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- [00:00]
GiveWell Representative
GiveWell, a non profit that researches and recommends giving opportunities, takes the impact of donations seriously to ensure their recommendations withstand tough scrutiny. GiveWell had their own researchers spend months trying to identify flaws in their past work. They then publish their findings, mistakes and all for any donors to use for their giving. It's this kind of rigor that can help your donation make a big impact on the world. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 125,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donations matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and specify where you heard this ad. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from this podcast.
- [01:00]
Narrator
Open source AI is available to all.
- [01:03]
Matt Levine
Not just the few Meta's open source is free to use, enabling startups like Xaon to innovate. Here's CEO and co founder Dr. Cal Clark. We've built a tool with Llama Meta's open source AI model to help radiologists double check their diagnoses. We're able to collaborate with universities to further radiology education and catch more errors. Learn how others are building with Meta's free open source AI at AI.meta.com Open.
- [01:30]
Narrator
In 15th century Florence, the great inventor Leonardo da Vinci dreamt of creating a flying machine. But something kept getting in his way. Admin. Piles of it. Luckily, Leo used the smart buying tools on Amazon business so he could work more efficiently with the extra time. He not only invented the flying machine, but actually built it.
- [01:51]
Katie Greifeld
Magnifico.
- [01:52]
Stifel Representative
Incredible.
- [01:55]
Narrator
Whoa, easy there Leo. Amazon Business your partner for smart business buying.
- [02:03]
Matt Levine
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio News so my idea for you guys is you guys just have like regular normal boring ads on the podcast. I think you need to do the post read ads where it's like we say a lot that everything in security is fraud, is having a bad night's sleep security, securities fraud. Now you don't need to worry about.
- [02:25]
John Collison
The Casper mattress or like I could do like the men's shaving club ads or something that could be fun too.
- [02:30]
Matt Levine
When buying short dated out of the money call options, I use Surfshark. Right? Yeah, I think it'd be good.
- [02:36]
Katie Greifeld
Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff podcast. I'M Matt Levine. I write the Money stuff. Com at Bloomberg Opinion.
- [02:41]
John Collison
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
- [02:46]
Katie Greifeld
Katie, today we're doing something new. We are doing our first interview on the Money Stuff podcast.
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John Collison
Are you nervous?
- [02:51]
Katie Greifeld
I'm pretty nervous.
- [02:52]
John Collison
I'm a little bit nervous too.
- [02:53]
Katie Greifeld
We're recording this after it happens, so we're not really nervous.
- [02:57]
John Collison
I'm still stressed out. Speak for yourself.
- [02:59]
Katie Greifeld
I'm pretty nervous. I haven't listened to it yet. Today our guest is John Collison of Stripe. Stripe is a payments and financial technology company. And John and his brother and co founder Patrick are kind of tech industry celebrities.
- [03:12]
John Collison
Yeah, he's an Irish billionaire. He's from Limerick. That's cool.
- [03:17]
Katie Greifeld
Katie's wearing her Limerick jacket, but we'll probably get into that during the podcast.
- [03:20]
John Collison
That's true. It's a little embarrassing that I wore this today.
- [03:23]
Katie Greifeld
It's a medium amount of embarrassing.
- [03:25]
John Collison
I truly didn't mean to, but as I said to you in our office, it was 47 degrees when I left my apartment this morning pre dawn, and I needed a top. And this is my favorite medium weight jacket.
- [03:37]
Katie Greifeld
This is the behind the scenes content that money's tough podcast listeners really crave.
- [03:42]
John Collison
Yeah.
- [03:43]
Katie Greifeld
So let's jump right back into that interview.
- [03:45]
John Collison
Nailed it.
- [03:46]
Katie Greifeld
Should I do like a crashing transition to talking about Stripe?
- [03:51]
Matt Levine
Yeah. So how do you guys usually start these? How do you want. I guess you haven't done these.
- [03:54]
Katie Greifeld
We haven't done these.
- [03:54]
Matt Levine
We could invent the format.
- [03:55]
John Collison
Yeah.
- [03:56]
Matt Levine
Start by reviewing the advertisements I've heard on the podcast.
- [03:59]
Katie Greifeld
We start the podcast with much like this. We walk into the room and bullshit for a bit and then record that. And then we eventually say hello and welcome to the Money Stuff podcast. And we talk about whatever the thing we're talking about today. So now we're talking about Stripe Capital Markets.
- [04:16]
Matt Levine
Yeah.
- [04:17]
Katie Greifeld
Destiny Tech. Okay, so we've listened to some podcasts with you. You talk a lot about your interest in business history and like you've learned from the tech companies of the past and the conglomerates of the conglomerate wave. I have not heard you talk about the lessons you've learned from financial services companies. And I write about finance and think of Stripe in many ways as like a financial services esque company or like some evolution of a financial services company. So I'm curious, like, I don't know, what do you think about financial services?
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GiveWell Representative
Yeah.
- [04:46]
Matt Levine
In general, we try to learn a lot from other businesses and. Okay. One of the things I really like is we live in a golden age of learning about other businesses right now. And one of the reasons I like this is because I think learning about other businesses at some level, learning about the world or certainly the economy, because you're getting a sense for how all the various entities work together with financial services in particular. You came up with the framing that, you know, Stripe is in a way kind of a new kind of scaled investment bank. Was it your framing?
- [05:19]
Katie Greifeld
I think I said something like that, yeah.
- [05:20]
Matt Levine
Yeah.
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Katie Greifeld
But I would love for you to tell me that's right. But I'm assuming you'll tell me it's wrong.
- [05:24]
Matt Levine
No, I actually kind of like it. Because if you think about what are the potential sources of funding for a business? Like if you want to scale up a business, how can you fund it? There's three ways you can fund a business. You can do it through dash equity or retained earnings. And so if you just tick through each one of those on the earnings side, maybe that's the place where Stripe is kind of the most directly doing this, where we're making it easier for businesses to self fund their growth. And we see tons of bootstrapped or kind of certainly early monetizing businesses on Stripe. Like we have this customer in Stripe photo room and they do online kind of gen AI powered photo editing. They're based in France and you know, maybe 10 years ago they would have, you know, raised a whole bunch of VC and scaled up that way. They're actually profitable within a year and they've just kind of scaled up profit since then. 98% of their business comes from outside France. And so they're kind of selling this product to a global audience and Stripe's making it easy to do that. And we've seen that in general with I guess the AI companies in particular, where during the social media boom maybe companies scaled up first with raising lots of VC dollars and then later on figured out monetization with a lot of the AI companies. You know, OpenAI perplexity, Claude, the photo room who I was mentioning, they actually monetized from pretty early on using Stripe. And so that's one source of funding.
- [06:35]
Katie Greifeld
Stripe allows early stage companies to monetize so efficiently that there's less need for debt and equity in the world because companies can self fund. Like you're putting VCs out of business.
- [06:46]
Matt Levine
Yeah, and obviously we think it's a more slightly more healthy dynamic for the businesses. A classic trap that early stage companies fall into is, you know, and Y Combinator say tries to get their companies to avoid falling into this failure mode is kind of they raise money and then they think kind of valuation milestones or any kind of financial or investor milestones are the milestones that matter for the business. Whereas obviously that's not the case. It's are you building something of value in the world which will generally be measured by does anyone want to buy it? And so I think maybe it gets people on the right leaderboard earlier on, where a revenue leaderboard is just a much healthier leaderboard to be thinking about than a fundraising valuation leaderboard. But we also play in the other parts of the capital stack where on the debt side, I mean, you guys have probably watched this, but banks have kind of gotten out of the S and P lending space since the financial crisis as just the compliance costs have gone up. Like people do not go to a bank for a $5,000 loan anymore. And so we now lend through our kind of lending partners, billions of dollars to startups. We do that entirely programmatically through ML models, you know, cash flow based lending. So we're not looking at a balance sheet, we're not trying to do kind of credit checks on the individual or something like that. We're looking at the stream of cash flows. Is it a healthy, reliable stream of cash flows that can support some debt?
- [07:59]
Katie Greifeld
That's just you're doing the cash flows so you can see.
- [08:02]
Matt Levine
Exactly. We see the cash flows and people repay out of the stripe cash flows. And so that is a new kind of lending product that exists in the market. The again is, you know, in the billions of dollars in terms of the debt we're providing. It's kind of ironic in a way. If you want to raise $100 million of debt, that is a very competitive market. Lots of people are playing in that. If you want to raise $5,000 of debt for your company, it's actually much harder to get that than it was say 20 or 30 years ago. We've gone backwards there and then on the equity side, I think Stripe Atlas has actually helped make more companies investable. Because what a lot of people don't realize is Stripe Atlas is our incorporation product. But it lets companies where the founders might be in Israel or might be in Singapore or something like that, create a U.S. delaware company. And that makes it much more investable. And so we've seen a lot of foreign founders kind of virtually creating a US company, which it just turns out foreign companies investors find too scary.
- [09:00]
Katie Greifeld
So I guess I'm responsible for the framing that you're sort of in some ways a substitute for an investment bank. So your framing is increase the GDP of the Internet, but you have these business as incorporating companies. What is the principle? And I was a real investment banker. I was doing corporate derivatives. And I assume you would never get into that business, but am I wrong?
- [09:21]
Matt Levine
We're certainly not planning on it. We build products that are scalable in some way through tech, and so stripe itself. This past year, we did a trillion dollars in payment through the stripe platform. That's still growing at a pretty healthy clip. The number of businesses served is millions of dollars. And so if there's something that is solved by just throwing an army of people at it, I mean, you know, all the investment banking firms are exceptional at recruiting armies of people, and that is a very competitive space. Whereas the space of, you know, like I was saying, with the lending side of things, that was just an underserved market where we came at it by talking to our customers and they said, we really need growth capital. It's actually very annoying for us to get it. And so I guess we tried to find the underserved spaces. And investment banking for, you know, certainly on the larger side does not seem underserved right now.
- [10:05]
John Collison
I've listened to a lot of podcasts you've been on in the past several weeks, and I'm so sorry. No, no, it's been really interesting. You interviewed Charlie Munger, which was.
- [10:13]
Matt Levine
I much prefer interviewing to being interviewed. So we'll come back for the second round of this where you guys are put on the spot.
- [10:18]
John Collison
That'll be a lot of fun. We'll put that on the calendar. But at one point, Charlie Munger started talking about, like, banks and they're selling these sleazy products. And of course, I couldn't see if you were nodding along. Matt and I were talking about, you know, whether you would chafe. It's sort of the comparison to, you know, an investment bank, for example. But it sounds like you don't.
- [10:35]
Matt Levine
No, I don't. Investment banking provides a useful set of services in the world. And. Okay, one of the things I really like about the Money Stuff newsletter is a studied detachment from what's going on, where there are people and people respond to incentives and that creates behaviors in the world. I, like Matt, does have views and, you know, dislikes crypto and, you know, all sorts of things. And you can kind of the views occasionally come out, but it's mostly this very detached view of what's going on in the world. But the way we think about it, like, for Example, we, you know, Stripe's scale and revenue are actually pretty decent proxies for the value Stripe is providing in the world. That's not always the case with a business. You could have an extractive business somewhere or monopolies or rent extraction or something like that. But in our case, we have very informed buyers and a very competitive market. There are lots of other places people could go for payment acceptance or billing software or something like that. And so generally, if customers are choosing you and paying you money for a service, it's because you're providing something of value that you can't get elsewhere. And similarly with investment banks, I think if people are going to investment banks for a thing, that's probably because they're providing some value to them. And so that's the framework I tend to take. I think Charlie, Rest in Peace, generally took a lot of offense at where he saw people hyping things. Principal agent problems. You know, you get there's a set of things that bothered him. Crypto, Robinhood Mutual Fund Advisors. And, you know, you could understand, I could construct the steel man for those cases.
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Katie Greifeld
I mean, I think there's a lot of opacity and pricing and value in financial services that there's probably a lot less of in your business. Right. Like, you're kind of charging a transparent fee to people.
- [12:10]
Matt Levine
Yeah. And certainly the more scaled something is, the more price comparison they'll be, the more efficient the pricing will be. Whereas, yeah, there's more room for extracting price when you get into bespoke deals.
- [12:19]
Katie Greifeld
So one thing I think of when I think of investment banking is just serving as an advisor to CEOs and sort of giving them general advice on their business. And we were talking before about, you know, you are now interacting with a lot of big companies and. And you had some views on the ability of a big company CEO to sort of understand her company. And I'd love for you to talk about them.
- [12:42]
Matt Levine
Yeah, I think people think that CEOs are able to drive change in their organizations. I'm just talking about organizations generally. I'm not talking about Stripe. People think that a CEO lands in a new job, they take over a company, and they're able to just whip everything into shape and change everything. And I think the General Experience of CEOs landing in New jobs is that is not the case. And organizations are pretty hard to change. And in fact, one of the things that we believe strongly at Stripe is it's very important for people to get close to the work or you will not be able to drive any meaningful, useful change. And so there's a bunch of different ways in which we do that. It actually reminds me of the lean manufacturing principle. They have all these very nice aesthetic Japanese terms for things. And so there's the English equivalence pretty much for the Japanese terms. But one of them is Gemba, which is this idea that managers should, you know, walk the factory floor and solicit ideas from the people who are on the production line and things like that. And all companies, like a tech company, like Stripe, has its equivalents. And so we very much encourage engineering managers to actually write code at Stripe to get the experience of what is it like working in their corner of the code base. What problems are engineers running into? I really enjoyed being CFO last year when we were between CFOs, and one of the reasons I really enjoyed that, again, was getting closer to the actual numbers, the processes by which we drive the business. Like we're going to hold Stripe to a budget regardless. And aren't you interested in how that process is actually set and how those numbers are set and everything like that? So I say that I think every founder should be CFO of their business at some point during its lifespan. It's a very educational experience.
- [14:22]
Katie Greifeld
Did you have any product ideas? Did you do that and come away with we need to do accounting software?
- [14:28]
Matt Levine
No, no. Or I mean, maybe in an abstract way, but again, Stripe's finance needs are maybe a little different from the broader one. But again, I just think for getting close to how the business actually runs, that's maybe the thing that's hard for CEOs to do. And we try to do it from a customer perspective. A huge amount of. Even some of the products we're talking about, like Stripe Capital, they basically come from us trying to spend more time with our customers than our competitors do. And so we'll start every leadership team meeting 8am Monday morning with hearing from a customer. We just ask them to come and give us candid feedback on the product. If you were to sit in on those meetings, it's not an eight plus report card that we're getting. You know, there are things they want us to fix. But I find that it's easy for, like product managers to overcomplicate things. And, you know, you can get in your own head and construct some really convoluted castle in the sky. And there's nothing quite as grounding as hearing directly from a customer talk about what is not working for them in the product. And, you know, we do the same on Fridays with like an all company thing bringing customers to talk to that. But anyway, I think the essence of this for CEOs is getting close to the actual production function and that is sometimes hard for them.
- [15:36]
John Collison
So I have two points. It's interesting to hear you say that. First of all, my brain immediately goes to Elon Musk on the factory floor at SpaceX and Tesla. But it was interesting. We had Home Depot this week announce that they were going to require corporate employees to work 8 hour factory shifts, which is interesting. Like retail shifts.
- [15:55]
Matt Levine
Starbucks did something similar, right?
- [15:56]
John Collison
Yeah, which makes a lot of sense, I mean, especially in brutal jobs such as that one. And then the other thing, I mean, given that you do know so much about his business history and you know, just love looking at companies, but those 8am meetings where you're just talking to your different companies, like you see so many different types of companies, which is interesting.
- [16:16]
Matt Levine
Yeah. And it is definitely a pretty interesting time. I think the behavior we observe is that tech has been very well covered. And so I think everyone knows broadly kind of what's going on in the tech world. What we find interesting is the businesses that are, you know, the Sherwin Williams of the world. You know, the businesses that are 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years old and how they are adapting to the model modern world. And generally what we find is that Covid provided a useful long term change to those businesses because those kinds of businesses all employed a chief Digital Innovation officer prior to Covid and that person had a team of 10 people and they produced all these slides and ideas and the ideas were pretty good and the company just ignored all of them and just didn't do any of them. And so they had the kind of idea generation part and nothing happened. And then Covid happened and it was this oh sh t moment where people, they were forced to adapt because, you know, obviously the stores were locked down and were not open. And so you maybe had gym companies moving to virtual training or something like that. But that created a mandate for actually getting serious about the digital stuff. And we see much higher quality digital execution coming out of that. And there's kind of a few common patterns in what everyone's trying to do. I think everyone is questioning their middlemen. I don't think middlemen are going away, but they're questioning the middlemen and do middlemen add value? And they are starting to do much more direct customer relationship stuff. Part of that is the product experience where Hershey is using stripe to sell candy directly online and the customization and things like that. And then everyone's just trying to build some kind of recurring revenue. And so we think there's two kinds of businesses in the world. There's those who have recurring revenue and those who want recurring revenue. And people talk about the, the engine, you know, the airplane engine makers would power by the hour. You know, you actually don't buy an engine. You buy, you know, exactly. You might trust, you know, by the, by the minute. But that is actually what all companies are moving towards because it's kind of better on both sides of the equation. And obviously that's pretty complex from an implementation point of view. And so they're coming to Strip.
- [18:22]
GiveWell Representative
GiveWell, a nonprofit that researches and recommends giving opportunities, takes the impact of donations seriously. To ensure their recommendations withstand, GiveWell had their own researchers spend months trying to identify flaws in their past work. They then published their findings, mistakes and all for any donors to use for their giving. It's this kind of rigor that can help your donation make a big impact on the world. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 125,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donations matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and specify where you heard this ad. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from this podcast.
- [19:22]
Matt Levine
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp has been revolutionary in connecting people to mental health services.
- [19:29]
John Collison
Using BetterHelp can be as easy as.
- [19:31]
Matt Levine
Opening your laptop or your phone and clicking a button and the session begins. Clients are able to choose in what way they would like to communicate with me. Whether video or on the phone or.
- [19:43]
GiveWell Representative
Chat, texting, betterhelp is there when you need it. And that's what makes all the difference.
- [19:49]
Matt Levine
Visit betterhelp.com podbusiness to get 10% off your first month. Therapists were compensated.
- [19:56]
Mikayla Shiffrin
I'm alpine skier Mikayla Shifrin. I've won the most World cup ski races in history. But what does success mean? To me, success means discipline. It's teamwork. It's the drive and passion inside of us that comes before all recognition. And it's why Stifel is one of the fastest growing global wealth management firms in the country. If you're looking for success, surround yourself with the people who will get you there.
- [20:21]
Stifel Representative
At Stifel, we invest everything into our advisors so they can invest everything into their clients. That means direct access to one of the industry's largest equity research franchises and a leading middle market investment bank. And it's why Stifel has won the J.D. power Award for Employee Advisor satisfaction two years in a row.
- [20:39]
Mikayla Shiffrin
If you're an advisor or investor, choose Stifel.
- [20:43]
Stifel Representative
Where success meets success. Stifel, Nicklaus & Co. Incorporated member SIPC and NYSE for J.D. power 2024 award information, visit jdpower.com Awards compensation provided for using not obtaining the award.
- [21:04]
Katie Greifeld
I did like a stripe fireside a while back and you're like, what should we do? And I was like, oh, you should fix paywalls. Have you done it?
- [21:12]
Matt Levine
We're getting there. Because one of.
- [21:14]
Katie Greifeld
Why is it hard?
- [21:15]
Matt Levine
Why is it hard? Okay, it's hard for a few reasons. One, I think people confuse paywalls with micropayments and I think more consumers want micropayments than publishers. Where the publishers want macro payments.
- [21:29]
Katie Greifeld
I think nobody wants micropayments and everyone wants to talk about it. But maybe I'm wrong.
- [21:32]
Matt Levine
Okay. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, once we move past the micropayments thing, then it's hard because you ultimately need to smooth the onboarding friction and you probably need some cross publisher network and you know, publishers are not, they're competing, they're maybe not inclined to work together and then it's just a bunch of tech upgrades which are actually kind of somewhat prosaic long running projects. But you know, you need to be able to have the patience to work with a media company to spend a year or year and a half upgrading their stack. The way we've ended up doing this is with our product link, which is very simple but is really starting to work. It just remembers you guys maybe run into it on the Internet. It just remembers your credentials across websites. And so if you've bought on website A with stripe and you have the box checked to remember your payment details, then you'll be able to buy on site B without entering your payment details again. And you might think it will lead to a big increase in conversion. If a lot of consumers have their payment credentials remembered so they don't have to type any extra data in, they can just click buy. And turns out it does. And there's obviously a virtuous cycle here where, you know, the more people sign up for it, the denser the network gets. So that's really starting to work. And so we have some media properties starting to use that. And so what it means is they get lots of people coming with credentials all pre filled and they just need to hit buy. And so then the commercial proposition just needs to work.
- [22:45]
Katie Greifeld
I just feel like the media paywall problem for me is, is not even the payment credentials. It's once you've paid for a paywall.
- [22:51]
Matt Levine
Keeping you logged in, keeping you, you're.
- [22:53]
Katie Greifeld
On your phone, cross devices, you're on two computers, you're on, yeah, you're like, you get something emailed to you.
- [22:57]
John Collison
It's like, and just remember me. It's really frustrating.
- [23:01]
Matt Levine
We should and may get to that as well. I agree. That's part two of it to me.
- [23:04]
Katie Greifeld
That's related to like online identity and the stuff that people are crypto people always talking about. So I also have listened to you on podcasts. One thing that you've said is that when you started raising money for Stripe, people were like, why isn't this a solved problem? PayPal exists. Can you tell us why it's not? Or why it wasn't or why isn't a solid? Like, why is payments hard? And like, there were payments companies before you, what's the thing that you're solving?
- [23:28]
Matt Levine
They didn't, it wasn't solved for a few reasons. Payments requires you to be good at two very different things that are quite distinct skill sets. There's technology and there's financial services. And so prior to Stripe, you had some payment companies that just did the technology layer. They said we're a nice API and we plug into whatever bank you use. But that wasn't a good payment experience because you would then try to sign up with the bank and it spends weeks shuffling paperwork around or something like that. And so a huge amount of what we do is at the intersection of those things where you have aml, KYC considerations, where Stripe is essentially aiming to look at the activity going on on its platform and ensure that it is licit and acceptable activity that's happening on the platform. And so we do lots of cool ML work. We don't talk about it really that much publicly because it is just what goes into operating a skilled platform like this. But it's a huge amount of the special sauce that makes Stripe tick. At the same time, the tech has to be really good and nice and usable. And customers really care about latency. They really care about how easy the API integration experience is. And so I would say companies prior to Stripe tended to pick a lane a bit where you had a few purely tech companies where they'd say we're a payments gateway and we just don't think about anything. We just hand off the transaction to someone else or those banks and they actually just generally outsourced the tech. They didn't even really do it themselves or if they did themselves, they did not do it particularly well. And so it was a very crummy experience for the developers actually using it. And of course the tech changes. Mobile was just coming along as we were getting started. You know the iPhone app store came out in 2008, we started Stripe in 2009. So we like, we're just in time for that. And so mobile was a very relevant consideration. You know, even just the, the Web apps and SaaS and everything grew a huge amount. And so I think the banks had not built for that and did not build for that. And so there was maybe a gap between the existing providers and there was that set of things that you had to be really good at. There are a huge number of things with Stripe that we did by intuitive feel. They were not part of a particularly deliberate tops down strategy that was written down in a business plan but ended up working out well. And so one was our really early focus on developers, where our go to market was through developers. We started by selling to startups and there was this really, I would say kind of bottoms up sort of adoption motion. But again, ultimately the product we're selling is a technical API product. And so of course you should be thinking about what the developers want. We just had the developer focus because we were software engineers ourselves and we just wanted to build a product that we thought was a good product. But I think it ended up being more strategic than we maybe realized in the beginning.
- [26:07]
Katie Greifeld
There's a lot of mess in the legal and infrastructure of the payment system. And your job is to provide people a very clean abstraction to that mess. And that means handling all of the mess and actually going out and figuring stuff out and then being able to put that in the back end of your API. So the API is a very clean abstraction.
- [26:26]
Matt Levine
Is that Bern Hobart had a line that I liked in one of his newsletters that Stripe makes the financial system work the way people think it already does. And that I think is actually a pretty nice design principle for us. And you know, maybe a good example.
- [26:40]
Katie Greifeld
Of this is, see when I hear that I want you to do like equity derivatives, I want you to do more of this stuff in my world.
- [26:47]
Matt Levine
But, but I don't think we have a view on how could be improved. But maybe we need to think about it more.
- [26:51]
John Collison
I do want to talk about crypto. Yeah, we debated this internally, but when it comes to the payments world, I mean the conversation tends to devolve into a crypto conversation because I feel like crypto is trying to solve a lot of payments problems, especially when it comes to cross border payments. And I'm not asking you about like the price of bitcoin or whether you're bullish on, you know, number go up, but when it comes to crypto and the, the that it's trying to solve, I mean, how do you think about it?
- [27:20]
Matt Levine
We're quite excited about crypto at the moment. I interpret money stuff as the house position as moderately crypto skeptical. And so I guess what I would say to a moderately crypto skeptical audience, maybe two things. One, there are just a bunch of scams and dodgy characters and everything like that. But it kind of reminds me of. I don't. The first. I grew up in Ireland. The first time I went to Vegas was for a work conference. There I was for a work conference and you know, at the Venetian or something like that, probably Monday 2020. And you're going into the hotel past like all the people smoking indoors and like the people just addicted to the slot machines, just pressing them again and again and again and all the blinking lights and you know, I guess the clatter of the coins paying out and you have to walk past this degenerate gambling area.
- [28:05]
John Collison
Grim scene.
- [28:06]
Matt Levine
Yeah, it's a grim scene to get to your serious industry conference. And that was very surprising to me. And I don't know, there's something similar in crypto where you have the casino dogecoin value speculating part of it. And then there's people doing all the serious work over in say stablecoins or something like that. And those two things just exist. But I think one cannot use the existence of the slots in the Vegas casino to write off the work convict. No. Maybe I'm stretching the analogy.
- [28:30]
John Collison
No, this is good.
- [28:32]
Katie Greifeld
Pitch me on stablecoins. We started with this. Your friend patio 11 would say it's a KYC avoidance mechanism, basically.
- [28:42]
John Collison
Right.
- [28:42]
Katie Greifeld
It's like a. Yeah.
- [28:43]
Matt Levine
Well, the thing about crypto is there's been a lot of hype on what crypto is useful for. And so, for example, if you go back and read the original bitcoin paper, which is a great read, it's a very readable original paper, it actually used the word interchange in there and talks about kind of the use of Bitcoin as a payment method. But Bitcoin turned out to be certainly stock Bitcoin, you know, before lightning and everything like that turned out to be a horrible payment method, like slow, expensive, let's not do that. And now the technology has matured through what has been kind of 14 years of development. I think the crypto haters use this argument that like, well, you know, is the web in 93 for, you know, many, many years, where is the actual web coming along? But there's been 14 years of lots of technical development happening such that we've ended up with much more advanced technologies. And so what you specifically have now with stablecoins is you have firstly something that's value doesn't change. And so there's none of the kind of speculation stuff that we're talking about. You have something that's actually very technically scalable. So with the current L2s, there's no real scal issues with them. And you have a pretty sensible construct where in a way it's narrow banking. Right. We've been talking about narrow banking in this country for decades and we have ended up with narrow banking through stablecoins where let's say a good stablecoin, you know, that like a Paxos or a usdc, in the case of USDC it is fully backed by short term treasuries. And that actually just seems like a pretty good construct to me. And so, you know, we now make it where you can, you know, accept money in stripe via crypto, you can do some payouts, things like that. And the obvious thing that people say is true where in the US you will be slightly too biased against crypto because the US has the world's best currency, the US has the world's reserve currency where you get to spend a mighty greenback. Exactly. And so of course people in the US think the USD is awesome because it is an awesome currency. Whereas many people in many other countries have a much more adversarial relationship with their own currency. And I'm not even talking about Zimbabwe, though it is true there. I'm talking about Turkey, which is a very, very large country and economy and population. But people there do not have full faith in the lira and they think about what's a better place to keep money than lira.
- [30:47]
Katie Greifeld
I guess the other US bias is that the US government really wants dollar payments to flow through the KYC banking system. And there's some suspicion that I think.
- [30:59]
Matt Levine
All the serious grown up crypto players today, they're subject to the fincen travel rule, they are kycing the actors. And so if you go through a crypto flow today, you will see the normal frictions of dealing with a regulated financial product where you are asked to provide your last four year social or upload a driver's license or things like that. And so I think just in most of the crypto use cases that are being taught, obviously there's the sketchy dark web stuff exists as well. But in most of the use cases we are talking about where serious businesses like Stripe or serious merchants are using crypto, it is the custodial licis part of the crypto.
- [31:33]
Katie Greifeld
So it's not like just sort of like an on chain, like non custodial transfer, like.
- [31:37]
Matt Levine
Correct. Yeah.
- [31:38]
John Collison
I am curious. I mean if you look into your crystal ball and you know it's been 14 years since Bitcoin was created. As you said, we've seen a ton of technology advancements since then. I mean you said you're quite excited about crypto, but I mean how far can we run that out? Do you think it's the future for example? Would you go that far if you look 50, 100 years into the future?
- [31:59]
Matt Levine
I don't think it's a singular future. And again there's a bit of over promising that's happened in the crypto world. Again, I think that's what gets people's backs up. Actually speaking of Bern Hobart, we just at Stripe Press published his new book. The title is Boom. And the thesis of the book is that we generally view financial bubbles as societally net negative because you know, they cause misallocation of resources and they cause you know, ultimately people lose out. And he makes the argument that bubbles provide a societally useful function by essentially coordinating effort. And you know, maybe the dot com boom is incorrectly understood as a, you know, pets.com and webvan. It was really like by dollars put into it. As you guys probably know, it was a telecoms boom and it was a fiber rollout boom. But it led to the US having just amazing fiber overcapacity that then led to the steady growth of the Internet for the decades that followed. And so that's maybe an example of it was a bubble, but it was a societally useful bubble because then it led to this overcapacity that had lots of positive externalities. Anyway, I think you can make that argument about crypto that I think that.
- [32:59]
Katie Greifeld
Argument made as crypto led to a build out of of GPUs that led to the AI boom.
- [33:04]
John Collison
Yeah.
- [33:04]
Matt Levine
Oh, interesting. I wasn't even Making that case. You could make that argument too, though, obviously there was a lot of GPU spent happening even before crypto. No, I was just making the argument that I think the speculative side of crypto, you could make the argument pulled in attention and resources that was then used to build the very boring, useful parts of crypto, like Ethereum 2 or again, stablecoins or things like that.
- [33:26]
Katie Greifeld
We could talk more about this. I do want to make sure. Are we talking about the things you don't want to talk about?
- [33:31]
John Collison
Yeah.
- [33:32]
Matt Levine
Great.
- [33:33]
John Collison
Which we do want to talk about.
- [33:35]
Katie Greifeld
So another money stuff theme that we'll probably do on our ad reads is that private markets are the new public markets. You guys are among the poster children for that. You're the cfo. Tell me about what it's like being private. I don't know. How should I think about the idea that you're an enormous company and you've stayed private and have no enthusiasm, as far as we know, for going public or even talking about this? 20 years ago, would you have been able to do that?
- [34:05]
Matt Levine
Yeah. We spend a lot of time internally at Stripe thinking about the value of the Stripe business. I think the external world spends a lot of time thinking about the value of the Stripe stock price, which are related, but different things. We have definitely stayed private longer than some people expected. I think we'll continue to stay private longer than maybe some people expect. But there's no complex answer. It's just a simple answer, which is we don't think companies should sleepwalk into going public. We think they should be deliberate about it. And why would Stripe run out and go public? It could be if we wanted to sell stock broadly to a retail audience. That's not something that we've had. The business is profitable. You know, we haven't needed to raise very large amounts of capital. A traditional reason might be return of capital. Not just kind of a capital raise for running the business, but return of capital to existing shareholders. But again, that's where you're maybe referencing the private markets have gotten deeper. And, you know, in our case, we've run two unlimited employee tenders, you know, last year and this year, you know, Sequoia just did an LP tender where they gave liquidity to some of their LPs, but liquidity is available to people in the private markets. And so it's more, I think, the. The default spring where companies, you know, a SaaS company would be started and, you know, go from zero to a hundred million in ARR and then just run out and go Public default is being questioned a little bit in Silicon Valley. Obviously lots of companies are still going public, but the default is being questioned. And the default is more of a Silicon Valley tech default than maybe a broader global default. So like in financial.
- [35:44]
Katie Greifeld
We know that.
- [35:44]
Matt Levine
Exactly. So as Bloomberg employees, you may be familiar with it, but Bloomberg, Bloomberg is the example that everyone cites. But if you just quickly run through financial services, you know, take the world's leading market maker, Citadel securities, private company take the world's leading prop trading. I'm probably offending one of the world's leading in all these cases. So I don't offend anyone. But if you look at Jane street, you know, which it's been reported on a lot these days, just how good a business it is, you know, where they're at a 10 billion profit run rate or something like that. Private company Fidelity, one of the world's leading brokerages. Private company Goldman Sachs, your former employer.
- [36:15]
Katie Greifeld
I assume that a big difference is that Jane street writes very large checks. And the Silicon Valley difference is not just that you have VCs who might be hungry to get out, whereas Citadel doesn't, but also you have employees who are getting paid in equity and they're getting tenders every year. Is a tender every year just as good as publicly traded stock?
- [36:34]
Matt Levine
We think the tender every year is a nice solution. And there are some things that would be different if we were a public company for the better. There's some things that'd be different as a public company for the worse and you get into trading windows and who's an insider and things like that. But it's thus far worked quite nicely for us solution.
- [36:48]
John Collison
So is that the model then like tender every year? You've only done two, but we don't.
- [36:52]
Matt Levine
Have forward looking plans to announce. And so I'd come back to you at some stage with, you know, we could go do something that you don't expect and we're not announcing the plans because genuinely it's not like there is a written down plan at stripe that we're going to do this, this and then this. We are always re evaluating it. But again up to this point it has made more sense for us to grow as a capital efficient private company then it's made sense for us to be a public company.
- [37:17]
Katie Greifeld
Sure, Jane street just makes money every year and they don't need to raise capital. And so they just seems like great business, pay their money to people. Right. I don't know what the economics of that business are like, but they seem extremely good but it does seem possible that you could just make cash every year and fund the business out of that and pay people out of that and never need to.
- [37:35]
Matt Levine
For 24, we're trying to make a decision for 24 and for 25 we'll try to make a decision for 25. So luckily it's not the case that, that you're faced with a fork in the road and you have to make some kind of permanent decision. We do constantly reevaluate it.
- [37:46]
Katie Greifeld
When I write about this topic. One concern that people have is that there are a lot of cool companies, an increasing number of them, like fast growing profitable companies that. Or sorry, I should say fast growing, not profitable, like early stage companies, middle stage companies, high growth companies, high growth companies that don't go public. And that deprives ordinary investors of access to those companies and, and therefore it should be made easier to go public or whatever. So for you, do you worry at all about that from a systemic perspective that you're depriving American retirement savers of access to Stripe? And then two, you're not entirely. Because there are people who are going around selling Stripe shares in a way that I believe you do not like. And I don't know, there's a way around the barrier that you've set up, I guess.
- [38:33]
Matt Levine
Yeah, look, I didn't. The debate over who should be allowed by private assets is a good debate and the accredited investor rule is kind of an odd rule. Like we ought to take it for granted that it's been around for a long time. But basically we define sophisticated investors as rich people, which is maybe somewhat ahistoric.
- [38:55]
Katie Greifeld
And a declining standard of rich, where it's now sort of upper middle class people.
- [38:59]
Matt Levine
Correct. Yeah. So I think debate on that is a good thing. In Stripe's case, most of the non employee ownership is through essentially VC funds and the underlying VC fund ownership, the LPs there tend to be pension funds, college endowments, people I think we feel quite good about making money for. And so I don't think it's the case that broader society doesn't get to benefit from the appreciation. I think we feel quite good about the LP base of the investors that are behind Stripe. And again, I think that's another thing that has allowed us to stay private for as long as we have, which is we actually have very long term VCs. And I think if we had a different set of VCs we would have been less fortunate in being able to grow Stripe as a private company because maybe they would have felt the need for a win or something like that. But I think luckily Sequoia Capital is one of the best VC firms there is. They don't quite need to prove themselves.
- [39:47]
Katie Greifeld
They probably count you as a win anyway.
- [39:49]
Matt Levine
Say again?
- [39:49]
Katie Greifeld
They probably count you as a win.
- [39:50]
Matt Levine
No, exactly. Yeah. And then on the. I don't know what you call them, but the firms out there, the market.
- [39:57]
Katie Greifeld
We've talked on the podcast about Destiny Tech 100, which has a private market closed end fund situation with some Stripe forward contracts. And there's a market for forward contracts which all seem to be not really approved.
- [40:12]
Matt Levine
Yeah, this is not going to end well because generally hyping financial assets has a bad history. It worked out badly with SPACs, it worked out badly with ICOs, and again, it just tends to work out badly, which is why it tends to be regulated that financial regulators try to rein in the hyping of private assets. And so again, Stripe is not a public company. We do not enable broad retail ownership of Stripe stock. And so if people try to back into that by having private company stock in a vehicle that is then available to public market investors, we just think it's not a good construct. Like it's under disclosed, where people are buying an interest in things based on name brand recognition, but not based on going over the financials or understanding what it actually is. They tend to all be very high fees. I mean, it depends on the vehicle, but they tend to be fairly extractive in that way. And so. So we don't like it, we don't approve of it, we don't permit it, and I'm personally not a fan.
- [41:19]
John Collison
Is there much that you can do about it? Like in the case of a Destiny Tech, for example, that says that they have Stripe forwards, is that correct? Yeah. I mean, what can you do?
- [41:30]
Matt Levine
We prohibit forwards. So we had a bit of a tete a tete about that.
- [41:33]
Katie Greifeld
People do them anyway. Can you then void them? And these people.
- [41:38]
Matt Levine
I don't know where this goes.
- [41:39]
Katie Greifeld
Yeah, because. Right. I mean, it seems like they're prohibited and people do them. Yeah.
- [41:45]
Matt Levine
We put it up on the website just to make it abundantly clear so everyone has the same information. These instruments are not allowed. So I don't know, there's some areas where people have to read the tea leaves or the body language. We tried to make it abundantly clear, get out there with the semaphore flags so that people are not in any doubt.
- [42:00]
John Collison
On the topic of going public. It doesn't sound like you're in any rush. Obviously you said in June. And I thought this was interesting, that many companies make the decision to go public too early, that you personally see tons of opportunities to change and grow the business quite a lot. And I think it's interesting that you want to stay private to do that. And I think a lot of founders would agree with you. But just the fact that, you know, sort of like going public, you see this as the sign of maturity and maybe that you're not innovating as much as you would in the privates, I don't know, it kind of made me think of, of tech companies like offering dividends. Like I remember when Meta started giving out dividends earlier this year, everyone was like, oh well, they're old news now, they're too mature.
- [42:43]
Matt Levine
Well, I think Meta is the wrong example to use for that argument because they currently seem to be doing extraordinarily well in the AI race. And I'm not making the claim that, you know, one cannot innovate as a public company because that is clearly an absurd claim and you would just be kind of constantly slapped in the face by counterexamples and Meta would be the perfect one where they just demoed the Orion glasses and those look amazing and again, they're just nailing it in the AI race. And so that'd be a silly argument. I do think that on the margin, if you are developing large number of new products, if you have a fast growing business, if you're constantly reinventing how the business works, and again, in our case we are transforming Stripe from not just being a payments business to there are all these new software lines of business that are much earlier, that are harder to, to predict how they grow. Everything like this. You know, we're changing out the underlying payment methods. You know, we talked about crypto, we didn't talk about around the world. There are all these interesting trends happening in new payment methods where basically bank transfers and things like UPI and PIX in Brazil and things like that are becoming much more relevant. So anyway, it's a huge amount of change. I think on the margin the public company valuation apparatus is, you see it how people, you know, the quarterly earnings and the missing the beat and everything like that, it is optimized for mature, predictable businesses. And indeed people talk about kind of business predictability, whereas, you know, for a business that is still in the, you know, in the early stages like Stripe, and we think about a lot of new products on a, on a five or ten year time horizon, again, I think on the margin there are some benefits to doing that as a private company, because you get to kind of completely retool the business as you go without necessarily wondering about, you know, what will the reception be for this in, know, the next quarter's earnings release.
- [44:21]
Katie Greifeld
I know you're not in any phase of planning an ipo, but I was a capital markets banker, and I know you've had thoughts about, like, the IPO process and, like, I don't know, if you were doing an ipo, like, what would you change about the process?
- [44:36]
Matt Levine
I find all the debates about IPO mechanics really uninteresting because it just doesn't matter. Like, if you have a great business that's valuable for customers, that millions of people use and makes money as a result, but you can do whatever you want. Like, you know, I think Facebook would say they botched the ipo, but they have, like, an incredible business, so it doesn't matter and no one remembers it. And then you can have, like, the world's best IPO plan. And if the business isn't good, it doesn't matter. And so people get into all these debates about direct listing versus regular ipo, and then Bill Girly complains that the bankers are taking too many fees and it just doesn't matter. Like, build a great business and you could write your prospectus on a cocktail napkin and it would be fine.
- [45:12]
Katie Greifeld
This is, like, why Charlie Munger doesn't like financial services business, right? Because you're like, like, oh, this is irrelevant. You just build a great business.
- [45:19]
Matt Levine
It's like, it's true, but it's true, right? Yeah. And. And the thing is, investors are smart. I think people try to do too much of a song and a dance with investor relations and try to, you know, gin things up. And ultimately, when you meet professional investors, you know, they're really smart and they can look through and understand the fundamental dynamics of a business. And so. So the secret to good investor relations is have a good business that's growing and is profitable.
- [45:42]
John Collison
More people should do that.
- [45:44]
Matt Levine
Exactly.
- [45:46]
John Collison
Sounds easy. Wow.
- [45:54]
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- [46:54]
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- [49:02]
John Collison
Oh, you have an airport. Do you want to talk about that? Is that something that you want? Okay. Why? Where did that come from?
- [49:09]
Matt Levine
Well, I should not be listened to for any rational financial or investment advice on this topic.
- [49:15]
John Collison
I don't know, I don't have the pockets right now.
- [49:18]
Matt Levine
Well, no, just I. I'm a pilot and an aviation nurse and I grew up interested in US and I've been flying since I was a teenager and still really love to do it and fly in my spare time. And so I would say it's not necessarily the most rational business interest of mine, but the case, the airport. So Dublin basically is three airports. Dublin International, which you've been to Dublin, that's the one you've been to. I guess three if you count the military airport, Beldano, and then Weston, which is the general aviation airport. And so general aviation is all the stuff that is not airlines. So it could be public service flights like search and rescue or air ambulance. It could be flight training, you know, people getting their pilot's licenses. It could be corporate jets, it could be all those kind of stuff. Stuff. And generally speaking, the appropriate home for the general aviation stuff is not where all the airlines are because they just don't mix that well. And so most places will have, you know, if someone's doing flight training in New York, they'll not do it at jfk, they'll do it at, you know, Westchester or something like that. Yeah, yeah, they really don't mix well. And in the case of Dublin's Western airport, I ended up buying it back in 2021 and it needed a bunch of investment and so I bought it. And we've been investing in and giving it the facilities it needs around, you know, instrument landing capabilities and, you know, redoing the terminal and the capital stock and things like that. And so it's partly, I think it's a good, I mean, they are in the us they're not for profit businesses. They tend to be government owned and federally funded. Internationally, they are like Heathrow is a for profit business and they just make money off lending fees. And so I actually think it will, in the fullness of time, be a good business once it's kind of come out on the right side of the growth curve. But it's also a passion product.
- [50:49]
John Collison
I know, that's awesome. I mean this not as an insult, but I feel like to enjoy being a pilot, like casually, you have to be like a little bit crazy. Like that seems like an insane proposition, but maybe I'm just really risk averse.
- [51:01]
Matt Levine
I don't think so. No, it just, it requires a lot of discipline, you know, checklist discipline and you know, recurrent training. I just went through Some recurrent training, and it just. I actually find it more interesting because obviously, aviation safety is generally talked about correctly as one of the best examples of process optimization over the last five decades where we have taken a system and just improved the crap out of it until it's, like, so good they talk. I saw a thing go by on Twitter recently where the FAA doesn't mandate car seats on airplanes because flying is so safe compared to driving that they're worried that if they mandated car seats on airplanes, even though it would have a tiny benefit, it would lead to people choosing not to fly and choose to drive instead and get into car accidents and therefore be net less safe. But I find it funny that, you know, again, flying an airplane feels like, in principle, it should be, like, kind of hard to do, and driving a car on the ground should be easy to do, but per mile, obviously, flying wins out. And so, again, you have this decades and decades and decades of history where we've taken the lessons of, you know, they say the rules and regulations are written in blood. You know, we take the lessons of the previous accidents that have happened, and then we wrap them into future training. And, you know, generally when you do pilot training, you're studying a lot of specific accidents that happened and you know, what the learnings were for them. And so I think if you're interested in systems design, engineering, process optimization, things.
- [52:24]
Katie Greifeld
Like that, lessons from piloting, like, inform your software engineering or.
- [52:28]
Matt Levine
I mean, they're pretty separate. But I think the software engineering brain tends to be attracted to flying. And, you know, you go to Palo Alto Airport, which is a little general aviation airport in the Bay Area, one of the busy general aviation airports in the entire country, because I think engineering minds, of which there are lots in Palo Alto, tend to enjoy it. And again, you're mixing, you know, a kinesthetic skill and meteorology and, you know, mechanical understanding of, you know, a combustion engine, all the attendant systems, and, you know, airspace and everything like that.
- [52:58]
John Collison
So it wasn't, like, fueled by you being an adrenaline junkie. Like, I want to go fast and I want to fly in the sky.
- [53:04]
Matt Levine
Adrenaline. Like, if you're feeling adrenaline while flying, you're doing something wrong.
- [53:07]
John Collison
I feel it all the time when flying. Like, God, I hope we stay in the air.
- [53:11]
Matt Levine
There was that, you know, you read Antoine de Saint Exupery and, you know, flying in Africa during the 1920s in his case, and, you know, getting shot down and all these kinds of things. There clearly was a.
- [53:21]
John Collison
That would make you feel something.
- [53:23]
Matt Levine
Yeah, that, exactly. I think that kind of stuff would make you feel something. But again, these days it has become much more safety oriented and the cowboy stuff has been pulled out. And again, they actually describe one of the cultural challenges that happened and the aviation industry underwent was that we produced all these military pilots in World War II and the Vietnam War. And those people then went into Pan Am cockpits and they actually kind of made bad captains in certain way because it was very much shut up. This is my cockpit. And so the CRM crew Resource Management, I guess thing basically was a multi decade effort to get rid of the captain mindset and get towards a collaborative problem solving.
- [54:04]
Katie Greifeld
I had always thought of like, if I'm going on a 737 and the pilot landed F14s on carriers, that's gotta be the safest possible way to fly. But apparently not.
- [54:14]
John Collison
No, he's going rogue.
- [54:16]
Katie Greifeld
He's not listening to his second officer or whatever.
- [54:18]
Matt Levine
The European airlines have a different model than the US airlines where they take pilots who have 250 hours only, which the US would consider very low, and they put them in the right seat of airliners and they have a really strong safety record. And so as you fly around an airline or in Europe, you could have someone who, who only learned to fly a few years ago. And the way they do that is a huge amount of standardization, a huge amount of process orientation. People make fun of Ryanair for the hard landings. The Ryanair landing in Europe, where they really plunk it on the Runway, that is one of their safety SOPs, where they say a positive landing, as it's known in the industry, is safer because it reduces the risk of hydroplaning if it's wet. And so it reduces the very small risk that you run off the end of the Runway if the Runway is wet. But we're just going to every landing we're going to plunk it on and that's safer. But again, it's generally process orientation standards and a lot of that kind of stuff that's driven the safety and not excessive piloting skill. And again, if you're relying on incredible piloting skill, something has gone wrong in your system. Because we should be able to have a 777 full of passengers, be safe even if the pilots are fatigued or, you know, something like that.
- [55:23]
John Collison
That's wild. I did not know that about Ryanair. I feel like they should put that fact out there, you know, that it's intentional that we're plunking down.
- [55:31]
Matt Levine
That's true. Yeah, yeah. Cause you know, it's quite jarring. Exactly. Yeah.
- [55:34]
Katie Greifeld
You really want to draw attention to it being uncomfortable.
- [55:38]
John Collison
Well, everyone knows we're in our mind. That's true.
- [55:41]
Katie Greifeld
That's true.
- [55:41]
John Collison
That's true.
- [55:42]
Katie Greifeld
John Collison, thanks for coming on the Money Stuff podcast.
- [55:44]
Matt Levine
Thank you, guys.
- [55:45]
Katie Greifeld
It was fun.
- [55:46]
John Collison
Our first cast.
- [55:47]
Matt Levine
Yeah, I'm honored.
- [55:55]
Katie Greifeld
And that was the Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levieu.
- [55:57]
John Collison
And I'm Katie Greifeld.
- [55:59]
Katie Greifeld
You can find my work by subscribing to the Money stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.
- [56:03]
John Collison
And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between 9 to 11am Eastern.
- [56:09]
Katie Greifeld
We'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to moneypodloomberg.net Ask us a question and we might answer it on air.
- [56:16]
John Collison
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.
- [56:21]
Katie Greifeld
The Money Stuff podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam. Special thanks this week to Stacy Wong.
- [56:28]
John Collison
Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
- [56:30]
Katie Greifeld
Brendan Frances Newnham is our executive producer.
- [56:33]
John Collison
And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
- [56:35]
Katie Greifeld
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.