Why Stripe isn't in a hurry to IPO

Will explains Stripe's rationale for staying private: little incremental benefit from IPO given strong profitability and alternatives.

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Episode notes

Will Gaybrick is the President of Technology and Business at Stripe.

Stripe builds financial infrastructure for the internet, and if you’ve ever purchased a product online, you’ve probably used Stripe.

We talk about what Stripe’s doing in crypto and stablecoins, how AI is changing commerce and payments, how they’re thinking about going public, how they build products internally, and interesting data they’re seeing around AI-native companies, like how they’re growing 3.5x faster than SaaS companies.

Thank you to Claire Hughes Johnson, Josh Kushner, and Cosmin Nicolaescu for help brainstorming topics for the conversation.

Thank you to Numeral and Amplitude for sponsoring this episode.Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance. Try it here: https://www.numeral.com

Amplitude: Listen to users at scale with AI https://www.amplitude.com/AI-Feedback

Timestamps:

2:42 Will’s promotion

5:29 Build vs Buy in AI

6:39 Inside the Bridge acquisition

8:54 Stripe’s stablecoin strategy

11:20 Why building Stripe is so complicated

13:22 How Stripe builds new products

18:29 AI companies growing 3.5x faster than SaaS

22:58 New fraud vectors in AI businesses

25:19 Agentic commerce in ChatGPT

29:34 Building modular products