benefit of like being extremely wellb built for [laughter] agents. >> I guess it's like this >> because like you guys are obviously you guys you guys are you guys are well well incredibly smart incredibly forward thinking but but when you guys started focusing on the developer experience intensely you I don't believe that you were thinking about weren't >> AI agents a decade later. >> This is a surprise for us too. Uh it's it's a it's a it's a useful externality to our um non-religious religious obsession with uh programmatic tools and religious. >> Yes, it's it's >> religiously secular. >> I can't there's not too much which is like a faux like a faux faux at Stripe, but uh saying um yes, let's put this incredible piece of financial uh infrastructure behind a gate that no one can use and you have to call and go through a maze to get some steak dinner. >> Yeah, it's Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're not a steak dinner company. >> Yeah, we have, you know, we showed how many uh users are now signing up for Stripe each each day, which is in like the many tens of thousands a day. And uh you know, that's a lot of steak dinners uh [laughter] to to get to get each of them turned on. So, uh it sort of actually surprises us how few companies Yeah. Like how how few companies in the world actually provide self-s served services. Uh and and you know, I could say that, but I also know that there's 10,000 people at Stripe who are like doing the the work to make those things dinner every once in a while. >> Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I would like to get a steak dinner personally. So >> for the for the 100th Atlas sign up, >> 100,000,000. >> How ambitious is Treasury? I imagine you've been getting the customer feedback from companies forever saying, "Hey, I I incorporated like why are you pushing me out to these other financial products when you already have all my information? I know you guys can store money. I know you guys can move money, but but how ambitious is that product?" >> Yeah. Um, Stripe Treasury is going to be this incredibly straightforward way for a business to be able to store any currency from any country, move it around the world, and just handle all of your banking and money management activities in one place. And it I think this is something that we've been building the infrastructure for for so long, you know, the ability to do currency conversion instantly or be able to pay out across border. But we finally decided that because of stablecoin, now is the time to make this a truly global product from the beginning. Whereas years ago, we would have had to make sort of a country bycountry decision to do a thing like Treasury, but we're going to go really global out the gate and get to 160 countries by the end of the year. Um, and so that's that's that's really where our ambition comes from is how to make this global infrastructure and then of course it's going to have a super slick UI. has comes with a metal metal card, 2% cash back, really super easy to use. And if you use Stripe to earn money through your customers, everything's in one place. >> All the money settles quickly. It it really feels like one of these kind of better together products where I I in my head I've written documents to say, "Hey, this will be a lot easier." And then when you actually go to use it, you're like, "Oh my goodness, this is like much easier." >> Very eloquent way to say, "We're coming for everyone." [laughter] uh there you know there's there there is um there are many services in the world that uh we're not going to by accidentally be able to be better better than and and uh but and I also will note that everything we're building Stripe Treasury on is available for anyone else to build uh and so we're going to see some much more specialization I think in a financial related tools uh and we're excited for Stripe users to be able to do it really quickly. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I think the agents coming to finance will be a big a big story of basically the next two years cuz a as a somebody who started my first real business while in college and then I was realizing like wait okay so we we've signed this like contract and then there's like these invoices but then like the invoices get sent around and then there's like all multiple stages of approval and it's like why does it need to get approved if it's already in the contract and and and you go you go like understanding like the complexity of [snorts] money movement and how many humans are in the loop to every process and it can make it can it can be great that there's humans in the loop because it prevents fraud and and and hopefully prevents errors but it also creates errors and it also slow thing slows things down a lot and so when you think about in the future where these things can be handled by machines I think it's going to be >> yeah I think that's you know it's like dangerous ously skip permissions and money like [laughter] tends to not be exactly the the joining parameters you want. We want smartly suggest permissions, you know, like I I look forward to the day where I get a notification from my smart robot that says, "Hey, here's all the ways you can improve your business. Here's the things you should be able to do to close your books. Here's the things you can do to h handle the invoice." I'm looking forward to those permissions. You know, I don't want to be >> But even something like so imagine a business owner receives an invoice from someone. This happens like still like if you've worked with freelancers enough, you will have experience where a freelancer sends you an invoice. >> It basically just has a number. It does not have like any account details. You're like, "Okay." And then you're replying back, "Okay, how how can I pay this?" Maybe it has an email. But a world where you receive the invoice, you just drop it into your own kind of agent and you say, "Pay this. I'm approving this already. I have approved this." And the agent agent can go Yeah. it can go email the person. and it can conf confirm everything and it can just process it. It's like that historically is something that I've done with having like maybe a part-time uh part-time like back office financial operations person where I'm like this is approved pay it and it's like that doesn't need to be like a uh it's it's not like really high leverage work. It probably doesn't need to be something a business is paying a thousand couple thousand dollar. >> We used to sort of joke that every chat app will eventually become like a banking app but now we like every banking app is actually now becoming a chat app. Uh, and so I think we're going to see the human agent interface related to the full life cycle of your business to become the new modality by which we run our businesses. And you want that to be in a super programmatic, super safe place uh that works globally. And that's what Stripe, Stripe Treasury, all these all this new payment stuff. >> I think you guys are you guys are uh culturally very humble, but the more I'm processing every conversation I've had today, I'm like, "Wow, they're actually coming for everything. They're [laughter] incredibly well positioned. Everything's going to be programmable. Everything's agents are going to be doing >> exactly when [clears throat] our customers succeed. And so I I feel [laughter] I I think I I uh I sleep I sleep very well at night knowing that our business model uh maps exactly to our customer success. [laughter] What else do you have on that thing by the way? >> A lot of stuff. >> Okay. What about the bottom right one just for fun? What's the bottom right one? >> Bottom right one. This is a gong. >> Perfect. Okay. Great. That's a good one. Okay. just go to a different We have a whole different setup there. We got so much stuff. Uh do we have time for one more question, you think? Or is Zach ready to rock? What are you thinking? >> Oh, there he is. >> Uh we we we we got a couple minutes. Yeah. >> Okay, cool. Uh hypothetically, uh like 21-year-old new grad, college [clears throat] grad comes to you and is one maybe wants to join Stripe, other one maybe wants to build a business on Stripe. How are you routing them in 2026? What are you talking them through? >> Well, I love that those are the two options. Uh so uh that that if that were the case that would already be a win. Uh there's many amazing companies. I I think that people should re >> you know follow their passion. I mean look at the two of you what you built, right? Like I I've got to know you over so many of of your awesome new entrepreneurial attempts and I remember you telling me you're going to do this TV show and I wasn't like thinking. [laughter] >> I wasn't like no but I was like >> certainly I will never be on that show. Stop by that crazy thing. >> We're not going to make a pub and then have [laughter] you do college game day in front of it. It'll be very strange. So I I mean like look you you you've followed your >> you followed your noses on this topic and you're and you have a good sense of it and and if you talk to someone who's who's got that kind of passion >> the tools to build something today are what all of us I mean dreamed of imagine having what we have today when we each started all of our startups in the past. >> Um and so I honestly I really encourage them to try to try it. And then I will also say if they're considering joining I mean look Stripe's a 10,000 person company. We're probably in a reasonable high echelon of like low communication costs, but there's 10,000 of us. You got to have it's like a higher communication cost than you and your co-founder. Um, but uh look, the Stripe projects thing where you can provision all these third parties that got started seven weeks ago by six people. >> Wow. >> You know, we we we put the links the link for agents for wallet that was 10 weeks ago and it's again it's built on all the stuff we have, but >> we're we're we're benefiting from all of these new tools. as well. So I I would tell that person I hope she find finds a passion that she has especially in an area where has a per personal interest uh and just go at it hard with the new tools. Um and otherwise you know stripe.com/job was asking what's underrated about working at a big company for a long time. >> I'm on year eight. What's underrated? >> Um >> overnight success. I you know you you >> because presum presumably I mean you've had you've had how many I I would guess like a hundred really talented people have tried to convince you to to join their effort or or leave or hey let me give you like $50 million to go after this thing. >> Have that one call me. Uh the [laughter] the other ones know but um I I >> Yeah, you're joking, but like you could easily go out and raise like 50 on 250 for some like payments related to I could make a I could make a rival TBPN. [clears throat] Uh >> we need more of those. >> Interesting that [laughter] you're not saying I'm going to go build a rival Stripe. That's very Polish. I don't know. >> This one seems to worked out very well for you. So yeah, [laughter] this one I I I you know I could spit wise I think that the the the what's really kept me very energized and and and more so is I tell people like on your worst day of work if you're looking forward to your most unhappy customer then you found your place. >> Sure. And I like I want to hear from an entrepreneur somewhere in the world who's got a serious problem with Stripe. And I'm I want to get on the phone with them. And that is just that's enough of like that's enough of a jolt to keep me going. >> Get in here first. If you have a problem with Stripe, DM me. I will give you Jeff's personal phone number. >> Phone number. Yeah. 4109132877. That is it. So give me a text. You couldn't I couldn't possibly get more spam. So let's just add let's [laughter] let's add to it. Uh, which is another thing I think we could solve with machine payments protocol about a different day story. >> Good point. Good point. Well, thank you so much for the time. >> So good to see y'all. Thanks for thanks for coming to our find you after. We'll hang out after take that off and let's bring in here Zack from Bridge. >> Uh, coming back on the show second third time. We've talked to him a bunch, right? >> A couple times. >> Zack, he's bringing the world's smallest cheeky pint. Cheers. Yours is nice and frosty. >> Cheers. Welcome back to the show in person. >> Nothing like a non-alcoholic micro pint. >> Wait, yours is non-alcoholic? Cuz I I got 0% but I asked for 0% non-alcoholic beer. So my beer is 100% alcoholic beer. 0% non-alcoholic beer, but I still I still tell everyone I'm drinking 0%. >> But you can't tell. There's no So you have no idea what you're saying. >> I have no idea. Yeah. All right. Let's start here. >> Okay. >> The economist says stable coins are over. >> Fire back. in the in the economist. >> Oh, man. In in print. Speaking of things that are over >> in print. I love this. It says two stable coins. [laughter] >> Yeah. Print media says says the future thing that is over says the new thing that is coming is over. >> Where [laughter] the shots finally go. Why the stable market is fizzling. The stable coin market is fizzling. They say stable coins are to proponents the respectable face of crypto. I think it's pretty respectable face right here. So >> in contrast to volatile Bitcoin, let alone speculative meme coins, they should be backed by holdings of treasury bills or other dollar denominated assets, on paper, this makes them safer store value than many fiat currencies. But they say after growing by 30% in the 6 months to late October last year, total stable coin assets have barely budged. Is this true? Is it over? >> Oh man. Um, yeah, it was really nice knowing you guys. [laughter] This is actually my last uh scrape session. >> This is the last last time you will ever let me on this show. Taking it all in. >> So [laughter] I mean there are a bunch of different predictions in here. Uh the stable coin market's worth 300 billion. Some people are calling for two trillion over the next uh 3 years, four years, 5 years, but all of that is very macro level. I want to hear about what you're actually seeing in terms of adoption, new use cases, glimpses of, you know, new areas to deploy stable coins and then just what the big market movers are. >> Totally. I mean, we I mean, our so our business, you know, we shared this in the annual letter last year, grew 4x last year. Our business continues to grow enormously. Like, we grew 20% over the last month alone. So, you know, we certainly don't see correction correction >> stable coins slowing down and and I do think total supply is, you know, flat. >> But these things always go through. >> Yeah. If you want to look at when when when you have a correction in in general digital asset prices, then trading activity at times falls and then it looks like you have a slowdown in adoption. But then you actually have to look at how people are actually using stable coins for non-trading related activities. >> Exactly. like stablecoin transaction volume is growing enormously, the number of transactions are growing enormously and we certainly see that you know the number of folks building with stable coins is growing enormously. Like we have folks from you know a bunch of banks now are leaning into stable coins. Pretty much every fintech that you could think of that is meaningful is doing something with stable coins and probably doing it with us. I mean we obviously announced yesterday with with Meta paying out folks in stable coins. So I I do think that this like the hyperbole around stable coins is dying down a little bit and that creates the opportunity for some of this this like FUD, but um you know it at at the same time we're like you know there there was this thing I think Henry said it yesterday which which is like funny of like the crypto world where for a long time people were like pointing at every problem and being like crypto solves this. Uh and now they're no longer pointing at every problem and saying crypto solves this. But uh but but it actually >> you guys are happy to solve problems with crypto. >> Yeah. Like very very quietly under the hood it is solving a number of problems like banks for crossber payments. We're seeing it for working capital needs. We're seeing it for just infrastructure for cars and infrastructure for global expansion. So it's uh it's certainly not slowing down. >> So there's like some very big meaningful categories. is the crossber payments one's very tractable huge >> is there a coming intersection of like vibe coding and stable coins that you're seeing glimpses of I'm just thinking about like >> that like there was this moment when >> iPhone games became fairly easy for like a kid to build in their bedroom and you got Flappy Bird and I think it was 99 cents and I'm wondering if if micro payments stable coins there's some sort of intersection there where you at vibe coding and you get some sort of new flourishing like ecosystem of like of like smaller transactions. I mean people don't love micro payments but there's like there's something that people I feel like could play with if they're spinning something up in a in an afternoon. >> Totally. I mean I I you know one of my refle one of the reasons why we started bridge is like I was reflecting on the fintech space generally. This was like in 2020 or so. Yeah. And I realiz or one of the realizations that I had was that the cards were basically just the entirety of fintech. Yeah. Everything was like you know people talk about platform shifts like AI is this big platform shift and mobile was a platform shift but in financial services platform shifts take a little bit of a different shape and cards were this new form factor and cards combined with the internet was like 90% of all >> we're talking about like credit cards from like the ' 70s that boom because we rode that boom for so long. There was a time when people would pay by doing like reverse debit and there were so many hacks on top of the credit card. >> Totally. It was a new platform. It was a new primitive on top of which all these new financial services got built and cards were like growing meekly for a while and then the internet came along and they were like uniquely well suited obviously stripe this is what we do but uniquely well suited to solve payment problems on the internet and then they just took off. It became reflexive. you know, more people were paying on the internet, so more people had cards, so more people paid in person, so then more people bought stuff on the internet, and then and then it just took off. But it was this like brand new platform shift in payments tied to an external platform shift. Our our view was that stable coins represented another platform shift in payments. And I think AI could be the corresponding one that helps drive adoption of stable coins. And I think that all the payment problems that we're solving now are like fiat paper problems and there's big markets and so on. But I think the much bigger market will be you know the new means of payment that are going to be required in these agentic services like and you know just simple things like the incrementality of payments is going to be very different very small the velocity of payments is going to be very different very fast uh the reversability of transactions like cards are you are not well suited in a situation where you don't want transactions to be to be reversed or disputed um and so I think there's a lot of benefit benefits of stable coins, but we're like at the very very early stages. So, you're kind of squinting and like looking like way down the tunnel and like trying to predict what what will happen, but it feels like it's there. >> Can you explain the tension between the traditional banking sector and the stable coin world? >> Oh man. Uh >> like what are you saying if if if there was a you know someone with a bank and they say like I make my money by taking deposits and I'm heavily regulated. I have to cover those costs with uh you know wi with interest and you're going to be able to do it without as many regulations. You're going to out compete me. Should I jump on the stable coin boom? Is there a world where we work together? How should the traditional banking system interface with the stable coin world? >> I mean it is um I would say uh complicated. >> Okay. [laughter] >> Do you spend much time in DC? I I went earlier this year and um it it was actually like mean it was like very heartening. I don't know if y'all have spent spent time there but like I hadn't been to DC since I was in high school and like a high school trip. if I grew up in North Carolina so we could like take the school bus up there and uh I went into you know like you're working at like a tech company or something like Stripe and it feels like impossible to understand all the ways in which Stripe is growing and then when you zoom in it's like literally just like one developer coming to Stripe and signing up and like you know one person selling and and then I went to DC and DC feels like this this incomprehensible like you know complexity of decision-m and stuff and then we just met with a bunch of folks and you realize it's just like one person talking to another and like them trying to learn and then they're they're going and talking to another person and they were like genuinely curious and these folks are like voting, you know, debating stuff on like agriculture and like, you know, airline safety and then coming in and talking to me about like the minutia of like stable coin regulation and they were like pretty well-versed. Uh so I think that like one speaks to how how high on the docket it got for them uh and like how important it is and and it has like you know I spent time there at the beginning of the year uh we've spent more time recently as like clarity act has come about and we think that you know it has certainly put the banks and the more stable coin friendly folks at odds but my experience has been that that is not universally the case like there's a whole group of banks coming together there's multiple groups of banks coming together to launch stable coins. There are multiple community banks that we're actually working with on different stable coin initiatives. The the one sort of outlier is um is some of the other folks that have more directly, you know, JP Morgan has their own stable coin and like their own thing that they're trying to push forward. So, there is some competition and and that sort of thing there. But, um I I hope that we can all like work together, but it certainly has been contentious at times. >> Give me a price prediction. 2030. If I put $1,000 in stable coins, how high can it go? [laughter] What do you think's possible? >> Oh, man. I mean, I think you are going to be exactly as wealthy then as you are today. >> That's fantastic. >> With with inflation with [laughter] inflation. um uh advice to founders that are uh feeling that want to start a company today but maybe feel like they're too late as part of this AI boom because I feel like when you started bridge >> there had been there was big stable coin companies that have been created did and maybe you felt at times that am I too late like but clearly you were very you were very early and the timing was perfect because you got to like sit out a terrible bare market and then you and then you were like wow I'm a genius >> that's [laughter] certainly not what everyone told me. Many people in the midst of it told me I was wasting wasting my time. Um >> yeah, I would I would say um I mean the lived experience for me and like you know you kind of see this now in some of these hotter spaces is that folks kind of build what they think others want them to build. >> Um like think about something in AI. You know you're building this thing for this market that isn't like a thing that you deeply believe in. And so you're you're building what you think an investor wants to fund or what you think other people in the industry will think is interesting. And what happened for me is like I was building something that I deeply had conviction should exist. And that is what enabled me to persevere through like some really dark times and build a company that you know ended up you know hitting the the sort of timing situation at like the perfect in the perfect moment. But like literally you know if I didn't have that conviction I would have pivoted you know a year before you know I mean FTX I mean literally you know Terra Luna blew up then FTX blew up then SVB went under. I mean it was like one stable coin went under the whole crypto market was done and then USDC depected. Uh and so we got funny when you made this joke. [laughter] >> Yeah. I mean we got booted off like four banks before we got started. >> I assume stable coins are going to stay stable but I understand [laughter] there is risk there is a new technology. Uh can you can you uh uh help me understand the interaction of like AI coding agents, AI code review in stable coin software development? Historically, I have always had the perception that anything in crypto is not just higher stakes but more technically complicated. It's more like I don't know writing a compiler than you know a front-end website. And so it's high stakes. >> [snorts] >> uh LLMs do make mistakes at the same time the new models mythos 5.5 like like superhuman and so there's probably a way to integrate that successfully what what works what are you hearing or seeing that makes sense are we still in like the centaur era where you need a great software developer working alongside AI is this something where you can just throw an a agent at it and it's you know oh there's no more risk anymore and it's not going to hallucinate I >> I mean I I would say for us it it kind of feels feels like we are one or two steps behind where like you know it feels like some of the folks are who are in pure software. >> Yeah. >> Where they're like, "Oh, I'm just going to I'm just going to, you know, have this long running agent vibe code an entire browser and ship it in a week and be fine." Uh we're nowhere close to that. Like we couldn't we, you know, there are big parts of our business that are pure software. Yeah. >> In a ton of ways. like think about like transaction monitoring or stuff like that and but but the risk >> from a regulatory reason of like having things off and then you know missing things and then not being able to appropriately justify it because someone vibe coded a thing. It's just not not possible. So the ways in which we use it end up being different. And another like very quick example is like we're standing up a national trust bank. As part of standing up a national trust bank there's a bunch of requirements. One of which is that every every commit has to be approved. >> Wait, what? >> So So like you literally cannot have >> over [laughter] fast takeoff fast. >> This is the most >> got it. [laughter] >> Still got it. >> Yeah. >> FDA for AI. This was something somebody was saying. >> It is like, you know, the the Jebans paradox of employment. We're just going to have to hire like more and more and more code reviewers. >> Yep. [laughter] I've worn the keyboard. >> Yeah, it's an interesting I I was talking to someone small business owner who was uh very very fired up on vibe coding. He told me specifically he hadn't slept in four nights. I was asking him [laughter] the product that he was working on. He was like, "This is something I've thought about building forever." I was like, "Well, have you ever thought about like rebuilding the sort of like vertical SAS fintech uh platform that you run your whole business on?" And he was like, >> "Uh, no. It's 1,200 a year. It's like [laughter] they give me so much. It's like it would never make sense to. And so it's like the one piece of like core technology that he runs his business on. He even he he's so fired up on vibe coding he's like I'd never rebuild that. It would never make sense. And but but so there's two things. There's like a value equation and then there's like a potential risk kind of like cost equation. And I feel like with stable coins specifically, the potential in in crypto like the potential cost is so astronomical where like saving a little bit here to then introduce like hund00 million of of risk and >> Yeah. Yeah, but there but there's a bunch of other things that are amazing like for us uh we are we have like rearchitected a lot of our a lot of our infrastructure to be a like before you know one of the one of the hard things in crypto is adding a bunch of different blockchains like every a lot of blockchains can kind of be the same but many are very different and so it's super tedious to add a bunch of a bunch of different blockchains we or or the same thing is true of like adding new payment rails so you know you might add a US bank and then you need a redundant US bank and then you need a European an bank and then you need a bank in Mexico and then and all of these integrations kind of look the same you know it's like you're you're getting money in you're checking the monies in you're sending money out you know and what we have built is the ability to sort of add all of these things very very quickly and so we took like you know what used to take you know two weeks to add a new blockchain now takes you know someone actually did it in a meeting the other day of like adding a new stable coin on a on a new blockchain all with a bunch of claw that you know >> does that mean we need 10,000 new layer ones >> that is that is it's the Jevans paradox of uh blockchains >> because it's easier to do a [laughter] new chain we need 100,000 more a million more >> yes >> maybe honestly one for one every American should have their own layer one >> we're just maximalist across every dimension >> there was a moment in stable [laughter] coins maybe last year where it was like this like this like small like county in New Mexico is going to have their own chain. >> That was that was a stable that was >> Yeah. Wyoming. Wyoming has its own stable coin. So, we're going to have every state's going to have its own stable coin. Every state's going to have its own blockchain. Maybe even every city. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. You know, you could have blockchain. Yeah. Neighborhood. There you go. >> Yeah. The mission stable coin, the Prescidio [laughter] stable coin. >> Which one would you buy? >> Sa [laughter] I'm going for the Mavericks. >> The Maverick stable coin. Okay. Well, Just a taste thing. >> Anything else? >> No, this was great. Thank you for coming on. Great to meet Great to meet in person. Close out with us. Uh, leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com. We'll be back tomorrow in the TVPN Ultradome 11 a.m. sharp. Thank you for tuning in and have a great day. Goodbye. It's been an honor. Cheers. >> Goodbye.