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- [00:00]
Interviewer 1
You're watching tvpn.
- [00:02]
Interviewer 2
We are here live at Stripe Sessions. We're joined by John and Patrick Collison. Thank you for having us. How is it going so far?
- [00:08]
Patrick Collison
It's incredible. We have 10,000 people.
- [00:10]
Guest from Bridge
10,000 people here.
- [00:11]
Patrick Collison
Yeah, yeah. And it is just the center. The economy is re platforming around AI and I think that's the theme of the conference.
- [00:16]
Interviewer 2
Which economy is that? The global economy of which you control 1.6%.
- [00:20]
Patrick Collison
That is the. We talk about the Internet economy, but you know yourself, everything is in the Internet economy these days. There's very few companies that are not interesting at being at the center of the Internet economy. So it's increasingly the whole thing.
- [00:30]
John Collison
When we spoke back a couple of weeks ago, which in singularity time is, you know, a couple of months ago or.
- [00:35]
Interviewer 2
Exactly.
- [00:36]
John Collison
Yeah. We said that we were seeing a significant surge in new business creation that is roughly doubled again since then. And so as of.
- [00:45]
Interviewer 2
And are you tracking that through Stripe Atlas specifically or through just new companies that are onboarding to Stripe? Both payment processes.
- [00:51]
John Collison
Both, both. So March was an all time record for new incorporations with Stripe Atlas and then in Q1 overall for just new businesses joining Stripe, that was up 71% year over year. We showed the chart at the beginning of keynote yesterday. It is parabolic, it is exponential. I'm running out of mathematical terms, but it's really very striking.
- [01:09]
Interviewer 2
And do you like the. I guess my collar is a little ruffled. There we go.
- [01:13]
Patrick Collison
Someone's ruffled.
- [01:13]
Interviewer 2
Yeah. And do you like the idea that this is driven by AI? This is driven by democratization of more tools, smaller companies, that there's more sort of like lifestyle businesses popping up.
- [01:26]
John Collison
So initially I thought when I saw these charts that it's. That's about new vibe coded businesses that are more abundant in number but in any given instance maybe not as significant or not growing as quickly or whatever. What we're actually finding is not only are there so many more businesses, but the average revenue per business is also increasing. And so it's not just more new tiny ones. Somehow the median business is also doing better.
- [01:55]
Patrick Collison
Yeah, I think even the term lifestyle business, you know, there's like a bit pejorative. It betrays a worldview. Whereas what we're seeing is there's tons of business now making more than a million dollars a year. Like that number is really inflecting. And in general like we think about it in, ah, you got the little color service. I mean I just have been doing my color myself. So you also have to look at it almost in Kosian terms where what we're seeing is more citizenship revoked for drinking this. I just want to clarify.
- [02:22]
Interviewer 1
These are full size pints, everyone.
- [02:24]
Interviewer 2
These are full size pints. We're just very large humans.
- [02:26]
Patrick Collison
I just want to clarify that. It's 00, which is very good, but given that it's 11am It's a little early.
- [02:32]
Interviewer 2
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:34]
John Collison
What are you seeing at Coast?
- [02:35]
Patrick Collison
Oh, just. Yeah, we're seeing thanks to AI, you now have more small businesses able to do million dollars plus of revenue and be really impactful. And so we think you'll probably see smaller firms have a big impact.
- [02:46]
Interviewer 1
And what's driving this is you think AI is making every little step of entrepreneurship slightly easier. Like slightly, slightly easier to incorporate, slightly easier to create a contract or to hire somebody, slightly easier to create an ad. And then you add all of that together.
- [02:59]
Patrick Collison
It's the merging of all the functions. It's the fact that you can do your design and your PM and your engineering all yourself as one really effective person. Sam Altman was here yesterday on stage and he was talking about the return of the idea guy. The fact that. Exactly. Yeah. The fact that if you. The long maligned idea guy, but now if you have really good ideas, you can actually go execute them and you have so much more capability to do so. And again, we are seeing that borne out in the stripe data where I think this phenomenon shows up as 71% year over year growth in businesses launching.
- [03:28]
Interviewer 2
So I mean, it feels like you could do nothing and win. Stripe's in the right place at the right time. But you're probably not taking.
- [03:33]
Patrick Collison
We are not doing nothing, I'll tell you that.
- [03:35]
Interviewer 2
So tell me what you're actually doing. How are you accelerating these businesses? Like what are you changing about stripe? What products are you adding? What functionalities are you building?
- [03:43]
Patrick Collison
So all the commerce is going agentic. We think that people will, like, people will still be doing stuff, but they will do it through their agents. So what does that mean on the consumer side of things? Like we've all had the experience of, you know, you're in chatgpt and you're retail. Like I was trying to buy a case for my bike and I was going back and forth and I was, you know, asking questions about your hardware, soft things like that. But anyway, at the end of that, you just want to be able to hit buy rather than like no one wants to fill out web forms. Not a value add activity. And so we just announced that Google is joining our agenta Commerce suite. So now we have Google, um, OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta all working with us on this agentic commerce modality where you can just buy there. That is the consumer side of things. Do you want to talk about the developer side of things?
- [04:21]
John Collison
Well, three other things. So first we're seeing a change across the economy and business models where with inference costs, with tokens and so forth and so many businesses in some way taking advantage of AI in their products. We're seeing a shift from SaaS from seat based business models to usage based business models and I think this is pretty profound. So we're, we acquired a company called Metronome back a couple months ago and we're now integrating that cohesively throughout the stripe platform we demoed yesterday. Something that I think is very cool and is the intersection between crypto stablecoins and usage based billing where basically you can have streaming payments where you're paying for each token as it's delivered in real time. Yeah, exactly. Today there's a kind of credit extension that implicitly happens with any token billing when you're billed at the end of the month and so forth. Which is actually pretty tricky because if you've token thieves, if you've some failed billing after somebody racked up a million dollar, a credit card tab or something, you know that that's a real problem for the provider. So anyway, we're doing a lot around usage based billing and this economy wide structural transformation. Then secondly to this fraud point we're seeing, I mean concomitant with the enormous increase in new business creation, we're also seeing a lot of fraud and there's
- [05:26]
Patrick Collison
a lot of fraud attempt.
- [05:28]
John Collison
Yeah. So you know, when you, you can't resell access to software and so if you got illicit access to some SaaS tool two years ago, there wasn't much you could do with that to monetize, so to speak. There wasn't much incent steal SaaS. But you can retail tokens, it's very lucrative to do so. And so all these new AI companies and all these new AI products, growth is not really a problem for them. They have a surfeit of growth. But there are also a lot of people, token pilferers looking to ne' er do wells. Exactly. Looking to run away with these, these, you know, this precious value.
- [06:03]
Interviewer 1
And walk us through how that would work, how that works in practice is that somebody spinning up a bunch of free accounts and then like hitting them with just kind of the bare minute
- [06:13]
Interviewer 2
or staying the motivation distillation or actual reselling both.
- [06:17]
John Collison
Yeah, so there's definitely just straight resell, but there's also more sophisticated attacks and distillation. So anyway, we've seen that one in six new accounts across this ecosystem are fraudulent. And for many providers it's actually difficult now to offer free trials because you know, the illicit accounts that set up for these pre trials they drive so much expense that it's hard to make the overall economics work out. So anyway, we're extending Stripe Radar to use the intelligence of the stripe network to help any of these companies not only score payments, but score customer signups to score trials. And we're turning Stripe Radar into this sort of X ray vision for the AI economy to try to prevent these new and more sophisticated attacks. I think this is really important in that we're not going to have an Internet with self serve access.
- [07:10]
Interviewer 1
So just to repeat it back to you, if somebody signs up and they can basically pay for tokens streaming with stablecoins that would enable like let's say a big AI company to be able to offer a self serve product and not worry about someone coming in, running up a big token bill and then saying like see you, I'm not even in the country.
- [07:28]
John Collison
That's exactly right. But we're also going to try to protect the regular signup flows as well and the kind of more straightforward consumer access.
- [07:34]
Patrick Collison
If you run any physical store you have to worry about shrinkage and you know, no one wants the direction of travel where you go to a CVS and everything is locked up behind a painting glass. Good upstanding people suffer from the small percentage of crime that happens. It's the exact same in the AI land where similarly they are selling a product that has real value and real resale value. Exactly. Real costs associated. And so therefore they need to prevent fraud not just for financial loss for themselves but also so they can continue to offer a great experience to all the good users.
- [08:04]
Interviewer 2
And then I want to go way deeper but I know you have a hard stop. Do you have something else?
- [08:08]
John Collison
Well, I was going to say one thing before I have to scurry away, which is, you know, so we're, we have this usage based billing stuff, we have the agent of commerce stuff that John just described, we have these, this new fraud functionality. And then the other thing is Stripe started out of course as a payments company but we've, you know, over the last couple of years Stripe has been becoming a broader programmable financial services platform. And that's a bit of a mouthful. What it means in practice is that not Only should be able to get paid with Stripe, but you should be able to hold money in Stripe, be able to pay people around the world to be able to orchestrate your entire financial services business. So it'd be an operating system for global money movement. And so we announced Stripe treasury where businesses can hold balances in Stripe, they can dispatch money to more than 150 countries. The instant free Stripe to Stripe account transfers and so forth. And so rather than Stripe be this sort of conduit where money ephemerally passes through, Stripe is becoming a home. And this is very valuable we think because Stripe's expertise in building programmable tools and APIs and CLI functionality and all the rest, this is obviously much more important in the Agentix era.
- [09:18]
Interviewer 1
Was. Sorry to cut you off. Was this in the seed pitch deck?
- [09:22]
Patrick Collison
None of this was in the seed pitch deck, no.
- [09:24]
Interviewer 1
But I imagine like you're in the fund, you're telling people we're in the funds flow at some point or another. We won't just pass this back to the. Their bank account will actually be able to unlock the value of the.
- [09:34]
Patrick Collison
That wasn't in the seed pitch deck. And in general, you know, the secret to being a Silicon Valley founder is you have to like get lucky for many, many years in a row. And then you go back and you pretend that that was your plan all along. You retcon. Exactly. Yeah. You do a lot of retconning. That's very important. However, what I will say is interesting is we did focus from the very beginning on developers and we thought developers were very important and underserved. I mean Stripe's original name was devpayments and you know, payments for developers was that you can go back in the wayback Ma. That was the tagline on the, on the website. I think what's interesting now obviously is that the, you know, all the agentic coding tools need something with well documented APIs with everything being available on an API basis. And so I think we have always thought that companies should take developers more seriously. I think we're now seeing just industry wide Companies that took developers seriously are now really benefiting from this AI moment because they built their stuff for the agents also.
- [10:28]
Interviewer 1
Everyone's a developer now.
- [10:29]
Patrick Collison
Exactly.
- [10:30]
Interviewer 2
And agents feel like they are developer shaped at least.
- [10:34]
John Collison
Agents want good DX developer experience even more than humans do. And so if you don't have it, I mean it's, it's a real problem.
- [10:40]
Patrick Collison
Not gonna make sense.
- [10:41]
Interviewer 2
I think they're gonna kill me if we keep you any longer. Okay, we'll let you get out of here. We did want you for being here. This plaque, can you explain to us what this is and what it. What it stands for? Are you familiar? This is the original print that went into.
- [10:53]
Patrick Collison
Wait, how did you get that?
- [10:55]
Interviewer 2
That's ours. It was given to us and we want you to sign it. You thieves. Things like this, they recommend here. And here we have a museum of business where we try and accumulate signed objects of historical dominac paper cover. Hey. This is the paperback paper cover of poor Charlie's arm.
- [11:14]
Patrick Collison
It's heavy. This is how we made the original hardcover, if you have it, of poor Charlie's Almanac. Sorry.
- [11:19]
Interviewer 2
I'm sorry. Right there. And we'll have it right over there.
- [11:22]
Patrick Collison
Yep.
- [11:22]
Interviewer 2
And this will live on the literal Gold Master museum of business. And we will let you get out of here and we will go way deeper. Stay with us. We are going to continue our interview with John Collison from Stripe at Stripe Sessions here in San Francisco. Thank you so much, Patrick, for taking the time to come chat with us. We really appreciate having you on the show. It's always a pleasure. Cheers and congratulations. We do want to have you. Can we have you Hit the gong. What is the headline number?
- [11:48]
Interviewer 1
Is it 1.6?
- [11:49]
Interviewer 2
Is it 1.6? Is that the headline, King?
- [11:51]
Patrick Collison
That is the 2025 number. Stay tuned for the 2026 number.
- [11:55]
Interviewer 2
And smack that gong.
- [11:59]
Interviewer 1
Powerful. Powerful hit. Powerful hit.
- [12:02]
John Collison
I see where you tell.
- [12:03]
Patrick Collison
He's been lifting.
- [12:03]
Interviewer 2
Yes, yes, yes. Well, thank you. Have a great rest of Stripe Sessions. We really appreciate you coming on the show. I wanted to shift over to another stripe press book. This is Maintenance of Everything by Stuart Brand. And in here, the general thesis is Maintenance of Everything. I mean, I'd love to know what you took away from this, but maintenance is what keeps everything going and what keeps life going. And he gives a ton of really interesting anecdotes about cars and repairs and weaponry and sailing. And there's so many interesting anecdotes. And I'm wondering about your thoughts on maintenance in the age of AI and what you feel and see in this. Like, we're in this. Maybe there's like this job replacement thing. AI does everything. But then there's so much that goes
- [12:47]
Interviewer 1
on in the maintenance acceleration of technical debt.
- [12:50]
Interviewer 2
And so I was wondering if you just reflect on, like, brands work in the age of AI so Stuart Brand
- [12:55]
Patrick Collison
is obviously amazing and, you know, is maybe famous for the. The Whole Earth catalog originally, which, you know, Steve Jobs talked about in that. That Famous commencement speech. But Stuart Brand has been around for the entirety of Silicon Valley history. Like, if you go back and read the. The Tom Wolfe book, the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, I don't know if you guys are big Tom Wolf fans, but it's talking about, like, the early LSD culture of the 1960s in the Bay Area. They're having these parties. Stuart Brand is in the book. You know, he's like, there at those early parties and everything like that. Yeah. When like the, you know, the Grateful Dead and everything like that. And so he's just been, like, there for everything all along. He was the. He was the manning, the computer at the mother of all demos, you know, the Engelbart famous demo.
- [13:37]
Interviewer 2
So it was where the original mouse was demoed. Exactly.
- [13:40]
Patrick Collison
Where the mouse was shown. Exactly.
- [13:42]
Interviewer 2
Among a ton of other things.
- [13:44]
Patrick Collison
Exactly. So. And Stuart Brand is still, you know, he just published this book. And so Stuart Brand is so intertwined with the history of technology and Silicon Valley studio technology. And obviously what this book is getting at and also the whole Earth catalog is this passion for tools and taking care of your tools and kind of thinking about tools. And it's interesting you bring that up in the context of AI, because one thing that I get excited about in the current moment is this idea of individual empowerment. And, you know, you could have different visions of AI. And I definitely have an adverse reaction to this. You know, very passive. You know, I think the term slop is, you know, the term we use for this, just, you know, being a passive recipient of AI generated stuff. And no one wants the, you know, Brave New World soma kind of vision. And instead if you look at something like openclaw, I get very excited about that because you are giving computing power and the ability to do stuff with programming and tinkering with technology. It's the homebrew computer club all over again. It's this tinkering energy that's back. And so I just get really excited about how I think tools and passion for tools is ascendant.
- [14:57]
Interviewer 1
I don't think that negativity there's been towards the entire, like, Mac mini open claw movement when it's like, for how long has Silicon Valley been like, I miss the days of, like, the hacker era, and then the hacker era comes back and then people.
- [15:13]
Patrick Collison
It's bonkers. Mock it. I agree. And okay, I was reflecting on this. I think there's something interesting where people maybe have an adverse reaction to early adopter enthusiast culture. The early open claw enthusiast group really reminds me of the early bitcoin enthusiast group who also got people's backs up in a way. Like you remember that famous New York Times article with like the guys with the sweaters? Like those guys are presumably big into open claw right now. So there's something about the maybe because people tend to over hype stuff. You know, they say my open claw does this, like maybe it doesn't quiet or something like that. But the tinkering is back and I think that's really cool. And so I agree with you. It's crazy that, you know, people have this skepticism because it's easily like the most fun you can have with computers.
- [16:02]
Interviewer 1
Yeah. People on X see an open claw meetup and someplace like Tokyo and they're just like mocking it.
- [16:08]
Patrick Collison
Right.
- [16:09]
Interviewer 1
And it's like, isn't this like core to the culture?
- [16:14]
Patrick Collison
Exactly. Yeah, I'm totally with you.
- [16:16]
Interviewer 2
That is the optimistic take on open claw tinkering. I love that. That's what I believe. But there is the other side, which is the. Not just the tools, but the tool shaped objects. You've heard of this criticism that you wind up. I've had this exact experience where I've gone to Codex and built a whole thing and been like, that could have just been a prompt and like I didn't actually need to have an instantiated Python script like I could have. And I think there is a risk in some Enterprises of having 25 people Vibe coding dashboards when you could have just had one. There is some managerial de duping and overhead and management. And I'm wondering how you've grappled with that side of AI.
- [16:51]
Patrick Collison
Yeah, I mean, a few thoughts here. One is, I think it's just awesome that software is becoming so accessible. I think we should really celebrate that. Like I'm writing much more software even just from a kind of a fun perspective, because it is so fun and it's this kind of addictive feeling. I think we're also very clearly in a transitional state where it just doesn't feel to me that the way we do things in 2026, where you know, you need to prompt us to, you know, make no mistakes or you know, you saw the caveman token efficiency thing where it's like if you talk like a caveman and I ask to talk like it just uses fewer tokens and so but gets the same results, you know, it's as effective and so if you want to kind of economize in
- [17:33]
Interviewer 2
the token budget, every image prompt was no six fingers.
- [17:37]
Patrick Collison
Yeah.
- [17:37]
Interviewer 2
And I haven't seen an AI image with six fingers in a year.
- [17:40]
Patrick Collison
Exactly.
- [17:40]
Interviewer 2
It just. We just crossed that chasm.
- [17:42]
Patrick Collison
Exactly. You know, if you're doing anything with financial data, you know, you need to prompt it to do not make up any numbers. And then it's much better not making up numbers. Right. So where we are in 26 is clearly not where we're going to be. The models are getting much better, but I think right now we're in this interesting transitional period. There is this software fatigue as you say, where you know, from software maintenance, things like that. I think we'll get there and like all these things, you know, there's puts and takes. People are talking a lot about the offensive side of security, which is true with, you know, the very powerful new models. But of course you also have the defensive side of things where if you ask your, you know, 5.5 to audit, go take a look at this application. Take a look at this. Just like go putter around this server and give me a security audit and suggestions to lock it down. It'll do a great job of that. And so again, I think we just haven't figured out what the end state is.
- [18:29]
Interviewer 2
Yeah, yeah. It does feel like as we move up the layers of abstraction, we go from, you know, pair programming alongside an AI to being more product manager, to almost winding up more in a build versus buy mentality. And yes, you could vibe code that, but if it already exists or it's open sourced already, or there's something you can pull off the shelf and it's going to be cheaper than the token cost, cheaper than the maintenance, like maybe.
- [18:51]
Patrick Collison
But again, we'll end up in a new equilibrium where, you know, the. I think exporting your data will become more important because you'll get back to the UNIX philosophy of you have individual tools that are much easier to interoperate between each other. You can kind of pipe your data conceptually between applications. If I can also bring this back to payments for a moment. A very important angle on all this stuff. You guys have probably had the experience of when you are doing something in Codex, when you're vibe coding away, you are the adult that needs to reach for things on the high shelves for it. So it is much better at writing code than you. It's able to architect an application. So what do you need to do? You need to go sign up for an API key, go get a PDF
- [19:30]
Interviewer 2
of a website that it can't access.
- [19:32]
Patrick Collison
Exactly. Log in and please get me API keys. Is like something you end up doing a lot. One of our biggest Announcements this year was something called Stripe projects where you are able to agentically do stuff in the wider world. And so you can hook up your Codex to Stripe Projects. And if you want to redema this, if you want to deploy a website, it can go sign up for Vercel for you and it can pay for it. And so now what was previously a multi step process where it could kind of do some version, they could like orchestrate Vercel but couldn't sign up for it. Now it can pay for Vercel, it can pay for Cloudflare, it can pay for browser base if you want to, you know, do headless web browsing and things like that, it can do all this stuff. And so we think the agents are going to get so much more powerful because we're giving them the ability to actually go buy what they need in the wider world and then it can do way more end to end. And so that's Stripe projects, which is kind of the second side of agent commerce is your, your agent needs to be able to go do stuff on your behavior. And you're exactly right. Agentic coding agents are not just for coding, they're for doing stuff. You know, we demoed today, write a research report for me, buy some data in the process of doing that research report. But again that's not, I happen to use a coding agent for it. It is not a coding task, it's a, it's a research task.
- [20:44]
Interviewer 2
Yeah, this happened. I on the show I used Codex, I vibe coded a beautiful webpage for some joke we were joking about and I was like, it's on my local host, I need to send it to Jordi. And actually deploying it was the harder part, which is supposed to be so easy.
- [20:58]
Patrick Collison
And that's Stripe Projects is the only way you can agentically buy a domain. Like you don't need to have anything, you don't need to have an account with any of these providers. You can just go buy a domain. It's super cool.
- [21:06]
Interviewer 2
And I feel like that's really important.
- [21:09]
Interviewer 1
How has recruiting changed over the last few years? Because I feel like so much of what made has made Stripe such an incredible company is convincing the smartest, most ambitious people in the world to work in payments. A place that they historically maybe wouldn't have been excited to work. And then now I imagine the job of any, any person that, that could get a job at Stripe can probably also get an offer at OpenAI Anthropic, you know, some of these other labs. And so I imagine you find Yourself having conversations with folks and helping them
- [21:40]
Privy Representative
make a difference decision.
- [21:40]
Patrick Collison
Yes. So, I mean, so many places you go there. One, as you say. I think we have always encouraged people to think bigger than just payments. And I think if, you know, Stripe was just about payments, fewer people would have been interested in joining. But I think they understand that going back to tools and the importance of them, I think people understand that the infrastructure that we give people for entrepreneurship actually changes the outcomes. You know, we're moving the supply demand curve and so we can encourage there to be more entrepreneurship again. Patrick talks about 71% year over year growth in the number of businesses being created on Stripe. That's not all Stripe, but we definitely contribute to it by making the whole entrepreneurship journey easier. And then when those companies scale, you know, OpenAI sells, ChatGPT, I think in more countries than it otherwise would have because all that infrastructure is just super available and on Rails. And so it exists that kind of the small getting started end of the spectrum. And for, you know, the biggest companies in the world, the Amazons and Hertz and Metas and everyone like that that we work with on, on projects like this, you probably saw that like the stablecoin thing, we answer them, okay, so that's one part of it is like you have to genuinely have a mission that's interesting. And I think we believed and believe that this stuff actually really matters and you can change the. The end equal. That's one second thing is that it has always been the most competitive time I can remember to compete for talent. It's just like I can never remember a time when it wasn't the case.
- [23:02]
Interviewer 2
It was easy when you were competing with Mark Zuckerberg and then it was easy when you're competing against Elon Musk
- [23:07]
Patrick Collison
where like no man steps in the same river twice because, you know, he's not the same man and it's not the same river. Like I remember, you know, when we were recruiting Greg Brockman, who's our second employee, who, you know, we're going to have a speak yesterday, but with Sam instead because we have a lot going on this week. But, but I remember recruiting Greg to join Stripe as our second employee, flying across the country to Boston to go meet with them because like, you know, why would you join this like no name company that you ever heard of and that's kind of stuff you do then and like you've stuffed and so it's always the most competitive time that it's ever been with recruiting and this is certainly no exception. And you Know, people have a lot of great options. That kind of gets to. I think, you know, people are talking about the death of software engineering and honestly, the closer people are to AI, the more they're like, oh, you know, software engineering is cooked. You know, it's got two years left. I think those people are all high. Honestly, like just, you have, you have so much, you are able to work with AI so much better if you understand the underlying concepts and you're so much better prepared for that. And I'd almost analogize it to remember in the 90s people had this view that like, okay, you know, the cloud or like a proto cloud back then is coming along. The network is the computer, all this vision. And people tried to have these leaky abstract or like abstract, you know, they thought they had a beautiful abstraction where you would have, you know, a full that just happened to be on the network, in the cloud and you still have that on the Mac today, your icloud folder and things like that. And same on Microsoft Windows. Those never worked that well because it turns out the network exists and it can sometimes be down in a way that your hard drive wasn't and things like that. It was always important to understand disk, IO and RAM swap, all these kind of things, even if you had useful helper abstractions over them. I think with AI, similarly, to be really effective working with AI, you need to understand what it's doing and what's going on underneath the hood. You need to understand that the model and then the memory and then you have your harnesses and you've got your skills and everything like that and how they all interact. And so I think all these people calling the death of software engineering. Yeah. Are smoking something.
- [25:15]
Interviewer 2
Yeah. I mean, there's also just the software engineers are dynamic and intelligent, creative and can operate at various levels of abstraction. And there have been transitions, if you
- [25:25]
Interviewer 1
want to make the argument that AI will translate, transform every aspect of the economy, but that engineering, like core understanding of engineering and software engineering will no longer be valuable. That's, that's. And obviously some, some of the people that are more bearish on the practice of software engineering have, you know, uptime issues. And like stripe is a category where you guys can't really afford to have, you know, reliability issues.
- [25:50]
Patrick Collison
There's two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now I think will do incredibly well over the coming 10 to 20 years. Firstly, high agency people. We know this at Stripe. The people who are like, I've been talking to customers, I know exactly what we should do. We got to go fix this. But the people who have that pep in their step and they want to go make Stripe better, they are now so much more empowered thanks to AI. The second is double majors. I think if you understand software and understand finance, or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company. And one person can do what would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems.
- [26:24]
Interviewer 2
Previously famous Paul Graham quote about that, too.
- [26:26]
Patrick Collison
Yeah.
- [26:27]
Interviewer 2
Typically an entrepreneurship team, a founding team, has a collection of like five or six skills between two founders, three founders.
- [26:33]
Patrick Collison
Charlie Munger talked about the importance of being multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking and implied was that, like, he thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books now, you know, you can talk to your AI about it. And so I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well.
- [26:51]
Interviewer 2
Yeah. Do we have a minute to talk about stablecoins?
- [26:54]
Patrick Collison
We have one minute. Yeah.
- [26:55]
Interviewer 2
Okay. One minute.
- [26:56]
Jeff Weinstein
The.
- [26:58]
Interviewer 2
In the Economist in Buttonwood, there is. There's a lot of doom and gloom about the stablecoin winter. I put a ton of money in stablecoins, didn't make a dime. They're saying it's too stable. But they are saying that the market grew 30% in the six months up until late October. But total stablecoin assets have barely bunched since. Are we in a stablecoin winter? Broadly, are you seeing that adoption.
- [27:24]
Interviewer 1
This is the Economist not processing that there can be a correction. There can be a correction in crypto asset prices and yet more adoption than ever in actual the utility of stablecoins. And the two things are not, not, not the same.
- [27:38]
Patrick Collison
We're always trying to point out to people, like, the difference between price curves and the underlying activity. And like, those are very different things. And, you know, we're talking about that in the SaaS apocalypse in the context of, you know, SaaS growth is.
- [27:49]
Interviewer 2
Yeah, yeah. Companies are still growing. Top lines.
- [27:51]
Patrick Collison
Exactly. Top line growth is really good and everything like that. And so kind of a similar story with stablecoins where we see volumes continue to grow. And again, we had this in a lot of our demos with agentic pay per use payments or streaming payments or things like that. You actually have to use something like Tempo. You have to use stablecoins because economically speaking, just like, what else are you going to do? And so we are as bullish on stablecoins as we've ever been.
- [28:15]
Interviewer 2
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time off. Come on the show.
- [28:18]
Interviewer 1
Great hanging out.
- [28:19]
Interviewer 2
Thanks for having us at Vlog.
- [28:21]
Interviewer 1
Cheeky pint.
- [28:22]
Patrick Collison
Yeah, there you go. You guys are the perfect setup.
- [28:24]
Interviewer 2
Have a great rest of Stripe session. We'll grab your headphones as well and we will bring on our next guest.
- [28:29]
Patrick Collison
Alrighty, tap out.
- [28:30]
Interviewer 1
Cheers.
- [28:31]
Interviewer 2
Goodbye. And we will bring on Henry next. Welcome back to the show. Last time we were in person, we'll let you put those headphones on. I think. Last time you were in person, didn't you help us translate something in French? Something random? Do you remember that?
- [28:48]
Privy Representative
I do. This is my second audition.
- [28:49]
Interviewer 2
Yes. That's fantastic. You can sit here.
- [28:51]
Privy Representative
It's about Meta's acquisitions.
- [28:53]
Interviewer 2
Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Because we were interviewed for French TV and we didn't know what they were saying and you helped us understand it. That was fun. What a wild time. I mean, I guess it's only getting wilder. Have you been struggling with any of the talent wars or have you been recruiting for your team? Are you growing your organization now?
- [29:12]
Privy Representative
All of the above. I mean, so when we were acquired, this is coming up on nine months, we were about 30 people at privy, we're about 60 now. And then Stripe generally is doing so much more.
- [29:24]
Interviewer 2
The soundboard made it incredible.
- [29:27]
Privy Representative
And then Stripe is doing a lot more in the space. So generally I think the talent wars are real. But also the reality is twofold. First you had to be a little bit damaged to go into crypto and stablecoins to begin with. And so we're seeing these people who are still coming in and then actually we're seeing a lot more merging of the two, which is to say yesterday was a good demo on streaming micropayments. Like there's a lot more that I think stablecoins and like, you know, Internet native money is going to enable for agentic use cases. It's still very much in its infancy,
- [29:57]
Interviewer 1
but it's like, yeah, we just spoke with the collisons around all this issue around AI fraud. People signing up for a bunch of free accounts to get access to tokens, or people signing up for an account, running up a bill and then basically stiffing the provider and, and how stablecoins could effectively be a solved for that, which is like, hey, if you're, if you're. If you're going to just sign up and use this tool, that's fine. We don't necessarily know who you are. We don't need to kyc to use a language model. But you might need to use stablecoins
- [30:27]
Privy Representative
to pay as you go.
- [30:29]
Interviewer 1
So there's no risk for sure.
- [30:31]
Privy Representative
I think a lot about it in terms of Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 ISPs where you'll call between, call it Verizon and AT&T and then at the end of the month you'll settle the bill across the tier ones. I think there's just such an interesting design space for managing token spend payments and so on. Using programmable money in the era we're
- [30:49]
Interviewer 2
coming into or have you been tracking the showdown between the stablecoin community and the banks? This was in this Economist article as well. And I want to know if you think that this is a true collision course, if there will really be a showdown. The concept here, as put in Buttonwood in the Economist, the prospect of stablecoin growth spooked America's banks. This is because a loophole in the law let stablecoins offer deposit like yield without bank like regulatory burden. The American Bankers association warned that a $2 trillion market for stablecoins if it was all dollar pegged could lead to a 10% decline in bank deposits. That would raise average funding cost for lenders by about a quarter of a percentage point, they said crimping their profits markets and driving up interest rates on all manner of loans for everyone else. Is this a real issue? Is there a logical solution? Is there going to be some sort of unification where the stablecoin community and the bank and the traditional community.
- [31:51]
Interviewer 1
Did we not get a, did they not get a solution with the Genius Act?
- [31:55]
Interviewer 2
I think it's.
- [31:56]
Privy Representative
Yeah, please, I'll follow you.
- [31:58]
Interviewer 2
Oh well, I mean in here it says bankers and stablecoin issuers have since been locked in a fight over the final shape of a follow up bill, the Clarity Act. And so that's where we are right now. But I want to know where you think it goes from here.
- [32:09]
Privy Representative
So Polymarket, last I checked, has it around 45%. The clarity bill will make it out of this committee and actually pass. And I think the reality is Genius was basically as buttoned down as it could be on this specific issue. And this is why Clarity needs to exist to set standards and procedures for actually doing this. I think it's a really.
- [32:30]
Interviewer 1
They were such a genius. Should have provided more, more clarity.
- [32:36]
Jeff Weinstein
It's very good.
- [32:38]
Privy Representative
But this is, this is why.
- [32:40]
Interviewer 2
This is why the show exists.
- [32:41]
Privy Representative
Exactly.
- [32:42]
Interviewer 1
I see this crowd doesn't like it flopped.
- [32:45]
Interviewer 2
It flopped.
- [32:46]
Privy Representative
But for those of you viewing I see this as the acoustic set versus the ultra dome. This is Your guys coming in unplugged. Totally. But no, I think it's an essential issue. And I think right now you're seeing also a twin thing around tokenized deposits versus stable coins and like two different formats for how digital assets I guess can impact finance and fintech generally. The reality is, I think more competition,
- [33:07]
Interviewer 1
say more about tokenized deposits, I can imagine what that is, which is like I go to a bank, I give them an actual dollar and you get an exchange, tokenize it, but then they're keeping the dollar there, they're lending against it. So it is, maybe they give me some yield even and they'll run all
- [33:23]
Privy Representative
of the same infra in the back that exists today. But you have a digital representation of your deposit that you can use. And so in a sense it is, it is akin to being handed a code check ticket and you get to walk around with your ticket and at some point you can redeem it at the code check or another code check potentially versus the stablecoin where you're actually holding the asset itself. And I think those are the two pathways that are getting a lot of exploration in the space. Ultimately I think a lot of these rails will merge and I think more importantly the question is one of competition for the consumer. The consumer should have more ways of actually earning on their assets. And so, so the idea that we need greater clarity, as it were, with issuers and institutions that are putting out stablecoins is so absolutely clear. But I think we should view it first and foremost from the question of what benefits the companies that are using stablecoins or the Internet generally what benefits the users? Not how different is this from the current infrastructure that we have? Because that is not a way to build new systems in the world.
- [34:22]
Interviewer 2
Yeah, then I guess there is also the sort of the additive outcome where yes, you get to $2 trillion in stablecoin assets, but it's for new use cases that are not competing with like the traditional credit card lending, mortgage lending, asset backed loan industry. And so it's not putting that downward pressure necessarily on the traditional banking system. And so I'm sure the banking industry is sort of like cautiously optimistic. This is all like net new dollars that are being created and used around the globe and for different purposes. But if it's, but if it does directly come after, well this company used to just use credit cards for everything and now they're not paying us, then that maybe has some negative effects.
- [35:02]
Privy Representative
And I think the two things you'll see as run ons is basically how does stablecoin deployment evolve worldwide? To what extent is it a western thing versus the rest of the world thing that probably has impact on USDT versus USDC market share? There's a lot of interesting run ons to this exact question. The second thing is at least this is why I'm excited to be at Stripe. And Stripe isn't doing any crypto things for crypto's sake. They are doing how do we build better Rails for our users? No matter what the Rail is under
- [35:28]
Interviewer 2
the hood, it's less ideological and more pragmatic first principles.
- [35:32]
Privy Representative
This is a very good tool. Exactly. And we should put it to use in ways that betters the experiences. This is where I'm interested in some of. I mean Defi is at a very complicated few months with basically a lot of exploits and things like that. And this is still an industry in its infancy and yet but we're seeing a very interesting merging of the rails with e.g. vault curators on Morpho, like folks like Apollo and others taking part in it. And so we're seeing again just a merging of traditional finance and online finance in a way that I think is
- [36:04]
Interviewer 1
going to continue to recent exploits. Is that more social engineering? For the most part this is not
- [36:11]
Privy Representative
AI led in those specific cases. My understanding is that is not AI led. I think it's very much social engineering, bad setups in various places that have led to unfortunate outcomes. And I think it's just the space maturing I think we are seeing. As a side note, this is very interesting. So we use at privy a number of basically AI tools to do constant pen testing to review every PR that goes out to do a lot of this. And we're also seeing quite a bit of just better bug bounties coming in, much more sophisticated. But the baseline basically on the bug bounty has gone much better and you're now able to string together more complex attack vectors that you couldn't do before. So that evolution is mega clear. And one of our engineers, Andrew McPherson used ChatGPT to find an exploit in React and it was a zero day in React. And the fact that react is a 15 year old library put out by Meta, it's open source, it's been beaten to death because it basically backs every product on the web. The fact that we're finding these now is insane.
- [37:19]
Interviewer 2
And do you have more clarity on a zero day? Does that allow someone to potentially get into someone's computer, their browser or is it more just cause the browser to crash in a certain or to be strung together? Because There's a wide range of what you can do once you exploit something you can, can just like, you know, take the service offline, which is bad.
- [37:40]
Privy Representative
Or you can like copy on the website.
- [37:42]
Interviewer 2
Yeah. Get into the database. Like there's a wide range of like negative outcomes.
- [37:46]
Privy Representative
Yeah. I'm not actually sure what the, what the ramification of his was but you know there's a very good economic market for buying 0 days and the price will depend on what it allows you to do.
- [37:55]
Interviewer 2
That makes sense. Has there been, have you been tracking any movements in the stablecoin community to do more interesting non dollar backed stablecoins? I'm thinking of like Peter Thiel back in like 99 sort of proposed like a Vanguard Total index like a VTI backed stablecoin where you have $1 but the dollar is backed by basically a massive basket of assets that includes gold, oil, real estate, a slice of stocks and bonds. And so it's sort of more diversified than even the US dollar could be. And maybe it's less stable relative to the dollar but you're bought in on the global economy.
- [38:36]
Privy Representative
So I think first we're going to see a rise of non dollar stablecoins as more people embrace it especially.
- [38:41]
Interviewer 2
And that would just be foreign currencies.
- [38:42]
Privy Representative
Yeah, foreign currencies. Second, I've heard of a few projects that are trying to basically have inflation stablecoin which is the stable actually grows with inflation so that you're on a purchasing power parity like standpoint.
- [38:56]
Interviewer 2
Are the famous assets that you can buy from the treasury, treasury inflation protection, something securities, I forget that one.
- [39:03]
Privy Representative
But that's the idea of one of them. I think they're really hard to instrument and get quite right which is why I don't think they've taken off just yet. And then I think the third piece is this is not a stable coin but it was a project I heard about recently I thought was very interesting. There's a company called Pearl that is finding a way to do like fast matrix multiplication and back a blockchain on this so you can issue tokens based on how much compute you've got ready to do useful inference.
- [39:28]
Interviewer 2
That's interesting.
- [39:29]
Privy Representative
And so there was a question for me of what other useful work could you back the currency on?
- [39:34]
Interviewer 2
Yeah, we've talked to Prime Intellect a few times. They've been doing early on some crypto token backed compute and interestingly the 3D rendering community, I don't know if you're familiar with the render token but basically most 3D artists, if they're rendering a CGI for movie, TV show, something like that animation. They will typ have an on premise rack of GPUs that they use to render the graphics or the final output. And the render network was an effort that I think was pretty successful to basically well I'm not rendering my project, I'll render yours and I get tokens that I can put back on the network because each frame is deterministic and separate. So you can render, you know, if there's 24 frames a second you can render thousands of frames across a whole bunch of different machines. They all will look the same when they come together. And so that was the first example of like oh a crypto project that's being done for useful work marshaling computer and now you can imagine like a thousand times more ways to.
- [40:38]
Privy Representative
These are hallowed times. While crypto prices are down and there's so much interesting thing happening in tech you can actually build very useful things
- [40:44]
Interviewer 1
in a way that's prediction time. When we look back on 2026.
- [40:49]
Interviewer 2
Yeah. What's your price for USDC? See price target for 2030.
- [40:54]
Interviewer 1
This is John's favorite joke but hope
- [41:00]
Privy Representative
it's $1 is a disastrous outcome.
- [41:04]
Interviewer 1
What do you think the story will be around the intersection of AI and crypto, specifically agents and stables? It's a great question because everyone keeps saying it right. But I feel like we need to have massive. It's very clear that when an AI tool has product market fit adoption is like extremely rapid. Right. You just immediately hockey stick. And so I'm like sort of like waiting for a hockey stick moment like that at the intersection of stables and agents.
- [41:35]
Privy Representative
So here's my first. We're seeing so much activity. Like 35% of new privy signups today are for people building agentic wallets. So they're using the wallet, they're like giving agents for example like some allowance and then they're like, you know, they have an ability to claw back assets if the agent doesn't spend it. They can control spend in a very like particular way. So we're seeing so much tinkering happening here that I think is going to lead to emerging behaviors that are really interesting. My prediction is first great use cases are going to happen in the background. There'll be a lot more about like business model innovation, things like what you were talking about earlier, which is how do we get payments in a streaming sense so that I can get paid on a per token basis much more easily.
- [42:16]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah, exactly.
- [42:16]
Interviewer 1
Without risk. Yeah.
- [42:18]
Privy Representative
So I think that's where we'll see the first few, and then over time, we'll see a much greater pickup of basically, agents actually running their own wallets. And that'll be across both Fiat and stablecoin rails.
- [42:27]
Interviewer 1
Very cool.
- [42:28]
Interviewer 2
Red button or blue button? What'd you push? Are you familiar with this?
- [42:31]
Privy Representative
I have no idea what you're talking about.
- [42:32]
Interviewer 2
We'll get to it.
- [42:33]
Interviewer 1
Locked in.
- [42:33]
Interviewer 2
Locked in.
- [42:35]
Privy Representative
I don't have time for these things.
- [42:37]
Interviewer 2
That's incredibly bullish. It's a thought experiment. You can go check it out online. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.
- [42:43]
Interviewer 1
Great to see you.
- [42:44]
Interviewer 2
Good to see you.
- [42:44]
Interviewer 1
Thank you.
- [42:45]
Interviewer 2
We'll talk to you soon. Pop those headphones off, put them down right there, and we're good to go. Jeff, welcome to the show. We are here live at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco. Great to see you.
- [42:57]
Interviewer 1
Great to see you.
- [42:58]
Interviewer 2
Throw a headset on, sit down, introduce yourself again. Yeah, you can sit here. Here with that headset.
- [43:04]
Jeff Weinstein
Hello. Hello.
- [43:05]
Interviewer 2
Introduce yourself for the fans, the viewers, the chat. Who are you?
- [43:11]
Jeff Weinstein
Howdy. I'm Jeff Stripe on the product team. Jeff Weinstein. Good to see you all.
- [43:16]
Interviewer 2
Good to see you.
- [43:16]
Jeff Weinstein
This is the first time I ever met you in person. We've been talking on Zoom for 10 years.
- [43:20]
Interviewer 2
Have we met in person?
- [43:20]
Interviewer 1
Wait, is that actually true?
- [43:22]
Jeff Weinstein
I don't think I've ever met you actually in person. It's like one of these things where you've met so many times through the computer. It's, like, true.
- [43:27]
Interviewer 1
That's crazy. That's crazy. No.
- [43:29]
Interviewer 2
Yeah.
- [43:30]
Interviewer 1
I assumed we had met multiple times.
- [43:32]
Jeff Weinstein
Crazy.
- [43:32]
Interviewer 1
Great to see you in person.
- [43:33]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah. This is amazing what y' all have done.
- [43:36]
Interviewer 1
How have you. Do you ever visit Delaware?
- [43:40]
Jeff Weinstein
Do.
- [43:40]
Interviewer 1
When you show up in Delaware, do people just start cheering when you walk out of the airport? You're basically like an athlete that, you know, wins a World cup, they're coming home, and they. They do, like, a parade.
- [43:51]
Jeff Weinstein
I'm assuming I got to meet.
- [43:53]
Interviewer 1
So before we get into this, Jeff. Jeff runs Atlas. He created Atlas. You're responsible for, like, a quarter of all new C Corps.
- [44:01]
Jeff Weinstein
Atlas is now incorporating about 26.6percent of
- [44:05]
Interviewer 2
the new Gong moment.
- [44:07]
Interviewer 1
I think it's a Gong moment. I think it's a Gong moment.
- [44:10]
Jeff Weinstein
Oh, man.
- [44:10]
Interviewer 2
This is a life 6%.
- [44:12]
Jeff Weinstein
This is a life honor, but there we go.
- [44:15]
Interviewer 1
Yeah, it's got a really good ring.
- [44:16]
Interviewer 2
26 of all new C Corps, right? That's the focus. Okay.
- [44:20]
Jeff Weinstein
Correct. Yeah. And today we celebrating our 100,000th new atlas. Business was incorporated recently, and we brought the Founder and she runs this incredible business for AI software to help power plant owners run batteries in a better way is like, fantastic. So it's been a great thing. I've been recently focused on all this crazy agentic stuff we're doing.
- [44:38]
Interviewer 2
Yeah. What is actually changing about Atlas? Because I've used it several times. I think I probably used it five years ago or something. I don't even remember how old it is.
- [44:46]
Interviewer 1
We used it for tvpn.
- [44:47]
Interviewer 2
We used it for TBPN a couple years ago. And it was like, fine. And I didn't really have any product requests.
- [44:52]
Interviewer 1
It's not fine.
- [44:53]
Interviewer 2
No, no.
- [44:54]
Interviewer 1
I just mean, like, beautifully.
- [44:55]
Interviewer 2
It was like.
- [44:56]
Interviewer 1
The point. The point is that you don't think about it.
- [44:58]
Interviewer 2
Exactly.
- [44:58]
Interviewer 1
That is how it should have worked.
- [44:59]
Interviewer 2
Exactly. And I'm always fascinated by products that are like, like, okay, yeah, thumbs up. It did my job. Like.
- [45:04]
Guest from Bridge
Yeah.
- [45:05]
Interviewer 2
What? What?
- [45:05]
Interviewer 1
I'm gonna make you go back and use Legal Zoom. I'm gonna make you go use Legal Zoom.
- [45:10]
Interviewer 2
Hey, that's a.
- [45:11]
Jeff Weinstein
It's one of these products. You just want it to work like electricity under the.
- [45:14]
Interviewer 2
Exactly. How do you keep it there?
- [45:17]
Interviewer 1
So. So I want to ask you about. Is there. And do you think there will be an incorporation apocalypse? Because theoretically, I could just have. I could tell a smart agent that can use my computer, that can use the Internet. Hey, do you like, go. I need to create a C corp in Delaware.
- [45:33]
Jeff Weinstein
It turns out that the agents want to use Atlas.
- [45:35]
Interviewer 2
They'll use Atlas.
- [45:36]
Jeff Weinstein
And not to preview too much, but coming up, Atlas CLI.
- [45:40]
Interviewer 2
Okay, there we go.
- [45:41]
Interviewer 1
And another exciting generate me 10,000 C corp. Generate me 1 million C corps.
- [45:48]
Interviewer 2
I think that would be a lot of money, but yeah.
- [45:50]
Jeff Weinstein
Vibe Incorporation coming. Another exciting Atlas update is now that you can do full, safe fundraising through at us. And coming soon, you'll be able to move the money from investors directly into your treasury account and just have these amazing little fundraising links to be able to quickly raise money along the way. So we think it's another way we can help entrepreneurs get going though. My recent focus has been all this great AI stuff we're doing to help commerce businesses succeed in the next wave of the Internet. All the link CLI work so you can have your robot help you shop along the way safely across the Internet. Machine payments protocol to have robots send stablecoin to each other and small bits. It's been a really whole new world.
- [46:28]
Interviewer 2
See the customer segmentation, customer target, customer ramp. Are you rerunning this Stripe Playbook? Like Stripe was adopted by A lot of startups it sold through developers, which was very unorthodox at the time. You used to sell through the cfo, now you're selling through the CTO or just some developer who chooses Stripe. Are you trying to be the incorporation platform for every tech company, every startup, every software small business? And then you're going to go into restaurants, you're going to go into Fortune 500, the next Fortune 500 companies. I mean, I guess it doesn't quite map to Stripe because the big companies don't necessarily need Atlas if they're already up and running. But how do you think about landing and then expanding?
- [47:13]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah, I think that we are trying to get all the technology businesses in the world to start on Stripe. Yep. Start with, you know, just as a project. Use Stripe projects to be able to configure your entire stack. I mean, do you remember having to go and make a hundred little accounts for to test a database here or test a CDN provider? Oh, should I use this particular thing for email? And then you'd have to go, you know, type in password and be like, no, you need $2 signs or $1 sign and you gotta go get the secret keys and like put in the wrong place and then you gotta rotate, there's like a whole mess. And so, so we're excited to take make basically continue to make everything programmable, making corporation programmable, make selling online programmable. And now we're making provisioning entire new stacks. So we think we're going to see, you know, we did 100,000 Atlas startups over about 8ish years. I can imagine doing the next 100,000 in, you know, in another year, another two years. We're just seeing the curve of new businesses grow so quickly. I think it's tools like this agentic provisioning of an entire stack quickly, which is going to really ignite the next wave of founders to go from just vive coding to like an entire vive business.
- [48:18]
Interviewer 1
How much attention are you paying to how Atlas shows up in LLM results? Because there's a lot of companies. Profound is one James, the founder's been on the show that help you optimize that, understand it. I think it's helpful to just create a product that's loved by everyone that uses it and ultimately gets talked a lot about sort of naturally. Is that something that you're putting time directly into or is good awareness and LLMs a byproduct of just building a great product?
- [48:51]
Jeff Weinstein
You have to make your business legible to the agents you need you know, if you want your checkout page to have bright colors, like that's not what the agent wants. If you want your homepage to have a crazy picture JavaScript thing that like loads only in certain browsers with the GPO turned way up, that's also not what what agents want. Agents want perfect information about what your offer is, what the tool is, what the SKU is, what the service is, what the shoe is. And we're basically helping businesses just make their entire checkouts, their entire SKU offering legible. And Atlas is actually part of that too. You know, it itself is a business. Atlas actually runs on Stripe. And so we, you know, make sure that the agents have access to the full LLM formatted markdown text. We bake it into all of the places where agents can self serve and learn about our products. And then we make everything at Stripe a programmatic primitive. Such an agent can use it directly. And so we've seen that the cli, the command line interface for interacting with Stripe, which you know, not like a side project for Stripe, but kind of an advanced tool for developers who never want to touch the dashboard, like sort of a terminal purist. This has become this incredibly fast growing part of Stripe because the agents are like, yes, I love the fact you have perfect information about all the things I can do on Stripe. Of course I'm going to do so versus try to computer use around the website. Yeah, it's a little clunky. At some point it feels almost like a Dilbert style of using computer, whereas the agents can just use it directly.
- [50:21]
Interviewer 2
Can you take me through maybe like day in the life Today is probably pretty different than like two or three years ago. I'm sure AI has seeped in a bunch of places, but maybe if you go back to like you know, a little bit earlier, like how have, how has your day to day changed over your career and what is it like now?
- [50:45]
Jeff Weinstein
We're really just following what customers want and they're coming to us. I mean I've worked at Stripe for eight years. They are coming to us with a veracity of new needs. You know, before it was like, hey, let's kind of put a meeting on the calendar next week to talk about how to grow your business in the next country. Now they're, I need to launch in 50 countries this afternoon. Yeah, sorry, what is sales tax in all, all those places? How, how can I mimic all these fast growing startups that are going at light speed? And so basically we're taking everything that we built at Stripe and turning it into sort of a managed service. You have managed payments so that you can sell. In all these countries we have the machine payments protocol where you can say hi, I've been using, you know, I spent time, 20 years selling to consumers. Now I need to sell through agents, take all the tools we have and make, make things available to agents. So my day to day is basically almost a whiplash of like customer meetings where they're coming to us with either a new type of fraud vector, they're seeing through AI, they want to expand into new countries. And we're just trying to take the pieces, the programmatic primitive pieces we've built over the last 15 years and turn them into these sort of CLI tools. Normally we would put out a beta or we'd put out some wait list and we'd wait for a couple people to sign up and then we'd email them, then we'd send them the docs, then they'd be on vacation or get busy and then you'd hear from the next week. Now we put out a beta. Developers send their agents after our beta page. They will go around our wait lists to use it. They'll give us feedback from their agent logs of how the developer about how the agent was using our developer tools in like minutes. And so the development cycle at Stripe is just increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing because the customer feedback loop from the highest taste developers is so now agentic that we don't even have basically have time for meetings. It's just like putting these betas out there and getting faster.
- [52:42]
Interviewer 2
So you think like less meetings now.
- [52:44]
Jeff Weinstein
I think it's less meetings.
- [52:45]
Interviewer 2
I was wondering if you were. Yeah. If it was like, I imagine that you're a fan of like talk to your company customers. That's a big piece of what you do. That's your, that's very much your job. Of course you have internal meetings, but you're probably talking to a lot of customers. But the, but the shape of the feedback.
- [52:58]
Interviewer 1
I was hoping that with AI you wouldn't have to talk to customers anymore. You would just throw like 10.
- [53:03]
Interviewer 2
Well, there are some companies that are
- [53:05]
Interviewer 1
say like, you know, I don't, I don't have time.
- [53:08]
Jeff Weinstein
We're very fortunate, slash cursed with that. Our customers are not shy. You know, they are extremely happy to hop in slack with us and just us bombard us with their needs. But now they're pasting the context windows from their agents along with them. And so it's sort of this back and forth between our agents and their agents. Trying to like winnow our way to the best product. And you know, so again, I think just like the clock cycle on Stripe has just dramatically increased which is why you saw so many of these announcements recently. And we're really proud that a lot of the stuff we're doing is just like ga. You can use the Link wallet today to delegate transactions to your agent a super safe way. It's very slick at a push message. Oh, hey, time for my agent to buy me that gift. Like fantastic, thank you agent. And so we're just, we're putting this all out there and really encourage people to try.
- [53:55]
Interviewer 1
Are you forcing yourself to constantly use agents to buy stuff? Because like right now I feel like a bunch of people want to. And there's certain instances where they can, but it's not exactly easy everywhere.
- [54:09]
Jeff Weinstein
Yes, it's a two sided, it's sort of like a three sided marketplace. You know, you've got on the seller side they need to be able to accept payments from agents. That's why we have the machine payment protocol or all our APIs are being upgraded so that you can just use, you can, agents can check on.
- [54:22]
Interviewer 1
And I go through this all the time where I will like see a product that I'm interested in. I'll be on my phone, I will click add to cart and then I will get to the cart and I'll see they're not on Shopify and then I'll just churn because I'm like, I don't, I don't have time. I didn't like, I don't have time to go through, fill this out, punch in my credit card. And so, so I'm really, really excited for this moment where it's like, I want to buy this thing. Please buy it for me.
- [54:43]
Jeff Weinstein
Totally. Yeah. It's. In some ways we have this incredibly modern world in which everything's available at our fingertips, but then it's like unfortunately overly available only on our fingertips. Where I'm sitting there typing in 16 digit numbers trying to peck my way through a checkout page. Even the stripe checkout page was pretty high performing. I'm still like, I can't believe they don't use Link. I can't believe I can't just have my agent go by this. So on the seller side, we're making it incredibly easy for any of the 5 million business on stripe to just accept payments from agents. That's like one side. Another side is on the consumers. They need to be able to have a way to super ergonomically on their phone, slick mobile app and link say, hey agent, I approve $50 transactions for the next 30 minutes in the following topic. Go agent, go bam. With you know, two fa face id, whatever. I can now approve an agent and it can safely shop for me on the Internet. Like giving like a rambunctious intern, like a perfect card that can only be spent where I want. And so on the third side of the marketplace is agents themselves. Whereas we're working with, you know, Copilot and Meta and ChatGPT and Gemini so that baked into their services they have access to all of the buying and the customer mandates so that we can make agentic conversations this super slick, super safe way to buy online. And I think we're now finally getting all the infrastructure in place. We can get this flywheel starting to spin. And with the model progress, I think you're going to see amazing new applications in agenda commerce.
- [56:08]
Interviewer 1
Is there a sentiment internally that the company got kind of lucky by focusing so intensely on developers and then accidentally getting the benefit of like being extremely well built for agents? I guess it's like you guys are obviously, you guys are, you guys are well, well, incredibly smart, incredibly forward thinking. But, but when you guys started focusing on the developer experience intensely, you, I don't believe that you were thinking about.
- [56:36]
Jeff Weinstein
We weren't AI agents.
- [56:37]
Interviewer 1
A decade later.
- [56:38]
Jeff Weinstein
This is a surprise for us too. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a useful externality to our non religious, religious obsession with programmatic tools. Secular and religious.
- [56:52]
Interviewer 2
Yes, it's, it's religiously secular.
- [56:54]
Jeff Weinstein
I can't, there's not too is like a faux, like a faux pas. Faux pas at stripe. But saying yes, let's put this incredible piece of financial infrastructure behind a gate that no one can use and you have to call and go through a maze to get some steak dinner. Yeah, it's. Yeah, exactly.
- [57:08]
Interviewer 2
You're not a steak dinner company.
- [57:09]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah, we, you know, we showed how many users are now signing up for stripe each. Each day, which is in like the many tens of thousands a day. And you know, that's a lot of steak dinners to get to get each of them turned on. So it sort of actually surprises us how few companies. Yeah. Like how few companies in the world actually provide self serve services. And you know, I could say that. But I also know that there's 10,000 people at stripe who are like doing the work to make those things.
- [57:36]
Interviewer 2
Get a steak dinner every once in a while.
- [57:37]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah. And yeah, yeah, I mean I would like to get A steak dinner personally
- [57:40]
Interviewer 2
for the 100th Atlas signup.
- [57:43]
Jeff Weinstein
100,000.
- [57:45]
Interviewer 1
How ambitious is Treasury? I imagine you've been getting the customer feedback from companies forever saying hey I incorporated like why are you pushing me out to these other financial products when you already have all my information? I know you guys can store money, I know you guys can move money. But, but how ambitious is that product?
- [58:03]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah, Stripe treasury is going to be this incredibly straightforward way for a business to be able to store any currency from any country, move it around the world and just handle all of your banking and money management activities in one place. And I think this is something that we've been building the infrastructure for, for so long. You know, the ability to do currency conversion instantly or be able to pay out cross border. But we finally decided that because of stablecoin, now is the time to make this a truly global product from the beginning. Whereas years ago we would have had to make sort of a country by country decision to do a thing like Treasury. But we're going to go really global out the gate and get to 160 countries by the end of the year. And so that's that. That's really where our ambition comes from is how to make this global infrastructure. And then of course it's going to have a super slick UI. It comes with a metal, metal card, 2% cash back, really super easy to use. And if you use Stripe to earn money through your customers, everything's in one place, all the money settles quickly. It really feels like one of these kind of better together products where in my head I've written documents that say hey this will be a lot easier. And then when you actually go to use it you're like oh my goodness, this is like much easier.
- [59:18]
Interviewer 1
Very eloquent way to say we're coming for everyone.
- [59:22]
Patrick Collison
You know
- [59:25]
Jeff Weinstein
there are many services in the world that we're not going to by accidentally be able to be better than. But I also will note that everything we're building Stripe treasury on is available for anyone else to build.
- [59:36]
Interviewer 2
Sure.
- [59:37]
Jeff Weinstein
And so we're going to see some much more specialization I think in a financial related tools and we're excited for Stripe users to be able to do it really quickly.
- [59:44]
Interviewer 2
Okay.
- [59:45]
Interviewer 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I think, I think the agents coming to finance will be a big, a big story of basically the next two years because as a somebody who started my first real business while in college and then I was realizing like wait, okay so we've signed this like contract and then there's like these invoices but then like the invoices get sent around and then there's multiple stages of approval and it's like, why does it need to get approved if it's already in the contract? And you go like understanding the complexity of money movement and how many humans are in the loop to every process. And it can be great that there's humans in the loop because it prevents fraud and hopefully prevents errors, but it also creates errors and it also slow things, slows things down a lot. And so when you think about in the future where these things can be handled by machines, I think it's going
- [60:42]
Jeff Weinstein
to be, yeah, I think that, you know, it's like dangerously skip permissions and money like tends not be exactly the joining parameters you want. We want smartly suggest permissions. You know, like I look forward to the day where I get a notification from my smart robot that says, hey, here's all the ways you can improve your business. Here's the things you should be able to do to close your books. Here's the things you can do to handle the invoice. I'm looking forward to those permissions. You know, I don't want to.
- [61:09]
Interviewer 1
But even something like, so imagine a business owner receives an invoice from someone. This happens like still, like if you've worked with freelancers enough, you will have experience. Where a freelancer sends you an invoice, it basically just has a number. It does not have like any account details. You're like, okay. And then you're replying back, okay, how can I pay this? Maybe it has an email. Yeah, but a world where you receive the invoice, you just drop it into your own kind of agent and you say, pay this. I'm approving this already. I have approved this.
- [61:36]
Patrick Collison
And the agent can go follow up and keep it.
- [61:38]
Interviewer 1
Yeah, it can go email the person, it can confirm everything and it can just process it. It's like that historically is something that I've done with having like maybe a part time, part time, like back office financial operations person where I'm like, this is approved, pay it. And it's like that doesn't need to be like a, it's not like really high leverage work. It probably doesn't need to be something a business is paying a thousand, couple thousand dollars.
- [62:02]
Jeff Weinstein
We used to sort of joke that every chat app will eventually become like a banking app, but now we act like every banking app is actually now becoming a chat app. And so I think we're going to see the human agent interface related to the full life cycle of your business to become the new modality by which we run our businesses. And you want that to be in a super programmatic, super safe place that works globally. And that's what Stripe, Stripe, treasury, all these, all this new payment stuff we're doing for gentics.
- [62:29]
Interviewer 1
I think you guys are, you guys are culturally very humble. But the more I'm processing every conversation I've had today, I'm like, wow, they're actually coming for everything. They're incredibly well positioned. Everything's going to be programmable, everything's agents
- [62:42]
Jeff Weinstein
are going to be doing everything exactly when our customers succeed. So I think I sleep very well at night knowing that our business model maps exactly to our customer success.
- [62:52]
Interviewer 2
Yes.
- [62:53]
Jeff Weinstein
What else do you have on that
- [62:54]
Privy Representative
thing, by the way?
- [62:55]
Jeff Weinstein
We got a lot of stuff. Okay, what about the bottom right one? Just for fun. What's the bottom right one?
- [63:01]
Interviewer 2
Bottom right one? This is a gong. Perfect. Okay, great.
- [63:04]
Jeff Weinstein
That's a good one.
- [63:05]
Interviewer 2
Okay, we have a whole different setup there. We got so much stuff. Do we have time for one more question, you think? Or is Zach ready to rock? What are you thinking?
- [63:13]
Jeff Weinstein
Oh, there he is.
- [63:15]
Interviewer 2
We got a couple minutes?
- [63:16]
Guest from Bridge
Yeah.
- [63:16]
Interviewer 2
Okay, cool. Hypothetically, like 21 year old, new grad, college grad, comes to you and is one maybe wants to join Stripe, other one maybe wants to build a business on Stripe. How are you routing them in 2026? What are you talking them?
- [63:32]
Jeff Weinstein
Well, I love that those are the two options. Yeah. So that, that if that were the case, that would already be a win. There's many amazing companies. I think that people should follow their passion. I mean, look at the two of you, what you've built.
- [63:44]
Interviewer 1
Right.
- [63:45]
Jeff Weinstein
I've got to know you over so many of your awesome new entrepreneurial attempts. And I remember you telling me you're going to do this TV show, and I wasn't like thinking, I wasn't like, no, but I was like, certainly I
- [63:56]
Interviewer 2
will never be on that show, stopped
- [63:58]
Jeff Weinstein
by that crazy thing, we're not gonna make a pub and then have you do college game day in front of it.
- [64:02]
Interviewer 2
That'll be very strange.
- [64:03]
Jeff Weinstein
So, I mean, like, look, you, you followed your, you followed your noses on this topic and you're. And you have a good sense of it. And if you talk to someone who's, who's got that kind of passion. The tools to build something today are what all of us, I mean, dreamed of. Imagine having what we have today when we each started all of our startups in the past. And so I honestly, I really Encourage them to try it. And I also say if they're considering joining, I mean Look, Stripes, a 10,000 person company, we're probably in a reasonable high echelon of like low communication costs but there's 10,000 of us. You got to have. It's like a higher communication cost than you and your co founder. But look, the Stripe projects thing where you can provision all these third parties that got started seven weeks ago by six people.
- [64:44]
Interviewer 2
Wow.
- [64:45]
Jeff Weinstein
You know we, we, we put the links, the link for agents, for wallet. That was 10 weeks ago. And it's again, it's built on all the stuff we have but we're, we're benefiting from all of these new tools. Well so I would tell that person I hope she finds a passion that she has especially in an area where has a personal interest and just go at it hard with the new tools and Otherwise, you know, stripe.com jobs what's,
- [65:10]
Interviewer 1
what's underrated about working at a big company for a long time?
- [65:14]
Jeff Weinstein
I'm on year eight. What's underrated?
- [65:17]
Patrick Collison
Overnight success.
- [65:20]
Jeff Weinstein
You know, you, you presume presumably.
- [65:22]
Interviewer 1
I mean you've had, you've had how many. I would guess like a hundred really talented people have tried to convince you to, to join their effort or leave or hey, let me give you like $50 million to go after this thing.
- [65:36]
Jeff Weinstein
Have that one, call me the other ones. No, but I, you're joking.
- [65:41]
Interviewer 1
But like you could easily go out and raise like 50 on 250 for some like payments related.
- [65:47]
Jeff Weinstein
Yeah, I could make a right, I could make a rival tppn.
- [65:51]
Interviewer 1
We need more of those.
- [65:52]
Interviewer 2
Interesting that you're not saying I'm gonna go build a rival stripe. That's very bullish.
- [65:57]
Jeff Weinstein
This one seems to work out very well for you. So yeah, this one I could spit wise. I think that the, what's really kept me very energized and more so is I tell people like on your worst day of work, if you're looking forward to your most unhappy customer, then you found your place.
- [66:18]
Interviewer 2
Sure.
- [66:19]
Jeff Weinstein
And I like, I want to hear from an entrepreneur somewhere in the world who's got a serious problem with stripe and I want to get on the phone with them. And that is just, that's enough of like that's enough of a jolt to keep your head here first.
- [66:32]
Interviewer 1
If you have a problem with Stripe, hit me up DM me. I will give you Jeff's personal phone number.
- [66:37]
Jeff Weinstein
Cell phone number. Yeah. 410-913-2877.
- [66:40]
Interviewer 2
That is it.
- [66:42]
Jeff Weinstein
Give me a text. He Could. I couldn't possibly get more spam. So let's just add. Let's. Let's add to it, which is another thing I think we could solve with machine payments protocol, but a different day's story.
- [66:50]
Interviewer 2
Good point. Good point. Well, thank you so much.
- [66:52]
Guest from Bridge
Okay.
- [66:52]
Jeff Weinstein
So good to see y'.
- [66:53]
Interviewer 2
All.
- [66:53]
Interviewer 1
Thanks.
- [66:54]
Jeff Weinstein
Thanks for coming
- [66:58]
Interviewer 2
that off. And let's bring.
- [66:59]
Jeff Weinstein
Okay, here comes Zach.
- [67:00]
Interviewer 2
Zach from bridge coming back on the show. Second, third time we've talked to him a bunch. Right.
- [67:05]
Interviewer 1
A couple times.
- [67:06]
Interviewer 2
Zach, he's bringing the world's smallest cheeky pint. Cheers. Yours is nice and frosty.
- [67:13]
Interviewer 1
Cheers.
- [67:16]
Interviewer 2
Welcome back to the show in person.
- [67:18]
Interviewer 1
Nothing like a non alcoholic micropyth.
- [67:21]
Interviewer 2
Yours is non alcoholic because I got 0% but I asked for 0% non alcoholic beer. So my beer is 100% alcoholic beer. 0% non alcoholic beer maybe, but I still, I still tell everyone I'm drinking 0%.
- [67:35]
Guest from Bridge
But you can't tell. There's no. So you have no idea what you're.
- [67:38]
Interviewer 2
I have no idea.
- [67:39]
Patrick Collison
Yeah.
- [67:39]
Interviewer 1
All right, let's start here.
- [67:41]
Interviewer 2
Okay.
- [67:41]
Interviewer 1
The economist says stable coins are over.
- [67:43]
Interviewer 2
Fire back in the. In the economist.
- [67:46]
Guest from Bridge
Oh, man.
- [67:47]
Interviewer 2
In.
- [67:47]
Guest from Bridge
In print. Speaking of things that are over in
- [67:50]
Interviewer 2
print, I love this. It says two stable coins. Yeah.
- [67:53]
Interviewer 1
Print media says. Says the future is over.
- [67:56]
Guest from Bridge
Says the new thing that is coming is over.
- [68:01]
Interviewer 2
Why? The stable market is fizzling. The stablecoin market is fizzling. They say stablecoins are to proponents the respectable face of crypto. I think it's pretty respectable face right here. In contrast to volatile bitcoin, let alone speculative meme coins, they should be backed by holdings of treasury bills or other dollar denominated assets. On paper, this makes them safer store value than many fiat currencies. But they say after growing by 30% in the six months to late October last year, total stablecoin assets have barely budged. Is this true? Is it over?
- [68:37]
Guest from Bridge
Oh, man. Yeah. It was really nice knowing you guys. This is the last time you will ever let me on this show again.
- [68:50]
Interviewer 2
There are a bunch of different predictions in here. The Stablecoin market's worth 300 billion. Some people are calling for 2 trillion over the next three years, four years, five years. But all of that is very macro level. I want to hear about what you're actually seeing in terms of adoption, new use cases, glimpses of new areas to deploy stablecoins. And then just what the big market movers are.
- [69:16]
Guest from Bridge
Totally. I mean we, I mean our. So our business, you know, we shared this in the annual letter last year. Grew 4x last year. Our business continues to grow enormously. Like we grew 20 over the last month alone. So you know, we certainly don't see correction, stable coins slowing down and I do think total supply is, you know, flat.
- [69:40]
Interviewer 2
But these things always go through.
- [69:41]
Interviewer 1
Yeah. If you want to like it when, when you have a correction in general digital asset prices, then trading activity at times falls and then it looks like you have a slowdown in adoption. But then you actually have to look at how people are actually using stablecoins for non trading related activities.
- [69:58]
Guest from Bridge
Exactly. Like stablecoin transaction volume is growing enormously. The number of transactions are growing enormously. And we certainly see that the number of folks building with stablecoins is growing enormously. We have folks from, you know, a bunch of banks now are leaning into stablecoins. Pretty much every fintech that you could think of that is meaningful is doing something with stablecoins and probably doing it with us. I mean we obviously announced yesterday with meta paying out folks in stablecoins. So I do think that this like the hyperbole around stablecoins is dying down a little bit and that creates the opportunity for some of this like fud. But you know, at the same time we're like, you know there was this thing, I think Henry said it yesterday, which, which is like funny like the crypto world where for a long time people were like pointing at every problem and being like crypto solves this and now they're no longer pointing at every problem and saying crypto solves this. But, but, but it actually solve problems with crypto. Yeah, like very, very quietly under the hood it is solving a number of problems like banks for cross border payments. We're seeing it for working capital needs, we're seeing it for just infrastructure for cars and infrastructure for global expansion. So it's certainly not slowing down.
- [71:12]
Interviewer 2
So there's like some very big meaningful categories. The cross border payments one's very tractable. Huge. Is there a coming intersection of vibe coding and stablecoins that you're seeing glimpses of? I'm just thinking about there was this moment when iPhone games became fairly easy for like a kid to build their bedroom and you got flappy bird and I think it was 99 cents. And I'm wondering if, if micropayments, stable coins, there's some sort of intersection there where you get vibe coding and you get some sort of new flourishing like ecosystem of like, of like smaller transactions. I mean people don't love micro payments, but there's like, there's something that people I feel like could play with if they're spinning something up in a, you know, in an afternoon.
- [71:59]
Interviewer 1
Totally.
- [71:59]
Guest from Bridge
I mean I, you know, one of my reflect. One of the reasons why we started Bridge is like I was reflecting on the fintech space generally. This was like in 2020 or so.
- [72:08]
Interviewer 2
Yeah.
- [72:09]
Guest from Bridge
And I realized, or one of the realizations that I had was that the cards were basically just the entirety of fintech.
- [72:15]
Interviewer 2
Yeah.
- [72:15]
Guest from Bridge
Everything was like, you know, and people talk about platform shifts, like AI is this big platform shift and mobile was a platform shift. But in financial services platform shifts take a little bit of a different shape. And cards were this new form factor. And cards combined with the Internet was like 90% of all you're talking about
- [72:32]
Interviewer 2
like credit cards from like the seventies.
- [72:34]
Guest from Bridge
Yeah, that boom. Yeah, yeah.
- [72:35]
Interviewer 2
Because we rode that boom for so long. There was a time when exactly people would pay by doing like reverse debit. And there were so many hacks on top of the credit card.
- [72:43]
Guest from Bridge
Totally. It was a new platform, it was a new primitive on top of which all these new financial services got built. And cards were like growing meekly for a while and then the Internet came along and they were like uniquely well suited. Obviously, obviously stripe, this is what we do. But uniquely well suited to solve payment problems on the Internet. And then they just took off. It became reflexive. You know, more people were paying on the Internet, so more people had cards and more people paid in person so that more people bought stuff on the Internet. And then it just took off. But it was this like brand new platform shift in payments tied to an external platform shift. Our view is that stablecoins represented another platform shift in payments. And I think AI could be the corresponding one that helps drive adoption of stablecoins. And I think that all the payment problems that we're solving now are like fiat paper problems. And there's big markets and so on. But I think the much bigger market will be, you know, the new means of payment. They're going to be required in these agentic services, like in, you know, just simple things like the incrementality of payments is going to be very different, very small. The velocity of payments is going to be very different, very fast. The reversibility of transactions like cards are not well suited in a situation where you don't want transactions to be to be reversed or disputed. And so I think there's a lot of benefits to stablecoins. But we're like at the very, very early stages. So you're kind of squinting and looking way down the tunnel and trying to predict what will happen, but it feels like it's there.
- [74:08]
Interviewer 2
Can you explain the tension between the traditional banking sector and the stablecoin world?
- [74:12]
Guest from Bridge
Oh man.
- [74:14]
Interviewer 2
What are you saying? If there was someone with a bank and they say I make my money by taking deposits and I'm heavily regulated, I have to cover those costs with, you know, with interest and you're going to be able to do it without as many regulations. You're going to out compete me. Should I jump on the stablecoin boom? Is there a world where we work together? How should the traditional banking system interface with the stablecoin world?
- [74:42]
Guest from Bridge
I mean, it is, I would say, complicated.
- [74:48]
Interviewer 2
Okay.
- [74:49]
Interviewer 1
Do you spend much time in dc?
- [74:51]
Guest from Bridge
I went earlier this year and it was actually like, mean. It was like very heartening. I don't know if y' all have spent spend time there, but like I hadn't been to D.C. since I was in high school and like a high school trip. I grew up in North Carolina so we could like take the school bus up there. And I went into, you know, like you're working at like a tech company or something like Stripe and it feels like, like impossible to understand all the ways in which Stripe is growing. And then when you zoom in, it's like literally just like one developer coming to Stripe and signing up and like, you know, one person selling and. And then I went to D.C. and D.C. feels like this, this incomprehensible like, you know, complexity of decision making and stuff. And then we just met with a bunch of folks and you realize it's just like one person talking to another and like them trying to learn and then they're, they're going to talking to another person and they were like, genuinely curious. And these folks are like voting, you know, debating stuff on like agriculture and like, you know, airline safety and then coming in and talking to me about like the minutiae of like stablecoin regulation. And they were like pretty well versed. So I think that like one speaks to how, how high on the docket it got for them and like how important it is. And it has like, you know, I spend time there beginning of the year. We've spent more time recently as like Clarity act has come about and we think that, you know, it has certainly put the banks and the more stablecoin friendly folks at odds. But my experience has been that that is not universally the case. Like there's a whole group of banks coming together. There's multiple groups of banks coming together to launch stablecoins. There are multiple community banks that we're actually working with on different stablecoin initiatives. The one sort of outlier is some of the other folks that have more directly. JP Morgan has their own stablecoin and their own thing that they're trying to push forward. So there is some competition and that sort of thing there. But I hope that we can all work together. But it certainly has been contentious at times.
- [76:53]
Interviewer 2
Give me a price prediction, 2030. If I put $1,000 in stablecoins, how high can it go? What do you think's possible?
- [77:00]
Guest from Bridge
Oh, man. I mean, I think you are going to be exactly as wealthy then as you are today.
- [77:06]
Interviewer 2
That's fantastic.
- [77:08]
Interviewer 1
With inflation. Advice to founders that are feeling that want to start a company today, but maybe feel like they're too late as part of this AI boom. Because I feel like when you started Bridge, there had been. There was big stablecoin companies that have been created. Maybe you felt at times that, am I too late? But clearly you were very, you were very early and the timing was perfect because you got to like sit out a terrible bear market. And then you. And then you were like, wow, I'm a genius.
- [77:38]
Guest from Bridge
That's certainly not what everyone told me. Many people in the midst of it told me I was wasting. Wasting my time. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would say, I mean, the lived experience for me and like, you know, you kind of see this now in some of these hotter spaces is that folks kind of build what they think others want them to build. Like, think about something in AI, you know, you're building this thing for this market that isn't like a thing that you deeply believe in. And so you're building what you think an investor wants to fund or what you think other people in the industry will think is interesting. And what happened for me is like I was building something that I deeply had conviction should exist. And that is what enabled me to persevere through like some really dark times and build a company that, you know, ended up, you know, hitting the sort of timing situation at like the perfect. In the perfect moment. But like, literally, you know, if I didn't have that conviction, I would have pivoted, you know, a year before. You know, I mean, ftx, I mean, literally, you know, Terra Luna blew up, then FTX blew up, then SVB went under. I mean, it was like one stablecoin went under. The whole crypto market was done. And then USDC depict. And so we got.
- [78:56]
Interviewer 1
Yeah, that's why it's not funny when
- [78:57]
Interviewer 2
you make this joke, John.
- [79:00]
Guest from Bridge
Yeah, I mean, we got Booted off like four banks before it got started.
- [79:03]
Interviewer 2
I assume stable coins are going to stay stable, but I understand there is risk. There is a new technology. Can you help me understand? And the interaction of like, AI coding agents, AI code review in stablecoin software development. Historically, I have always had the perception that anything in crypto is not just higher stakes, but more technically complicated. It's more like, I don't know, writing a compiler than a front end website. And so it's high stakes. LLMs do make mistakes. At the same time, the new models, mythos 5.5, like, like superhuman. And so there's probably a way to integrate that successfully. What. What works? What are you hearing or seeing that makes sense? Are we still in like the Centaur era where you need a great software developer working alongside AI? Is this something where you can just throw an agent at it and it's, you know, oh, there's no more risk anymore. It's not going to hallucinate.
- [80:02]
Guest from Bridge
I mean, I would say for us, it kind of feels like we are one or two steps behind where, like, you know, it feels like some of the folks are who are in pure software, where they're like, oh, I'm just gonna have this long running agent Vibe, code an entire browser and ship it in a week and be fine. We're nowhere close to that. Like, we couldn't. There are big parts of our business that are pure software in a ton of ways. Like think about transaction monitoring or stuff like that. And, and, but the risk from a regulatory reason of, like, having things off and then, you know, missing things and then not being able to appropriately justify it because someone Vibe coded a thing, it's just not possible. So the ways in which we use it end up being different. And another, like, very quick example is like, we're standing up a national trust bank. As part of standing up a national trust bank, there's a bunch of requirements, one of which is that every commit has to be approved. Wait, what? So like, you literally cannot have.
- [81:10]
Interviewer 2
It's over from fast takeoff. Fast takeoff's cooked. This is the most bearish.
- [81:16]
Interviewer 1
Still got it.
- [81:17]
Interviewer 2
Humans still got it.
- [81:20]
Guest from Bridge
Yeah.
- [81:20]
Interviewer 2
FDA for AI. This was something somebody was saying.
- [81:23]
Guest from Bridge
It is like, you know, the Jevons paradox of employment. We're just going to have to hire, like, more and more and more code reviewers.
- [81:30]
Interviewer 2
Yep.
- [81:32]
Interviewer 1
Yeah, it's an interesting. I was talking about talking to someone, small business owner who was very, very fired up on Vibe coding. He told me specifically he hadn't slept in four nights. I was asking him the product that he was working on, he was like, this is something I've thought about building forever. I was like, well, have you ever thought about rebuilding the sort of vertical SaaS fintech platform that you run your whole business on? And he was like, no, it's 1,200 a year. And it's like, they give me so much. It would never make sense. Sense. And so it's like the one piece of core technology that he runs his business on, he's so fired up on vibe coding, he's like, I'd never rebuild that. It would never make sense. So there's two things. There's like a value equation and then there's like a potential risk, kind of like cost equation. And I feel like with stablecoins specifically in crypto, the potential cost is so astronomical where saving a little bit here to then introduce like $100 million of risk.
- [82:34]
Guest from Bridge
Yeah. But there's a bunch of other things that are amazing. Like for us, we have re architected a lot of our infrastructure to be like before. One of the hard things in crypto is adding a bunch of different blockchains. A lot of blockchains can kind of be the same, but many are very different. And so it's super tedious to add a bunch of different blockchains or the same thing is true of adding new payment Rails, so. So you might add a US bank and then you need a redundant US bank, and then you need a European bank, and then you need a bank in Mexico. And all of these integrations kind of look the same. It's like you're getting money in, you're checking the moneys in, you're sending money out. And what we have built is the ability to sort of add all of these things very, very quickly. And so we took what used to take two weeks to add a new blockchain, now takes. Someone actually did it in a meeting the other day of like adding a new stablecoin on a new blockchain, all with a bunch of Claude that, you
- [83:36]
Interviewer 1
know, does that mean we need 10,000 new layer ones?
- [83:40]
Guest from Bridge
That is, that is. It's the Jevons paradox of blockchains because
- [83:44]
Interviewer 1
it's easier to use a new chain. We need 100,000 more. A million more.
- [83:51]
Guest from Bridge
Yes, maybe.
- [83:52]
Interviewer 1
Honestly, one for one, every American should have their own layer one.
- [83:55]
Guest from Bridge
We're just maximalist across every dimension.
- [83:57]
Interviewer 2
There was a moment in Stable Coins maybe last year where it was like this, like this like small, like county in New Mexico is going to have their own chain.
- [84:07]
Interviewer 1
That was a stable. That was.
- [84:08]
Privy Representative
Yeah.
- [84:08]
Guest from Bridge
Wyoming. Wyoming has its own stable coin. So we're going to have. Every state's going to have its own stablecoin. Every state is going to have its own blockchain. Maybe even every city you could have your own blockchain. Yeah. Neighborhood. There you go.
- [84:20]
Interviewer 2
The Mission Stablecoin. The Presidio Stablecoin.
- [84:23]
Guest from Bridge
Which one would you buy?
- [84:25]
Interviewer 2
Soma.
- [84:28]
Interviewer 1
I'm going for the Mavericks.
- [84:30]
Interviewer 2
The Maverick Stablecoin. Okay.
- [84:32]
Interviewer 1
Well, it's just a taste thing.
- [84:33]
Interviewer 2
Anything else?
- [84:34]
Interviewer 1
No, this was great. Thank you for coming on.
- [84:35]
Interviewer 2
Thank you so much for having me.
- [84:37]
Interviewer 1
Great to meet you in person.
- [84:38]
Guest from Bridge
You can close it out with us.
- [84:39]
Interviewer 2
Close it out with us. Leave us five stars on Apple, Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tvpn.com, we'll be back tomorrow in the TVPN UltraDome, 11am Shark. Thank you for tuning in and have a great day. Goodbye.
- [84:52]
Interviewer 1
It's been an honor.
- [84:53]
Interviewer 2
Cheers.
- [84:54]
Jeff Weinstein
Goodbye.