🟣 The Collison Brothers LIVE on TBPN | John Collison, Patrick Collison, Henri Stern, Jeff Weinstein, & Zach Abrams

(00:00) - - John & Patrick Collison, the co-founders of Stripe, discuss the significant surge in new business creation, noting a 71% year-over-year increase in Q1, attributing this growth to AI's role in simplifying entrepreneurship. They highlight Stripe's initiatives like agentic commerce, enabling AI agents to perform tasks such as purchasing domains and deploying websites autonomously. Additionally, the Collisons address the challenges posed by increased fraud attempts in the AI economy and outlines Stripe's efforts to enhance fraud prevention through tools like Stripe Radar. (28:27) - - Henri Stern, a leader at Stripe, discusses the rapid growth of his team following an acquisition, the challenges posed by the competitive talent market, and the evolving landscape of stablecoins and their potential impact on traditional banking. He highlights the emergence of non-dollar stablecoins, the concept of tokenized deposits, and the integration of AI tools in security practices. Stern also explores the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency, noting the rise of agentic wallets and the potential for innovative business models enabled by programmable money. (42:46) - - Jeff Weinstein is a product lead at Stripe, where he has significantly contributed to the growth of their payment APIs and the development of Stripe Atlas, simplifying company formation for entrepreneurs. In the conversation, he discusses the importance of customer obsession, the role of metrics in driving impact, and techniques for effective product development within large companies. He also highlights initiatives like Stripe's "Study Group" to enhance product craft and shares insights into Stripe Atlas's mission to increase global entrepreneurship. (01:06:58) - - Zach Abrams, Zach Abrams is a fintech entrepreneur and product leader best known as the co-founder and CEO of Bridge, a company building infrastructure to help businesses move and manage money using stablecoins. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVN. We are here live at Stripe Sessions. We're joined by John and Patrick Collison. Thank you for having us. How is it going so far?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  It's incredible. We have 10,000 people here.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  10,000 people here.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  And it is just the center. The economy is replatforming around AI, and I think that's the theme of the conference.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  Which economy? Is that the global economy of which you control 1.6%?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  And when we spoke back a couple of weeks ago, which in Singularity time is a couple of months ago, or exactly, yeah. We said that we're seeing a significant surge in new business creation.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  That has roughly doubled again since then. And so as of...

• 0:44John Coogan?

  And wait, are you tracking that through Stripe Atlas specifically or through just new companies that are onboarding to Stripe's payment process?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Both, both. So March was an all-time record for new incorporations with Stripe Atlas.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  And then in Q1 overall, for just new businesses joining Stripe, that was up 71% year-over-year. We showed the chart at the beginning of our keynote yesterday. It is, it is parabolic. It is exponential. I'm running out of mathematical terms, but it's really very striking.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  And do you like the, I guess my color is a little ruffled.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Someone's ruffled, yeah.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:25Speaker 02

  I, so initially I thought when I saw these charts that it's, that it's about new vibe-coded businesses that are maybe more abundant in number, but on a, 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.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  And so it's not just more new tiny ones. Somehow the median business is also doing better.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Like that number is really inflecting. And in general, like we think about it in, ah, you got the little collar service. I mean, I just... I've been doing my color myself. And so you also have to look at it almost in Kosian terms, where what we're seeing is more small businesses.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I'm gonna have my citizenship revoked for drinking this.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I just wanna clarify that.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  These are full-sized pints, everyone.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  These are full-sized pints. We're just very large humans.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  I just wanna clarify that it's Guinness zero zero, which is very good, but given that it's 11 a.m., it's a little early. Yeah.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  But so why are you saying it's a coast?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  And what's driving this is you think AI is making every little step of entrepreneurship slightly easier, like slightly easier to incorporate, slightly easier to create a contract, or to hire somebody, slightly easier to create an ad, and then you add all of that together.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Revenge of the idea guy.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, 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.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  So I mean, it feels like you could do nothing and win Stripes in the right place at the right time, but you're probably not taking this year off.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  We are not doing nothing. I'll tell you that. Yeah.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  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?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  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, oh, you know, 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. It's not a value-add activity. And so we just announced that Google is joining our agentic commerce suite. So now we have Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta all working with us on this agentic commerce modality where you can just buy there. That is the consumer side. Do you want to talk about the developer side of things?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Well, I'll give you 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 acquired a company called Metronome back a couple of months ago, and we're now integrating that cohesively throughout the Stripe platform. We demoed yesterday something that I think is very cool, and as the intersection between crypto/stablecoins and usage-based billing, where basically you're kind of streaming payments, where you're paying for each token as it's delivered.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  In real time.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  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's racked up a million-dollar credit card tab or something, that's a real problem for the providers. 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.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  A lot of fraud attempts.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when 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 incentive to steal SaaS. But you can resell 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...

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Nerd duels.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Exactly, looking to run away with these precious value.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  And walk us through how that would work, how that works in practice? Is that somebody's spinning up a bunch of free accounts?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  And then hitting them with just kind of the bare...

• 6:13John Coogan?

  And is the motivation distillation or actual reselling?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Both.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Really, both.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  So there's definitely just straight resale, but there's also more sophisticated attacks and distillations of it. 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 the illicit accounts that sign up for these free trials, they drive so much expense that it's hard to make the overall economics work out. Anyway, we're extending Stripe Radar to use the intelligence of the Stripe network to help any of these companies not only score payments, but score customer signups, to score trials, and we're turning Stripe Radar into this sort of X-ray vision for the AI economy to try to prevent these new and more sophisticated attacks.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I think this is really important in that we're not going to have an internet with self-serve access.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 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."

• 7:28Speaker 02

  That's exactly right, but we're also going to try to protect the regular signup flows as well and the more straightforward consumer access.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  If you run any physical store, you have to worry about shrinkage, and no one wants a direction or travel where you go to a CVS and everything is locked up behind a painting. Good, upstanding people suffer from the small percentage of crime that happens. It's the exact same in the AI land where similarly, they're 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.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  I want to go way deeper, but I know you have a hard stop. Do you have something else to say?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Well, I was going to say one thing before I have to scurry away, which is, so we're, we have this usage-based billing stuff, we have the agent-to-commerce stuff that John just described, we have this new fraud functionality. And then the other thing is Stripe started out, of course, as a payments company, but we've, 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. You should 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.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  They can dispatch money to more than 150 countries. The instant free Stripe to Stripe account transfers and so forth. And so rather than Stripey, 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 agentic era.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Was, sorry to cut you off, was this in the seed pitch deck?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  None of this was in the seed pitch deck.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  But I imagine like you're in the fun, you're telling people, we're in the funds flow at some point or another, we won't just pass this back to their bank account. We'll actually be able to unlock the value of the.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  The retcon.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, you do a lot of retconning.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  It's a key skill.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  That's, 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 in underserved. I mean, Stripe's original name was slash dev slash payments. And you know, payments for developers was that you can go back in the Wayback Machine. 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.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Also, everyone's a developer now.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  And agents feel like they are developer shaped at least.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Agents want good DX developer experience.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Even more than humans do. Yep. And so if you don't have a, I mean, it's, it's a real problem.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Not gonna make it.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Makes sense. 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 to sign this plaque. Can you explain to us what this is and what it, what it stands for? Are you familiar? This is the original. Of course. Uh, print that went into.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Wait, how did you get that? That's ours.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  It was coming to us and we want you to sign it.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  You've thieves.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  They recommended here and here. From the archives. We have a museum of business where we try and accumulate signed objects of historical significance. And this is the new Poor Charlie's Almanac paper cover. Hey, this is the paperback, uh, paper cover of Poor Charlie's Almanac.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  It's heavy. It's, this is how we made the original hardcover, if you have it, of Poor Charlie's Almanac.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  I think right there and we'll have Patrick sign right over there.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  And this will live on.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  The literal gold mast.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  The museum of business and we will let you get out of here. Uh, and we will go way deeper. Stay with us. We are going to continue our interview with John Collison from Stripe, at Stripe Sessions here in San Francisco. Uh, thank you so much, Patrick, for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to hang. 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? Uh, what is the headline number?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  You need to gong.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Let's have you hit the gong. Is it 1.6? Is that the headline?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  That is the 2025 number. Stay tuned for the 2026 number.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  There you go. And smack that gong.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Powerful. We love a good gong. Powerful hit. Powerful hit.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I see why you need that. You can tell he's been lifting.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Uh, well, thank you. Have a great rest of Stripe Sessions. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Uh, 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, uh, what, what Maintenance of Everything? I, I mean, I'd love to know what you took away from this, but, uh, maintenance is what keeps everything going. It's what keeps life going. And he gives a ton of really interesting anecdotes about cars and repairs and weaponry and sailing. And there's so many interesting anecdotes and I'm wondering about your thoughts on maintenance in the age of AI? And what you feel and see in this, that, that, like, we're in this, maybe there's like this job replacement thing. AI does everything, but then there's so much that goes on in the maintenance of the system.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Acceleration of technical debt. And so I was wondering if you could just reflect on like brands work in the age of AI?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  So Stuart Brand is obviously amazing and, you know, is maybe famous for the Whole Earth Catalog originally, which, you know, Steve Jobs talked about in 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 Tom Wolfe book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I don't know if you guys are big Tom Wolfe fans, but it's talking about like the early LSD culture of the 1960s in the Bay Area, having these parties. Stuart Brand is in the book, you know, he's like there at those early parties and everything like that.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  That was where the, the original mouse was demoed, correct?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, where the mouse was shown, exactly.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Among a ton of other things.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. So Stuart Brand is still, you know, he just published this book.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And so Stuart Brand is so intertwined with the, the history of technology and Silicon Valley's view of 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

• 14:27Speaker 01

  stuff, and no one wants the, you know, Brave New World, soma kind of vision. And instead, if you look at something like, 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.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it surprising how much negativity there's been towards the entire like Mac Mini, OpenClaw movement, when it's like... How how how long how long has Silicon Valley been like, I miss the days of like the hacker era?

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Arduino era, the Raspberry Pi.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  And then people are quick to mock it.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  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 being into open claw right now. So there's something about the, maybe because people tend to overhype stuff, you know, they say my open claw does this, like, maybe it doesn't quite, you know, 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

• 15:59Speaker 01

  it's easily like the most fun you can have with computers.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  People on people on X, you know, see an open claw meetup in someplace like Tokyo, and they're just like mocking it, right? And it's like, isn't this, isn't this, isn't this like core to the culture?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, I'm totally with you.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  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 it instantiate a Python script. Like, I could have, and and and I think there is a risk in some enterprises of having 25 people vibe coding dashboards when you could have just had one. There is some managerial deduping and overhead in management, and I'm wondering how you've grappled with that side of AI.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a few thoughts here. One is, uh,

• 16:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  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 it asks you to talk like it, it just uses fewer tokens, and so, but gets the same result, you know, it's as effective. And so if you want to kind of economize on the token budget, you talk to it.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  For a full year, every prompt was no six fingers.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  And I haven't seen an AI image with six fingers in a year.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we just, we just crossed that chasm.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And then it's much better, you know, not making up numbers. Right, right. So, like, where we are in 26 is clearly not where we're going to be.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  The models are getting much better. But I think right now, we're in this interesting transitional period. There is this software fatigue, as you say, where, you know, from software maintenance, things like that. I think we'll, we'll get there. And like all these things, you know, there's puts and takes. People are talking a lot about the offensive side of security, which is true with, you know, the very powerful new models.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  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.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  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 you just...

• 18:51Speaker 01

  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 know, you have individual tools that are much easier to interoperate between each other. You can kind of pipe your data.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Conceptually between applications. In fact, 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.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And so it is much better 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.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Go get a PDF of a website that it can't access.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. Log in and please get me API keys is like something you end up doing a lot.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Set a bill.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  One of our biggest announcements this year was something called Stripe Projects, where you are able to agentially do stuff in the wider world. And so you can hook up your Codex to Stripe Projects. And if you want to redem it, if you want to deploy a website, it can go sign up for Vercel for you.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  This is huge.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  And it can pay for it. And so now what was previously a multi-step process where it could kind of do some of it and they could like orchestrate Vercel, but it 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 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 agentic commerce. Is your agent needs to be able to go do stuff on your behalf. And you're exactly right. Agentic coding agents are not just for coding. They're for doing stuff. We demoed today, write a research report for me. Buy some data in the process of doing that research report.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  But again, that's not, I happen to use a coding agent for it. It is not a coding task. It's a research task.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, this happened on the show. I use 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 Jordy. And actually deploying it was the harder part, which is supposed to be so easy. And that's.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Stripe Projects is the only way you can agentially buy a domain. Like you don't need to have anything. You don't need to have an account within these providers. You can just go buy a domain. It's super cool.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  And I feel like that's really important.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  How has recruiting changed over the last few years? Because I feel like so much of what 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 you wouldn't have been excited to work. And then now, I imagine the job of any, any person that, that could get a job at Stripe can probably also get an offer at, at OpenAI, Anthropic, you know, some of these other labs. And so I imagine you, you find yourself having conversations with folks and helping them make a decision.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yes. So, I mean, some of the 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, removing the supply demand curve. And so we can encourage there to be more entrepreneurship. Again, Pat talked about 71% year-over-year growth in the number of businesses being created on Stripe. That's not all Stripe, but we definitely contribute to it by making the whole entrepreneurship journey easier. And then when those companies scale, you know, OpenAI sells ChatGPT, I think, in more countries than it otherwise would have, because all that infrastructure is just super available and on rails.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  And so it exists like kind of the small getting started end of the spectrum. And for, you know, the biggest companies in the world, the Amazons and Hertz's and Metas and everyone like that that we work with on, on projects like this, you probably saw the like the stablecoin thing, we answered 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 equilibrium. 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.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  It was easy when you were competing with Mark Zuckerberg. And then it was easy when you were competing against Elon Musk.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  No man steps in the same river twice, because you know, he's not the same man, it's not the same river. Like, I remember, you know, when we were recruiting Greg Brockman, who's our second employee, who, you know, we're going to have a speak yesterday, but with Sam instead, because there's 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've ever heard of? And that's kind of stuff you do then, and like you've stuff. And so it's always the most competitive time that it's ever been with recruiting. And this is certainly no exception. And, you know, people have a lot of great options. That kind of gets to. I think, you know, people are talking about the death of software engineering.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  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 have, you are able to work with AI so much better if you understand the underlying concepts and you're so much better prepared for that. And I'd almost analogize it to, you 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 abstraction or like, you know, they thought they had a beautiful abstraction where you would have, you know, a folder that just happened to

• 24:33Speaker 01

  be on the network in the cloud. And, you know, you still have that on the Mac today, you know, your iCloud folder and things like that. And same on Microsoft Windows. Those never worked that well because it turns out the network exists and, you know, it can sometimes be down in a way that your hard drive wasn't and things like that. And so it was always important to understand disk I/O and ram swap and all these kind of things, even if you had useful helper abstractions over them.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  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.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you want to make the argument that AI will transform every aspect of the economy, but that engineering, like, core understanding of engineering and software engineering will no longer be valuable. That's, and, and, and, and obviously, some, some of the people that are more bearish on, 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.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  There's two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now. I think we'll 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 gotta 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, it would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems previously.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Famous Paul Graham quote about that, too.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Typically, an entrepreneurship team, a founding team, has a collection of like five or six skills between two founders, three founders.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do we have a minute to talk about stable coins?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  We have one minute. Yeah.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Okay, one minute. The, 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.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  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?

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 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.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  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 has been really good.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  The companies are still growing top lines.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  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 P 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.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging out. Thanks for having us at the Cheeky Pint.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yes, there you go. You guys have the perfect setup.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of Stripe's sessions.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  We'll grab your headphones as well.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  And we will bring on our next guest.

• 28:29Henri Stern?

  Alrighty, tap out.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  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?

• 28:47Henri Stern?

  I do. This is my second audition. It was about a...

• 28:50John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. You can sit here.

• 28:51Henri Stern?

  It was about Meta's acquisitions of...

• 28:53John Coogan?

  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?

• 29:12Henri Stern?

  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.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  The soundboard made it.

• 29:25Henri Stern?

  Incredible. And then Stripe is doing a lot more in this space. So generally, I think the talent wars are real, but also the reality is twofold. First, you have 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, you know, 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 like streaming micropayments. Like, there's a lot more that I think stablecoins and like... You know, internet native money is going to enable four agentic use cases. It's still very much in its infancy, but it's like.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just spoke with the Collisons around, you know, the all this issue around AI fraud, people signing up for a bunch of free accounts to get access to tokens, or people signing up for an account, running up a bill, and then basically stiffing the provider.

• 30:09Henri Stern?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  And how stablecoins could effectively be a solve for that, which is like, hey, if you're, if you're, if you're going to just sign up and use this tool, that's fine. We don't necessarily know who you are. We don't need to KYC to use like, you know, a language model, but you might need to use stablecoins.

• 30:27Henri Stern?

  To pay as you go.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  To spend as you go. So there's no, so there's no risk.

• 30:30Henri Stern?

  For sure. I think a lot about it in terms of like, you know, tier one, tier two, tier three ISPs where you'll call between Callit Verizon and AT&T. And then at the end of the month, you'll settle the bill across the tier ones. Like, I think there's just such an interesting design space for managing token spend payments and so on, using programmable money in the era we're coming into.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Or have you been tracking the showdown between the, the stablecoin community and the banks? This was in the, this was in this Economist article as well.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  I would hope so.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  And I, and I want to know if you think that this is a true collision course, if there will really be a showdown. The, the concept here, as, as put in Buttonwood in the, in the Economist is, "The prospect of stablecoin growth spooked America's banks. This is because a loophole in the law lets 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 costs for lenders by about a quarter of a percentage point," they said, "crimping their profits and driving up interest rates on all manner of loans for everyone else." Is this a real issue?

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Is there a logical solution? Is there going to be some sort of unification where the stablecoin community and the bank and the traditional banking community come across?

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  Did we not get a, did they not get a solution with the Genius Act?

• 31:55John Coogan?

  I think it's, yeah. Please.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  I'll follow you.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  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.

• 32:08Henri Stern?

  So, Polly Market, last I checked, has it around 45% that the Clarity bill will make it out of a 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-

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  They were such a genius, should have provided more clarity.

• 32:33Henri Stern?

  More clarity?

• 32:35Henri Stern?

  It's very good.

• 32:38Henri Stern?

  But this is, this is why the-

• 32:39John Coogan?

  This is why the show exists.

• 32:40Henri Stern?

  Exactly.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Crowd doesn't like it. Crowd says it flops.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  It flopped.

• 32:45Henri Stern?

  For those of you viewing, I see this as the acoustic set versus the UltraDome. This is your guys coming in unplugged.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 32:52Henri Stern?

  But, but I, no, I think it's an essential issue. And I think right now you're seeing also a twin thing around tokenized deposits versus stablecoins and like two different formats for how digital assets, I guess, can impact finance and fintech generally. The reality is, I think, more competition-

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 33:14Henri Stern?

  And you get an exchange-

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  And then they tokenize it, but then they're keeping the dollar, they're lending against it.

• 33:18Henri Stern?

  So it is, it is the-

• 33:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they, maybe they give me some yield even.

• 33:22Henri Stern?

  And they'll run all of the same infra in the back that exists today, but you have a digital representation of your deposit that you can use. And so in a sense, it is, 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, you know, a lot of these rails will merge. And I think more importantly, the question is one of like competition for the consumer. The consumer should have more ways of actually earning on their, on their assets. And so the idea that we need, you know, greater clarity, as it were, with issuers and institutions that are putting out stablecoins

• 34:06Henri Stern?

  is so absolutely clear. But I think we should view it first and foremost from the question of like, what benefits the companies that are using stablecoins or, you know, the internet generally? What benefits the users? Not how different is this from the current infrastructure that we have? Because that is, you know, not a way to build new systems in the world.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then I guess there is also the- Sort of the like 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, it's not putting that downward pressure necessarily on the traditional banking system. And so I'm sure the banking industry is sort of like cautiously optimistic. This is all like net new dollars that are being created and used around the globe and for different purposes. But if it's, but if it does directly come after, well, this company used to just use credit cards for everything and now they're not paying us, then that's maybe has some negative effects.

• 35:01Henri Stern?

  And I think the two things you'll see as run-ons is basically how does stablecoin deployment evolve worldwide? To what extent is it a Western thing versus a rest of the world thing that probably has impact on, you know, USDT versus USDC market share? Like, there's a lot of interesting run-ons to this exact question. The second thing is, at least this is why I'm excited to be at Stripe and, and, you know, Stripe isn't doing any crypto things for crypto's sake. They're doing, you know, how do we build better rails for our users, no matter what the rail is under the hood?

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's less ideological and more pragmatic, first principles.

• 35:31Henri Stern?

  This is a very good tool. Exactly. And we should, we should put it to use in ways that that better the experiences. This is where I'm interested in some of, I mean, DeFi has had a very complicated few months with basically a lot of exploits and, and things like that. And this is still an industry in its infancy. And yet, we're seeing a very interesting merging of the rails with, for example, Vault curators on Morpho, like, you know, folks like Apollo and others taking part in it. And so we're seeing, again, just a merging of, of traditional finance and online finance in a way that I think is going to continue to.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  Recent exploits, is that more social engineering for the most part? This is not, not AI-led?

• 36:12Henri Stern?

  In those specific cases, my understanding is it is not AI-led. I think it's very much social engineering, you know, bad.

• 36:21Henri Stern?

  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 like 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 gotten much better. And you're now able to string together like more complex attack vectors that you couldn't do before. So that evolution is like mega clear. And one of our engineers, Andrew McPherson, used ChatGPT to find an exploit in React.

• 37:05Henri Stern?

  And it was a zero day in React. And the fact that, you know, React is a 15 year old library put out by Meta. It's open source. It's been beaten to death because it basically backs every web, every product on the web. The fact that we're finding these now is insane.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  And do you have more clarity on like a zero day? Does that allow someone to potentially get into someone's computer, their browser? Or is it more just like, like cause the browser to crash in a certain, or it'd be strung together? Cause there's like a wide range of like what you can do once you exploit something. You can just like, you know, take the service offline, which is bad.

• 37:40Henri Stern?

  Or change copy on the website.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that get into the database. Like, like there's a wide range of like negative outcomes.

• 37:46Henri Stern?

  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 zero days and the price will depend on what allows you to do.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Has there been, have you, have you been tracking any movements in the stablecoin community to do 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 one dollar, but the dollar is backed by basically a massive basket of assets that includes gold, oil, real estate, a slice of stocks and bonds. And so it's sort of more diversified than even the US dollar could be. And maybe it's less stable relative to the dollar, but it's, you're bought in on the global economy.

• 38:36Henri Stern?

  So I think first we're going to see a rise of non-dollar stablecoins as, you know, more people embrace it, especially, you know,

• 38:41John Coogan?

  And that would just be foreign currencies?

• 38:42Henri Stern?

  Yeah, foreign currencies. Second, I've heard of a few projects that are trying to basically have a Inflation, stablecoin, which is the stable actually grows with inflation so that you're on a purchasing power parity like Snap point.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, TIPS are the famous assets that you can buy from the treasury, treasury inflation protection, something, securities, I forget.

• 39:02Henri Stern?

  That one, 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 stablecoin, 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.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  That's interesting.

• 39:28Henri Stern?

  And so there was a question for me of like, what other useful work could you back the currency on?

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, I mean, 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, you know, most 3D artists, if they're rendering CGI for movie, TV show, something like that, animation, they will typically have like 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

• 40:17John Coogan?

  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, Marshall and computer. And now you can imagine like a thousand times more like ways to.

• 40:37Henri Stern?

  These are hallowed times while crypto prices are down and there's so much interesting thing happening in tech. We can actually build very useful things.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  Prediction time. When we look back on 2026.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  What's your price for USDC? Price target for 2030?

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  This is John's favorite joke.

• 40:56Henri Stern?

  Hope it's one. It's a disastrous outcome.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the story will be around the intersection of AI and crypto, specifically agents and stables?

• 41:15Henri Stern?

  It's a great question.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Because everyone, everyone keeps saying it, right? But I feel like we need to have like massive. It's very clear that when, when an AI tool has product market fit, adoption is like extremely rapid, right? You just immediately hockey stick. And so I'm like, sort of like waiting for a hockey stick moment like that at the intersection of stables and, and agents.

• 41:35Henri Stern?

  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 clawback 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 gate, you know, payments in a streaming sense? So that I can get paid on a, you know, per token basis much more easily.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  Real time, with no risk.

• 42:16Henri Stern?

  Yeah. 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.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Red button or blue button? What'd you push? Are you familiar with this?

• 42:30Henri Stern?

  I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  We'll get to it another time.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Locked in.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Locked in. Didn't get sucked into the swap discos. That's incredibly bullish. It's a thought experiment. You can go check it out online. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 42:44Henri Stern?

  Thank you.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  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. Good to see you.

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Throw a headset on, sit down, introduce yourself again. Yeah, you can sit here, here with that headset.

• 43:03Jeff Weinstein?

  Hello, hello.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself for the fans, the viewers, the chat. Who are you?

• 43:10Jeff Weinstein?

  Howdy, I'm Jeff Stripe on the product team.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:14Jeff Weinstein?

  Jeff Weinstein, good to see y'all.

• 43:15John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 43:16Jeff Weinstein?

  This is the first time I've ever met you in person. We've been talking on Zoom for 10 years.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Have we, have we met in person?

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is that actually, is that actually true?

• 43:22Jeff 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 in a computer, it's like true.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. That's crazy. No, I, yeah, I, I, I assume we had met multiple times.

• 43:31Jeff Weinstein?

  Crazy.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you in person.

• 43:33Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, this is amazing what y'all have done.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  How have you, do you ever visit Delaware? 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 wins a World Cup, they're coming home and they do like a parade, I'm assuming.

• 43:51Jeff Weinstein?

  I got to meet the scene.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  So before we get into this, Jeff runs Atlas, he created Atlas, you're responsible for like a quarter of all new C corps.

• 44:00Jeff Weinstein?

  Atlas is now incorporating about 26% of the new.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Gong moment?

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a gong moment. I think it's a gong moment.

• 44:10Jeff Weinstein?

  Oh man, this is a life, this is a life on her.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  But there we go.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  It's got a really good ring to it.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  26% of all new C corps, right? That's the focus?

• 44:19Jeff Weinstein?

  Correct, yeah, and today we're celebrating our 100,000 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.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  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.

• 44:46Jordi Hays?

  We use it for TVPN?

• 44:47John Coogan?

  We use it for TVPN a couple of years ago and it was like fine and I didn't really have any product requests.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  It's not, it's not fine.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  No, no, I just mean like, it was like job finished.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Like the point, the point is that you don't think about it, you're like, that is how it should have worked, right?

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Exactly, and I'm always fascinated by products that are like, okay, yeah, thumbs up, it did my job, like, I'm good, what, what have you added?

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna make you go back and use LegalZoom. I'm gonna make you go use LegalZoom.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Hey, that's a, that's a passing the staple.

• 45:12Jeff Weinstein?

  You just want it to work like electricity under the.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So how do you keep it there?

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 45:32Jeff Weinstein?

  It turns out that the agents want to use Atlas.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  They'll use Atlas, yeah.

• 45:35Jeff Weinstein?

  And, you know, not to preview too much, but coming up, Atlas CLI.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 45:41Jeff Weinstein?

  And another exciting thing.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  Generate me 10,000 C corps.

• 45:45Jeff Weinstein?

  Generate me 1 million C corps.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  I think that would be a lot of money, but.

• 45:49Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, vibe, vibe incorporation coming.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Jeff Weinstein?

  Another exciting Atlas update is now that you can do full safe fundraising through Atlas.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:57Jeff Weinstein?

  And it's 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.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Jeff Weinstein?

  Though my recent focus has been all this great AI stuff we're doing to help commerce businesses succeed in the next wave

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Jeff Weinstein?

  of the internet, all the link CLI work, so you can have your robot help you shop along the way safely across the internet.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Jeff Weinstein?

  Machine payments protocol to have robots send stablecoin to each other's in small bits.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Jeff Weinstein?

  It's been a really whole new world.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Do you see the customer segmentation, customer target, customer ramp? Are you rerunning the Stripe playbook? Like Stripe was adopted by a lot of startups. It was very, 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 like landing and then expanding?

• 47:13Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, I think that we're trying to get all the technology businesses in the world to start on Stripe.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:18Jeff Weinstein?

  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 100 little accounts for, to test a database here or test a CEDAN 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. You gotta go get the secret keys and like put it in the wrong place. And then you gotta rotate this like a whole mess. And so, so we're excited to take, make basically continue to make everything programmable, make incorporation 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 eight-ish years. I can imagine doing the next 100,000 in, you know, in another year, another two years.

• 48:03Jeff Weinstein?

  We're just seeing the curve of new businesses grow so quickly. I think it's tools like this agentic provisioning of an entire stack quickly, which is going to really ignite the next wave of founders to go from just vibe coding to like an entire vibe business.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  How much attention are you paying to how Atlas shows up in LLM results? Cause there's a lot of companies, Profound is one, James, the founder's been on the show, that, that help, help you, you know, 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 in LLMs a byproduct of just building a great product?

• 48:51Jeff 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 JavaScript thing that like loads only in certain browsers with your, with the GPO turned way up, that's also not what agents want. Agents want perfect information about what your offer is, what the tool is, what the 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.

• 49:33Jeff Weinstein?

  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 had, you know, not like a side project for Stripe, but kind of an advanced tool for developers who never want to touch the dashboard, like sort of a terminal purist. 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-

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  Computer use around the website.

• 50:13Jeff Weinstein?

  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.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  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 has your day-to-day changed over your career and what is it like now?

• 50:44Jeff 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.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:06Jeff Weinstein?

  Sorry, what is sales tax in all those places? 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 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

• 51:48Jeff Weinstein?

  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, we would put out a beta, or we'd put out some waitlist, and we'd wait for a couple people to sign up, and then we'd email them, then we'd send them the docs, then they'd be on vacation, you know, or like get busy. And then like, you'd hear from the next week. Now, we put out a beta, developers send their agents after our beta page. They will go around our waitlists 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

• 52:32Jeff Weinstein?

  feedback loop from the highest taste developers is so now agentic that, yeah, we don't even have, basically have time for meetings. It's just like putting these betas out there and getting faster.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  So you're doing like less meetings now?

• 52:44Jeff Weinstein?

  I think it's less meetings.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  I was wondering if you were, yeah, if it was like, I imagine that you're a fan of like, talk to your customers.

• 52:48Jeff Weinstein?

  I am, yes.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  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 is changing these days.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  I was hoping that with AI, you wouldn't have to talk to customers anymore. You would just throw like 10 slot prompts and then just say like, you know, I don't, I don't have time.

• 53:07Jeff Weinstein?

  We're, we're very fortunate slash cursed with that our customers are not shy. You know, they, they are extremely happy to hop in Slack with us and just bombard us with their, 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 that just like the clock cycle on Stripe has just dramatically increased, which is why I saw so many of these announcements recently. And, and we're really proud that a lot of this stuff we're doing is just like, GA, you can use the link wallet today to delegate. Transactions to your agent is super safe way. It's very slick and a push message. Oh, hey, time for my agent to buy me that gift. Like fantastic, thank you, agent.

• 53:52Jeff Weinstein?

  And so we're just, we're putting this all out there and really encourage people to try.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you forcing yourself to constantly use agents to buy stuff? Cause 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.

• 54:08Jeff 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 a machine payment protocol or all our APIs are being upgraded so that you can just use, you can, agents can check on it.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  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 I'm really, really excited for this moment where it's like, I want to buy this thing. Please buy it for me.

• 54:43Jeff 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, like trying to like peck my way through a checkout page. Even the Stripe checkout page was like pretty high performing. I'm still like, I can't believe they don't use link. I can't believe, I can't just like have my agent go buy this. So on the seller side, we're making it incredibly easy for any of the five 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 economically on their phone, slick mobile app and link. Say, hey, agent, I approve $50 transactions for the next 30 minutes in the following topic.

• 55:28Jeff Weinstein?

  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 the third side of the marketplace is agents themselves, who we're working with. 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 Agenda Commerce this super slick, super safe way to buy online. 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.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 56:19Jeff Weinstein?

  I guess it's like-

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Because like you guys are obviously-

• 56:21John Coogan?

  The rudest way to frame-

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  You guys are-

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Massive success.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  You guys are, well, incredibly smart, incredibly forward-thinking, but when you guys started focusing on the developer experience intensely, you, I don't believe that you were thinking about-

• 56:35Jeff Weinstein?

  No, we weren't.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  AI agents a decade later.

• 56:38Jeff Weinstein?

  This is a surprise for us, too. It's a useful externality to our non-religious, religious obsession with programmatic tools.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Secular and religious.

• 56:51Jeff Weinstein?

  Yes, it's-

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Religiously secular.

• 56:54Jeff Weinstein?

  I can't, there's not too much which is like a 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 so-

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Steak dinner.

• 57:07Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, exactly.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  You're not a steak dinner company.

• 57:09Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, we, you know, we showed how many users are now signing up for Stripe each day, which is in like the many tens of thousands a day. And that's a lot of steak dinners to get each of them turned on. So it sort of actually surprises us how few companies-

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  Humanoids fix this.

• 57:24Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, like how few companies in the world actually provide self-serve services.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:29Jeff Weinstein?

  And, you know, I can say that, but I also know that there's 10,000 people at Stripe who are like doing the work to make those things exist and go.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Of course, there's steak dinner every once in a while.

• 57:36Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, and, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would like to get a steak dinner personally, so.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  For the, for the 100th Atlas signup.

• 57:42Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, 100,000.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  100,000, sorry.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  How ambitious, 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?

• 58:03Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Jeff Weinstein?

  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've 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 really where our ambition

• 58:49Jeff Weinstein?

  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 card, 2% cash back, really super easy to use. And then 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 to say, hey, this will be a lot easier. And then when you actually go to use it, you're like, oh my goodness, this is like, much easier.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  Very eloquent way to say we're coming for everyone.

• 59:21Jeff Weinstein?

  You know, there is, there are many services in the world that we're not going to accidentally be able to be better than. And I also will note that everything we're building Stripe Treasury on is available for anyone else to build.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 59:36Jeff Weinstein?

  And so we're going to see some much more specialization, I think, in financial-related tools. And we're excited for Stripe users to be able to do it really quickly.

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  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 like all multiple stages of approval and it's like, why does it need to get approved if it's already in the contract? And you go like, understanding like 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

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  loop because it prevents fraud and hopefully prevents errors, but it also creates errors and it also 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 gonna be-

• 1:00:42Jeff Weinstein?

  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.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:00:53Jeff Weinstein?

  You know, 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 the-

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 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-

• 1:01:17Jeff Weinstein?

  Yes.

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:01:27Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  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."

• 1:01:35Jeff Weinstein?

  And the agent can go follow up and see if it's the right person too.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  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."

• 1:01:52Jeff Weinstein?

  Yes.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  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 a month for.

• 1:02:01Jeff 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 gonna see- The human agent interface related to the full lifecycle 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 are doing.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  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 gonna be programmable. Everything's, agents are gonna be doing everything.

• 1:02:43Jeff Weinstein?

  We succeed exactly when our customers succeed. And so I feel, I think, I, I sleep, I sleep very well at night knowing that our business model maps exactly to our customer success. What else do you have on that thing, by the way?

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  We got a lot.

• 1:02:55Jeff Weinstein?

  A lot of stuff.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Founder mode.

• 1:02:57Jeff Weinstein?

  Okay. What about the bottom right one? Just for fun, what's the bottom right one?

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Bottom right one? This is a gong?

• 1:03:03Jeff Weinstein?

  Perfect. Okay, great. That's a good one.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:03:13Jeff Weinstein?

  Oh, there he is.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  We, we, we got a couple of minutes?

• 1:03:15Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:03:31Jeff Weinstein?

  Well, I love that those are the two options.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Jeff Weinstein?

  So that, if that were the case, that would already be a win. There's many amazing companies.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:03:39Jeff Weinstein?

  I, I think that people should, you know, follow their passion. I mean, look at the two of you, what you built, right? Like, I've got to know you over so many of your awesome new entrepreneurial attempts. And I remember you telling me you're gonna do this TV show. And I wasn't like, thinking, you know, I wasn't like, no, but I was like, okay.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Certainly, I will never be on that show. I'll never stop by that crazy thing.

• 1:03:58Jeff Weinstein?

  We're not gonna make a pub and then have you do College Game Day in front of it. That'll be very strange. So I, 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, to try it. And then I will also say if they're considering joining, I mean, look, Stripe's a 10,000-person company. We're probably in a reasonable high echelon of like low communication costs, but there's 10,000 of us. You gotta have, it's like a higher communication cost than you and your co-founder. But you look, the Stripe projects thing where you can provision all these third parties,

• 1:04:42Jeff Weinstein?

  that got started seven weeks ago by six people.

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:04:44Jeff 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

• 1:04:53Jeff Weinstein?

  we're, we're benefiting from all of these new tools as 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.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  What's underrated about working at a big company for a long time?

• 1:05:13Jeff Weinstein?

  I'm on year eight. What's underrated?

• 1:05:17Jeff Weinstein?

  Overnight success.

• 1:05:20Jeff Weinstein?

  You know, you, you

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Because presumably, I mean, you've had, you've had, how many, I would guess like 100 really talented people have tried to convince you to, to join their effort or, or leave or, hey, let me give you like $50 million to go after this thing.

• 1:05:35Jeff Weinstein?

  Have that one call me. The other ones, no, but I, I

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're joking, but like you could easily go out and raise like 50 on 250 for some like payments related.

• 1:05:46Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, I could make a rival TBN.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  We need more of those.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  Interesting that you're not saying I'm gonna go build a rival Stripe. That's very bullish for Stripe.

• 1:05:56Jeff Weinstein?

  No, this one seems to have worked out very well for you. So yeah, this one I, I, I could spitwise. I think that what's really kept me very energized and, and more so is I tell people like, on your worst day of work, if you're looking forward to your most unhappy customer, then you found your place.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:18Jeff 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 me going.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  You heard it here first, if you have a problem with Stripe.

• 1:06:33Jeff Weinstein?

  Hit me up.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  DM me, I will give you Jeff's personal phone number.

• 1:06:37Jeff Weinstein?

  Cell phone number, yeah. 410-913-2877, that is it.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Whoa, breaking news.

• 1:06:42Jeff Weinstein?

  Give me a text, I couldn't possibly get more spam, so let's just add to it, which is another thing I think we could solve with Machine Pay must for a couple of different days' story.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Good point, good point, well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:06:52Jeff Weinstein?

  Okay, so good to see y'all.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:06:54Jeff Weinstein?

  Thanks for coming to our little festival.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  I'll find you after.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  And we'll hang out after.

• 1:06:57Jeff Weinstein?

  Okay.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Let's take that off and let's bring in Zach from Bridge, coming back on the show second, third time, we've talked to him a bunch, right?

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Couple times.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Zach, he's bringing the world's smallest cheetah pint, cheers. Ooh, yours is nice and frosted.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show in person, live.

• 1:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Nothing like a non-alcoholic micro pint.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Wait, yours is non-alcoholic? Cause I got 0%, but I asked for 0% non-alcoholic beer. So my beer is 100% alcoholic beer, 0% non-alcoholic beer. But I still tell everyone I'm drinking 0%.

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  But you can't tell, there's no, so you have no idea what you're drinking?

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 1:07:39Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's start here.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  Okay, yes.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  The Economist says stable coins are over.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  Fire back.

• 1:07:44Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  But in The Economist.

• 1:07:46Speaker 06

  Oh, man, in print, speaking of things that are over.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  In print, I love this, it says two stable coins.

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Print Media says the future is dead.

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  The thing that is over says the new thing that is coming is over.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Shots fired, why the stable market is fizzling, the stable coin market is fizzling, they say stable coins are, to proponents, the respectable face of crypto, I think it's a pretty respectable face right here.

• 1:08:11Speaker 06

  Oh, man, I hope so.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  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 stable coin assets have barely budged. Is this true? Is it over?

• 1:08:37Speaker 06

  Whoa, man, yeah, it was really nice knowing you guys.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  This is my last scrape session.

• 1:08:44Speaker 06

  This is the last time you will ever let me on this show again.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Taking it all in.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  So, I mean, 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 3 years, 4 years, 5 years. But all of that is very macro level. I want to hear about what you're actually seeing in terms of adoption, new use cases, glimpses of, you know, new areas to deploy stablecoins, and then just what the big market movers are.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  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 stablecoins slowing down. And I do think total supply is, you know, flat.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  But these things always go through.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, if you want to look at 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.

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  Exactly. Like, stablecoin transaction volume is growing enormously, the number of transactions are growing enormously, and we certainly see that, you know, the number of folks building with stablecoins is growing enormously. Like, 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, this, like, FUD. But, you know, at the same time, we're like, you know, there was this thing, I think Henry

• 1:10:41Speaker 06

  said it yesterday, 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 it actually is solving.

• 1:10:54Jordi Hays?

  You guys are happy to solve problems with crypto.

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  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... It's certainly not slowing down.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  So there's like some very big, meaningful categories, the cross-border payments one's very tractable, huge.

• 1:11:17Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Is there a coming intersection of like vibe coding and stable coins that you're seeing glimpses of? I'm just thinking about like,

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  Like, there was this moment when iPhone games became fairly easy for like a kid to build in their bedroom. And you got Flappy Bird and I think it was 99 cents. And I'm wondering if, if 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 micropayments, but there's like, there's something that people I feel like could play with if they're spinning something up in a, in an afternoon.

• 1:11:58Speaker 06

  Totally. 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.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

  And I realized, or one of the realizations that I had was that the cards were basically just the entirety of fintech.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  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 or more.

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Credit cards from like the seventies, that boom.

• 1:12:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  Because we rode that boom for so long. There was a time when,

• 1:12:37Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  People would pay by doing like reverse debit and there were so many hacks on top of the credit card.

• 1:12:42Speaker 06

  Totally. It was a new platform. It was a new primitive on top of which all these new financial services got built. And cards were like growing meekly for a while. And then the internet came along and they were like uniquely well-suited, obviously Stripe, this is what we do, but uniquely well-suited to solve payment problems on the internet. And then they just took off. It became reflexive, you know, more people were paying on the internet and more people had cards and more people paid in person. So then 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 stable coins represented another platform shift in payments, and I think AI could be the corresponding one that helps drive adoption of stable coins. And I think that all the payment problems that we're solving now are

• 1:13:25Speaker 06

  like fiat payment problems, and there's big markets and so on. But I think the much bigger market will be, you know, the new means of payment that are going to be required in these agentic services. Like, and, you know, just simple things like the incrementality of payments is going to be very different, very small. The velocity of payments is going to be very different, very fast. The reversibility of transactions, like cards are not well-suited in a situation where you don't want transactions to be reversed or disputed. And so I think there's a lot of benefits to stable coins, but we're like in the very, very early stages. So you're kind of squinting and like looking like way down the tunnel and like trying to predict what will happen, but it feels like it's there.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Can you explain the tension between the traditional banking sector and the stablecoin world?

• 1:14:12Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  What are you saying if there was, you know, someone with a bank and they say like, "I make my money by taking deposits and I'm heavily regulated. I have to cover those costs with, you know, with interest, and you're going to be able to do it without as many regulations. You're going to outcompete 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?

• 1:14:41Speaker 06

  I mean, it is, I would say, complicated.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  Do you spend much time in DC? I went earlier this year, and it was actually like...

• 1:14:56Speaker 06

  It was like very heartening. I don't know if y'all have spent time there, but like I hadn't been to DC 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 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 then I went to DC and DC 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.

• 1:15:38Speaker 06

  And then they're, they're going to talk to another person and they were like genuinely curious. And these folks are like voting, you know, debating stuff on like agriculture and like, you know, airline safety. And then coming in and talking to me about like the minutia of like 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, and it has like, you know, I spent 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

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  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, is some of the other folks that have more directly, you know, JP Morgan has their own stablecoin and like 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 like work together, but it certainly has been contentious at times.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Give me a price prediction. 2030, if I put $1,000 in stablecoins, how high can it go? What do you think's possible?

• 1:16:59Speaker 06

  Oh, man. I mean, I think you are going to be exactly as wealthy then as you are today.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  With inflation, with inflation.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  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 had 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.

• 1:17:38Speaker 06

  That's certainly not what everyone told me. Many people in the midst of it told me I was wasting, wasting my time. 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, 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.

• 1:18:21Speaker 06

  And that is what enabled me to persevere through like some really dark times and build a company that, you know, ended up, you know, hitting the, the sort of timing situation at like the perfect, in the perfect moment. But like literally, you know, if I didn't have that conviction, I would have pivoted, you know, a year before, you know, I mean, FTX. I mean, literally, you know, Terra Luna blew up, then FTX blew up, then SVB went under. I mean, it was like one stablecoin went under, the whole crypto market was done and then USDC de-pegged. And so we got booted off of it.

• 1:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Funny when you make this joke, John.

• 1:18:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, we got booted off like four banks before we got started.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  I assume in stablecoins, they're gonna stay stable, but I understand there is risk. There is a new technology. Can you, can you help me understand 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, you know, 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.

• 1:19:43Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  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? And it's not gonna hallucinate?

• 1:20:01Speaker 06

  I mean, I would say for us, it, 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.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Speaker 06

  Where they're like, oh, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, you know, 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, we, you know, there are big parts of our business that are pure software in a ton of ways. Like, think about like transaction monitoring or stuff like that. And, but, but the risk from a regulatory reason of like having things off and then, you know, missing things and then not being able to appropriately justify it because someone vibe coded a thing, it's just not, not possible. So the ways in which we use it end up being different. And another, like, very quick example is like, we're standing up a national trust bank.

• 1:20:58Speaker 06

  As part of standing up a national trust bank, there's a bunch of requirements. One of which is that every, every commit has to be approved by someone else.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 1:21:07Speaker 06

  So, so like, you literally cannot have- Full employment.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  It's over for fast takeoff. Fast takeoff's cooked. This is the most bearish thing.

• 1:21:16Speaker 06

  Still got it, humans.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  Still got it.

• 1:21:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20John Coogan?

  FDA for AI. This was something somebody was saying.

• 1:21:22Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  Yep. I've run the game.

• 1:21:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting. I was 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 like rebuilding the sort of like vertical SaaS fintech platform that you run your whole business on? And he was like, ah, no, it's 1,200 a year. It's like, they give me so much. It would never make sense. And it's like the one piece of like core technology that he runs his business on. He even, he's so fired up on vibe coding, he's like, I'd never rebuild that. It would never make sense.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  And but, but so there's two things. There's like a value equation and then there's like a potential risk, kind of like cost equation. And I feel like with stable coins specifically, the potential in crypto, like the potential cost is so astronomical. Where like saving a little bit here to then introduce like a hundred million dollars of risk and.

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, but there, but there's a bunch of other things that are amazing. Like for us, we are, we have like re-architected a lot of our, a lot of our infrastructure to be like before. You know, one of the, one of the hard things in crypto is adding a bunch of different blockchains. Like every, a lot of blockchains can kind of be the same, but many are very different. And so it's super tedious to add a bunch of, a bunch of different blockchains. We, or the same thing is true of like adding new payment rails. So you know, you might add a US bank and then you need a redundant US bank. And then you need a European bank and then you need a bank in Mexico. And then, and all of these integrations kind of look the same, you know? It's like. You're getting money in, you're checking the mines in, you're sending money out, you know?

• 1:23:15Speaker 06

  And what we have built is the ability to sort of add all of these things very, very quickly. And so we took like, you know, what used to take, you know, two weeks to add a new blockchain now takes, you know, someone actually did it in a meeting the other day of like adding a new stablecoin on a new, on a new blockchain, all with a bunch of Claude that, you know?

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Does that mean we need 10,000 new Layer Ones?

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  That is, that is, it's the Jevens paradox of blockchains.

• 1:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Because it's easier to fuse a new chain, we need 100,000 more, a million more.

• 1:23:50Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Maybe honestly, one for one, every American should have their own Layer One.

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  We're just maximalist across every dimension.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  There was a moment in stablecoins, maybe last year, where it was like, this like, this like small like county in New Mexico is gonna have their own chain?

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  That was, that was a stablecoin.

• 1:24:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, Wyoming, Wyoming has its own stablecoin. So we're gonna have, every state's gonna have its own stablecoin. Every state's gonna have its own blockchain, maybe even every city.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, you could have your own blockchain. Yeah, neighborhood, there you go.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, the mission stablecoin.

• 1:24:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  The precedio stablecoin.

• 1:24:22Speaker 06

  Which one would you buy?

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  Soma.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm going for the Mavericks' stablecoin.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  The Mavericks' stablecoin, okay.

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  It's just a taste thing.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Anything else?

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:24:36Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet a person you can close out with us.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Close out with us. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll be back tomorrow in the TBPN UltraDome, 11 a.m. sharp. Thank you for tuning in and have a great day. Goodbye.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor. Cheers.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Goodbye.