Tokens Are the New Dollars | Stripe with a16z

1. 0:00 – 1:00

   Intro

   1. WGWill Gaybrick0:00

      If you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create founder-like agency inside your company. A single engineer can do what two teams of engineers could do two years ago. Suddenly, the market opportunity landscape is just much broader, and you can do more with software.

   2. DGDavid George0:15

      How do you guys ship so much product?

   3. WGWill Gaybrick0:16

      Companies have skewed in that direction, where they've seen this new agentic efficiency and power as a way to optimize cost structure. Our belief, I'm being a little cheeky, but to build everything. The Opus four five Cambrian explosion moment. We haven't had that in agentic commerce today, and I think there's a few reasons for that. One is we are merging so much more code than last year, and it is stressing every system. So we create something called Stripe Minions. You're not gonna iterate, you're not going to planning mode. You're just gonna say, "This is what I want. Go do it." That's kind of where the world is going.

   4. DGDavid George0:48

      You guys are, I think, over two trillion of volume now. What do you think is sort of the future state of how we all access models and tokens?

   5. WGWill Gaybrick0:56

      I'm very bullish on...

2. 1:00 – 8:00

   What Is Stripe Today

   1. DGDavid George1:00

      I wanna start with just a state of Stripe.

   2. WGWill Gaybrick1:04

      Yes.

   3. DGDavid George1:04

      So what is Stripe today? And, you know, when we originally invested it, you know, it's a payment processor, but now I think the average AI company uses 11 different-

   4. WGWill Gaybrick1:12

      Yep

   5. DGDavid George1:13

      ... Stripe products. And at Sessions, I believe you had 288 distinct-

   6. WGWill Gaybrick1:19

      Mm-hmm

   7. DGDavid George1:19

      ... product launches.

   8. WGWill Gaybrick1:20

      Yeah.

   9. DGDavid George1:20

      So I wanna talk about velocity also, but just start with just what is the state of Stripe today?

   10. WGWill Gaybrick1:24

       So internally, we think about Stripe as having, you know, inverted our value proposition from being a Payments company with sort of add-ons to now being this multi-product platform where everything sort of focuses on financial infrastructure, helping you grow by reducing the friction and increasing the agency, you know, to, um, be more agile with your business model, to, uh, operate in more countries, uh, and just go faster when it comes to everything that touches revenue and cash. So, you know, just practically speaking, went from payments to then, you know, billing, subscriptions, and invoicing, uh, Connect if you're a platform or marketplace, Radar for mitigating fraud, you know, Radar now for doing many more things than that, tax, and, and just f- I think we, we don't actually count, but somewhere in and around 25, 30 products that are sort of headlining branded products and then of course, you know, hundreds and thousands of features below that. But again, the framework we think about is really reducing frictions and increasing agency. So a good example, last year, uh, we saw a lot of users for the first time experiencing free trial abuse. And this wasn't-

   11. DGDavid George2:38

       Oh

   12. WGWill Gaybrick2:38

       ... really an issue pre-AI because, you know, most Stripe users are software companies and-

   13. DGDavid George2:44

       Yeah, high gross margins.

   14. WGWill Gaybrick2:45

       Yeah, exactly.

   15. DGDavid George2:46

       Token, token burden wasn't there yet.

   16. WGWill Gaybrick2:47

       Yeah.

   17. DGDavid George2:47

       Yeah.

   18. WGWill Gaybrick2:47

       So they're, they're wasting a little compute.

   19. DGDavid George2:49

       Yeah.

   20. WGWill Gaybrick2:49

       But, but it's, it's, it's, it's negligible. It's de minimis. But now software is a cost structure. And so actually I think Cursor was the first user that we-

   21. DGDavid George2:57

       I was gonna say [chuckles]

   22. WGWill Gaybrick2:58

       Yes.

   23. DGDavid George2:58

       It was our portfolio [chuckles]

   24. WGWill Gaybrick3:00

       Yes, exactly.

   25. DGDavid George3:01

       Where we first experienced it.

   26. WGWill Gaybrick3:02

       Yes.

   27. DGDavid George3:02

       And, uh, you know, I, I guess internet users can be crafty, but yes.

   28. WGWill Gaybrick3:05

       Yes. Yes. And, and I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were abusive, you know?

   29. DGDavid George3:13

       Yes. Yeah.

   30. WGWill Gaybrick3:14

       Um, and so, you know, you're just throwing money at these, you know, users who are just signing up for another account, another account, another account, you know, maybe even doing model distillation and, and, and things like that. And so we sort of, you know, got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend a pipeline where we were able to, you know, use our foundation model, look across the entire Stripe network, use our embeddings, and then, you know, after that, put a reasoning layer on top of so we could sort of say, "We think this is a, a free trial abuser because..." um, and point to those signals. And I th- I, I, I think it's today, I think it's ElevenLabs recently told us that they're blocking 2,000 free trial abusers per day using Stripe signals.
3. 8:00 – 14:25

   The AI Cohort Explosion: 50% More Signups & Software Creation Booming

   1. DGDavid George8:00

      that, uh, first half signups grew 50%-

   2. WGWill Gaybrick8:03

      Yep

   3. DGDavid George8:04

      ... year over year.

   4. WGWill Gaybrick8:04

      Yep.

   5. DGDavid George8:05

      And that the median '26 cohort is generating 50% more revenue than the comparable '25 cohort. So, um, and then I think the '25 cohort was generating 70% more revenue than the comparable-

   6. WGWill Gaybrick8:21

      '24, yes

   7. DGDavid George8:21

      ... '24 cohort.

   8. WGWill Gaybrick8:22

      Yes.

   9. DGDavid George8:23

      Um, so what has changed?

   10. WGWill Gaybrick8:24

       Yeah. Well, I think two things. One is, um, AI is giving rise to so much opportunity for new business creation. There's just-

   11. DGDavid George8:36

       Yeah

   12. WGWill Gaybrick8:36

       ... things you couldn't do before that you can do now.

   13. DGDavid George8:39

       Mm-hmm.

   14. WGWill Gaybrick8:39

       Uh, you couldn't build a Suno four years ago, um, or you could maybe build a much worse Suno four years ago.

   15. DGDavid George8:46

       Yeah.

   16. WGWill Gaybrick8:46

       Uh, you couldn't build a Higgsfield four years ago. You know, there's, um, there's just new things that you can do, and so suddenly the, um, market opportunity landscape is just much broader, and you can do more with software. Uh, on the other side, the sort of cost of doing more software has decreased a lot because you just need many fewer engineers to build the things that you want to build because of, you know, agentic coding. And so we're just seeing this explosion in new software creation. You know, when you look at the year-on-year increase in usage of Stripe Billing, it's actually a lot higher than usage of Stripe overall-

   17. DGDavid George9:23

       Oh, interesting

   18. WGWill Gaybrick9:24

       ... because it disproportionately skews towards people creating software companies.

   19. DGDavid George9:27

       Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. That's awesome to hear. Um, I wanna shift now to, um, some of the products that we talked about.

   20. WGWill Gaybrick9:35

       Yeah.

   21. DGDavid George9:35

       Right? So you have this w- proliferation of new products to serve all the needs of companies online. Um, the high level question is like, how do you do that? Like, how do you guys ship so much product?

   22. WGWill Gaybrick9:49

       Yeah. Well, speed has always been, you know, near the top, m-maybe, maybe user... [chuckles] Relentless focus on user is probably the top-

   23. DGDavid George10:01

       Yeah, probably so

   24. WGWill Gaybrick10:01

       ... you know.

   25. DGDavid George10:02

       Yeah.

   26. WGWill Gaybrick10:02

       Exactly. But speed is, is right up there. Um, and it's interesting, you know, we're... I, I think a lot about institutional progress.

   27. DGDavid George10:11

       Yeah.

   28. WGWill Gaybrick10:11

       Um, and, you know, we, we study the great companies that have come before us and now are, you know, b-beside us. Um, you know, the Amazons are still around, of course. But you look at Stripe, and you'd say, "Okay, well, we have sort of an adaptive, adap-adapted version of, of how we set goals, um, that's quite similar to Google's OKRs."

   29. DGDavid George10:32

       Yeah.

   30. WGWill Gaybrick10:32

       Um, you know, our sales team is organized pretty similarly to Microsoft's. Um-
4. 14:25 – 19:24

   Stripe Minions: From 1,200 to 7,000 PRs a Week

   1. DGDavid George14:25

      Yeah, exactly.

   2. WGWill Gaybrick14:25

      Exactly. And on the other side then, it's how do you, you know, with your dev, uh, your dev prod team, just make the tools better and better and better?

   3. DGDavid George14:34

      Yeah.

   4. WGWill Gaybrick14:34

      Um, so we create something called Stripe Minions, which we've blogged about a little bit. And, you know, of course, we've got tons of developer tooling to help users iterate with agents. But Minions, uh, we think of as, you know, the most imp- like, one of our most important metrics intern-internally is how many PRs and what percentage of our PRs are created by Minions. And the reason for that is that Minions are one shot.

   5. DGDavid George14:59

      Yeah.

   6. WGWill Gaybrick14:59

      So you, you give it a prompt and, you know, it's going to build it and then it's going to, you know, go through CI/CD and all of testing-

   7. DGDavid George15:08

      Yep

   8. WGWill Gaybrick15:08

      ... and then you're gonna review it. So you're not gonna iterate, you're not go into planning mode. You're just gonna say, "This is what I want. Go do it." And so we think, you know, that's kind of where the world is going. You know, it's the, the one shot or the glorified REL loop-

   9. DGDavid George15:21

      Yep

   10. WGWill Gaybrick15:21

       ... where you're just letting the agent be super, super powerful. And so we blogged about Minions, I think, in January, February, and they were doing 1,200, you know, PRs per week. And last week, I think 7,000 PRs-

   11. DGDavid George15:37

       Oh my gosh

   12. WGWill Gaybrick15:37

       ... came from Minions.

   13. DGDavid George15:38

       Wow.

   14. WGWill Gaybrick15:38

       Yeah. And, and about 30% of our PRs in that week came from Minions. So, you know, that sort of developer tooling and then the internal processes just get out of the way and make the tools amazing and that's how we're gonna go fast.

   15. DGDavid George15:52

       That's amazing. In terms of empowering senior engineers who are now more powerful than ever, have you made any dramatic changes to how you organize the company internally? So obviously the, the Minions example is incredible and I assume the 30%-

   16. WGWill Gaybrick16:08

       Yes

   17. DGDavid George16:08

       ... is gonna go to a very high percentage within a year or something. Um, but some of the things that we've heard from other companies is taking your most powerful engineers, putting them into business units-

   18. WGWill Gaybrick16:17

       Yes

   19. DGDavid George16:17

       ... or closer to the customers.

   20. WGWill Gaybrick16:19

       Yes.

   21. DGDavid George16:20

       Um, but then you have sort of coordination problems that come from that.

   22. WGWill Gaybrick16:23

       Yeah.

   23. DGDavid George16:23

       So like how have you guys approached that empowerment?

   24. WGWill Gaybrick16:26

       Yeah. So engineers have always been, you know, some of the most important product leaders at Stripe. You know, we build for engineers, for technical users. Of course, we've built for many personas at this point, but engineers have always been sort of the hero, you know, ICP, um, uh, for Stripe. And so because of that, engineers have always been some combination of engineer, PM, designer.

   25. DGDavid George16:48

       Yep.

   26. WGWill Gaybrick16:49

       Uh, and so I think we're just leaning even more into that. You know, we're building tools and platforms so that engineers can sort of do a lot of the, the front-end development themselves and, um, and, and front-end design themselves. Um, probably, you know, just the, the shortest answer to your question is flatter.

   27. DGDavid George17:08

       Yeah, flatter. Smaller, I assume smaller teams.

   28. WGWill Gaybrick17:11

       Smaller teams, flatter. Uh, you had, you know, a lot of layers that were sort of orchestrating work-

   29. DGDavid George17:16

       Yeah

   30. WGWill Gaybrick17:16

       ... and very valuably so in most cases.
5. 19:24 – 28:00

   Build Everything: Going Long vs Going Short on Your Future

   1. DGDavid George19:24

      not the latter.

   2. WGWill Gaybrick19:24

      Yeah. So I think there was an, an early narrative and, and it still, you know, lingers for sure. Um, and there's some truth to it, um, of just we have agents now, we should be more efficient, um, we should be able to do more with less. Um, and, and the main thing I actually think about on this front is making our people more productive. [chuckles] Uh, we have a tool internally called Chi, which is our sort of knowledge AI tool. And, uh, we built it, I don't know, maybe six months ago. Two people built it. Um, now eighty-three percent daily actives, uh, or sorry, eighty-three percent weekly actives, about sixty percent daily actives at Stripe. Uh, seller productivity is increased by twenty percent. Uh, but we're not saying, "Wow, we need fewer sellers." We're saying, "So we need a lot more sellers." [laughs] You know, just, uh, you know-

   3. DGDavid George20:15

      The idea of payback of our sellers just got way better. We should have way more of them.

   4. WGWill Gaybrick20:19

      Exactly. A-and then on the flip side, you know, operational teams are just feeling much more productive. Their day-to-day life is, is more enjoyable. They're using better tools. They're having to do less, you know, manual work. Um, and so, you know, it's almost trite in tech circles now, but the Jevons paradox, you know, an asset becomes more productive. You don't want less, you want more.

   5. DGDavid George20:39

      Yeah, exactly.

   6. WGWill Gaybrick20:40

      Uh, and it is very much the case for us when it comes to engineers. You know, our engineers are just magnificently more productive. And so I mentioned earlier just making Stripe a platform for founders, like internal platform for founders. You know, going forward, you could say, well, because engineers are so productive, there'll just be fewer engineers in the world. And I just really don't believe that, and that's not what we're seeing at all. You know, you see, you know, that much more software creation. We, you know... There was a narrative, um, nine months ago about, you know, S-SaaS platforms and how they're, you know, vertical platforms, you know, um, how they were all gonna struggle. Uh, our, um, new SaaS platform cohort is a hundred and three percent larger than, uh, in 2026 than it was in 2025. So people are just saying, "Well, there are so many spaces that need a SaaS platform. I'm building it faster and faster and faster." And so I think there will be more software engineers in the world. Uh, we will need few of that, fewer of them to do the things we're already doing. [chuckles]

   7. DGDavid George21:42

      Right.

   8. WGWill Gaybrick21:42

      And so Stripe then becomes for new grads and early career engineers, more of an incubator of come in, [chuckles] figure out a high agency project that can help our users. Let's get out of your way. Let's create the paved paths. Let's make you, make it easy for you to go faster. And we should be able to just build more and more and more and, you know, not just random things, but adjacencies that sort of compound what we're doing today. Um, so spend management is adjacent to treasury, and that might have been roadmapped for two years from now. Instead, one engineer has picked it up as a project, and they're just building it themselves. Um, actually, I wrote the first commit for it, but, uh, they're now, they're now running with it.

   9. DGDavid George22:26

      It's in more capable hands now. [laughs]

   10. WGWill Gaybrick22:28

       Exactly. It's in more capable hands. Um, so yeah, we, we, um, we believe the big opportunity and the one that we're leaning into is, uh, doing more with what we have and over time doing more with more.

   11. DGDavid George22:40

       Yeah, I totally agree with that. And, um, yeah, I wrote a, a piece recently about founders being the asset class, like the, the representation of-

   12. WGWill Gaybrick22:49

       Yes

   13. DGDavid George22:49

       ... our market of late-stage venture, which you guys are probably at the forefront of. Um, founders are the asset class because founders are gonna be the ones who enable the companies to find the next product areas.

   14. WGWill Gaybrick22:58

       Yes. Yes.

   15. DGDavid George22:59

       And so this idea that you have to make trade-offs today around do we try and build new products for revenue or cut costs-

   16. WGWill Gaybrick23:06

       Yeah

   17. DGDavid George23:07

       ... I think for companies like Stripe that are run by you guys-

   18. WGWill Gaybrick23:09

       Yes

   19. DGDavid George23:10

       ... there's probably always gonna be that next opportunity-

   20. WGWill Gaybrick23:12

       Yes

   21. DGDavid George23:12

       ... to create additional revenue opportunities, you know, find the new customer products that are a big hit and that is never gonna go away.

   22. WGWill Gaybrick23:19

       Yes.

   23. DGDavid George23:19

       You're always gonna have the chance to build more.

   24. WGWill Gaybrick23:20

       Yes, absolutely. I do think it's a good moment for company leaders to create some resourcing back pressure because that back pressure drives more efficient and more expansive use-

   25. DGDavid George23:31

       Yeah, of course

   26. WGWill Gaybrick23:31

       ... of new tools. Um, but I also imagine that in the years ahead, we'll have a budgeting process that looks not that dissimilar from what it's been in the past of we're doing so much with what we have. We can do even more if we continue to expand resourcing. Um, but in this moment, I think it is a good time to say, "Well, let's really do a lot with what we have today," um, because you still see increases in productivity-

   27. DGDavid George23:56

       Absolutely. Yeah

   28. WGWill Gaybrick23:57

       ... you know, from what you, what you already have. Beyond that, you know, from, from a user's first standpoint, just there's so much more they want from us. Um, you know, we've heard from, from a lot of users, um, that for Stripe Tax, they want global filing, and it took us a long time to get to, you know, US filing on Stripe Tax, meaning that, you know, every state in the US will just automatically file for you. Um, it's hard. It's a hard problem because you are dealing with, um, so many different jurisdictions that accept filing in different ways. And so it took us a long time to get there. Um, global filing was the next ask. You know, we just don't wanna have to think about this in any market. And we built that in about a third of the time that it took us to get to US filing. And-

   29. DGDavid George24:39

       Wow, with much greater complexity.

   30. WGWill Gaybrick24:40

       Exactly. Much greater complexity. And so it's just like, you know, an infinite list of, of asks and opportunities like that. And so if you're just relentlessly focused on users, you're going to focus on, on that. Uh, we, um, we launched recently a product called Stripe Treasury. Um, a-and it's an interesting moment in sort of fintech right now because I think there is, uh, sort of an unbundling of what banking means. And Stripe, you know, is not a bank, does not aspire to be a bank, but does aspire to provide your banking portal-
6. 28:00 – 37:28

   Agentic Commerce: The Missing Primitives

   1. DGDavid George28:00

      I, uh, I got it. Okay. Um, I wanna shift over to a new topic which you guys are on the cutting edge of and which gets a lot of play, but almost in like a nebulous sense. So I'd li- I'd like to go a little bit deeper on it with you, um, which is sort of agents engaging in commerce-

   2. WGWill Gaybrick28:15

      Mm-hmm

   3. DGDavid George28:15

      ... on the internet.

   4. WGWill Gaybrick28:16

      Mm-hmm.

   5. DGDavid George28:16

      So what is the state of where we are today? What are the bottlenecks?

   6. WGWill Gaybrick28:20

      Yes.

   7. DGDavid George28:20

      And how do you sort of view a framework for how that could be done in the future?

   8. WGWill Gaybrick28:24

      Yeah. So we are-- You know, we talked about the Opus four five Cambrian explosion moment. We haven't had that in agentic commerce to date.

   9. DGDavid George28:34

      Yeah.

   10. WGWill Gaybrick28:34

       Um, like there isn't a, um, just, there aren't a ton of canonical use cases that you just see repeated over and over and over again. Um, and I think there's a few reasons for that. One is we're missing primitives.

   11. DGDavid George28:47

       Right. Yeah.

   12. WGWill Gaybrick28:47

       Uh, and just that's something we're very focused on. You know, we-

   13. DGDavid George28:50

       Mm-hmm

   14. WGWill Gaybrick28:50

       ... we, uh, we created with Tempo the machine payments protocol so that s- services can indicate, you know, what needs to be paid and how you can pay for it. So if you're selling, you know, an image or a piece of content online, you can request it and get a 402 response back.

   15. DGDavid George29:09

       Yep, yep.

   16. WGWill Gaybrick29:10

       Um, and it just says like, "Here's how you buy me."

   17. DGDavid George29:12

       Yep.

   18. WGWill Gaybrick29:12

       Uh, so that's a primitive, like we think machines will want to buy from, from other machines. Um, and there's the question of like what sh- what should checkout look like for agents? And it's still sort of an open question. You know, browser automation's getting better, so maybe agents should just be, you know, crawling through checkout forms and filling them out. I, I think there's still a lot of open questions here.

   19. DGDavid George29:31

       It's early.

   20. WGWill Gaybrick29:31

       Yeah, but-

   21. DGDavid George29:31

       It's like the, yeah, that, that's the skeuomorphic version.

   22. WGWill Gaybrick29:34

       Exactly.

   23. DGDavid George29:34

       You know, there's gonna be a native version. Yeah.

   24. WGWill Gaybrick29:35

       Yeah. I, I think that's right.

   25. DGDavid George29:36

       Yeah.

   26. WGWill Gaybrick29:36

       I think that's right. Um, so we're, we're sort of at the missing primitives phase, and we're sort of figuring that out. And then there's a sociological phase of just in what ways will agentic commerce be better than non-agentic commerce?

   27. DGDavid George29:51

       Mm-hmm.

   28. WGWill Gaybrick29:52

       I think there's some very non-speculative ways in which it'll be better, like just checkout pages shouldn't exist for humans. You know, with, with Stripe link and, you know, Shop with Shop Pay, and it's very easy to get through a checkout page these days. But should you even need to go to one or should you just be able to say, sort of buy it on a, you know, product display page? I think so. I think just checkout pages will go away.

   29. DGDavid George30:17

       It'll be a thing of the past.

   30. WGWill Gaybrick30:18

       Yeah.
7. 37:28 – 49:00

   Stablecoins & the Global Money Movement Platform

   1. DGDavid George37:28

      You know, we've talked about the idea of commerce, you know, agentic commerce. Um, talk about stablecoins.

   2. WGWill Gaybrick37:33

      Yeah.

   3. DGDavid George37:33

      Like you said, there's a lot of friction in the process today, but just state, state of the stablecoin market and what you see the opportunity to be for the next, call it five years.

   4. WGWill Gaybrick37:42

      Yeah. So I'm an infrastructure nerd, so I always will go there first, and stablecoins are just a better platform for moving money than exists otherwise. Um-

   5. DGDavid George37:52

      I strongly agree.

   6. WGWill Gaybrick37:53

      Yeah. Um, and better for a couple reasons. You know, there are certain countries, uh, that have, you know, rolled out really good payment systems. Most of them are nationalized, you know, UPI in, in India. Um, actually, it's interesting when you look at these economies, uh, the percentage of sub $5 payments in India, I believe is, o-on UPI is I think something like 86%, whereas-

   7. DGDavid George38:19

      Oh, wow

   8. WGWill Gaybrick38:19

      ... in the US, on cards, I think it's single digits percent.

   9. DGDavid George38:22

      Yeah, yeah.

   10. WGWill Gaybrick38:23

       So, you know, there's some good, cheap, fast payment schemes that are nationalized. Pix, another one in Brazil-

   11. DGDavid George38:29

       Yeah, of course. Yeah, we've seen

   12. WGWill Gaybrick38:30

       ... which has grown majorly.

   13. DGDavid George38:32

       Yep.

   14. WGWill Gaybrick38:32

       But you need a shelling point [chuckles] for the global economy, right?

   15. DGDavid George38:35

       Right.

   16. WGWill Gaybrick38:36

       Just what can we all agree on? And that's where crypto rails solve this political problem.

   17. DGDavid George38:41

       Right.

   18. WGWill Gaybrick38:41

       Where it's just this platform works everywhere.

   19. DGDavid George38:44

       Mm-hmm.

   20. WGWill Gaybrick38:45

       And so if we just all used it, the world-- the, the global financial system would work better, it'd be faster, it'd be cheaper and so on. Um, so if we all, like, went to sleep tonight and woke up tomorrow, and we all held stables, it would just be a better global-

   21. DGDavid George38:57

       There would be less friction and less cost-

   22. WGWill Gaybrick38:58

       Exactly

   23. DGDavid George38:58

       ... in the economy. Yeah.

   24. WGWill Gaybrick38:59

       Exactly. Um, now, that might be one of those, uh, should work this way, may never, it, you know, work this way problems. And so we are sort of resolutely focused on trying to change that. Um, you know, we talked earlier about Stripe Treasury.

   25. DGDavid George39:15

       Yeah.

   26. WGWill Gaybrick39:15

       And, you know, we decided to make stablecoins native to Stripe Treasury. So you can just hold a balance in stables, just like you can hold a balance in USD or EUR, GBP or anything like that. So, um, we believe that the opportunity for stables is just faster, um, money movement, cheaper money movement, and more global money movement.

   27. DGDavid George39:36

       Yeah.

   28. WGWill Gaybrick39:37

       Um, right now you can be a Stripe user in, uh, I can't remember what the exact number is, but around 60 countries in fiat. But you can be a Stripe user in stablecoins-

   29. DGDavid George39:48

       Yeah

   30. WGWill Gaybrick39:48

       ... in, I think, about 150 countries. So just bringing more people into the, uh, online economy, uh, in a way that allows them to, you know, transact with, you know, the AI companies and, you know, as the, as the economy-- the software economy gets more and more global, like bringing more people into it is more and more valuable. You can build a powerful AI company with two engineers in Thailand, uh, just as well as you can do it in the US or as well as you can do it in Brazil.
8. 49:00 – 53:33

   Scaling Taste at Stripe

   1. DGDavid George49:00

      So in closing, uh, I wanted to just get your take, and this is-- I don't want to get too deep into-

   2. WGWill Gaybrick49:05

      Yes

   3. DGDavid George49:05

      ... you know, the role of humans versus AI, but one of the things that Stripe has always been universally recognized for and appreciated for, I think, is your taste, right?

   4. WGWill Gaybrick49:16

      Yeah.

   5. DGDavid George49:16

      And it sounds funny because you're an infrastructure company-

   6. WGWill Gaybrick49:18

      Yes

   7. DGDavid George49:18

      ... but I think it's, it's generally agreed upon. Um, how do you continue to uphold that at such a large scale-

   8. WGWill Gaybrick49:25

      Mm-hmm

   9. DGDavid George49:25

      ... and with so much of the work that you're doing now being done by AI?

   10. WGWill Gaybrick49:28

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's interesting how much the word taste is being used right now.

   11. DGDavid George49:34

       Yeah. [chuckles]

   12. WGWill Gaybrick49:35

       And it's sort of hard sometimes to-- It's, you know, the, the cynical view is that it's how we're all justifying our future value. [chuckles]

   13. DGDavid George49:41

       Yeah, that no one actually has taste, and it's just we're all reproducing-

   14. WGWill Gaybrick49:45

       Yeah, exactly

   15. DGDavid George49:45

       ... you know, we're, we're reproducing machines of things that we had previously perceived.

   16. WGWill Gaybrick49:48

       Yes.

   17. DGDavid George49:48

       Yeah.

   18. WGWill Gaybrick49:49

       Yes, yes. And, like, my fingers are no longer as useful, but this nebulous notion of taste is-

   19. DGDavid George49:55

       Yeah. Yeah

   20. WGWill Gaybrick49:55

       ... um, and, and, and models will never have taste, and so on, which is probably just not true. Um-

   21. DGDavid George49:59

       Yeah, I agree, I agree with you on that

   22. WGWill Gaybrick50:00

       ... yeah. But, uh, to your, um, you know, more proximate to your question, you know, product quality is really, really core to our culture and to our identity. Uh, and it's for a few reasons. Like, one is just we want users to have amazing tools that are carefully crafted that, you know, can make their, um, make them go faster, you know, enjoy, [chuckles] uh, you know, the, the, the, um, the journey of building a company that much more. You know-

   23. DGDavid George50:30

       Yeah

   24. WGWill Gaybrick50:31

       ... it's not an easy journey.

   25. DGDavid George50:32

       Right.

   26. WGWill Gaybrick50:32

       But if you have, you know, tools that are surprisingly great, it feels that much better. So it's, uh, it's a big user lens. Um, another dimension of it is it's just more fun, you know?

   27. DGDavid George50:42

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   28. WGWill Gaybrick50:43

       You, you look at what you created with your team, and you're like: Wow, that looks amazing, versus, you know, you kind of janked this thing together, and it barely works, and, you know, it just isn't as fun, you know, to, to, to, you know, go through the slog, the long, the long nights, the long weekends, and so on to build it. Um, and I think the single thing I would say, uh, for scaling taste at Stripe-- Well, actually two things. One is, I think it has to be top down. You just-

   29. DGDavid George51:10

       Yeah

   30. WGWill Gaybrick51:10

       ... have to say it-

Episode duration: 53:48