The Ledger, every show

“Entrepreneurs in Europe can boost tepid economies with new tools, but only if well-intentioned yet counterproductive burdens such as the EU AI Act are curtailed.”

“It is not good for early career people. We can actually measure it in our productivity data before the whole discussion about remote work happened during COVID, and it's bad from a work point of view.”

“The thing that we have seen, and interestingly, we measured this before COVID, because we were doing a lot of remote hiring, and we wanted to see how much we should lean into it, is that it is not good for early career people. We can actually measure it in our…”

“People generally make the argument that it is critical for discipline to be public and public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. And I think that's hogwash. Like if you need a 25 year old fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your capex, bla…”

“Bitcoin is kind of inefficient enough that it uses 40 times the power of the Visa network, despite kind of a much lower throughput than the Visa network.”

“Two places that we're seeing tons of interesting stuff is one, any kind of cross-border use case, where if you want to send money to a hundred countries, it's already the case that stablecoin's a much better way to do that than anything else. And that's where …”

“The second, and this is where Tempo, our new initiative, That you guys were nice enough to work with us on is coming in is very scalable crypto payments, and obviously agents is what we have in mind as we're developing Tempo, where, you know, if you want to pa…”

“My biggest takeaway from all this Has been that around agency where I feel like high agency people are the winners of the advances in AI and within organizations, low agency people will lose out.”

“High work ethic people. Who maybe weren't the best engineers you know, previously or now, those people are massively ascendant, as far as I can tell, because they suddenly got the exoskeleton, you know, and like, they always have the ideas as to what we should…”

“Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just i…”

“Stablecoin issuers will, in a similar way, be large buyers of U.S. Debt and create more dollar strength.”

“GDPR alone is estimated to have reduced profits for small tech firms in Europe by up to 12%.”

“And this progress is in large part due to stablecoins, where borderlessness allows fintechs to set up infrastructure that works everywhere. Global by default financial services are for the first time a real possibility.”

“In our view, agents will most likely soon be responsible for most internet transactions, and will likely need blockchains that support more than a million, or maybe even more than a billion, transactions a second.”

“Crypto enabled transactions are going to be a very large part of the economy and just stripes business in the relatively near future.”

“I don't think they would survive the company very long if someone's walking around like, I don't know, I don't think the stable going thing is going to be a thing.”

“People still have no idea how big stable coins are going to be. And I think they discount us because it feels like it's a lot of hype right now, but we're going to look back when stable coins are a hundred times bigger and just think of this moment as so cute.”

“Thanks to Shopify, we are now, I don't think it's hyperbole to say we're living in an inverted world where the very large retailers are worse off in their e-commerce experience. They have, you know, worse systems and lower converting websites than Small busine…”

“It feels like step one is, that's going to happen with agentic commerce is, I feel like existing aggregators, if just aggregation is their raison d'etre, then they're going to have a lot of, ah, questions that they need to answer, because ChatGPT and the AI ap…”

“I think there'll be something similar with stable coins where they'll be offered at the point of checkout way before people Become super familiar with them, but we're probably only a small number of years away from some mass market.”

“I think second acts are kind of a bit over-valorized in Silicon Valley somehow, where everyone talks about, oh, we want to do, like, a new AWS is kind of the coolest thing ever, where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first thing, versu…”

“People, people are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. They, it just, it blows through all their projections.”

“You don't want to design your policies around, like, the bottom five percent of the company. That would be a horrible mistake. Yeah, you want to design your policies against the top talent.”

“We are profitable, yeah. And profitable on like a fully loaded gap net income basis, not like a community adjusted EBITDA stuff.”

“If I was an equity investor, there's no way I would be short these companies. Because you have the secular growth of just, like, digital payments.”

“And if you look at how the fraud systems that actually back your credit card work today, what happens is, you know, so you have a chaser bank for America or whatever credit card. And there's a set of neural networks that were trained and you're like, oh, cool.…”

“That's the simpler way of saying what I'm saying is that we have passed the Turing test with text LLMs a long time ago, and we're actually nowhere near that on voice LLMs.”

“You talk to university students and often their ideas for companies are pretty half-baked. Yeah, it's find my friends. It's like a college textbook exchange app, you know, but you know, there's like the five apps or whatever. Whereas so frequently what happens…”

“I feel like investor updates with a lot of words and no metrics. Oh yeah, those are bad. Those are bad. And actually like, no investor updates is fine. Like you didn't have to send me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no with either very good or very bad. Yeah. met…”

“Businesses on Stripe generated 1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the prior year and reaching a scale equivalent to around 1.3% of global GDP.”

“More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, a figure that we expect will be substantially eclipsed by the total in 2025.”

“Last year, businesses running on Stripe generated 1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 24, an equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.”

“Economy-wide, demand for software, computers, and data center investment drove nearly half of all U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and will likely soon be a majority of all U.S. Growth.”

“The number of companies reaching ten million in ARR within three months of launch was double that of the 24 cohort.”

“In 25, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously and is now 50% down from October, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around 400,000,000,060 percent of which is estimated to represent B to B payments.”

“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.”

“Only 41% of small business loan applications were approved in the US last year, down from 50% in 2015.”

“Businesses that received and accepted capital offers grew, on average, 27 percentage points faster over the following year than the otherwise equivalent businesses who didn't.”

“What the startups were interested in were often better product experiences, and so if the startups want stable coins or usage-based billing or what have you, we should build for those needs, not just because we'll have a good startup business, but the enterpri…”

“Maybe what we're describing is a bunch of swim lanes Have been established by random accidents of software and org charts and everything like that. You do customer service. When people come with a query as of a non-commercial nature, you are an SDR. You know, …”

“You get way better outcomes with one-on-one tutoring focused on mastery learning, where you only progress through topics once the student has mastered the prior topic, and you kind of move your way sequentially through things. And schools almost definitionally…”

“Elon's companies have always been very capital efficient and like build a bad one and then build a good one. And so the boring company bought a commercial tunnel boring machine before they started developing their own. Tesla had the master plan where they buil…”

“I think at Stripe we, ah, we're, we found we're shipping 30% more code.”

“One is where the regs are just bad, and the second is where the regulations are not standardized, where places where, you know, employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries, and so if you're a ten-person startup and you employ people…”

“This is our life's work. You know, we're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years' time, in 20 years' time.”

“For internet businesses, payments is actually part of the strategy that matters. It's part of the product experience. And so basically, I think this used to be a fairly tactical vendor decision for the business, where it was just something that needs to be tak…”

“The way we see the world, there is no revenue platform right now, and if you look at all the products that we have been building, better analytics on the revenue data that you have in Stripe, a source of truth billing system, things like that, it's moving in t…”

“I think every AI product will need, you know, they probably want to have some all you can eat, most of what you can eat, subscription with limits, and then the ability to pay for overages.”