Our intern just built the first zero-person company. Listen's agent ran a loop: - Interview users - Build - Test with real people - Fix issues - Repeat 2,000 interviews and 100 concepts later: an app with 100s of paying customers. Here’s how it works:

I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (projects.dev) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: bookofkells.vercel.app. I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.

Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: joinopenstandard.com.

RT @stripe: There are many important products (public goods!) that would improve the world but don’t exist because the commercial motivatio…

The launch blogpost is worth reading: interceptfund.substack.com/p…

We're launching Intercept, a new philanthropic initiative to fight respiratory viruses like colds and flus. interceptfund.com/

Very early experiment but I think this will be cool. stripe.directory.

Delighted for @eileenomara to become Stripe’s Vice Chair and @tybryson our Chief Revenue Officer. The internet economy is entering a period of significant change. Eileen will work with policymakers, officials, and leaders at Stripe’s customers and partners to advance entrepreneurship and increase economic dynamism globally.

Ireland has ended up a vetocracy.

First day on the job and the CEO already trusts me to go get apple gift cards for him

Congrats @destraynor, @eoghan and the entire Fin / Intercom team! Very well deserved for impressive execution.

seems like an overreaction. it’s just an $85B offering and they do need to ramp capex to remain competitive. the dilution is minimal

Me: “Can you please print this black and white document?” My printer: “Whilst my cyan is depleted? Are you insane?”

.@Collision is bullish on two types of people: high-agency individuals and double majors. "There are two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now and I think will do incredibly well over the next 10-20 years. First, high-agency people. The people at Stripe who have been talking to customers and know exactly what we should do. It's the people who have that pep in their step and want to go make Stripe better. They are so much more empowered thanks to AI." "The second is double majors. I think if you understand software and understand finance, or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company. Now, one person can do what would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems." "Charlie Munger talked about the importance of being multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking. He thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books now or you can talk to your AI about it. I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well."

At Stripe Sessions, we showed how we think agentic commerce will often happen behind the scenes in the course of producing other final products. Here, we show our Claude Code using MPP and @tempo to buy a dataset from @alpha_vantage in the process of generating a research report for me on AI energy usage.

We've been thinking a lot at Stripe about the Coasean lens on AI: - The obvious near-term effect is reduced transaction costs within companies: shared context, systems of record, aligned incentives etc. - But inter-company transaction costs also reduce sharply: agents are great at discovery, make it trivially easy to integrate; make contracting much more straightforward; agent-to-agent commerce. - On net, we think second effect bigger in medium term: fewer people per firm, more output per firm, just more firms, and more coordination happening through market-like mechanisms

Your honour, I think this should be allowed.

I spoke to @EdLudlow at @business from Stripe Sessions about how the economy is replatforming around AI. bloomberg.com/news/videos/20…

We just announced a large raft of improvements at @Stripe Sessions. My meta reflections: • It feels that the entire economy is replatforming right now. • Many charts at Stripe are inflecting in quite dramatic ways. What GitHub recently reported for commits we are seeing in economic activity (such as new company formations). • It is increasingly clear that agents will be responsible for most transactions in the not overly distant future. • Stripe was always developer-centric, but AI is making developer-centricity strategic in a new way: agents are even hungrier for good DX than developers themselves are. • Things that we’re launching are increasingly network products at heart. (Instant transfers between Stripe businesses, new kinds of fraud prevention with Stripe Radar, stablecoin payouts to anyone with Link.) "How can we turn Stripe's economies of scale into user benefits?" is increasingly the relevant question. • Between Privy, Bridge, Tempo, and Stripe’s core capabilities, we’re now doing a lot in stablecoins/crypto, and companies like DoorDash, Ramp, Meta, and Klarna are using our crypto stack to deploy meaningful new functionality in production. “But where’s the production use?” is rapidly becoming stale when applied to crypto. • After more than a decade of building, we seem to have hit some kind of critical mass of core platform capabilities such that building new things now feels easier and faster than before. (AI also helps.) We announced Stripe Treasury last year (originally called Financial Accounts); since then, we’ve added multi-currency support, global payouts, card issuance and rewards, and a bunch of other sophisticated functionality. By the end of this year, Treasury will support 15 more currencies and be available to businesses in 160 countries. On the launches themselves, a small selection that I thought were cool, though this is really just a subset: • The @Link AI wallet. Point your agent to github.com/stripe/link-cli and ask it to make purchases on your behalf with secure single-use tokens. (To test it, I asked Claude Code to buy a small gift for me yesterday. It purchased HTTPZine on Gumroad.) • New payment methods for Link, including Pix (largest payment method in Brazil) and UPI (largest payment method in India). We’re also adding stablecoin support to Link (which I think will be huge if we execute well). • We’re adding a lot of new Machine Payments Protocol functionality, including micropayment and recurring payment support. • We announced Checkout studio: a sophisticated dashboard for managing your checkout flow, including things like transaction replays and A/B tests. Today this tends to require a lot of fussy edits to production code. • Adaptive Pricing (which automatically localizes the price and currency that customers see) now supports subscriptions. We’ve seen pretty huge (4–5%) conversion rate improvements after enabling it — customers really like paying in their home currency. • New Stripe Terminal reader (the T600) with a customer-facing screen that can run native apps, plus support for 15 new international markets for Stripe Terminal. • General availability for Stripe Managed Payments, our merchant of record solution. (Natively handles tax, disputes, fraud.) Maybe sounds a bit arcane, but it’s one of those iykyk products. It saves a lot of schlep. • Fraud is a *much* bigger priority for customers than it was 2 years ago (AI makes fraud easier unlike software, tokens can be resold), so we’ve been extending Stripe Radar to support things beyond payments fraud: free trial abuse, multi-account abuse, pay-as-you-go abuse. Early results are extremely positive. We also announced Stripe Signals — new scoring APIs for customers, businesses, and other objects, not just payments on and off Stripe. • Usage-based billing is also becoming the de facto business model of the AI era, and we launched a bunch of new pricing models in @getMetronome and features like low-balance alerts, automatic credit top-ups, and multidimensional pricing structures. • We showed streaming payments built on @Tempo and Metronome — track usage and get paid the instant value is delivered. Hard to predict, but I think this could be big. (Why wouldn’t you want to get paid as costs are incurred?) • We added automatic US tax filing in Stripe Tax. • We announced Stripe Database -- a hosted PostgreSQL database with all of your Stripe data, updated in real time. Read-only to start but we’ll make it read-write. • Stripe Workflows are now GA. • We showed Stripe Console, a full agentic execution environment built directly into the Stripe Dashboard. It’ll happily write code and use tools to answer your questions. • We previewed custom objects: model your business data directly in Stripe, with custom objects, typed fields, and relationships. • As mentioned above, Stripe Treasury accounts will support storage in 15 currencies by the end of the year. And instant/free(!) transfers between US Stripe businesses. • You can use a Stripe card with your Treasury balance and get 2% cash back on purchases. • We’re massively expanding our Global Payouts coverage -- soon 100 countries with fiat rails and 160 with stablecoins. • Atlas companies can now raise money directly within Stripe. • We launched the platform growth studio, which uses Stripe’s network data to generate specific recommendations for optimization/growth. • We announced the Stripe Managed Risk API — platforms can outsource risk handling to Stripe while maintaining full UI/UX control. • Connected accounts now benefit from networked onboarding, which hugely increases conversion rates. • We’re launching Treasury for Platforms. Connected accounts can get spend cards with just a few lines of code. (Plus cash rewards, cash acceptance, check acceptance, real-time payments…) • We announced Issuing for agents: easily create cards for agents. But that’s really just a subset of a subset. (See stripe.com/roadmap for more.) The Stripe team is cooking! And if you’re interested in building the economic infrastructure for this new world, we’re hiring.

Stripe really cooked with Link CLI. Look at how easily I can get my OpenClaw agent to buy me some coffee beans.