a16z Podcast - Stripe’s AI Strategy: Build More, Not Less

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

a16z General Partner David George is joined by Will Gaybrick, President of Product & Business at Stripe, to discuss how AI is changing the way Stripe builds products, organizes teams, and thinks about the future of internet commerce. Stripe has evolved from a payments company into a multi-product financial infrastructure platform, while a new generation of AI companies is growing and monetizing faster than previous software cohorts. Will explains why Stripe sees AI productivity as an opportunity to build more rather than simply cut costs, including how its internal coding agents now generate thousands of pull requests each week. They discuss creating founder-like agency inside large companies, building smaller and flatter teams, and why Stripe believes dramatically more software will be created as the cost of building continues to fall. They also look ahead to agentic commerce, why checkout pages could disappear, the potential return of micropayments, stablecoins as infrastructure for a global economy, and a future where AI agents increasingly buy software and services from other machines.   Resources: Follow Will Gaybrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-gaybrick-5730347/ Follow Will on X: https://x.com/gaybrick Follow David George on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83 Follow Stripe on X: https://x.com/stripe Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create a founder-like agency inside your company. A single engineer can do what two teams of engineers could do two years ago. Suddenly, the market opportunity landscape is just much broader, and you can do more with software. How do you guys ship so much product? Companies have skewed in that direction where they've seen this new agentic efficiency and power as a way to optimize cost structure. our belief I'm being a little cheeky but build everything

yes the opus 45 Cambrian explosion moment we haven't had that in agentic commerce today and I think there's a few reasons for that one is we are merging so much more code than last year and is stressing every system

so we create something called striped minions you're not going to iterate not go into planning mode you're just going to say this is what I want go do it that's kind of where the world is going you guys are I think over two trillion of volume now, what do you think is sort of the future state of how we all access models and tokens?

I'm very bullish on... AI is making engineers dramatically more productive. Stripe's response isn't to build the same things with fewer people. It's to build more. In this episode, A16Z General Partner David George sits down with Stripe's Will Gaborick to unpack how AI is changing the way one of the world's largest technology companies builds. They discuss Stripe's internal coding agents, which recently generated. 7,000 poll requests in a single week, why teams are becoming smaller and flatter, and how

Stripe is trying to give engineers the kind of agency traditionally associated with founders. Then they look at what all this new software means for commerce itself, from AI agents sparring software from other agents to micropayments, stable coins, and why Will believes the checkout page will eventually disappear altogether. I want to start with just a... state of Stripe. Yes. So what is Stripe today?

And when we originally invested, it's a payment processor. But now, I think the average AI company uses 11 different strike products. And at Sessions, I believe you had 288 distinct product launches. So I want to talk about velocity also, but just to start with just what is the state of Stripe today? So internally, we think about Stripe as having inverted our value proposition from being a payments company with sort of add-ons. to now being this multi-product platform

where everything sort of focuses on financial infrastructure, helping you grow by reducing the friction and increasing the agency, to be more agile with your business model, to operate in more countries, and just go faster when it comes to everything that touches revenue and cash. So just practically speaking,

went from payments to then billing, subscriptions and invoicing, Connect if you're a platformer marketplace, radar for me to getting fraud, radar now for doing many more things than that, tax. I think we don't actually count, but somewhere in and around 25, 30 products that are sort of headlining branded products and then, of course, hundreds and thousands of features below that. But again, the framework we think about is really reducing frictions and increasing agency. So a good example, last year, we saw a lot of users for the first time experiencing free trial abuse. And this wasn't really an issue pre-AI because most type

users are software companies. Yeah, high-hours margins. Yeah, exactly. Joken burden wasn't there. Yeah, so they're wasting a little compute, but it's negligible, it's minimis. But now, software is a cost structure. And so actually, I think Cursor was the first user that we were going to say. It was our portfolio. Yes, exactly. Experienced it. And I guess internet users can be crafty, but yes. Yes, yes. And I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were abusive. And so you're just throwing money at these users who are just signing up for another account, another account, another account, maybe even doing model distillation and things like that. And so we sort of got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend, a pipeline, where we were able to use our foundation model, look across the entire stripe network, use our embeddings. And then after that, put a reasoning layer on top of could sort of say we think this is a free trial abuser because and point to those signals and i think it's today i think it's 11 labs recently told us that they're blocking 2 000 free trial abusers per day using striped signals incredible so you just think about how much money you'd be burning if you

were well how much money you wouldn't how much revenue you wouldn't be creating if you weren't getting these trials exactly exactly and then on the increasing agency side it's still just so hard to go global and think about having to register, calculate, remit taxes in so many geographies and this new crop of AI companies, the digital goods companies, and they want to just go global very fast.

And so I guess A-Refs is a good example. They're using this product, straight-managed payments, where in their home markets, the U.S., let's say they have an entity in Europe, they are the seller of record, but in long-tail markets, you know, the Kazakhsans and all

over APAC, where they haven't sort of entities, Stripe stands in as the actual merchant of record. We handle tax calculation, tax remittance, and everything like that. And so let's just let some cover 100 plus geographies and complainantly. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. And if you go back to the fraud example, if you identify abusive actors, there's actually a network effect in that business, right?

Which is super powerful. And obviously, we appreciate it as investors in many of the companies who benefited from it. So if you look at the product. set today. Obviously, the origin of Stripe was startups. And so you can very easily stand up payments, sell stuff online. And then famously, part of the beauty of Stripe's growth and business model is that you captured companies like DoorDash and Instacart when they were NYC. And then you grew with them along the way. How do you think about the product strategy as it relates to serving startups versus serving

large enterprises now. So I think it was actually Colin at clerk who summarized our strategy nicely on X recently where he said Stripe strategy is unabashed and paraphrasing his words, but it's win all the startups and then win them again. And I think to some extent that's just

a good business model because startups are very ambitious. They typically grow into the biggest companies of tomorrow. They're sort of canaries for what the next opportunity is. So I'm an Another subtle reason to win all the startups and win them again is they actually have the highest standards of all of our customers.

I looked recently at the CSAP for Stripes Reporting and for our very, very large enterprise users, your reporting is great. We love the data you go, so it's way better than anything we get from any of our other. Because they're accustomed to the incumbents, yeah. Exactly. And then you look at it for startups. You're reporting is garbage. You have got to fix this.

This is driving me crazy. And so there's this persistent sense that startups just make us better by being the fast. by being most demanding and so on. But of course, once we start working with the startups, we want to work with them forever. And so this pulls us up market and forces us to become as surprisingly great. That's the standard we try to hold ourselves to

for enterprises as for startups. And now we're working with, I don't know the exact percentages today, but it's not quite half, but we're getting there, Fortune 500 companies. We work, of course, with the Amazon's in the world, Microsoft's. And at the enterprise, it's sort of a different sales cycle. It's a different post-sale activation motion.

It's a lot more required after you've already signed the contract, whereas startups sort of go live like that. But fundamentally, it's the same thing. You just stay close to the user. You hear their needs. You show that you're sort of provably better when it comes to the metrics they care about. And yeah, so it's really both at this stage.

Yeah, win them and then win them again. I love that. Yeah, that's a great dynamic. I want to shift gears. So I think you guys publicly said that first half signups grew 50%. year over years, and that the median 26 cohort is generating 50% more revenue than the comparable 25 cohort. So, and then I think the 25 cohort was generating 70% more revenue than the comparable 24 cohort. So what has changed? Yeah. Well, I think two things. One is giving rise to

so much opportunity for new business creation. There's just, things you couldn't do before that you can do now. You couldn't build a Suno four years ago, or you could maybe build a much worse Suno four years ago. You couldn't build a Higgs field four years ago. There's just new things that you can do. And so suddenly the market opportunity landscape is just much broader, and you can do more of software.

On the other side, the sort of cost of doing more software has decreased a lot because you just need many fewer engineers to build the things that you want to build because of, you know, agentic coding. And so we're just seeing this explosion in new software creation. When you look at the year-on-year increase in usage of straight billing, it's actually a lot higher than usage of strike overall because it disproportionately skews towards people creating software companies.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. That's awesome to hear. I want to shift now to some of the products that we talked about, right? So you have this proliferation of new products to start. all the needs of companies online. The high-level question is, like, how do you do that? Like, how do you guys ship so much product?

Yeah. Well, speed has always been near the top. Maybe user, relentless focus on users, probably the top. Yeah, of course, no star. Yeah. Exactly. But speed is right up there. And it's interesting.

I think a lot about institutional progress. And we study the great companies that have come before us and now are beside us, The Amazon's are still around, of course. But you look at Stripe and you'd say, okay, well, we have sort of an adaptive version of how we set goals that's quite similar to Google's OK, ours. Yeah. You know, our sales team is organized pretty similarly to Microsoft's. You know, we have a DRI culture similar to apples and we, you know, have a product quality standard and how we do our product review is similar to theirs. a lot of the day-to-day mechanisms that I use to sort of run the business,

I've basically stolen from Alan Malawi, the former CEO of Ford and Boeing Aviation. And so we study these companies and we try to bring it all into Stripe. And we think about just how do we create an enduring institution that can sort of outlast any of us because it's a great container for entrepreneurship. And then you should have reached today. and there's just no one to copy. What do you do when, you know, a single engineer can do what, you know,

two teams of engineers could do two years ago? And, you know, sort of the theory of mind right now is that Stripe needs to become more than it ever has been before a platform for founders internally. And it's always been a platform for founders externally. Yes, yeah, of course, the customers. Yeah. Exactly. And founders have always done incredibly well at Stripe.

You know, we actually was an inducing company, Metronome. Yeah, of course. We acquired Metronome last year, and Scott Woody, the CEO, is thriving at Stripe. He's leading all of Metronome and billing at this point. We acquired Privy, which is a Wallets Infrastructure Company and Bridge over the last couple of years. And, you know, Henry is now leading most of crypto. Zach is leading OpenUSD and Bridge. Of course, Osta from Privy is leading.

You have engineering for crypto. JR Farr from Lemon Squeezy is leading to type treasury at this point. And so just founders have always done very well at Stripe. But now you have this very interesting moment where senior engineers are just so powerful. Yes. And so you say, well, there's a few different ways our org could be shaped going forward. It could be that we just have many fewer engineers. And maybe that's what the world would look like.

I think a lot of companies have skewed in that direction where they've seen this new, you know, agentic efficiency and power as a way to optimize cost structure. You've saw some layoffs, you saw, you know, companies shrinking OPEX. And our belief is that it's just an opportunity to, I'm being a little cheeky, but build everything. Yes.

And, you know, the best way to optimize your cost structure is to grow more. Yes, exactly. We have reams of user asks going back many years that are unmet, and so we just want to get through them all faster. And so while we have, you know, more and more productivity from most senior engineers, if you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create a founder-like agency inside your company.

And so the main things that are holding back our progress today are actually sort of back office things. You know, we are merging so much more code than last year. and it is stressing every system. It is stressing how do we get things into our seller systems? How do we get things onto our pricing page? How do we actually bring things to market when we can't train sellers on them fast enough?

And so we are really trying at this stage to optimize every single phase of, we think of it as sort of the critical path in Stripe from the ideas behind product development, the user asks all the way to products being in user's hands. And so to your question of how do you go faster, It's really two things. It's one, just how do you create that agency for everyone at Stripe?

How do you let everyone at Stripe be an otter, like a founder, a creative, and not have them held back by the morass of centralized processes? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And on the other side, then, it's how do you, you know, with your DevProd team, just make the tools better and better and better. So we create something called Stripe Minions, which we've blogged about a little bit. And, you know, of course we've got tons of developer tooling to help users iterate with agents.

But minions, we think of as, you know, the most, like, one of our most important metrics internally is how many PRs and what percentage of our PRs are created by minions. And the reason for that is that minions are one shot. Yeah. So you give it a prompt and, you know, it's going to build it and then it's going to, you know, go through CICD and all of testing. And then you're going to review it. So if you're not going to iterate, not go into planning mode, you're just going to say, this is what I want, go do it. And so we think, you know, that's kind of where the world is going.

You know, it's the one shot or the glorified Ralph Loop, where you're just letting the agent be super, super powerful. And so we blogged about minions, I think, in January, February, and they were doing 1,200, you know, PRs per week. And last week, I think 7,000 PRs came from minions. Wow. Yeah, and about 30% of our PRs in that we came from Minion. So, you know, that sort of developer tooling and then the internal processes just get out of the way and make the tools amazing.

And that's how we're going to go fast. That's amazing. In terms of empowering senior engineers who are now more powerful than ever, have you made any dramatic changes to how you organize the company internally? So obviously the Minion's example is incredible. and I assume the 30% is going to go to a very high percentage within a year or something. But some of the things that we've heard from other companies is taking your most powerful engineers,

putting them into business units or closer to the customers. But then you have sort of coordination problems that come from that. So how have you guys approached that empowerment? So engineers have always been, you know, some of the most important product leaders at Stripe. You know, we build for engineers for technical users. Of course, we've built for many personas at this point.

but engineers have always been sort of the hero, you know, ICP for Stripe. And so because of that, engineers have always been some combination of engineer, PM, designer. And so I think we're just leaning even more into that. You know, we're building tools and platforms so that engineers can sort of do a lot of the front-end development themselves and front-end design themselves. probably, you know, just the shortest answer to your question is flatter. Yeah, flatter. Smaller teams. Smaller teams, flatter.

You had, you know, a lot of layers that were sort of orchestrating work, and very valuably so in most cases. Right. At the time, yeah. Exactly. But you just don't need that anymore. I was talking to one of our most senior engineers recently. In fact, the guy who built Stripe Projects, because Strait Projects was, you know, basically a PM and a very senior engineer and a few weeks and a couple of other engineers who

jumped in as well so want to give them due credit but most of the PRs came from one guy it's got Alexander now he just got a screen he's orchestrating 16 agents and he's going a whole lot faster yeah that's amazing do you have a standard uh team size for projects like this is it like we've gone around it's like okay one you know one there's no social dynamic and so maybe that doesn't work and four is probably the max size and we've heard everything in between you have a view on it not really I mean we still have I mean you kind of want in a flatter org you both want wider teams right because that means fewer layers of management but then you know you also sort of believe you can have fewer people

because each individual is is more empowered these days and so I think those forces are offsetting to some extent today. And in fact, it's more like, you know, if you have a line-managed team of eight people, they're just doing three X more. Yeah, exactly. So you might have the same manager to IC ratio, but the team is doing three things rather than one. Yeah, that makes total sense. So one of the things that, you know, I have talked about is, and you touched on it, but I'd like to expand on a little more, is this idea that you can do all these new things with AI. And so where do you direct the efforts?

And so you guys have very clearly directed the efforts toward the front-facing stuff, so building new products for customers. And lots of what is discussed in the market is back-in-facing stuff. So optimizing your call structure, as you said, everything is a markdown file, and, you know, let's map out everything that everyone does in the organization and optimize it to death. Talk about your philosophy for why you want to go for the former and not the latter. Yeah.

So I think there was an early narrative, and it still lingers for sure. And there's some truth to it of just, we have agents now, we should be more efficient, we should be able to do more with less. And the main thing I actually think about on this front is making our people more productive. We have a tool internally called Kai, which is our sort of knowledge AI tool. And we built it, I don't know, maybe six months ago, two people built it. Now, 83% daily actives, or sorry, 8,3% weekly actives, about 60% daily actives at Stripe. Cellar productivity is increased by 20%.

But we're not saying, wow, we need fewer sellers. We're saying, so we need a lot more sellers. You know, it's just, you know. The idea of payback of our sellers just got way better. We should have way more of them. Exactly. And then on the flip side, You know, operational teams are just feeling much more productive their day-to-day life is more enjoyable.

They're using better tools. They're having to do less, you know, manual work. And so, you know, it's almost trite in tech circles now, but the Javon's paradox, you know, an asset becomes more productive. You don't want less. You want more. Yeah, exactly. And it is very much the case for us when it comes to engineers.

You know, our engineers are just magnificently more productive. And so I mentioned earlier just making straight a platform for. for founders, like internal platform for founders, going forward, you could say, well, because engineers are so productive, there'll just be fewer engineers in the world. And I just really don't believe that, and that's not what we're seeing at all.

You know, you see that much more software creation. We, you know, there was a narrative nine months ago about, you know, SaaS platforms and how they're, you know, vertical platforms, you know, how they were all going to struggle. our new SaaS platform cohort is 103% larger than in 2026 and it was in 2025. So people are just saying, well, there's so many spaces that need a SaaS platform. I'm building it faster and faster and faster.

And so I think there will be more software engineers in the world. We will need fewer of them to do the things we're already doing. Right. And so Stripe then becomes for new grads and early career engineers, more of an incubator of come in, figure out a high agency project that can help our users. Let's get out of your way. Let's create the pave paths. Let's make it easy for you to go faster. And we should be able to just build more and more and more. And not just random things, but adjacencies that sort of compound what we're doing today. So spend management is adjacent to Treasury.

and that might have been roadmapped for two years from now. Instead, one engineer has picked it up as a project, and they're just building it themselves. Actually, I wrote the first commit for it, but they're now running with it. It's more capable hands now. Exactly, more capable of hands. So, yeah, we believe the big opportunity

and the one that we're leaning into is doing more with what we have and over time doing more with more. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I wrote a piece recently, about founders being the asset class, like the representation of our market of late stage venture, which you guys are probably at the forefront of, founders are the asset class

because founders are going to be the ones who enable the companies to find the next product areas. And so this idea that you have to make tradeoffs today around do we try and build new products for revenue or cut costs, I think for companies like Stripe that are run by you guys, there's probably always going to be that next opportunity to create additional revenue opportunities. opportunities, you know, find the new customer products that are a big hit, and that is never going to go away.

You're always going to have the chance to build more. Yes, absolutely. I do think it's a good moment for company leaders to create some resourcing back pressure because that back pressure drives more efficient and more expansive use of new tools. But I also imagine that in the years ahead, we'll have a budgeting process that looks not that dissimilar for what it's been in the past of we're doing so much with what we have. We can do even more if we continue to expand resourcing. But in this moment, I think it is a good time to say, well, let's really do a lot what we have today

because you still see increases in productivity from what you already have. Beyond that, from a user's first standpoint, just there's so much more they want from us. You know, we've heard from a lot of users that for Stripe tax, they want global filing. And it took us a long time to get to you know, U.S. filing on strike tax, meaning that, you know, every state in the U.S.

will just automatically file for you. It's a hard. It's a hard problem because you are dealing with so many different jurisdictions that accept filing in different ways. And so it took us a long time to get there. Global filing was the next ask. You know, we just don't want to think about this in any market. And we built that in about a third of the time that it took us to get to U.S. filing. Wow, with much greater complexity. Exactly. Much greater complexity. And so it's just like an infinite list of asks and opportunities like that. And so if you're just relentlessly focused on users, you're going to focus on that. We launched recently a product called Strip Treasury.

And it's an interesting moment in sort of FinTech right now because I think there is sort of an unbundling of what banking means. And Stripe is not a bank, does not aspire to be a bank, but does aspire to provide your banking port. And to help you with global money movement, is this something that we've been asked for for a very long time? And so we built straight treasury to allow our users to hold funds in dozens of currencies, across many countries, and just build what the banking portal should be able to do. And so, you know, we've focused on bringing this experience to users extremely quickly. And what we're finding in every case is that the timelines that we thought, you know, were the best doable two years ago are now being compressed again and again and again.

And it's because the direction that we're finding from an eugenic engineering standpoint is kind of akin to injection molding. You know, it's a bit reductionist. Yeah. But when you look at the growth-in-containty-tanked packaged goods and toys and things like that, a lot of it just exploded post-war. And it was because we got really good in the 40s at melting plastic. It's the injection-molding screw that sort of melts plastic very evenly and sort of injects it into a metal casting. And that's sort of how we're doing code production at this point.

We're creating the mold and the templates. You mentioned markdown files. Like those are extremely important. You need your agents files in every repo. And as long as you create those patterns and you sort of understand the pattern of how you integrate with financial institutions, you can hand off so much lower work to agents. And they just get it done. And all of the time you end up spending is sort of on the back end at code review. But even then, agents are doing code review even better than humans did.

So just again, compressing timelines, it just feels like a much bigger opportunity than optimize the cost structure. Yeah, I think you may be the first person to compare modern AI-based software engineering to injection molding. So this is great. We're covering your guns. And I've actually been to an injection molding plant before. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing, especially when you think about the fact that it was probably 70 years ago that it was created.

James Watson Hendry, I think was the guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been in Pennsylvania. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. That's great. You know, if you, you know, as an investor in Stripe, you know, large investor in Stripe, another way, that I think about what you just described is the opportunity to optimize cost is finite, right?

You said long versus short. Yeah, I really like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's, optimising your cost structure is going short, sort of your own future potential and just building faster, building more is going long, you know, your future potential. It's like the capital allocation equivalent of, like, returning cash. Yes. As opposed to reinvesting cash. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got it. Okay. I want to shift over to a new topic, which you guys are on the cutting edge of, and which gets a lot of play, but almost in like a nebulous sense. I'd like to go a little bit deeper on it with you,

which is sort of agents engaging in commerce on the internet. So what is the state of where we are today? What are the bottlenecks? And how do you sort of view a framework for how that could be done in the future? Yeah. So we are, you know, we talked about the Opus 4-5 Cambrian explosion moment.

We haven't had that in agent of commerce today. There isn't a just, there aren't a ton of canonical use cases that you just see repeated over and over and over again. And I think there's a few reasons for that. One is we're missing primitives. Right. And just that's something we're very focused on. You know, we created the tempo, the machine payments protocol, so that services can indicate, you know, what needs to be paid and how you can pay for it. So if you're selling an image or a piece of content online, you can request it and get a 402 response back.

And it just says, like, here's how you buy me. So that's a primitive. Like we think machines will want to buy from other machines. And there's just a question of like, what should checkout look like for agents? It's still sort of an open question. You know, browser automation is getting better. So maybe agents should just be, you know, crawling through checkout forms and tell them out. I think there's still a lot of open questions.

Yeah, that's the skemorphic version. Exactly. There's going to be a native version. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I know that's right. So we're sort of at the missing primitives phase, and we're sort of figuring that out. And then there's a sociological phase of just in what ways will agentic commerce be better than non-agentic commerce.

And there's some very non-speculative ways in which it'll be better. Like just check out pages shouldn't exist for humans, you know, with, with Stripe Link and shop a shop pay. It's very easy to get through a checkout page these days, but should you even need to go to one or should you just be able to say, buy it on a product display page? I think so.

I think just checkout pages will go away. That'll be the thing of the best. Yeah, I think they'll go away. And so that's like a sort of non-speculative, but maybe less ambitious form of agentic commerce. I actually think that's interesting because they will go away for human users too. This is not just like only commerce.

Yes, okay, so StripedLink, like you have like 400 million users on Striplink, and shop pay probably has some comparable to the large number, and then you can use those and just automate the whole process. Exactly. Yeah, we launched recently the Link Agent Wallet, so that there's now just a Link CLI. So an agent can just sweep up link credentials and go use them with humans in the loop to say how they can use them.

I think one of the places we were the most excited about Agentic Commerce actually is B2B. So we launched straight projects, Straight Projects is, you know, a way to scaffold apps. And that's sort of the narrow definition of it. But the most exciting thing that Strait Projects is is a way to provision B2B services agentically. So you can go, an agent can go adopt a VERSEL for hosting. And they can do it without you needing to go to vassal.com and do anything.

This is actually informed our investment thesis in a few investments recently. Yes. They're developer tools. Yes. And we say, okay, assume that the agents are going to, be the shoppers in the future. Exactly. Like, is this the one that the agents will want to pick?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And that's a very good framework. You know, an agent can go adopt browser base. Yeah. And we actually had a really great demo a while back at Stripe where we used browser base live to, via an agent to fill out an NCAA bracket. That's cool. That's great.

Which I thought was awesome because I have three brothers and, you know, we all love sports, but I'm always too busy to engage in the family pools. And so it was so cool to just watch the agent pick up a browser base session and fire up ESPN.com and do a bit of research and just like fill it out. How did it do? I don't actually know. I don't think we ever sort of ran the evils on it. I suspect probably as good as humans. Probably better.

Yeah, exactly. Probably better. And so I do think agents sort of adopting B2B or sort of B2C services that are more utilitarian. will be very popular. And so today, again, as a primitive, we're just trying to make it easier for agents to adopt services. But I do think the sort of sociology will continue to evolve.

You know, the long-running tasks are not sort of, I don't know that we've sort of figured out exactly how to do them on the consumer side. Yeah, it's not there yet. My, I was trying the other day. I was using plug code to try to compose a song for my niece's birthday. Oh. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

And, you know, in the past, without a Suno, I just, like, definitely wouldn't have done that. With a Suno, I might do that. You might do it with the Higgs field as well. We're talking about them earlier. But I'm not sure that I want to go create a $10.99 or $9.99 a month account with them. I just want the sort of microconsumption for that. And so, you know, along with the actual. commerce primitives, I think there's these microconsumption APIs that need to sort to exist.

And browser rates we're talking about, they're sort of leaning into it. But I'm very bullish on, you know, all these services standing up, you know, sort of not necessarily anonymous, but just ephemeral or one-time consumption. And I think that will really unlock agent at commerce too, because then you won't have to say, well, I need to pay these guys, 10 bucks a month, but these guys, 10 bucks on these. You just forget their accounts and all this stuff. Exactly. Just use the service and pay. Agent, do this, discover the services. is your budget is $15.

Go. My 10-year-old has been creating rap songs. So I'm very familiar with all of these services. Yes, yes. And by the way, you know, the quality is actually pretty good. And he posts them on Spotify. Yes. But the execution maybe is not quite as good,

but the lyrics are very good from AI. And the music itself is pretty good. Yes. So, yeah, I would welcome that. So the critical thing, I think, one of the critical things that you just said is this concept of micro-payments or microtransactions.

So this has been something that has been talked about probably since the advent of the internet as an opportunity. Like, why do you think now it could work? Well, agents really increase human agency, I guess. It almost sounds redundant.

But, you know, talking about these applications, composing a song for your knees, filling out your NCAA racket, whatever else, it's really hard to do without agents. It take a lot of time. You're creating all these different accounts. And so I'm just very bullish on services leaning into saying you can use me ephemerally. You can use me in a very, you know, sort of lightweight way.

And I think to make that work, you're just going to need to support microtransactions. I think the case against microtransactions has always been, well, you're trying to consume content. and if you're trying to sell an article, you're always going to be squeezed between the subscriber business model and the free business model. You want to capture the excess as part of the subscriber. Exactly.

You capture the excess or you do it with ads. And just like one or the other is better than what you're doing. And I think that was probably true in the past. But as you give agents more complex tasks, you know, you want them to be these little sort of hummingbirds, like going around the internet, just slipping up a little data here, you know,

pulling it over here, you know, some very transient ephemeral storage, doing a little compute over here. And you don't want the individual human to have to think about what they're using. You know, you want them thinking about what they're using in that these services are secure, right? Right. They're bona fide. But you don't want them to have to sort of create accounts everywhere. So I think microtransactions will just be necessary for that economy to exist, the sort of agentic economy. And then on the flip side, they're now eminently possible because of stable.

Yeah. And stable coins are in today relatively unergonomic. So if you're a human, you know, you have to go jump through a bunch of hoops. Yep. But if you just give an agent a budget, they can easily, you know, take dollars, move into stables or, you know, just use a shared balance and find a way to check out. And they don't mind the sort of back and forth. Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And look, we've seen that transition that's happened. in a lot of software business models today, right? Like the predominant business model of selling subscriptions and seats, and we've now seen a shift to consumption. And I think, you know, there's probably analogies where, you know, the consumers are better off

because they can get access to more stuff. And then the businesses can access more people, which they otherwise couldn't access from the service. So my hope is that that, you know, that does come into play. So on the topic of stable coins, so we've covered sort of how you guys build software, how you move so fast in an AI development world. We've talked about the idea of commerce, you know, agenda commerce.

Talk about stable coins. Like you said there's a lot of friction in the process today, but just state of the stable coin market and what you see the opportunity to be for the next call at five years. So I'm an infrastructure nerd, so I always will go there first. And stable coins are just a better platform

for moving money than exists otherwise. We strongly agree. And better for a couple reasons. You know, there are certain countries that have, you know, rolled out really good payment systems. Most of them are nationalized, you know, UPI in India. Actually, it's interesting when you look at these economies, the percentage of sub-5-dollar payments in India, I believe, is on UPI is, I think, something like 86%. Whereas in the U.S. cards, I think it's single digits percent. So, you know, there's some good, cheap, fast payment schemes that are nationalized, picks

another one in Brazil, which is really, mediarchly. But you need a shelling point for the global economy, right? Right. Just what can we all agree on? And that's where crypto rails solve this political problem. Right. Just this platform works everywhere. And so if we just all used it, the world, the global financial system would work better,

be faster, be cheaper and so on. So if we all went to sleep tonight and woke up tomorrow and we all held stables, it would just be a better global... Friesion and less cost to the economy. Exactly. Now, that might be one of those should work this way, may never work this way problems. And so we are sort of resolutely focused on trying to change that. We talked earlier about striped treasury. And we decided to make stable coins native to strike treasury.

So you can just hold a balance in stables, just like you hold a balance in USD or EUR, or TPP or anything like that. So we believe that the opportunity for stables is just faster money movement, cheaper money movement, and more global money movement. Right now you can be a stripe user in, I can't remember what the exact number is, but around 60 countries in fiat. But you can be a stripe user in stable coins. in I think about 150 countries. So just bringing more people into the online economy in a way that allows them to transact with the AI companies and as the economy, the software economy gets more and more global.

Bringing more people into it is more and more valuable. You can build a powerful AI company with two engineers in Thailand just as well as you can do it in the US or as well as you can do it in Brazil. So, you know, for Stables, for us, it is higher performance and more global. Yeah. And I like the position that you guys are in as relates to Stable Coins just because, again, talk about meeting the market where it is. Like, people don't want to cut over full wholesale and just, you know, drop all their fiat and move over to Stable Coins.

So I think the relationships that you have and the sort of comprehensive offering that you have allows for adoption to happen at the pace that the enterprise is one adoption and adopt at. Or startups. Yeah. Yeah. And all of this works. you know, when you really lean into it, Felix Pogger, Felix, I think, is as they're called now, which started as a remittance company between the U.S. and Mexico, and now, you know, has other corridors as well. They built it on Stables.

And a few years in, they're now between 5 and 10 percent of remittances along that corridor, which is the largest remittance corridor in the world. Yeah, it's amazing. And so, you know, you think about how long it takes companies to, to move fiat money efficiently, you know, how long it took initially for the wisest of the world to do this, let alone the Western unions before it. And, you know, these are great companies. But to get to 5 to 10% in just a few years is amazing.

That's remarkable. Yeah. I'd love to have you talk a little bit about tempo. Yeah. So, you know, obviously it's a big important project that you guys are in the center of. Talk about, you know, where that is and what the aspirations for it are. Yeah. I think this, I'll just play the infrastructure nerd card again for a second.

There are great blockchains. And I think there are, you know, there was no obvious need for another blockchain outside of payments. Right. And there's a whole lot of reasons why a payment-specific blockchain can work really well. You know, privacy for one, because, you know, blockchains are generally public and sort of reverse engineer, you know, what's happening. on blockchains. So I want to make sure that privacy is a first class primitive, making sure that throughput is never sacrificed.

Blockchains are disproportionately used for trading. And so when you see massive trading events happen, you'll typically see performance degrade a lot. Transaction fees, like finding a way to create a blockchain where the transaction fee is never going to spike because other blockchains have... That's ability is important. Yeah, exactly.

And they have, you know, floating sort of gas. And so the project there is just saying, how do we move money, you know, as efficiently, consistently, and cheaply as possible. Still in the early stages of building out, getting a lot of great traction. You're working with companies like DoorDash, you know, making it sort of the default, but not only blockchain in Stripe and feeling very optimistic about it. That's great. That's awesome. Last topic I would love to cover with you is just the sort of token economy. And so, you know, it sounds a little buzzwordy, but you guys are, you know, I think over two trillion of volume now.

And I think, you know, you and I would probably share the belief that the token economy is going to be one of the biggest things we've ever seen. So, you know, what do you think is kind of the state of play for accessing tokens? You know, obviously there's a lot of work that gets done in first-party applications today. But, you know, what do you think is sort of the future state of how we all access models and tokens? Yeah. Well, I love, I've always loved the word token. And the reason is that it just sounds like an approximation of money. Yeah. And increasing that's just what it is. Right. We're seeing, you know, we talked earlier about, you know, free trial abuse, multi-accounting. And the attacks that we're seeing against users who have sort of general, whose platforms are general purpose token consumers. You know, you can do just about anything with tokens on cursor, right? you just want anything with tokens on Repple. So the attacks against these users are very sophisticated. They're very reminiscent of what we see in terms of people trying to steal money from the stripe users.

And so there's this blurring that you see between tokens and dollars. And so for us, we think about wanting to help users move money, store money, send money, safely, compliantly and so on. And the, we now feel this mandate to do the same thing on tokens, right? To protect our users in the same way. And, you know, over time, I think this is only going to happen more, right? You know, we talk about some of these long running agented tasks.

And a lot of them will replace, you know, services. And you'll just be able to say, you know, close my books. And I used to pay, you know, a human in tokens for that. Now, or many humans, now I pay fewer humans or a human, or sorry, in dollars for that. Now I pay fewer humans or a human in tokens, right? Because they're augmented by my agents. So we just want to make sure that moving between tokens and dollars is as seamless and safe as move between, you know, dollars and euros.

We're at the beginning of this journey, but we think it's going to be a big part of the future of Stripe. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, it's, it's super exciting. And look, personally speaking, I think you guys have a real right to play a role there because of the relationship that you have with somebody companies since inception all the way through to enterprises, as you said. Yeah, and we usually, it's funny, we're always a little bit careful internally about talking about rights. And so we talk about mandates. And that's good. Yeah, we feel like it.

And then win it again. Exactly. We have a mandate to help users with this. And so that's why we're really leaning into it. You know, there's, we're also focusing even more on spend management for our. our customers, you know, they're using Stripe Treasury, they're thinking a lot about how much they're spending, and how to reduce their spending,

how they're spending ties due to revenue. And, you know, a lot of token usage is actually in product. Yeah. So you see sort of two different types of token usage. One is, you know, to build things, and this is sort of the OPEX management side of token management. And then there's the product efficacy side. Right. Of token management, just how good is my,

token-oriented or sort of token-driven product, you know, how should I shift between different models to make it the most effective? And so we're really thinking about how do we help users on both of these? Yeah, for sure. I mean, certainly in the latter, this sort of, you know, position as an orchestration layer that helps you effectively get the most out of tokens and, you know, also maintain some form of control, I think, has like never been more top of mind than it is right now. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, It's interesting because there's a hypothesis that software will be severely commoditized. And it's plausible.

You know, I think we're at the, let's say we're either in the singularity or creeping towards the singularity. And it's very hard to estimate what a future looks like where, you know, models are sort of recursively, you know, generating models and so on and so on. but we are seeing the exact opposite right now where software creation is exploding. Yes. Customers are monetizing faster than ever. And we talked about our 20-26 cohort growing 50% faster than our, or 50% larger and growing faster than 25 cohort,

that one being 70% larger and growing faster than the 24 cohort. And so, you know, some more software being created. It's being adopted faster than ever before. and then more straight products are being adopted than ever before. 11 labs is using 14 straight products. I just wish it were 11 in a way.

I'm glad it's 14. Just make it 22. We're close with Maddie and he does everything in denominations of 11. Exactly. You've got to shoot for 22. Exactly. And there's a lot more to software

than just building. There's the expertise about how abstractions should thread through your entire business and sort of keeping those up to date and you have turnover inside of your company and so you build a system internally and then it starts to sort of degrade and that person leaves the company and the expertise goes away and so we think about just how can we help companies

across their entire revenue stack you know manage cash manage revenue close the books faster grow faster globalized faster and that opportunity i think is just larger than it was ever ever was before yeah couldn't agree more um so in closing uh i wanted to just get your take and this is I don't want to get too deep into, you know, the role of humans versus AI. But one of the things that Stripe has always been universally recognized for and appreciated for, I think, is your taste, right? And it sounds funny because you're an infrastructure company, but I think it's generally agreed upon. How do you continue to uphold that at such a large scale and with so much of the work that you're doing now being done by AI? Yeah, it's interesting how much the word taste is being used right now.

And it's sort of hard sometimes. It's, you know, the cynical view is that it's how we're all justifying our future value. Yeah, that no one actually has taste and it's just we're all reproducing. Yeah, exactly. We're reproducing machines of things that we had previously perceived. Yes, yes. And like my fingers are no longer as useful, but this nebulous notion of taste is, and models will never have tastes and so on. It's probably just not true.

Yeah, I agree with you down there. But to your, you know, more approximate to your question, you know, product quality is really, really core to our culture and to our identity. And it's for a few reasons. One is just we want users to have amazing tools that are carefully crafted that, you know, can make them go faster, you know, enjoy, you know, the journey of building a company that much more. It's not an easy journey. But if you have tools that are surprisingly great, it feels that much better. So it's a big user lens. Another dimension of it is it's just more fun.

You look at what you created with your team and you're like, wow, that looks amazing versus you know, you kind of janked this thing together and it barely works. And, you know, it just isn't as fun, you know, to go through the slog, the long nights, the long weekends and so on to build it. And I think the single thing I would say for scaling tastes, it's right. Actually, two things. One is I think it has to be a top stand. You just have to say it over and over and over again.

It's like the company strategy of when the start-ups and when again, it's like talk about quality and talk about it again. And then the other thing is just use the product. Yes. And make it easy to use the product. You know, in aviation, you know, simulation is so important. like you can't you can't just say like I hope the jet works you have to kind of prove to yourself that it before you ever fly it or in invidia you know they really hit escape velocity was when they you know went from needing to wait for the fab to give them the chips to try the chips to actually simulate chip forms and so we actually invest a lot in simulating the usage of products yeah well and so you can point to an account and say you know give me something that looks like that yeah but make it you know completely PII by, you know, free, you know,

randomized the growth rate, so I don't actually know how big they are. But just, you know, the day-dating problems that they face, you know, the ups and downs of their business, the seasonality, you know, give me a sense of that. And then, you know, make it feel alive, you know, make it so that I feel like I'm receiving disputes from customers and refunds are happening.

And, of course, these aren't real disputes. They're not real refunds, but just give me the experience that users having. So I can really live in it and use that with my. team. And so I think, you know, you have the, the mandate to use the product and we really ask our EMs to lead this because they're the ones who control the resources and they're the ones who can sort of say, wow, this does not feel good. It needs to get fixed. So we're going to, you know, our next sprint is going to be elevating quality. And the other side, it's how do you give people the

tools to do it more easily? So scaling taste for us is, you know, culture and it is the, you know, shibolets and then it is the daily rhythms. I'm just using the process. products and stepping into these issues. That's awesome. That's so great. Will, this is so fun to talk to you about all these topics, you know, obviously covering how you're building so much product inside Stripe, which is super unique and right on the cutting edge, I think, and the future of how we engage in agentic commerce and stable coins. You know, one of the things that I think you guys have said is, you know, how do we assure that we build the next stripe inside of Stripe? Yes.

and I love that in closing, and I really appreciate the time. Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family.

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