Inside Stripe: Stablecoins, AI, and (not) Going Public | Will Gaybrick, President of Technology and Business at Stripe

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: numeral.com
Amplitude: Listen to users at scale with AI 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
34:05 How Stripe uses AI internally
42:12 Building the first payments foundation model
48:23 Link, Stripe’s 200M user consumer product
56:52 Will Stripe ever IPO?
59:14 Blurring of private and public companies
1:03:39 Starting Hack Yale
1:08:23 Joining Thrive’s $5 million Fund 1
1:12:30 Low margin businesses are underrated
1:16:30 Joining Stripe as CFO
1:21:59 How Stripe’s go-to-market has evolved
1:25:56 Stripe’s margins
1:29:52 Why financial services are so hard to use
1:33:04 Lessons from Alan Mulally

Referenced
Stripe: stripe.com
Careers at Stripe: stripe.com/jobs/search

Follow Will
Twitter: x.com/gaybrick
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/william-gaybrick-5730347

Follow Turner
Twitter: twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: thespl.it