Stripe 用 AI 反免费试用滥用与全球化扩张的策略

If you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create 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 the Opus 45 Cambrian explosion moment we haven't had that in agentic commerce today and 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 created something called strike minions you're not going to iterate you're not go into planning mode you're just going to say this is what I want go do it that's kind of where the world is going you guys are I think over two trillion of volume now what do you think is sort of the future state of how we all access models and tokens

and very bullish on

I want to start with just a state of stripe.

Yes.

So what is stripe today and you know when we originally invested it you know it's a payment processor but now I think the average AI company uses 11 different stripe products and at sessions

I believe you had 288 distinct

product launches. So I want to talk about velocity also but just start with just what is the state of stripe today? So internally we think about Stripe as having you know 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 you know to um be more agile with your business model to uh operate in more countries uh and just go faster when it comes to everything that touches revenue and cash.

So you know just practically speaking went from payments to then you know billing subscriptions and invoicing uh connect if you're a platform or marketplace radar for mitigating fraud you know radar now for doing many more things than that tax and just I think we we don't actually count but somewhere in and around 2530 products that are sort of headlining branded products and then of course you know hundreds and thousands of features below that but again the framework work we think about is really reducing frictions and increasing agency.

So a good example last year uh we saw a lot of users for the first time experiencing free trial abuse and this wasn't really an issue pre- AI because

you know most stripe users are software companies margins burden wasn't there yet.

Yeah. So they're wasting a little compute but but it's it's it's it's negligible. It's minimous but now software has a cost structure and so actually I think cursor was the first user that we

I was going to say it was our portfolio where we exactly experienced it and uh you know I I guess internet users can be crafty but yes

yes and and I think it was something like one in six users of free trials were abusive um

and so you know you're just throwing money at these you know users who are just signing up for another account, another account, another account, you know, maybe even doing model distillation and and and things like that. And so we sort of, you know, got in the bunker with them and just stood up in a weekend a pipeline where we were able to, you know, use our foundation model, look across the entire Stripe network, use our embeddings, and then, you know, after that put a reasoning layer on top of so you could sort of say we think this is a free trial abuser because um and point to those signals.

And I I I I think it's today, I think it's 11 labs recently told us that they're blocking 2,000 free trial abusers per day using stripe signals.

Incredible.

So, you just think about how much money you'd be, you know, burning if you were um you know, well, how much money you wouldn't how how much revenue you wouldn't be creating if you weren't giving these trials, you know, how false positives and the false Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And then on the increasing agency side,

it's still just so hard to go global. you know, you think about um having to register, calculate, remmit taxes in so many geographies

and this new crop of AI companies, you know, they're digital goods companies and they want to just, you know, go global very fast. And so I guess, you know, AEFs is a good example. um they're using uh this product strike managed payments where in their home markets you know the US let's say they have an entity in Europe they are the seller of record but you know in longtail markets you know the Kazakhstans and you know all over um APAC uh where they you know haven't sort of entities you know stripe stands in as the actual merchant of record we handle all tax calculation tax remittance and everything like that and so this just lets them cover you know 100 plus geographies and compliantly.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. And if you go back to the to the fraud example, you know, if you identify abusive actors, you know, there's actually a network effect in that in that business, right? Which is um which is super powerful. Um and obviously we appreciate it as uh as as you know, investors and many of the companies who benefited from it. Um so if you look at the product set today

you know obviously the origin of stripe was startups and so you can very easily stand up payments you know sell stuff online

and then famously part of the the beauty of Stripe's growth and business model is that you captured companies like Door Dash and Instacart when they were in YC

and then you grew with them along the way. How do you think about the product strategy as it relates to serving startups versus serving large enterprises?

So, I think it was actually um Colin at Clerk who who summarized our strategy nicely on on X recently where he said stripe strategy is unabashed. I'm paraphrasing his words, but it's win all the startups and then win them again.

Yes. Um and I think you know to some extent that's just a good business model because startups are um very ambitious. They typically grow into the biggest companies of tomorrow. They're sort of canaries for what the next opportunity is. So on another subtle reason to win all the startups and win them again is they actually have the highest standards of all of our customers. uh you know I I looked recently at uh the seesap for stripes reporting and for our very very large enterprise users like your reporting is great like we love the data you go it's way better than anything we get from any of our other

because they're accustomed to the incumbents. Yeah, exactly. And then you you look at it for startups like your reporting is garbage. You have got to fix this. This is driving me crazy. And so there's um this persistent sense that startups just make us better by being the fastest, by being most demanding and so on. But of course once we start working with startups, we want to work with them forever. And so this pulls us up market and you know forces us to become you know as sort of surprisingly great.

That's the standard we try to hold ourselves to for enterprises as for startups. And now we're working with I don't know what the exact percentage is today but it's not quite half but we're getting there. Uh Fortune 500 companies you know we work of course with the Amazons of the world um Microsofts and you know at the enterprise it's sort of a different sales cycle. It's a different uh you know post sale activation motion.

It's a lot more required you know after you've already signed the contract whereas startups sort of go live like that. But fundamentally it's you know the same thing. You just stay close to the user. you hear their their needs. Um you show that you're sort of provably better