The Ledger, every show

“As we add more functionality to it, just the right way to navigate this big product surface area is an AI that's read all the API docs for you.”

“The rate for sports betting companies is around 10%, and the order of magnitude for prediction markets is, you know, one percent or a few points.”

“Still in twenty-twenty-six, if you open a new Gemini chat, or if you open a new ChatGPG chat, it's basically a blank slate. There's no memory.”

“And of course, now we're building that because it's like much more relevant in the agentic world”

“It turns out there's a lot of switches in the dashboard. Yeah. You know, there's no API for, and we are all as an industry collectively discovering that.”

“Stripe's revenue and finance automation suite, with billing at its core, has now passed a five hundred million dollar revenue run rate.”

“From top corporate leaders, half of the Fortune 100 uses Stripe. To hyper-growth companies, we count 80% of the Forbes Cloud 178% of the Forbes AI-fifty as customers. To newly formed upstarts, one in six new Delaware corporations incorporates with Stripe Atlas…”

“In aggregate, the revenue that businesses process on Stripe is growing seven times faster than that of all companies in the S&P 500.”

“Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant, raced to over one hundred million dollars in recurring revenue in just three years.”

“We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which hit seventeen million dollars ARR in just three months, Bolt, achieving twenty million ARR in two months, and Kodo, radically lower the barrier for turning software ideas into working applications.”

“Today, 60% of all small businesses in America use vertical SaaS platforms to help run their business.”

“When a credit card is used for a payment, there is a greater than 92% chance that Stripe has encountered the same card before.”

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

“Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled between Q four, 20, 23 and Q four, 20, 24. And the number of monthly active stablecoin wallets has now reached forty million.”

“We further note with interest that despite regulatory uncertainty in the United States, early stablecoin adoption has shown a notable US dollar preference, with an estimated 99% of stablecoin balances being USD-based.”

“While the economies of the US and Europe were similarly productive in 1990, there has since been a stark divergence, with US productivity per hour works reaching 104 dollars, as compared with a plateau of something closer to 85 dollars per hour in Europe.”

“Our programmable financial services now power more than five million businesses directly or via platforms, including all the top AI companies, many of the largest blue chip companies, 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, most of the biggest tech companies,…”

“25% of all Delaware corporations are now created with Stripe Atlas.”

“Stripe remained robustly profitable in 25, allowing us to continue investing heavily in product development, with over 350 product updates over the last year, as well as acquisitions.”

“Since our last update, we acquired Privy, which powers more than a hundred and ten million programmable wallets, and Metronome, which powers the complex usage-based billing models used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Confluent, and NVIDIA.”

“Metronome joins our revenue suite, comprising Stripe billing, invoicing, tax, and more, Which is on track to hit an annual run rate of a billion dollars this year.”

“Today, the most profitable third of publicly listed companies in the United States accounts for two-thirds of the total market capitalization, the highest share since data began in 1963.”

“Pushes to GitHub, which grew roughly 10 to 12% in prior years, jumped 41%. Between Q. Three, 24 and Q. Three, 25.”

“Of businesses on stride that earn most of their revenue internationally, 30% of that revenue comes from countries that are neither their home market nor one of the top 10 global economies.”

“Gamma is a California-based AI platform used by seventy million people to create presentations. When they joined the first cohort of Stripe users to accept UPI payments in India, their Indian revenue jumped 22% in that very same month.”

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

“Last year, Stripe Capital distributed 45% more funds compared to twenty-twenty-four to more than 81,000 businesses.”

“Between June and October, Stripe delivered a meaningful increase in authorization rates for Microsoft using a combination of adaptive acceptance, card account updater, network tokens, and more. As a result, Microsoft is now routing a larger share of its paymen…”

“Presenting Blick to your customers in Poland drives an average 46% increase in checkout conversion. Offering Pix does the same in Brazil with a 31% average conversion uplift.”

“But as with the early internet, the future success of agentic commerce is contingent on universal interoperability. Our ascent through those five levels we discussed depends on our ability to all work together.”

“Brands already onboarding to ACS include Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Etsy, Coach, Kate Spade, and a bunch more.”

“We launched Machine Payments, a way for developers to charge agents directly for API calls, MCP usage, and HTTP requests using stablecoin microtransactions.”

“And we partnered with OpenAI to power the first shopping experience inside ChatGPT.”

“Part of the reason this is an evergreen pitch is because companies don't actually have all their data at their fingertips. Companies do not eat their data infrastructure vegetables.”

“What we're now doing is training a payments foundation model where we're using all the data that we have in the Stripe network, and you have a much larger, more capable model taking into account. So anyway, we are trying to do exactly what you're saying.”

“I feel like there could be a product in the next 10 years for finance people, where in hindsight, it is obviously the correct UI, but just like the spreadsheet kind of came out of nowhere as a UI, it may feel like it came out of nowhere at that time.”

“There's a lot of charts of the shape of Stripe, I don't know if it's this way of Microsoft, where obviously March, 2020, you saw this discontinuity, right? Much more e-commerce activity happening, and we saw the rate of online business creation because, you kn…”

“What's different here is, one, you have AI. So all the integrations for the merchant are much easier. It's much less of a lift than previous Times when things like that, this have been tried.”

“Part of what we're doing with this is making merchants product catalogs remotely discoverable and inventory and everything like that. And then remotely purchasable. Where you don't necessarily have to go through the whole flow on their site and everything like…”

“So we're building out this platform in agentic commerce where we have You know, some open source protocols like our agenda commerce protocol. We obviously have the regular Stripe products, you know, people are using us for, you know, and this, it's particularl…”

“People in the U.S. Do not have a good mental model for how different the banking ecosystem in every other country is, because the U.S. Is so sweet generous, it's like, 5000 banks or whatever the number is currently in the U.S., whereas every other banking mark…”

“If you're serious about all these layers of the stack, you can't bind them all together because just like there's no way you're going to get that much. You know, if Microsoft is serious about the office suite, they're going to have it run on Mac and Windows be…”

“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 interpret Henry Kaiser, Howard Hughes, Elon Musk, they decide that their circle of competence is not rockets or roads or what have you, but is engineering, and that engineering competence can be broadly applied to many potential domains.”

“Stripe was much more his idea than mine.”

“We just worked with Shopify to, like they now offer a stablecoin Payments on all of their checkouts, or they're rolling that out on all of their checkouts. That's just not a thing that would have made sense even three or four years ago.”

“Obviously that growth curve does not apply to many AI companies.”

“I would say Stripe broadly, Is in a pretty similar spot to where it was beforehand, which is most people go into an office. Like most people are, you know part of our San Francisco office or New York or Dublin or Singapore or wherever. And then we have a bunch…”