Inside Stripe's AI Strategy with Will Gaybrick Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 If you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create founder-like agency inside your company. A single engineer can do what two teams of engineers could do two years ago. Suddenly the market opportunity landscape is just much broader and you can do more with software. How do you guys ship so much product? Companies have skewed in that direction where they've seen this new agentic efficiency and power as a way to optimize cost structure.

00:25 our belief I'm being a little cheeky but build everything the Opus 45 Cambrian explosion moment we haven't had that in agentic commerce today and I think there's a few reasons for that one is we are merging so much more code than last year and it is stressing every system so we created something called strike minions you're not going to iterate you're not go into planning mode you're just going to say this is what I want go do it that's kind of where the world is going you guys are I think over two trillion of volume

00:50 now what do you think is sort of the future state of how we all access models and tokens >> and very bullish on >> I want to start with just a state of stripe. >> Yes. >> So what is stripe today and you know when we originally invested it you know it's a payment processor but now I think the average AI company uses 11 different stripe products and at sessions >> I believe you had 288 distinct >> product launches.

01:19 So I want to talk about velocity also but just start with just what is the state of stripe today? So internally we think about Stripe as having you know inverted our value proposition from being a payments company with sort of add-ons to now being this multi-product platform where everything sort of focuses on financial infrastructure helping you grow by reducing the friction and increasing the agency you know to um be more agile with your business model to uh operate in more countries uh and just go faster when it

01:54 comes to everything that touches revenue and cash. So you know just practically speaking went from payments to then you know billing subscriptions and invoicing uh connect if you're a platform or marketplace radar for mitigating fraud you know radar now for doing many more things than that tax and just I think we we don't actually count but somewhere in and around 2530 products that are sort of headlining branded products and then of course you know hundreds and thousands of features below that but again the framework

02:24 work we think about is really reducing frictions and increasing agency. So a good example last year uh we saw a lot of users for the first time experiencing free trial abuse and this wasn't really an issue pre- AI because >> you know most stripe users are software companies margins burden wasn't there yet. >> Yeah. So they're wasting a little compute but but it's it's it's it's negligible.

02:50 It's minimous but now software has a cost structure and so actually I think cursor was the first user that we >> I was going to say it was our portfolio where we exactly experienced it and uh you know I I guess internet users can be crafty but yes >> yes and and I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were abusive um >> and so you know you're just throwing money at these you know users who are just signing up for another account, another account, another account, you know, maybe even doing model

03:23 distillation and and and things like that. And so we sort of, you know, got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend a pipeline where we were able to, you know, use our foundation model, look across the entire Stripe network, use our embeddings, and then, you know, after that put a reasoning layer on top of so you could sort of say we think this is a free trial abuser because um and point to those signals.

03:43 And I I I I think it's today, I think it's 11 labs recently told us that they're blocking 2,000 free trial abusers per day using stripe signals. >> Incredible. >> So, you just think about how much money you'd be, you know, burning if you were um you know, well, how much money you wouldn't how how much revenue you wouldn't be creating if you weren't giving these trials, you know, how false positives and the false Yeah, exactly.

04:09 Exactly. >> And then on the increasing agency side, >> it's still just so hard to go global. you know, you think about um having to register, calculate, remmit taxes in so many geographies >> and this new crop of AI companies, you know, they're digital goods companies and they want to just, you know, go global very fast. And so I guess, you know, AEFs is a good example.

04:30 um they're using uh this product strike managed payments where in their home markets you know the US let's say they have an entity in Europe they are the seller of record but you know in longtail markets you know the Kazakhstans and you know all over um APAC uh where they you know haven't sort of entities you know stripe stands in as the actual merchant of record we handle all tax calculation tax remittance and everything like that and so this just lets them cover you know 100 plus geographies and compliantly.

05:03 >> Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. And if you go back to the to the fraud example, you know, if you identify abusive actors, you know, there's actually a network effect in that in that business, right? Which is um which is super powerful. Um and obviously we appreciate it as uh as as you know, investors and many of the companies who benefited from it. Um so if you look at the product set today >> you know obviously the origin of stripe was startups and so you can very easily stand up payments you know sell stuff online >>

05:35 and then famously part of the the beauty of Stripe's growth and business model is that you captured companies like Door Dash and Instacart when they were in YC >> and then you grew with them along the way. How do you think about the product strategy as it relates to serving startups versus serving large enterprises? >> So, I think it was actually um Colin at Clerk who who summarized our strategy nicely on on X recently where he said stripe strategy is unabashed.

06:04 I'm paraphrasing his words, but it's win all the startups and then win them again. >> Yes. Um and I think you know to some extent that's just a good business model because startups are um very ambitious. They typically grow into the biggest companies of tomorrow. They're sort of canaries for what the next opportunity is. So on another subtle reason to win all the startups and win them again is they actually have the highest standards of all of our customers.

06:30 uh you know I I looked recently at uh the seesap for stripes reporting and for our very very large enterprise users like your reporting is great like we love the data you go it's way better than anything we get from any of our other >> because they're accustomed to the incumbents. Yeah, exactly. And then you you look at it for startups like your reporting is garbage.

06:48 You have got to fix this. This is driving me crazy. And so there's um this persistent sense that startups just make us better by being the fastest, by being most demanding and so on. But of course once we start working with startups, we want to work with them forever. And so this pulls us up market and you know forces us to become you know as sort of surprisingly great.

07:10 That's the standard we try to hold ourselves to for enterprises as for startups. And now we're working with I don't know what the exact percentage is today but it's not quite half but we're getting there. Uh Fortune 500 companies you know we work of course with the Amazons of the world um Microsofts and you know at the enterprise it's sort of a different sales cycle.

07:29 It's a different uh you know post sale activation motion. It's a lot more required you know after you've already signed the contract whereas startups sort of go live like that. But fundamentally it's you know the same thing. You just stay close to the user. you hear their their needs. Um you show that you're sort of provably better when it comes to the metrics they care about and um and yeah, so it's really both at this stage.

07:52 >> Yeah. Win them and then win them again. I love that. That's a great that's a great dynamic. Um I want to shift gears. So, um I think you guys publicly said that uh first half signups grew 50% >> year-over-year >> and that the median 26 cohort is generating 50% more revenue than the comparable 25 cohort. So, um and then I think the 25 cohort was generating 70% more revenue than the comparable four cohort.

08:23 >> Um so, what has changed? >> Yeah. Well, I think two things. one is um AI is giving rise to so much opportunity for new business creation. There's just things you couldn't do before that you can do now. >> Uh you couldn't build a sunno four years ago. Um or you could maybe build a much worse four years ago. >> Uh you couldn't build a Higsfield 4 years ago.

08:48 You know, there's um there's just new things that you can do. And so suddenly the um market opportunity landscape is just much broader and you can do more with software. Uh on the other side the sort of cost of doing more software has decreased a lot because you just need many fewer engineers to build the things that you want to build because of you know agentic coding.

09:09 And so we're just seeing this explosion in new software creation. You know, when you look at the year-on-year increase in usage of Stripe billing, it's actually a lot higher than usage of Stripe overall because it disproportionately skews towards people creating software companies. >> Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. That's awesome to hear. Um I want to shift now to >> um some of the products that we talked about, right?

09:35 So, you have this proliferation of new products to serve all the needs of companies online. Um the high level question is like how do you do that? Like how do you guys ship so much product? >> Yeah. >> Well speed has always been you know near the top maybe maybe user relentless focus on user is probably the top part. Yeah. Exactly. >> But speed is is right up there.

10:03 Um and it's interesting you know we're I think a lot about institutional progress. Um, and you know, we we study the great companies that have come before us and now are, you know, beside us. Um, you know, the Amazons are still around, of course, but you look at Stripe and you'd say, okay, well, we have sort of an adapted adapted version of of how we set goals.

10:26 Um, that's quite similar to Google's OKRs. Um, you know, our sales team is organized pretty similarly to Microsoft's. Um, you know, we have a DRRi culture similar to Apples and we, you know, have a product quality standard and how we do our product reviews is similar to theirs. Um, you know, a lot of the day-to-day mechanisms that I use to sort of run the business, I've basically stolen from Alan Mali, the former CEO of >> of Ford um, and Boeing Aviation.

10:56 And so we study these companies and we try to bring it all into stripe and we think about just how do we create an enduring institution that can sort of outlast any of us because it's you know a great container for entrepreneurship and then you sort of reach today and >> there's just no one to copy like what do you do when you know a single engineer can do what you know two teams of engineers could do two years ago and you know sort of the theory of mind right now is that Stripe needs to become more than it ever has

11:32 been before a platform for founders internally and it's always been a platform for founders externally. >> Yeah, of course the customers. Yeah, >> exactly. And founders have always done incredibly well at Stripe. You know, we um actually it was an adjacent company um Metronome we acquired Metronome last year and Scott Woody the CEO is thriving at Stripe.

11:52 He's leading >> leading all of you know Metronome and billing at this point. Uh we acquired um Privy uh which is a wallets infrastructure company and Bridge uh over the last couple of years and you know Henry is now leading most of crypto. Zach is leading OpenUSD and bridge of course um uh AA from from privy is leading a lot of engineering for crypto.

12:13 Uh JR Far from Lemon Squeezy is leading Stripe Treasury at this point. And so just founders have always done very well at Stripe. But now you have this very interesting moment where senior engineers are just so powerful. >> Yes. >> And so you say, well, there's a few different ways our or could be shaped going forward. It could be that we just have many fewer engineers and maybe that's what what the world would look like.

12:40 And I think a lot of companies have skewed in that direction where they've seen this new, you know, agentic uh efficiency and power as a way to optimize cost structure. Uh you saw some layoffs. You saw, you know, companies shrinking opex. And our belief is that it's just an opportunity to I'm being a little cheeky, but build everything. >> Yes. >> And you know, the best way to optimize your cost structure is to grow more.

13:10 >> Yes. you know, we have reams of user asks going back many years that are unmet. And so we just want to get through them all faster. >> And so while we have, you know, more and more productivity from those senior engineers, if you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create founder-like agency inside your company. >> And so the main things that are holding back our progress today are actually sort of back office things.

13:34 You know, we are merging so much more code than last year. And it is stressing every system. It is stressing how do we get things into our seller systems? How do we get things onto our pricing page? How do we actually bring things to market when we can't train sellers on them fast enough? And so we are really trying at this stage to optimize every single phase of we think of it as sort of the critical path in Stripe from you know the ideas behind product development the user asks all the way to products being in

14:04 users's hands. And so, you know, to your question of how do you go faster, it's really two things. It's one just how do you create that agency for everyone at Stripe? How do you let everyone at Stripe be an otur like a founder, you know, a a a creative and not have them held back by the morass of, you know, centralized processes overhead. Yeah. Exactly.

14:26 >> Exactly. And on the other side then it's how do you you know with your de uh your dev prod team just make the tools better and better and better. Um, so we created something called Stripe Minions, which we've blogged about a little bit. And, you know, of course, we've got tons of developer tooling to help users iterate with agents, but minions, uh, we think of as, you know, the most like one of our most important metrics internally is how many PRs and what percentage of our PRs are created by minions.

14:54 And the reason for that is that minions are one shot. >> Yeah. So you you give it a prompt and you know it's going to build it and then it's going to you know go through CI/CD and all of testing and then you're going to review it. So you're not going to iterate not go into planning mode. You're just going to say this is what I want go do it. >> And so we think you know that's kind of where the world is going.

15:16 You know it's the the oneshot or the glorified real loop where you're just letting the agent be super super powerful. And so we blogged about Minions, I think in January, February, and they were doing 1,200, you know, PRs per week. And last week, I think 7,000 PRs came from minions. Wow. >> Yeah. And and about 30% of our PRs in that week came from Minions.

15:41 So, >> you know, that sort of developer tooling and then the internal processes just get out of the way and make the tools amazing. And that's how we're going to go fast. >> That's amazing. In terms of empowering senior engineers who are now more powerful than ever, have you made any dramatic changes to how you organize the company internally? So, obviously that the minions example is incredible and I assume the 30% is going to go to a very high percentage within a year or something.

16:10 Um, but some of the things that we've heard from other companies is taking your most powerful engineers, putting them into business units or closer to the customers. Um but then you have sort of coordination problems that come from that. So like how have you guys approached that empowerment? >> Yeah. So engineers have always been you know some of the most important product leaders at Stripe.

16:31 You know we build for engineers for technical users. Of course we built for many personas at this point but engineers have always been sort of the hero you know ICP um uh for Stripe. And so because of that engineers have always been some combination of engineer, PM, designer. >> Yeah. Uh, and so I think we're just leaning even more into that. You know, we're building tools and platforms so that engineers can sort of do a lot of the the front-end development themselves and um and front-end design themselves.

17:01 Um, probably, you know, just the the shortest answer to your question is flatter. >> Yeah, flatter. Smaller, I assume smaller teams. >> Smaller teams, flatter. uh you had you know a lot of layers that were sort of orchestrating work and very valuably so in most cases. Exactly. But you just don't need that anymore. I was talking to a one of our most senior engineers recently.

17:24 In fact >> the guy who um uh who built Stripe Projects because Stripe Projects was >> you know basically a PM and one of a very senior engineer and a few weeks and and a couple of other engineers who who um jumped in as well. So I want to give them due credit but most of the PRs came from one guy. He's got Alexander now. He's just got a screen. He's orchestrating 16 agents and he's going a whole lot faster.

17:48 >> Yeah, that's amazing. Do you have a standard uh team size for projects like this? Is it like we've gone around it's like okay one you know one there's no social dynamic and so maybe that doesn't work and you know four is probably the max size and we've heard everything in between. You have a view on it? >> Not really. I mean we still have I mean you kind of want um in a flatter or you both want wider teams right because that means fewer layers of management >> but then you know you also sort of >> believe you can

18:20 have fewer people because each individual is is more empowered these days and so I think those forces are offsetting to some extent today and in fact it's it's more like >> you know if you have a a linemanaged team of eight people, they're just doing 3x more. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So, you might have the same manager to the manager to IC ratio, but the team is doing three things rather than one.

18:43 >> Yeah. Yeah, it makes total sense. So, one of the things that you and I have talked about is um and you touched on it, but I'd like to expand on a little more is this idea that you can do all these new things with AI. And so, where do you direct the efforts? And so you you guys have very clearly directed the efforts toward the front-facing stuff. So building new products for customers.

19:06 Um and lots of what is discussed in the market is backend facing stuff. So optimizing your call structure as you said everything is a markdown file and you know let's let's map out everything that everyone does in the organization and optimize it to death. Um talk about your philosophy for why you want to go for the former and not the latter. >> Yeah.

19:24 So I think there was an an early narrative and it still you know lingers for sure um and there's some truth to it um of just we have agents now we should be more efficient um we should be able to do more with less um and and the main thing I actually think about on this front is making our people more productive uh we have a tool internally called Kai which is our sort of knowledge AI tool and uh we built it I don't know maybe 6 months ago, two people built it.

19:56 Um, now 83% daily activives. Uh, or sorry, 83% weekly activives, about 60% daily activives at Stripe. Uh, seller productivity has increased by 20%. Uh, but we're not saying, "Wow, we need fewer sellers." We're saying, "So, we need a lot more sellers." [laughter] You know, it's just, uh, you know, >> the idea of payback of our sellers just got way better.

20:17 We should have way more of them. >> Exactly. And then on the flip side, you know, operational teams are just feeling much more productive. Their day-to-day life is is more enjoyable. They're using better tools. They're having to do less, you know, manual work. Um, and so, you know, it's almost trit in tech circles now, but the Javon's paradox, you know, assets becomes more productive.

20:36 You don't want less, you want more. >> Yeah. Exactly. >> Uh, and it is very much the case for us when it comes to engineers. You know, our engineers are just magnificently more productive. And so I mentioned earlier just making Stripe a platform for founders like internal platform for founders you know going forward you could say well because engineers are so productive there'll just be fewer engineers in the world and I just really don't believe that and that's not what we're seeing at all you know you see you know

21:06 that much more software creation we you know there was a narrative um 9 months ago about you know SAS platforms and how there you know vertical platforms you know um how they were all going to struggle. Uh our um new SAS platform cohort is 103% larger than uh in 2026 than it was in 2025. So people are just saying well there's so many spaces that need a SAS platform.

21:28 I'm building it faster and faster and faster. And so I think there will be more software engineers in the world. Uh we will need few of them fewer of them to do the things we're already doing, >> right? And so Stripe then becomes for new grads and early career engineers more of an incubator of come in figure out a high agency project that can help our users.

21:54 Let's get out of your way. Let's create the pave paths. Let's make you make it easy for you to go faster and we should be able to just build more and more and more and you know not just random things but adjacencies that sort of compound what we're doing today. Um, so spend management is adjacent to Treasury and that might have been roadmapped for two years from now.

22:18 Instead, one engineer has picked it up as a project and they're just building it themselves. Um, actually I wrote the first commit for it, but they're now they're now running with it. >> Two more capable hands now. >> Exactly. More capable hands. Um, so yeah, we we um we believe the big opportunity and the one that we're leaning into is uh doing more with what we have and over time doing more with more.

22:40 Yeah, I totally agree with that. And um I wrote a piece recently about founders being the asset class, like the the representation of our market of late stage venture, which you guys are probably at the forefront of. Um founders are the asset class because founders are going to be the ones who enable the companies to find the next product areas. >> And so this idea that you have to make trade-offs today around do we try and build new products for revenue or cut costs?

23:06 Y >> I think for companies like Stripe that are run by you guys There's probably always going to be that next opportunity to create additional revenue opportunities, you know, find the new customer products that are a big hit and that is never going to go away. You're always going to have the chance to build more. >> Yes, absolutely. I do think it's a good moment for company leaders to create some resourcing back pressure because that back pressure drives more efficient and more expensive use of new tools.

23:30 Um, [snorts] but I also imagine that in the years ahead, we'll have a budgeting process that looks not that dissimilar for what it's been in the past of we're doing so much with what we have. We can do even more if we continue to expand resourcing. Um, but in this moment, I think it is a good time to say, well, let's really do a lot with what we have today.

23:52 Um, because you still see increases in productivity, you know, from what you what you already have. Beyond that, you know, from from a users first standpoint, just there's so much more they want from us. Um, you know, we've heard from from a lot of users um that for Stripe Tax, they want global filing and it took us a long time to get to, you know, US filing on Stripe Tax, meaning that, you know, every state in the US will just automatically file for you.

24:19 Um, it's hard. It's a hard problem because you are dealing with um so many different jurisdictions that accept filing in different ways [snorts] and so it took us a long time to get there. Um global filing was the next task. You know, we just don't want to have to think about this in any market. And we built that in about a third of the time that it took us to get to US filing.

24:39 >> Wow. With much greater complexity. >> Exactly. Much greater complexity. And so it's just like you an infinite list of of asks and opportunities like that. And so if you're just relentlessly focused on users, you're going to focus on on that. Uh we um we launched recently a product called Stripe Treasury. Um and it's an interesting moment in sort of fintech right now because I think there is sort of an unbundling of what banking means.

25:05 And Stripe, you know, is not a bank, does not aspire to be a bank, but does aspire to provide your banking portal and to help you with global money movement. This is something that we've we've we've been asked for uh for a very long time. And so we built Stride Treasury to allow our users to hold funds in dozens of currencies, you know, across many countries and, you know, just build what the banking portal should be able to do.

25:30 And so, you know, we we've, you know, focused on bringing, you know, this experience to users uh extremely quickly. Um, and what we're finding in every case is that the timelines that we thought, you know, were were the the best doable 2 years ago, uh, are now being compressed again and again and again. And it's because the direction that we're finding, um, from an agent engineering standpoint is kind of akin to injection molding.

26:03 You know, it's it's it's a bit reductionist. Yeah. Uh but when you look at sort of the growth in consumer package goods and toys and things like that, a lot of it just exploded postwar and it was because we got really good in the 40s uh at melting plastic uh you know it's the inject injection molding screw that sort of you know melts plastic very evenly and you know sort of injects it into uh you know a metal casting and that's sort of how we're doing code production at this point.

26:33 you know, we're creating the molds and the templates and you mentioned markdown files like those are extremely important. You need your agents files in every repo >> and as long as you create those patterns and you sort of understand the pattern of how you integrate with financial institutions, you can hand off so much of the work to agents and they just get it done and all of the time you end up spending is sort of on the back end at code review.

26:55 Um, but even then agents are doing code review even better than humans did before. So just again compressing timelines, it just feels like a much bigger opportunity than optimizing cost structure. >> Yeah, I think you may be the first person to compare uh modern AI based software engineering to injection molding. So this is this is great. We're covering your ground.

27:14 And I've actually been to an injection molding plant before. >> It's pretty amazing. >> It's pretty amazing, especially when you think about the fact that it was probably 70 years ago that it was created. Uh >> James Watson Henry, I think the guy I've been in Pennsylvania. >> Yeah, there you go. That's uh that's great. Um, you know, if you, you know, as an investor in Stripe and a large large investor in Stripe, um, another way that I think about what you just described is the opportunity to optimize cost is finite,

27:40 right? You said long verse short. I really like. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's optimizing cost structure is going short. Uh, sort of your own future potential and just building faster, building more is going long, you know, your future potential. >> It's like the capital allocation equivalent of uh like returning cash. Yes. As opposed to reinvesting cash.

27:59 Yeah. Yeah. I uh I got it. Okay. Um I want to shift over to a new topic which you guys are on the cutting edge of and which gets a lot of play but almost in like a nebula sense. I' I'd like to go a little bit deeper on it with you. Um which is sort of agents engaging in commerce on the internet. So >> what is the state of where we are today? What are the bottlenecks and how do you sort of view a framework for how that could be done in the future?

28:24 >> Yeah. So we are, you know, we talked about the Opus 45 Cambrian explosion moment. We haven't had that in a commerce today. Um like there isn't a um just there aren't a ton of canonical use cases that you just see repeated over and over and over again. Um and I think there's a few reasons for that. One is we're missing primitives, >> right? >> Uh and just that's something we're very focused on.

28:49 you know, we we uh we created with Tempo the machine payments protocol so that uh services can indicate, you know, what needs to be paid and how you can pay for it. So, if you're selling, you know, an image or a piece of content online, you can request it and get a 402 response back. Um, and it just says like here's how you buy me. So, that's a primitive like we think machines will want to buy from from other machines.

29:16 Um, and there's really a question of like what what should checkout look like for agents? And it's still sort of an open question. You know, browser automation is getting better. So maybe agents should just be, you know, crawling through checkout forms and them out. I think there's still a lot of open questions. It's like the Yeah, that that's the skuorphic version.

29:33 There's going to be a native version. Yeah. >> Yeah. I I think that's right. I think that's right. Um, so we're we're sort of at the missing primitives phase and we're sort of figuring that out. And then there's a sociological phase of just in what ways will agentic commerce be better than non-agentic commerce. [gasps] I think there's some very non speculative ways in which it'll be better like just checkout pages shouldn't exist for humans you know with with stripe link and you know shop with shop pay and it's very

30:04 easy to get through a checkout page these days but should you even need to go to one or should you just be able to say buy it on a you know product display page I think so I think just check out pages will go away at the best I think they'll go away and so that's like a sort of nonspecul ulative but maybe less ambitious form of agent commerce. >> I actually think that's interesting because you they will go away for human users too.

30:28 This is not just like only Yes. Okay. So, stripe link like you have like 400 million users on strip link and then shop pay probably has some comparably large number and then you can you can use those and just automate the whole process. >> Exactly. Yeah. We launched recently the link agent wallet so that there's now just a link CLI so an agent can just you know sweep up link credentials and go use them um with you know humans in the loop to say how they can use them um the I think one of the places we are the most

30:55 excited about gentic commerce actually is B2B so we launched straight projects straight projects is you know a way to scaffold apps you know that's sort of the the narrow definition of it uh but the most exciting thing that Stripe projects is is a way to provision B2B services agentically. >> Yep. >> So you can go um adop an agent can go adoptic Versell uh for hosting and they can do it without you needing to go to versell.com and do anything.

31:23 >> This is this has actually informed our investment thesis in a few investments recently that are developer tools and we say okay assume that the agents are going to be the shoppers in the future. Exactly. Like is this the one that the agents will want to pick? >> Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Um and that's a very good framework. um you know, an agent can go adopt browserbase.

31:39 Uh and we actually had a really great demo uh a while back at Stripe where we um >> uh we used uh browserbase uh live to uh with via an agent to fill out an NCAA bracket. >> That's [laughter] cool. That's great. >> Which I thought was awesome because I have three brothers and you know, we all love sports, but I'm always sort of too busy to engage in the family pools.

32:00 And so it was so cool to just watch the agent, you know, pick up um a browserbased session and, you know, fire up espn.com and do a bit of research and just like fill it out. >> How'd it do? >> Uh I don't actually know. I don't think we ever sort of ran the evals on it, but uh >> I suspect probably as good as human. >> It's probably better. Yeah, exactly.

32:20 Probably better. Um >> and so I I I do think agents sort of adopting B2B or sort of B2C services that are more utilitarian uh will be very popular. And so today again as a primitive we're just trying to make it easier for agents to adopt services. Um but I do think the sort of sociology will continue to evolve. Um you know the the longunning tasks uh are not sort of uh I don't know that we've sort of figured out exactly how to do them on the consumer side.

32:54 >> Yeah. It's not there yet. my um uh I was uh trying the other day I was using uh cloud code to try to uh compose a song for my niece's birthday. >> Oh >> yeah, it was pretty cool. Um and you know in the past without a pseudo I just like definitely wouldn't have done that. >> Um with ao I might do that. Uh you might do it with a Higsfield as well. We're talking about them earlier >> but I'm not sure that I want to go create a $10.99 or $9.99 a month account with them.

33:22 I just want the sort of micro consumption for that. And so, you know, along with the actual commerce primitives, I think there's these micro consumption APIs that need to start to exist. Um, and browser rates we're talking about, they're sort of leaning into it. >> But I'm very bullish on, you know, all these services standing up, >> you know, sort of not necessarily anonymous, but just ephemeral or one-time consumption.

33:45 And I think that will really unlock agent commerce too because then you won't have to say well I need to pay these guys 10 bucks a month or these guys 10 bucks a month these accounts and all this stuff just use the service and pay >> agent do this discover the services your budget is $15 go >> my uh my 10-year-old has been creating rap songs so uh so I'm very familiar with all of these services and uh and by the way you know the the quality is actually pretty good and he's you know he posts them on Spotify >> uh but uh

34:12 but the execution maybe is not quite as good The lyrics are very good from AI and the music itself is pretty good. So it's yeah I would welcome that. Um so the the critical thing I think or one of the critical things that you just said is this concept of micro payments or microtransactions. So this has been something that has been talked about >> probably since the advent of the internet uh as an opportunity like why do you think now it could work?

34:38 >> Well agents really increase human agency. I guess it almost sounds um uh almost sounds redundant, but you know, talking about these um these applications, uh composing a song for your niece, filling out your NCAA bracket, whatever else, it's really hard to do without agency. They take a lot of time. You're creating all these different accounts. And so, I'm just very bullish on services leaning into saying you can use me ephemerally, you can use me um in a very um you sort of lightweight way.

35:06 Um, and I think to make that work, you're just going to need to support microtransactions. Um, I think the case against microtransactions has always been, well, you're trying to consume content and if you're trying to sell an article, you're always going to be squeezed between the subscriber business model and the free business model. >> Yeah. Like you you want to capture the excess as part of the subscriber.

35:35 Exactly. Like that's the business model. or you do it with ads and just like they're one or the other is better than what you're doing. >> And I think that was probably true in the past. But as you give agents more complex tasks, you know, you want them to be these little sort of hummingbirds like going around the internet just slurping up a little data here, you know, pulling it over here, you know, some very transient ephemeral storage, doing a little compute over here.

35:59 And you don't want the individual human to have to think about what they're using. you want them in that these services are secure, right? But you don't want them to sort of create accounts everywhere. So I think microtransactions will just be necessary for that economy to exist, the sort of agentic economy. >> And then on the flip side, they're now eminently possible because of stable coins.

36:25 Um, [snorts] >> and stable coins are today relatively unorganic. So if you're a human, you know, you have to go jump through a bunch of hoops. But if you just give an agent a budget, they can easily, you know, take dollars, move into stables or, you know, just use a share a stored balance um and find a way to check out and they don't they don't mind the sort of back and forth stables.

36:48 Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with that. And look, we've we've seen that transition that's happened in a lot of software business models today, right? like the predominant business model of selling subscriptions and seeds and you know we've now seen a shift to consumption and I think you know there's probably analogies where um you know the consumers are better off because they can get get access to more stuff and then the businesses can access more people which they otherwise couldn't access with a subscription

37:14 service. So my hope is that that >> you know that does come into play. Um so on the topic of stable coins so we've covered sort of how you guys build software how you move so fast uh in an AI development world you know we've talked about the idea of commerce you know aentic commerce um talk about stable coins like you said there's a lot of friction in the process today but just state state of the stable coin market and what you see the opportunity to be for the next call it five years [sighs and gasps] >> so I'm an

37:43 infrastructure nerd so I always will go there first and stable coins just a better platform for moving money than exists otherwise. Um >> we strongly agree. >> Yeah. Um and better for a couple reasons. You know there are certain countries uh that have you know rolled out really good payment systems. Most of them are nationalized. You know UPI in in India.

38:04 Um actually it's interesting when you look at these economies uh the percentage of sub$5 payments in India I believe is on UPI is I think something like 86% whereas in the US cards I think it's >> single digits%. So, you know, there's some good, cheap, fast payment schemes that are nationalized. Picks, another one in Brazil, which has grown meteorically, [snorts] >> but you need a shelling point for the global economy, right?

38:36 >> Just what can we all agree on? And that's where crypto rails solve this political problem where just this platform works everywhere. >> And so, if we just all used it, the world, the global financial system would work better, be faster, be cheaper, and so on. Um, so if we all like went to sleep tonight and woke up tomorrow and we all held stables, it would just be a better global >> less friction and less cost in the economy.

38:59 >> Exactly. Um, now that might be one of those, uh, should work this way, may never, you know, work this way problems and so we are sort of resolutely focused on trying to change that. Um, we talked earlier about stripe treasury and, you know, we decided to make stable coins native to stripe treasury. So you can just hold a balance in stables just like you hold a balance in USD or EUR or GBP or anything like that.

39:24 [snorts] So um we believe that the opportunity for stables is just faster um money movement, cheaper money movement and more global money movement. Um, right now you can be a Stripe user in I can't remember what the exact number is, but around 60 countries in fiat, but you can be a Stripe user in stable coins in I think about 150 countries. So just bringing more people into the uh online economy uh in a way that allows them to you know transact with you know the AI companies and you know as the as the economy the

40:02 software economy gets more and more global bringing more people into it is more and more valuable. You can build a powerful AI company with two engineers in Thailand uh just as well as you can do it in the US or as well as you can do it in Brazil. So you know for stables for us it is higher performance more global. >> Yeah and I like the position that you guys are in as it relates to stable coins just because again talk about meeting the market where it is like people don't want to cut over full wholesale and just you

40:31 know drop all their fiat and move over to stable coins. So I think >> the relationships that you have and the sort of comprehensive offering that you have allows for adoption to happen at the pace that the enterprises want to adoption adopt at or startups. >> Yeah. Yeah. And all of this works, you know, when you really lean into it. Uh Felix Bogar, Felix, I think, is as as they're called now.

40:51 Um which started as a remittance company between um the US and and Mexico and now, you know, has other corridors as well. Um they built it on stables and uh a few years in, they're now between 5 and 10% of remittances along that corridor, which is the largest remittance corridor in the world. >> It's amazing. And so, you know, you think about how long it takes companies to um, you know, to to move fiat money efficiently.

41:21 You know, how long it took initially for the wisest of the world to do this, let alone the Western unions before it. And, you know, these are great companies, but to get to 5 to 10% in just a few years is amazing. >> That's remarkable. Yeah. Um, I'd love to have you talk a little bit about tempo. Yeah. So, um, you know, obviously it's a big important project that you guys are are in the center of.

41:42 um talk about, you know, where that is and and what the aspirations for it are. >> Yeah, I think this um I I'll just play the infrastructure nerd card again for a second. Um there are great blockchains, you know, um and I think there are, you know, there was no obvious need for another blockchain outside of payments, >> right? >> And there's a whole lot of reasons why a payments specific blockchain can work really well.

42:10 you know privacy for one because you know blockchains are generally public and you sort of reverse engineer you know what's happening on on on blockchains so I want to make sure that privacy is a first class primitive uh making sure that throughput is never sacrificed um blockchains are disproportionately used for trading >> and so when you see you know massive trading events happen you'll typically see you know performance degrade a lot transaction fees like finding a way to create a a blockchain where the transaction

42:39 fee is never going to spike because you know other blockchains have >> capability is important. Yeah. >> Exactly. And and and they have you know floating sort of gas fees and so the the project there is just saying how do we move money you know as efficiently consistently and cheaply as possible. Still in the early stages of building out getting a lot of great traction you working with companies like um Door Dash you know making it sort of the default but not only blockchain in Stripe and uh feeling very optimistic

43:07 about it. That's great. That's awesome. >> Um, >> last topic I would love to cover with you is, um, just the sort of token economy. >> Um, and so, you know, it sounds a little buzzwordy, but you guys are, you know, I think over two trillion of volume now. >> Um, and I think, you know, you and I would probably share the belief that the token economy is going to be one of the biggest things we've ever seen.

43:30 Um, so, you know, what do you think is kind of the state of play for accessing tokens? you know, obviously there's a lot of work that gets done in first party applications today. Um, but you know, what do you think is sort of the future state of how we all access models and tokens? >> Yeah. >> Well, I love I've always loved the word token. Um, and the reason uh is that it just sounds like an approximation of money.

43:56 >> Yeah. >> And [laughter] increasing that's just what it is, right? We're seeing, you know, we talked earlier about, you know, free trial abuse, multi-accounting, and the attacks that we're seeing against users who have sort of general whose platforms are general purpose token consumers. You know, you can do just about anything with tokens on cursor, right?

44:15 Um, you do just about anything with tokens on on replet. >> Uh, so the attacks against these users are very sophistic sophisticated. you know, they're they're very reminiscent of what we see, >> you know, in terms of people trying to steal money from Stripe users. [snorts] >> And so there's this blurring that you see between tokens and dollars. >> Yeah.

44:37 >> And so for us, we think about >> wanting to help users move money, store money, send money safely, compliantly, and so on. >> And the uh we now feel this mandate to do the same thing on tokens, right? to um protect our users in the same way and you know over time I think this is only going to happen more right you know we talk about >> some of these longunning agentic tasks and a lot of them will replace you know services and you'll just be able to say you know close my books and I used to pay you know a human in

45:09 tokens for that now I or many humans now I pay fewer humans or a human or sorry in dollars for that now I pay fewer humans or a human tokens >> in tokens right um because they're augment rented by by agents. So, we just want to make sure that moving between tokens and dollars is as seamless as moving and safe as moving between, you know, dollars and euros.

45:33 >> We're at the beginning of this journey, but we think it's going to be a big part of the future of Stripe. >> Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, it's uh it's it's super exciting and and look, personally speaking, I think you guys >> have a real right to play a role there uh because of the relationship that you have with so many so many companies since inception all the way through to enterprise as you said.

45:51 >> Yeah. And we we use it's funny um we're we're always a little bit careful internally about talking about about rights and so we talk about mandates. >> That's good. Yeah. We feel >> win and then win it again. Exactly. We have a mandate to help users with this and >> uh and so that's why we're really leaning into it. You know, there's uh we're also focusing even more on spend management for our customers.

46:10 You know, they're using Stripe Treasury. They're thinking a lot about how much they're spending and how to, you know, uh reduce their spending. How their spending ties through to revenue and you know, a lot of token usage is actually in product. >> Yeah. >> So, you see sort of two different types of token usage. One is, you know, to build things and this is sort of the opex management side of of of token management.

46:34 And then there's the product efficacy side right of of token management is how good is my token oriented or sort of token driven product you know how should I shift between different models to make it the most um effective and so we're really thinking about how do we help users on both of these >> yeah for sure I mean certainly in the latter this sort of you know uh position as an orchestration layer that helps you effectively get the most out of tokens and >> you also maintain some form of control I think has like

47:06 never been more top of- mind than it is right now. >> Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And it's it's interesting because um there's a hypothesis that you know software will be severely commoditized. Um, and it's plausible. You know, I think we're we're at the u let's say we're either in the singularity or creeping towards the singularity and it's it's very hard to um to estimate what a future looks like where you know models are sort of recursively you know generating models and so on and so on.

47:35 Um but we are seeing the exact opposite right now where you know software creation is exploding. >> Yes, >> customers are monetizing faster than ever. You know, we talked about our 2026 cohort growing 50% faster than our or 50% larger and growing faster than 25 cohort. That one being 70% larger and growing faster than the 24 cohort. >> And so, you know, more software being created.

48:01 It's being adopted faster than ever before. >> And then more Stripe products are being adopted than ever before. You know, uh 11 Labs is using 14 uh stripe products. Sort of wish it were 11 in a way, but actually I'm I'm glad it's 14. >> Just make it 22. He got really close with Matty and he does everything in denominations of 11. So you got to shoot for 22.

48:20 >> Exactly. And you know there's a lot more to software than just building right. There's the expertise about how abstractions should thread through your entire business and you sort of keeping those up to date and you have you know turnover inside of your company and so you build a system internally and then you know it starts to sort of degrade and that person leaves the company and the expertise goes away.

48:40 And so we think about just how can we help companies across their entire revenue stack, you know, manage cash, manage revenue, close the books faster, grow faster, globalize faster, and that opportunity, I think, is just larger than it was ever ever was before. >> Yeah. Couldn't couldn't agree more. >> Yeah. Um, so in closing, uh, I wanted to just get your take, and this is I don't want to get too deep into, you know, the role of humans versus AI, but one of the things that Stripe has always been universally recognized

49:11 for and appreciated for, I think, is your taste, right? And it sounds funny because you're an infrastructure company, but I think it's it's generally agreed upon. >> Um, how do you continue to uphold that at such a large scale and with so much of the work that you're doing now being done by AI? >> [laughter] >> Mhm. >> Yeah. It's interesting how much the word taste is being used right now.

49:34 [laughter] >> And it's sort of hard sometimes to, you know, the the cynical view is that it's how we're all justifying our future value. >> Yeah. That no one actually has taste and it's just we're all reproducing reproducing machines of things that we had previously perceived. >> Yes. Yes. suddenly my fingers are no longer as useful, but this nebulous notion of taste is um and and and models will never have taste and so on, which is probably just not true.

49:57 Um >> yeah, I agree I agree with you on that. >> But uh to your um you know, more approximate to your question, you know, product quality is really really core to our culture and to our identity. And it's for a few reasons. Like one is just we want users to have amazing tools that are carefully crafted that you know can make their um make them go faster you know enjoy uh you know the the um the journey of building a company that much more you know it's not an easy journey >> but if you have you know tools that are

50:34 surprisingly great it feels that much better. So it's it's a big user lens. Um >> another dimension of it is it's just more fun. you know, you look at what you created with your team and you're like, "Wow, that looks amazing." Versus, you know, you kind of janked this thing together and it barely works and, you know, it just isn't as fun, you know, to to to, you know, go through the slog, the long the long nights, the long weekends and so on to build it.

50:59 Um, and I think the single thing I would say uh for scaling cases, right? Well, actually two things. One is I think it has to be a tops down. You just have to say it% over and over and over again. You know, it's like it's like the the the the company strategy of when the startups win them again. It's like talk about quality and talk about it again. >> And then the other thing is just use the product.

51:23 >> Yes. >> And make it easy to use the product. You know, in in you know, uh aviation, you know, simulation is is so important. Like you can't uh you can't just say like I hope the jet works. You have to kind of prove to yourself that it does before you ever fly it. um or Nvidia, you know, when they hit really hit escape velocity was when they, you know, went from needing to wait for the fab to give them the chips to try the chips to actually simulate >> chip performance.

51:45 And so we actually invest a lot in simulating the usage of products. >> Yeah. Wow. >> And so you can point to an account and say, you know, give me something that looks like that. >> Yeah. But make it you know completely PII you know free you know randomize the growth rates so I don't actually know how big they are but just you know the day-to-day problems that they face you know the ups and downs of their business the seasonality you know give me a sense of of that and then you know make it feel live you know make it

52:16 so that I'm feel like I'm receiving disputes from customers and refunds are happening and of course these aren't real disputes they're not real refunds but just give me the experience that user is having. So I can really live in it and and use that with my team. And so I think, you know, you have the the mandate to use the product and we really ask our EMs to lead this because they're the ones who control the resources and they're the ones who can sort of say, "Wow, this does not feel good.

52:42 It needs to get fixed. So we're going to, you know, uh our next sprint is going to be elevating quality." And the other side, it's how do you give people the tools to do it more easily. Um so scaling taste for us is you know culture and it is the you know shival lifts and then it is the daily rhythms of just using the products and stepping into these issues.

53:02 >> That's awesome. That's so great. Uh will this is so fun uh to talk to you about all these topics. you know, obviously covering uh how you're building so much product inside Stripe, which is which is super unique uh and right on the cutting edge, I think, um and the future of how we engage in agent commerce and and stable coins. Um you know, one of the things that I think you guys have said is, you know, how do we assure that we build the next Stripe inside of Stripe?

53:27 Yes. And uh I love that in closing and um I really appreciate the time. >> Yeah. Thank you. Great to be here.