Stripe’s AI Strategy: Build More, Not Less

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 four point five Cambrian explosion moment. We haven't had that in agentic commerce today. I think there's a few reasons for that. One is we are merging so much more code than last year and it is stressing every system. So we create something called Stripe Minions. You're not gonna iterate, not go into planning mode. You're just gonna say, this is what I want. Go do it. That's kind of where the world is going. You guys are, I think, over 2,000,000,000,000 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, a 16 z general partner David George sits down with Stripe's Will Gabrick 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 barring software from other agents, to micropayments, stable coins, and why Will believes the checkout page will eventually disappear altogether. I wanna start with just a state of Stripe. Yes. So what is Stripe today? And when we originally invested it, payment processor. But now I think the average AI company uses 11 different Stripe products. And at Sessions, I believe you had 288 distinct Mhmm. Product launches. Yeah. So I wanna 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 platform or marketplace, radar from beginning fraud, radar …