Stripe’s strategy is to “win all the startups and then win them again.” I had a great time talking with @gaybrick. Will has held a broad seat at @stripe for more than a decade, joining as CFO in 2015, and today leading Technology and Business. This makes him the right person to explain how Stripe went from a simple payments API to a platform with ~25-30 banner products and 288 launches at its most recent Sessions event. Here’s what their strategy looks like: -Companies like DoorDash and Instacart started on Stripe when they were tiny and pulled the company upmarket as they expanded. -The fastest startups act as canaries for new product opportunities. Cursor surfaced a burgeoning problem of AI free-trial and token abuse; so Stripe built a token detection pipeline with the team in a weekend, and the resulting network now helps companies on Stripe’s platform block thousands of fraudulent trials daily. -Stripe keeps expanding the number of needs it serves inside each company, from Billing, Radar, and Tax to Managed Payments, Treasury, and stablecoin infrastructure. There is a large and timely lesson from Stripe which I strongly agree with: using AI solely to reduce cost is essentially going short your own company. Instead, companies should be using AI (and the tailwinds it creates) to ship more, serve users better, and create their next product line. And as Stripe continues to invest in agentic commerce, the company can move from processing a transaction to orchestrating the entire economic loop around it. The line between tokens and dollars is already blurring, and Stripe’s next mandate is to make moving between them as seamless and safe as moving between dollars and euros. A fun conversation about what it takes to build the next Stripe inside Stripe. @a16z