Bridge

“SpaceX uses Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets.”

“Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration platform we acquired, saw volume more than quadruple.”

“Klarna, whose CEO was once a self-proclaimed crypto skeptic, became the first bank to launch a stablecoin, Klarna USD, on the Tempo testnet, using Bridge's open issuance to facilitate faster and cheaper cross-border settlement.”

“Obviously, with rates moving and cap rates moving, we, this year, went out and bought a fifty billion dollar real estate Asset manager called Bridge, and that's now an area we're starting to redirect and lean into because the relative pricing has repriced ther…”

“20, 20, 23 is when we launched our APIs. 2022 is when we start, Sean and I started the company. And raised money, and then immediately after we raised money, Terra Luna happened, and then the whole space was nuked, and then FTX happened, and it was nuked again…”

“The first idea we had was using your bank account to acquire NFTs.”

“One of our first ideas was to build wallets as a service, and which was obviously your business. At the time, I don't think that You, maybe you existed, but at least it wasn't, you weren't on our radar at all. And I remember looking at the space and being like…”

“SpaceX came to us, they're selling Starlink all over the world. And so as a result, they're collecting local, so people are paying for Starlink and, you know, dozens, many dozens of different countries with their cards. So they're getting local currencies in a…”

“The companies who are building on top of this are behind today, but basically making a bet that the cumulative power of all the builders in the world is going to create a better application over N years.”

“That was the first week we launched.”

“First time we did an aid payment disbursement, we were working with the US government to disperse aid payments into LATAM. We were sending tens of thousands of payments, which was like a lot for us. It's not that much for Stripe. It took us like 18 hours to se…”

“And this was a part of the conversations that we had at Privy when talking to Stripe about M&A, which was like, what are conditions under which we think we can be successful here? And I think one of them was the need to be able to work with competitive endeavo…”

“And today we're issuing stablecoins with Phantom, we're issuing stablecoins with MetaMask, we're issuing stablecoin for Hyperliquid.”

“There's deep value to bundles and to being able to layer our software with stablecoin orchestration, stablecoin issuance, with traditional fiat money movement and rails, with the networks that Stripe has built across like, you know, marketplaces and merchants.…”

“I mean, there's just a lot of things like our stablecoin issuance platform that we just launched, an amazing opportunity. We could launch that as an independent business, but it is a very different opportunity, a very different set of customers that are intere…”

“At some level, Bridge and Privy make me much more bullish on M&A, because we had an idea going in, and Stripe was very much taking crypto and stablecoins seriously, and there's no way we would collectively be where we are now or there's no way Stripe would be …”

“If you totally stay independent and you don't do any form of integration, there is like, One plus one equals maybe two, but probably less than two. Almost certainly, like, definitionally, you are setting yourself up for less than two.”

“Through, like, the work that Bridge is doing, we can settle into US dollars directly. So the merchants They've just gained a new ability without having to make a strategic choice to go into a new industry.”

“The next one that Is obviously really interesting is the Stripe bridge deal. So, you know, that was announced a few months ago and bridge was started by a Brex alum, Zach Abrams. We love him. And that's super interesting, obviously, because it shows Stripe tak…”

“I mean, like one of the most interesting parts about the Stripe bridge deal was that it seemed that the, one of the investors from Sequoia on both boards was like pretty instrumental in helping to get that deal done, which you don't see very often. And it's a …”

“Yeah, I believe they were using Bridge, which Stripe now acquired.”

“That led us to kind of like source and co-lead the seed for bridge, which eventually got acquired by Stripe after I had since left.”

“And I bet if circle was public at that point, they would have gotten a huge bump for no particular reason.”

“The BAB stable coin payments, like the PSP stable coin based PSP thing, immensely commoditized. There's a hundred new bridges, right? Everybody wants to be the next bridge. Very, very competitive, very hard. Gonna be thin margin.”

“I think after the bridge acquisition, we genuinely got like. Probably, like, 50 stable coin pitches. Like, it was legitimately, like, insane.”

“The segment that we originally launched into, which was like buying, buying like NFTs and stuff like that is what we kind of originally were like, you take your bank account, you convert the funds in your bank account and stable coins, you then use a stable co…”

“We raised in April, so we closed the route in April. And then we pivoted in May. So that's how long idea one lasted.”

“I actually reached out maybe in, like, late May to one of our investors And I was like, hey, this idea that we raise money on. And I was like, not, I was so stressed. I was like, not sleeping because, you know, it was like these people invest all this money in…”

“There was like circle at the time kind of had some APIs, but they were really bad. And we realized there was no clean way for a developer Like a strike effectively a strike style API for a developer to come in and take a dollar and convert it into a stable.”

“What happened was like over the course of a year, there were like, you know, a whole bunch of failures in the space and their company was impacted by it, indirectly impacted by FTX and so on. And that essentially just, like, nuked the competitive landscape for…”

“When we were first building the product, FTX had a bunch of APIs that nobody really knew about, but we kind of discovered that made it easy to convert between stable coins.”

“The one thing that was, like, truly existential, Was when SVB went under, and USDC depegged, because, and that was the week that we launched.”

“And then we, like, maybe in, like, June or something, we ended up signing Bitso, which is the largest exchange in LATAM, and then Bitso became, like, kind of like a big enterprise customer for us, and we started You know, we launched with them in September and…”

“I mean, we were probably pretty consistently growing somewhere between 20 and 50% a month.”

“We were, I actually thought that we were unacquirable as a company, because, mostly because we were working in a frontier space, and our belief of how big this space could be has, like, consistently been way more optimistic than everyone else's belief.”

“It's meaningfully accelerated the rate at which we've been, like, Acquiring developers and they've been launching and scaling and so on, which has been super exciting to see.”

“As you're starting a company, especially in the early phases, there is an immense desire to benchmark yourself versus everyone else. And there's always going to be someone who's growing faster. He's in a hotter space. Who's like more popular than you are or wh…”

“Acquisition of the year for me had to be bridge.”

“Bridge is the same company as Wire, but has 10% of the infrastructure that we had.”

“Strong like infrastructure Platforms like Bridge, and especially the amount of investment that I imagine Stripe will put behind Bridge going forward, like merchant adoption will go up. Coinbase, you know, recently, you know, last week ran that ad, you know, sh…”

“Yeah, the top story, we gotta talk about Stripe acquiring Bridge for over one billion dollars.”

“And the funny thing is this will inspire an entire massive wave of new crypto infrastructure investing.”

“It was like fifteen million dollar run rate.”

“It shows that there's so much alpha and just being okay with the fact that you're taking on a regular, you're taking on a lot of regulatory risk, you're taking on a lot of platform risk, and you need to just That's part of what creates these sort of exponentia…”

“With bridge, the one Really interesting example that I did see of, like, a company using this, and it was a perfect example of this was scale. So they have a bunch of contractors internationally. They want to pay them quickly in dollars because there's no fluc…”

“I talked with Zach within six months of him incorporating Bridge, didn't invest. I met Shane from Polymarket, like we would DM back in like, 20, 21, and I didn't go back up the Brinks truck.”

“You know, like, you know, my mentor was a champion in Well, is a world champion in bridge, and this is, you know, he's the smartest guy in the world in my dictionary, right?”

“We have about 90 designers that have gone through that program, 4500 designers have applied for it, so it kind of has a tougher acceptance, right, than Stanford or Harvard.”