No Priors Ep. 71: The Best of 2024 (so far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil

(digital music) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. We're halfway through 2024, so we're doing a mid-year best of episode, where we go back to some of our favorite moments from episodes so far, and catch you up on everything that's been going on in AI, from the state-of-the-art in research to hyper scalers and upstarts. We'll list all the episodes featured so you can go back and re-listen to the whole conversation. To kick it off, we're gonna hear a little bit from Emily Glassberg Sands, who's the head of information at Stripe. We talked a lot about how AI can help small businesses make a big impact in the economy. Here, she talks about the intersection of fintech and AI. (upbeat music)

When you think forward on the w- the directions that the overall financial services industry is going, and let's put Stripe aside for a second, because I think Stripe, um, is obviously a core company to sort of the internet economy and it touches so many different pieces of fintech and things like that. But where do you think, outside of Stripe, the biggest white space for fintechs employing AI is? Like, from a startup perspective or even an incumbent perspective, like where do you think this sort of technology will have the biggest impact?

It's a great question. Um, I don't know exactly what others will do. I think, um, having a really robust understanding of identity, who businesses are, what they're selling, um, has always been important. And you know, I think often in industry, we think it's important for marketing or sales or sort of go to market motions. But it's also super important in fintech. Um, yeah, it's important for credit lending decisions, but it's also important for supportability, um, decisions and understanding, uh, where, you know, the business does or does not meet the requirements of, uh, a given card network, uh, or a given bin sponsor. Um, and so I think that that identity piece, like who is this merchant, are they who they say they are, um, but also what are they ... what's their business, what are they selling, and how does that map to this pretty complicated regulatory environment, um, is a really interesting and hard problem that lots of folks are solving in their own ways, but, uh, is, is likely, um, an opportunity. I think there's almost certainly an opportunity to, you know, whether Stripe does it or somebody else does it, to make, um, sort of financial integrations way more seamless. Um, Stripe has a whole suite of no code products so you can use, uh, you know, payment links or no code invoicing. But how does one actually build a, a really robust, um, specific to the user integration without needing, um, you know, a, a substantial number of payments engineers or, um, any complicated developer work? LLMs are proving that they can be very good at writing code. Um, we have a couple cases actually where we're already seeing it work. But as the, as the decisions get more and more complicated, I think there's still a lot of work to do, um, to build the right integration and to build it well, um, in an automated way. And then I think, as I mentioned before, some of this layer on top of the payments data of like, okay, you could build solutions that make payments work better, but payments actually allows you to really deeply understand and improve the business is, is pretty fascinating. And you'd have to think about like, is it a startup that does that or is it an incumbent that does that and what's the, what's the business model? Um, what's the business model there? But you know, if I think about the case of Stripe, um, you know, sort of Stripe has the opportunity to be beneficent, right? Incentives are super aligned. The more Stripe can help its users, businesses grow, the more Stripe grows and the more the economy grows. And so whether it's Stripe or someone else using financial data to help businesses be more successful, to grow the pie, to grow the GDP, um, I think is, is really powerful.