Stripe

Great experience joining Patrick Collison and John Collison for a fireside chat with Stripe last week! I joined Manuel J Godoy to share the Félix story, what we’re building across remittances, financial products, and cross-border services powered by new rails. Big shoutout to our amazing AE Valentina Buitron!

79% of Gen Z shoppers now prefer digital wallets over other payment methods. Globally, digital wallets account for 30% of total point-of-sale volume. We analyzed checkout activity across 20K businesses on Stripe to understand how agents, digital wallets, and trust are rewriting checkout. Read the blog: https://lnkd.in/gTSaxRkh.

Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. He sits down with John Collison and Elad Gil to discuss Google’s resurgence in the AI race, managing a massive $180 billion CapEx budget, and why 2026 is the year of the supply crunch. They cover the constraints of memory and power, why he believes the US economy will grow significantly due to AI, and the internal cultural shift back to "Googley" optimism. Sundar also shares details on long-term bets like data centers in space, why he wishes he had funded Waymo even faster, and the small thing inside Google that still ignites his passion for building. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gY4HRtJs Spotify: https://lnkd.in/g3hA3kQ7 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gi82kspG Full transcript on Substack: https://lnkd.in/gSPdzebz

Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, joins the pub to discuss building the future of agentic trust. She explains why compliance has a “vitamin vs painkiller” dynamic, the drama behind their famous 101-billboard campaign, and why she believes "market sizing is bullshit." They cover the tension between vibe coding and rigorous security, how Vanta is using agents to generate UI, and why the best founders are relentless truth-seekers. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gbVejU2W  Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gdBJAUyx Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/g8gsYmFP Full transcript on Substack: https://lnkd.in/gPXJF8Rc

We’re rolling out a preview of Stripe Projects. Provision your stack from the CLI and set up hosting, databases, auth, analytics, and monitoring. Sign up: https://projects.dev. 

We're powering a new way to buy on Facebook with the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Businesses can turn on selling with Meta ads from the Stripe Dashboard, letting buyers complete purchases in one click from businesses like Fanatics and Quince. https://lnkd.in/gSB9dU8C

“There’s driver-assist systems, and then there is full autonomy. I see it as fundamentally two different problems. I think it’s deceptive to think of them as incremental on one spectrum of complexity. The hardest parts of building a fully autonomous, rider-only system are very different from what you do for a driver-assist system. I don’t want to say you can’t make the jump, but it is a qualitative jump.” Waymo is now doing nearly 500,000 rides a week across 10 cities. Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov came to the pub to discuss how they moved from scientific research to massive global scaling. He gives a masterclass on the sensor stack (and why you still need Lidar), how they use "Simulation" and "Critic" models to train the AI, and why he believes cars that require human supervision will never naturally evolve into robotaxis. They also cover the new custom-built vehicle that feels like a living room, the economics of ride-hailing in rural Alaska, and the "Russian math nerd" diaspora that seems to run the UK tech scene. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gKJF5KmN Spotify: https://lnkd.in/g-RnGrh4 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gtfXAcEt Substack: https://lnkd.in/g6u9x5_U

Adaptive Pricing is now available for subscriptions, letting businesses automatically localize prices in over 150 countries while Stripe handles currency conversion. In an A/B test across 1.5 million subscription checkouts, businesses saw 4.7% higher conversion: https://lnkd.in/gye_63AD.

AI agents are not going to replace software engineers yet, at least not when building Stripe integrations. The critical gap between our AI reality today and production-ready reality: we sorely lack a stable and realistic validation layer, especially when it comes to financial infrastructure where we require 100% accuracy. So to measure how AI is progressing on that last mile of value, Kevin Ho and I built a set of robust, replicable software engineering environments to benchmark models on their ability to build complete Stripe integrations. They mirror realistic integration scenarios: huge codebases, data migrations, breaking version changes, server and client-side API integrations, and even browser use. The range of results were extremely surprising, and even more exciting is how we now have an experimentation test bed to demonstrably improve how models integrate with Stripe. We’ve open-sourced the full benchmark suite in our AI toolkit: https://lnkd.in/em-aEwMF. Read the blog post: https://lnkd.in/eXAVSHRq.