John Collison: preference

Transcript context

…One of the things I'll never forget talking to you and Patrick about is we grew up together in the years of building our companies. You've always had the idea that Stripe is a technology company that happens to be in payments. It's not a payments company. You've always challenged, I remember, your customers to think about, "Don't think about just accepting payments. There's more that you can do." I'm curious, what more can we do? Should we be doing with things like crypto or stablecoins?" Two topics that are on the minds of all our customers today are, yes, stablecoins and then AI, specifically with respect to changing buying, agentic commerce. On stablecoins, I think maybe DoorDash is not where I would start. Two places that we're seeing tons of interesting stuff is, one, any cross-border use case where if you want to send money to 100 countries, it's already the case that stablecoin is a much better way to do that than anything else. That's where we're seeing a ton of adoption where just that long-tail coverage, and they really work for that. The second, and this is where Tempo, our new initiative that you guys were nice enough to work with us on, is coming in, is very scalable crypto payments. Obviously, agents is what we have in mind as we're developing Tempo, where if you want to pay for your API consumption or if your agent wants to be able to pay for things around the internet, you actually need a really good scalable blockchain for that. Okay, so that's on the crypto side of things. The other thing that we're thinking about a lot is just how does commerce change? Now that people's expectations are increasingly, they ask their AI for stuff. It feels like you should be able to ask your AI, whether that's ChatGPT or Gemini or whether that's Siri or whatever your interface is to AI, it's like, "Let's just order again what we ordered on Sunday." You should be able to make that natural language query and have it take care of interfacing with DoorDash and payment and everything like that. I'm curious how you guys think about the interface changing. I mean, you just had a lot. Do you want to enable people to order within the AI apps? Do you want to have just more of a natural language input to DoorDash? How is that going to happen given that that is presumably what people want in terms of the low friction AI experience? Well, I think what people want is definitely low friction, but I think people also want the products to show up on time and think they want—…

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