The Exchanges

Q I was about to say, I'm subscribing. That's an instant, 10 dollar a month subscription. But what do you think, John?

A I don't know. People just said a lot of sh** during the pandemic. Like, do you remember? It's like, oh, handshakes are going to be over. Business travel is going to be over. Every company is going to be fully remote. 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 of people also who work remotely. I think kind of, obviously, you know, Jamie is right on some points. I think also working remotely has had a bunch of benefits where there's a way larger talent pool available to companies like Stripe. And there's a lot of people, you know, you see, uh, kind of the two body problem where it allows a lot of couples where, you know, maybe one partner is assigned to some hospital in Idaho and like, they don't get to choose what hospital necessarily they got assigned to. And the other person gets to work, uh, A high-paying tech job.

AI assessment note: “I would say Stripe broadly is in a pretty similar spot to where it was”

Q All right. All right. Now, good morning. Everybody's been waiting for. Patrick, John, you founded the company in 2010. It's, uh, 15 years later. The entire LP industrial complex and venture capitalists everywhere. I'm sure some employees are wondering when will Stripe go public and under what circumstances and what's the hold up here? Why aren't you public already?

A Yeah, look, um, I think people sometimes Hold us out to be dogmatic or something on this topic, whereas we feel like so many other people out there in the world are dogmatic, and we just try to be pragmatic on it. You know, Keith was on the show and he was saying, you know, he believes companies should go public as quickly as possible. I don't know. Maybe that's the right thing for some companies, but, uh, in at least Stripe's case, that, that hasn't been the case. I also think the environment has changed quite a bit. Where it used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, you know, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets. That's obviously not true today where, uh, the, you know, stable private markets exist. But we look and we say, is Stripe better off at the moment as a private or a public company? And, you know, up to this point, we have determined private that could change at some point, but it's kind of no dogma from our point. The last thing I'll just say is, you know, I think Keith made the argument. 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, blah, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with disciplin…

AI assessment note: “up to this point, we have determined private that could change at some point”

Q Perfect. Now, could we then go pay people from our Stripe account, and then you could lower our fees if they were also doing stable coins? Does that exist today, or is that something coming next year?

A Look, you could pay people into stablecoins, but again, to the point of where you'll see adoption first, paying people via bank transfer in the US, like, yeah, it's not great, it's kind of slow, everything like that, but it's fine, it's not the biggest problem. And it's really cheap today. Yeah, exactly, whereas the people who are using Bridge, it's like, scale AI is, you know, they have to pay the contractors all around the world, and when you want to get money to people in the Philippines, that starts to get really annoying and expensive, and so, just from our point of view, The like real hair on fire problem is the international stuff and domestic. I don't know. I assume you're paying domestic suppliers. It'll come later.

AI assessment note: “The like real hair on fire problem is the international stuff... It'll come later.”

Q build a financial system for the world from scratch today? And can you guys see a world where we bridge away from the credit card networks, where we move out of Some of these legacy systems, or are they so deeply ingrained in everything that it's, it's going to continue to be the same where we've got to build these complicated solutions into and around the legacy of financial infrastructure?

A I'll give my few, and then I'm curious about, um, Patrick has. I would say, firstly, there is just general tech scalability. You know, there's the, um, you know, the finance industry has its version of the mine shafts for sure, where, uh, everything should be, uh, you know, highly scalable in real time. And I think in a way, stable coins are solving something that you wouldn't, you don't technically need full decentralization to do, but the ability to make kind of real time payments any hour of the day or night is a useful property. And again, some private systems have also built that. I think a big one for us is trust. And the fact that the fraud problem hasn't really been solved in online payments, a big reason people come to Stripe is basically, we are a reputation network across the internet economy. And so when someone comes and buys something from a Stripe user, 93% of the time, we have seen that card before. And so the merchant can know something and know that they can trust this end user. And it's gotten to the stage now where if someone comes along and buys with a credit card, If they're, you know, signing up with an email address or a phone number or something that we haven't seen before, that is just ipso facto suspicious because, you know, they are coming along and maybe trying to, it's a stolen credit card or something like that. And so a big part of what Stripe en…

AI assessment note: “fraud problem hasn't really been solved in online payments”

Q Is there a moment, guys, where, is it a regulatory event where you'll say the Visa MasterCard duopoly can get challenged? Is there a set of boundary conditions that you have written down where, when you can check a few of these boxes, you know that it's time for those companies to get dismantled?

A Behavior we're seeing right now is that stablecoins are most interesting and seeing most adoption where there is some cross-border component. And so, uh, you need to manage corporate treasury around the world. You want to send remittances to people in other countries. Often it's people in other countries want to hold dollar balances or things like that. What we've always seen is that, I don't know, in the U.S., Things work pretty well in Europe. Things work pretty well, and so we even see this pre-crypto where the way people pay for stuff has been radically changing. You know, UPI in India, PIX in Brazil, you have all these designed by central banks, actually really good kind of government-run Venmo solutions. Those have all happened in emerging markets broadly and not in the US and Europe. We certainly keep our eyes peeled for that changing at some point, but I think right now, I don't know, Patrick, would you characterize it that way, that like, A lot of the interesting stuff we see is happening internationally. Yes.

AI assessment note: “A lot of the interesting stuff we see is happening internationally.”

Q Hey, John, uh, Toby, I don't know if you know Toby from Shopify, but he did this like zero based budgeting kind of concept for meetings. He just purged all meetings at the beginning of the year. He just like deleted everybody's meetings from the top down. I'm curious how you think about bloat and just all of these meetings and committees. Do you worry about that at Stripe?

A We know Toby very well. And I don't know. I always feel like, yeah, we should, uh, I'm tempted to take some of the ideas. Like we haven't done the meeting deletion one and you just say, oh, the meetings get recreated, but they measured us and they didn't. It sounds like, uh, and I do always enjoy Toby's perspective, which is, I think that, you know, many organizational problems are in fact software problems. And, you know, you just need to write a script to literally, like, I think he wrote the script, uh, you know, from the Google calendar instance. But, uh, there's kind of this purity that, uh, uh, you're, you're over intellectualizing your problems. And I do agree with Chamath on the remote thing where, like, it's, it's very dangerous. One thing that can be dangerous with as CEOs think about this stuff is I think there is these unfair anecdotes that feel unfair that get people really riled up. The quiet quitters, the anti-work subreddit, you know, all these talk of people working two jobs and that generates a lot of energy with corporate leaders. But 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, and we have some, like, outrageously productive remote people, and they're off, and again, the cabin in Idaho somewhere just, you know, coat…

AI assessment note: “I do agree with Chamath on the remote thing”