WEBVTT - John Collison 0:00:03.160 --> 0:00:10.959 Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. So my idea for 0:00:11.000 --> 0:00:13.600 you guys is you guys just have like regular normal, 0:00:13.720 --> 0:00:16.079 boring ads on the podcast. I think you need to 0:00:16.120 --> 0:00:19.480 do the post red ads for yeah, say a lot 0:00:19.520 --> 0:00:21.880 that everything in securities, frauds is having a bad night 0:00:21.960 --> 0:00:25.279 sleep securities for us. 0:00:25.400 --> 0:00:27.640 Well, like I could do like the men's shaving club 0:00:27.840 --> 0:00:29.800 ads or something that could be fun too. 0:00:29.840 --> 0:00:33.840 When buying short data out of the money called out right, Yeah, 0:00:33.920 --> 0:00:34.640 I think we good. 0:00:35.600 --> 0:00:38.479 Hello and welcome to The Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levine, 0:00:38.680 --> 0:00:40.720 I read The Money Stuff Colm at Bloomberg. 0:00:40.400 --> 0:00:43.720 Opinion, and I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News 0:00:43.720 --> 0:00:45.360 and an anchor for Bloomberg Television. 0:00:45.800 --> 0:00:46.080 Katy. 0:00:46.120 --> 0:00:48.839 Today we're doing something new. We're doing our first interview 0:00:48.840 --> 0:00:49.920 on The Money Stuff Podcast. 0:00:50.000 --> 0:00:52.479 Are you nervous, I'm pretty nervous. I'm a little bit 0:00:52.520 --> 0:00:53.080 nervous too. 0:00:53.240 --> 0:00:55.760 We're recording this after it happens, and we're not really nervous. 0:00:56.960 --> 0:00:57.880 I'm still stressed out. 0:00:57.920 --> 0:00:59.440 To speak for yourself, I'm pretty nervous. 0:00:59.440 --> 0:01:02.040 I haven't listened to it yet. Today our guest is 0:01:02.120 --> 0:01:06.080 John Collinson. Stripe is a payments and financial technology company, 0:01:06.520 --> 0:01:09.240 and John and his brother and co founder Patrick are 0:01:09.360 --> 0:01:11.280 kind of tech industry celebrities. 0:01:11.800 --> 0:01:16.199 Yeah, he's an Irish billionaire. He's from Limerick. That's cool. 0:01:16.600 --> 0:01:18.959 Katy's wearing her Limerick jacket, but we'll probably get into 0:01:18.959 --> 0:01:19.840 that during the podcast. 0:01:19.880 --> 0:01:22.200 That's true. It's a little embarrassing. 0:01:21.720 --> 0:01:24.280 That I wore this medium amount of embarrassing. 0:01:24.480 --> 0:01:27.160 I truly didn't mean to, but as I said to 0:01:27.160 --> 0:01:29.680 you in our office, it was forty seven degrees when 0:01:29.720 --> 0:01:32.520 I left my apartment this morning, pre dawn, and I 0:01:32.560 --> 0:01:36.759 needed a top. And this is my favorite medium weight jacket. 0:01:37.360 --> 0:01:39.800 This is the behind the scenes content that my stuff 0:01:39.800 --> 0:01:43.800 podcast listener is really grave. Yeah, let's jump right back 0:01:43.800 --> 0:01:46.800 into that Internet failed it should I do like a 0:01:46.840 --> 0:01:49.640 crashing transition to talking about striper? 0:01:50.840 --> 0:01:52.440 Yeah, so how do you guys usually start these? How 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:53.520 do you one? I guess you haven't done that, You 0:01:53.560 --> 0:01:56.120 haven't done that, you could invent the forduct. Yes, start 0:01:56.160 --> 0:01:59.000 by review of the advertisements I've heard the podcast. 0:01:59.160 --> 0:02:02.600 We start the podcas us with much like this. We 0:02:02.640 --> 0:02:06.160 walk into the room and bullshit a bit and then 0:02:06.320 --> 0:02:09.680 record that. Yeah, and then we eventually say hello and 0:02:09.720 --> 0:02:11.800 welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast. Then we talk about 0:02:11.800 --> 0:02:13.760 whatever the thing we're talking about today. So now we're 0:02:13.760 --> 0:02:18.160 talking about stribe, capital markets, Yeah, destiny tech. Okay, So 0:02:18.320 --> 0:02:20.760 listens in podcasts with you, you talk a lot about 0:02:21.040 --> 0:02:23.760 your interest in business history and like you've learned from 0:02:24.040 --> 0:02:26.079 the tech companies of the past and the conglomerates of 0:02:26.120 --> 0:02:29.600 the conglomerate wave. I have not heard you talk about 0:02:29.720 --> 0:02:32.800 the lessons you've learned from financial services companies. And I 0:02:32.840 --> 0:02:36.000 write about finance and think of Stripe in many ways 0:02:36.120 --> 0:02:39.440 as like a financial services esque company here, like some 0:02:39.480 --> 0:02:42.400 evolution to a financial services company. So I'm curious, like, 0:02:42.800 --> 0:02:44.840 I don't know we you think about financial services. 0:02:45.639 --> 0:02:48.799 Yeah, in general, we try to learn a lot from 0:02:48.919 --> 0:02:52.120 other businesses. And Okay, one things I really like is 0:02:52.120 --> 0:02:54.760 we live in a golden age of learning about other 0:02:54.800 --> 0:02:57.280 businesses right now. And one of the reasons I like 0:02:57.360 --> 0:03:00.520 this is because I think learning about other businesses at 0:03:00.560 --> 0:03:04.320 some level learning about the world or certainly the economy, 0:03:04.520 --> 0:03:07.000 because you know, you're getting sense for how all the 0:03:07.080 --> 0:03:11.720 various entities work together. With financial services in particular, you 0:03:11.760 --> 0:03:14.280 came up with the framing that you know, Stripe is 0:03:14.280 --> 0:03:16.359 in a way kind of a new kind of scaled 0:03:16.400 --> 0:03:18.680 investment bank. Was it you're framing I think? 0:03:18.720 --> 0:03:21.280 I said, yeah, yeah, but I would love for you 0:03:21.360 --> 0:03:23.120 to tell me that's right, but I'm assuming you'll tell 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:23.600 me it's wrong. 0:03:23.800 --> 0:03:25.960 No. I actually kind of like it because if you 0:03:25.960 --> 0:03:28.200 think about what are the potential source of funding for 0:03:28.200 --> 0:03:29.720 a business, Like, if you want to scale off a business, 0:03:29.720 --> 0:03:31.120 how can you fund it? There's three ways you can 0:03:31.160 --> 0:03:33.480 fund a business. You can do it through debt, equity, 0:03:33.840 --> 0:03:36.800 or retain earnings. And so if you just tick through 0:03:36.840 --> 0:03:39.840 each one of those on the earning side, maybe that's 0:03:39.840 --> 0:03:42.000 the place where a Stripe is kind of the most 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:45.440 directly doing this, where we're making it easier for businesses 0:03:45.480 --> 0:03:48.600 to self fund their growth. And we see tons of 0:03:48.640 --> 0:03:52.200 bootstrapped or kind of certainly airly monetizing businesses on the Stripe, 0:03:52.320 --> 0:03:54.600 like with this customer and Stripe Photo Room, and they 0:03:54.600 --> 0:03:57.760 do online kind of GENI powered photo editing. They're based 0:03:57.800 --> 0:04:00.280 in France, and you know, maybe ten years ago they 0:04:00.320 --> 0:04:02.080 would have you know, raised a whole bunch of VC 0:04:02.200 --> 0:04:04.280 and scaled up that way. They're actually profitable within a 0:04:04.360 --> 0:04:07.200 year and they've just kind of scaled up profitably since then. 0:04:07.480 --> 0:04:09.760 Ninety eight percent of their business comes from outside France 0:04:09.760 --> 0:04:11.200 and so they're kind of selling this product to a 0:04:11.240 --> 0:04:13.400 global audience and stripes making it easy to do that. 0:04:13.640 --> 0:04:15.400 And we've seen that in general, I guess the AI 0:04:15.520 --> 0:04:19.159 companies in particular, where you know, during the social media boom, 0:04:19.520 --> 0:04:23.000 maybe companies scaled up first with raising lots of VC 0:04:23.120 --> 0:04:25.719 dollars and then later on figured out monetization. With a 0:04:25.720 --> 0:04:27.599 lot of the AI companies, you know, open the eye 0:04:27.600 --> 0:04:30.200 perplexity clause, you know, the photo room who I was mentioning, 0:04:30.360 --> 0:04:33.280 they actually monetized from pretty early on using stripe, and 0:04:33.320 --> 0:04:34.440 so that's one source of funding. 0:04:35.160 --> 0:04:39.840 Stripe allows early stage companies to monetize so efficiently that 0:04:39.880 --> 0:04:41.800 like there is less need for data and equity in 0:04:41.839 --> 0:04:44.960 the world because companies can sell fund like you're putting 0:04:45.040 --> 0:04:46.000 vcs out of business. 0:04:46.200 --> 0:04:49.160 Yeah, and obviously we think it's a more slightly more 0:04:50.360 --> 0:04:53.800 healthy dynamic for the businesses. A classic trap that early 0:04:53.839 --> 0:04:57.640 stage companies fall into is you know, and why combinators 0:04:57.680 --> 0:05:00.440 say tries to get their companies to avoid falling into 0:05:00.440 --> 0:05:02.680 this failure mode is kind of they raise money and 0:05:02.720 --> 0:05:05.720 then they think kind of valuation milestones or any kind 0:05:05.720 --> 0:05:08.719 of financial or investor milestones are the milestones that matter 0:05:08.760 --> 0:05:10.320 for the business, whereas obviously that's not the case. It's 0:05:10.320 --> 0:05:11.960 are you building something of value in the world which 0:05:12.000 --> 0:05:14.560 will generally be measured by does anyone want to buy it? 0:05:14.600 --> 0:05:16.280 And so I think maybe it gets people on the 0:05:16.320 --> 0:05:19.240 right leaderboard earlier on, where a revenue leader board is 0:05:19.279 --> 0:05:21.440 just a much healthier leaderboard to be thinking about than 0:05:21.480 --> 0:05:24.200 a fundraising valuation leaderboard. But we also play in the 0:05:24.240 --> 0:05:27.080 other parts of the capital stack, where on the debt side. 0:05:27.160 --> 0:05:29.839 I mean, you guys have probably watched this, but banks 0:05:30.160 --> 0:05:32.120 have kind of gotten out of the SMB lending space 0:05:32.279 --> 0:05:35.000 since the financial crisis, as just the compliance costs have 0:05:35.040 --> 0:05:36.720 gone up, Like people do not go to a bank 0:05:36.800 --> 0:05:39.320 for a five thousand dollars loan anymore, and so we 0:05:39.400 --> 0:05:44.599 now lend through our lending partners billions of dollars to startups. 0:05:44.640 --> 0:05:48.080 We do that entirely programmatically through amount models, you know, 0:05:48.160 --> 0:05:49.840 cash flow based lending. So we're not looking at the 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:52.200 balance sheet, We're not trying to do credit checks on 0:05:52.240 --> 0:05:54.359 the individual or something like that. We're looking at the 0:05:54.360 --> 0:05:57.160 stream of cash flows. Is it a healthy, reliable stream 0:05:57.200 --> 0:05:59.039 of cash flows that can support some debt? 0:05:59.640 --> 0:06:02.440 You're doing the cash flows you can see exactly. 0:06:02.440 --> 0:06:04.400 We see the cash flows and people repay out of 0:06:04.400 --> 0:06:06.599 the stripe cash flows, and so that is a new 0:06:06.800 --> 0:06:09.479 kind of lending product that exists in the market. That 0:06:09.720 --> 0:06:11.360 now again is you know, in the billions of dollars 0:06:11.400 --> 0:06:13.200 in terms of the debt we're providing. It's kind of 0:06:13.240 --> 0:06:14.719 ironic in a way. If you want to raise one 0:06:14.760 --> 0:06:17.119 hundred million dollars of debt, that is a very competitive market. 0:06:17.160 --> 0:06:18.880 Lots of people are playing in that. If you want 0:06:18.960 --> 0:06:22.640 to raise five thousand dollars of debt for your company, 0:06:22.800 --> 0:06:24.960 it's actually much harder to get that than it was, 0:06:25.240 --> 0:06:27.839 say twenty or thirty years ago. We've gone backwards there. 0:06:28.040 --> 0:06:32.240 And then on the equity side, I think stripeatless has 0:06:32.279 --> 0:06:37.240 actually helped make more companies investable because what a lot 0:06:37.240 --> 0:06:40.080 of people don't realize is stripeatlists are in corporation product. 0:06:40.279 --> 0:06:44.440 But it lets companies where the founders might be in 0:06:44.480 --> 0:06:47.039 Israel or might be you know, in Singapore or something 0:06:47.080 --> 0:06:50.720 like that, create a US Delaware company and that makes 0:06:50.760 --> 0:06:52.560 it much more investable. And so we've seen a lot 0:06:52.600 --> 0:06:56.359 of foreign founders kind of virtually creating a US company, 0:06:56.480 --> 0:07:00.119 which it just turns out foreign companies investors fanan too scary. 0:07:00.160 --> 0:07:02.000 So I guess I'm responsible for the framing that you're 0:07:02.040 --> 0:07:04.160 sort of in somebody's a substitute for an investment back. 0:07:04.200 --> 0:07:06.080 So like your framing is like increase the GDP of 0:07:06.080 --> 0:07:08.240 the Internet. But like you know, you have these businesses 0:07:08.279 --> 0:07:12.880 like incorporating companies, like what is the principle? And like 0:07:13.360 --> 0:07:15.040 that was like a real investment banker I was doing, 0:07:15.080 --> 0:07:18.720 like corporate derivatives. I'm like, I assume you would never 0:07:18.880 --> 0:07:20.560 get into that business, But am I wrong? 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:23.600 We're certainly not planning on us. We build products that 0:07:23.680 --> 0:07:26.600 are scalable in some way through tech and so you know, 0:07:26.800 --> 0:07:30.080 Stripe itself. This past year we did trillion dollars in 0:07:30.120 --> 0:07:32.160 payment through the strip platform. That's still growing in a 0:07:32.160 --> 0:07:34.559 pretty healthy clip. The number of businesses served is millions 0:07:34.600 --> 0:07:37.160 of dollars. And so if there's something that is solved 0:07:37.160 --> 0:07:39.280 by just throwing an army of people at it, I mean, 0:07:39.520 --> 0:07:41.560 you know, all the investment banking firms are exceptional ash 0:07:41.560 --> 0:07:44.760 recruiting armies of people, and that is a very competitive space, 0:07:44.800 --> 0:07:46.480 whereas the space of you know, like I was saying, 0:07:46.480 --> 0:07:48.160 with the lending side of things, that was just an 0:07:48.240 --> 0:07:50.600 underserved marketers where we came at it by talking to 0:07:50.640 --> 0:07:52.680 our customers and they said, we really need growth capital 0:07:52.760 --> 0:07:55.200 as actually very annoying for us to get us and 0:07:55.280 --> 0:07:58.880 so I guess we try to find the underserved spaces, 0:07:58.960 --> 0:08:02.880 and investment banking, for you know, certainly on the larger side, 0:08:02.880 --> 0:08:04.400 does not seem underserved right now. 0:08:04.600 --> 0:08:06.880 I've listened to a lot of podcasts you've been on 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:09.840 in the past several weeks, so sorry, no, no, it's 0:08:09.840 --> 0:08:13.160 been really interesting. You interviewed Charlie Munger, which was I. 0:08:13.200 --> 0:08:16.240 Much prefer interviewing to being interviewed. So we'll come back 0:08:16.240 --> 0:08:17.640 for the second round of this where you guys are 0:08:17.640 --> 0:08:18.160 put on the spot. 0:08:18.240 --> 0:08:19.560 That'll be a lot of fun. We'll put that on 0:08:19.560 --> 0:08:22.920 the calendar. But at one point Charlie Munger started talking 0:08:22.960 --> 0:08:26.280 about like banks and they're selling these sleazy products, and 0:08:26.320 --> 0:08:28.119 of course I couldn't see if you were nodding along 0:08:28.240 --> 0:08:30.120 and I were talking about, you know, whether you would chafe. 0:08:30.160 --> 0:08:33.320 It's sort of the comparison to you know, an investment bank, 0:08:33.400 --> 0:08:35.680 for example, but it sounds like you don't, No, I don't. 0:08:35.880 --> 0:08:38.280 Investment banking provides a useful set of services in the 0:08:38.280 --> 0:08:40.679 world and Okay, one things I really like about the 0:08:40.720 --> 0:08:46.400 Money Stuff newsletter is a studied detachment from what's going 0:08:46.440 --> 0:08:48.920 on where there are people and people respond to incentives 0:08:48.960 --> 0:08:51.000 and that creates behaviors in the world. I like Matt 0:08:51.040 --> 0:08:53.640 does have views and you know, just like crypto and 0:08:53.840 --> 0:08:55.840 you know, all sorts of things, and you can kind 0:08:55.880 --> 0:08:58.040 of the views that occasionally come out, but it's mostly 0:08:58.080 --> 0:09:00.600 this very detached view of what's going on in the world. 0:09:00.920 --> 0:09:03.520 But the way we think about it, like, for example, 0:09:03.559 --> 0:09:06.320 we think, you know, stripes, scale and revenue are actually 0:09:06.360 --> 0:09:09.600 pretty decent proxies for the value stripe is providing in 0:09:09.600 --> 0:09:11.400 the world. That's not always the case with the business. 0:09:11.440 --> 0:09:13.720 You could have an extract of business somewhere, or monopolies 0:09:13.800 --> 0:09:16.439 or rent extraction or something like that. But in our 0:09:16.480 --> 0:09:21.200 case we have very INFORGMNED buyers and a very competitive market. 0:09:21.240 --> 0:09:23.040 There are lots of other places people could go for 0:09:23.120 --> 0:09:26.160 payment acceptance or billing software or something like that, and 0:09:26.240 --> 0:09:28.559 so generally, if customers are choosing you and paying you 0:09:28.600 --> 0:09:30.839 money for a service, it's because you're providing something of 0:09:30.920 --> 0:09:33.560 value that you can't get elsewhere. And similar with investment banks, 0:09:33.600 --> 0:09:35.400 I think if people are going to investment banks for 0:09:35.440 --> 0:09:37.960 a thing, that's probably because they're providing some value to them. 0:09:38.000 --> 0:09:39.319 And so that's the frame of guy I tend to take. 0:09:39.520 --> 0:09:43.360 I think Charlie rest in Peace generally took a lot 0:09:43.360 --> 0:09:48.319 of offense as where he saw people hyping things, principal 0:09:48.360 --> 0:09:51.160 agent problems. You know, there's a set of things that 0:09:51.200 --> 0:09:55.440 bothered him, Crypto Robinhood, mutual fund advisors, and you know, 0:09:55.600 --> 0:09:58.160 you could understand I could construct the Steelman for those cases. 0:09:58.320 --> 0:10:02.040 I think there's a lot of opacity and pricing and 0:10:02.160 --> 0:10:06.000 value in financial services that there's probably a lot less 0:10:06.000 --> 0:10:08.080 of in your business, right, Like you're kind of charging 0:10:08.080 --> 0:10:09.240 a transparent feed to people. 0:10:09.320 --> 0:10:11.120 Yeah, and certain the more scaled something is, the more 0:10:11.160 --> 0:10:14.040 price comparison they'll be, the more efficient the pricing will be. Whereas, yeah, 0:10:14.080 --> 0:10:17.320 there's more room for extracting price in the when you 0:10:17.360 --> 0:10:18.520 get into bespoke deals. 0:10:19.160 --> 0:10:21.720 So one thing I think of when I give investment 0:10:21.760 --> 0:10:24.480 banking is just serving as an advisor to CEOs and 0:10:24.520 --> 0:10:26.679 sort of giving them general advice on their business. And 0:10:26.720 --> 0:10:28.880 we were talking before about you know, you are now 0:10:28.960 --> 0:10:32.120 interacting with a lot of big companies, and you had 0:10:32.120 --> 0:10:35.760 some views on like the ability of a big company 0:10:35.840 --> 0:10:38.800 to CEO to sort of understand her company, and I'm 0:10:39.400 --> 0:10:41.120 I'd love for you to talk about them. 0:10:41.320 --> 0:10:46.720 Yeah, I think people think that CEOs are able to 0:10:47.280 --> 0:10:50.199 drive change in their organizations. I'm talking about organizations in general. 0:10:50.200 --> 0:10:52.240 I'm not talking about the Stripe. People think that a CEO 0:10:52.360 --> 0:10:54.360 lands in a new job, they take over a company, 0:10:54.720 --> 0:10:57.480 and they're able to just whip everything into shape and 0:10:57.640 --> 0:11:02.000 change everything. And I think the general experience of CEOs 0:11:02.040 --> 0:11:04.120 and in new jobs is that is not the case. 0:11:04.160 --> 0:11:06.839 And organizations are pretty hard to change. And in fact, 0:11:06.960 --> 0:11:10.000 one of the things that we believe strongly at STRIPE 0:11:10.360 --> 0:11:14.120 is it's very important for people to get close to 0:11:14.160 --> 0:11:17.640 the work or you will not be able to drive 0:11:18.480 --> 0:11:21.200 any meaningful, useful change. And so like a bunch of 0:11:21.200 --> 0:11:23.480 different ways in which we do that. It actually reminds 0:11:23.520 --> 0:11:26.440 me of the lean manufacturing principle, you know. And they 0:11:26.600 --> 0:11:29.000 have all these very nice esthetic Japanese terms for things, 0:11:29.040 --> 0:11:30.640 and so you know, there's the English equivalent per much 0:11:30.640 --> 0:11:32.920 for the Japanese terms, but in them is gemba, which 0:11:32.960 --> 0:11:35.160 is this idea that managers should you know, walk the 0:11:35.160 --> 0:11:37.520 factory floor and solicit ideas from the people who are 0:11:37.559 --> 0:11:40.600 on the production line and things like that, and all companies, 0:11:40.640 --> 0:11:43.280 like a tech company like Stripe has its equivalents. And 0:11:43.360 --> 0:11:50.000 so we very much encourage engineering managers to actually write 0:11:50.040 --> 0:11:51.920 code at Stripe to get the experience of what is 0:11:51.920 --> 0:11:53.960 it like working in their corner of the code baselat 0:11:54.080 --> 0:11:57.040 problems our engineers running into. I really enjoyed being a 0:11:57.120 --> 0:12:00.040 CFO last year when we were between CFOs, and the 0:12:00.080 --> 0:12:02.400 reasons I really enjoyed that again was getting closer to 0:12:03.400 --> 0:12:06.840 the actual numbers, the processes by which we drive the business, 0:12:06.880 --> 0:12:09.640 Like we're going to hold Stripe to a budget regardless, 0:12:09.640 --> 0:12:11.720 and aren't you interested in how that process is actually 0:12:11.720 --> 0:12:13.480 set and how those numbers are set and everything like that. 0:12:13.520 --> 0:12:15.840 So you know, I say that I think every founder 0:12:15.840 --> 0:12:18.560 should be CFO of their business for at some point 0:12:18.720 --> 0:12:21.439 during its lifespan. It's it's a very educational experience. 0:12:21.880 --> 0:12:24.400 Did like product ideas? Did you do that and come 0:12:24.440 --> 0:12:28.319 away with like we need to do accounting software? No? No? 0:12:28.840 --> 0:12:29.160 Or or? 0:12:29.200 --> 0:12:31.600 I mean I mean maybe in an abstract way, but again, 0:12:31.800 --> 0:12:34.199 Stripes finance needs are are maybe a little different from 0:12:34.200 --> 0:12:37.160 the broader ones. But again, I just think for getting 0:12:37.200 --> 0:12:40.840 close to how the business actually runs that's maybe the 0:12:40.840 --> 0:12:44.960 thing that's hard for CEOs to do, and you know, 0:12:45.120 --> 0:12:47.040 we tried to do it from a customer perspective a 0:12:47.120 --> 0:12:49.120 huge amount of Even some of the products we're talking about, 0:12:49.160 --> 0:12:52.200 like Stripe Capital, they basically come from us trying to 0:12:52.240 --> 0:12:55.600 spend more time with our customers than our competitors do. 0:12:55.840 --> 0:12:58.240 And so you know, we'll start every leadership team meeting 0:12:58.720 --> 0:13:01.679 at am Monday morning with hearing from a customer. We 0:13:01.679 --> 0:13:02.839 just asked them to come and give us kind of 0:13:02.880 --> 0:13:05.120 feedback on the product. If you were to sit in 0:13:05.160 --> 0:13:08.160 on those meetings, it's not an A plus report card 0:13:08.200 --> 0:13:10.199 that we're getting. You know, there are things they want 0:13:10.240 --> 0:13:13.360 us to fix. But I find that it's easy for 0:13:13.480 --> 0:13:15.760 like product managers to overcomplicate things, and you know, you 0:13:15.760 --> 0:13:18.079 can get in your own heads and construct some really 0:13:18.160 --> 0:13:20.760 convolutioned castle in the sky, and there's nothing quite as 0:13:20.760 --> 0:13:23.719 grounding as hearing directly from a customer talk about what 0:13:24.000 --> 0:13:25.440 is not working for them in the product. And you know, 0:13:25.440 --> 0:13:27.199 we do the same on Fridays with like an all 0:13:27.240 --> 0:13:30.040 company thing, bring customers to talk to that. But anyway, 0:13:30.320 --> 0:13:32.400 I think the essence of this for CEOs is getting 0:13:32.400 --> 0:13:35.480 close to the actual production function. And that is sometimes 0:13:35.480 --> 0:13:35.920 hard for them. 0:13:36.160 --> 0:13:38.840 So I have two points. It's interesting to hear you 0:13:38.880 --> 0:13:40.800 say that. First of all, my brain immediately goes to 0:13:40.840 --> 0:13:44.560 Elon Musk, like on the factory floor at SpaceX and Tesla. 0:13:44.640 --> 0:13:46.840 But it was interesting. We had Home Depot this week 0:13:46.960 --> 0:13:50.160 announced that they were going to require corporate employees to 0:13:50.200 --> 0:13:54.199 work eight hour factory shifts, which is interesting, like retail shifts. 0:13:54.360 --> 0:13:55.920 So Starbucks did something similar. 0:13:55.679 --> 0:13:57.680 Right, Yeah, which makes a lot of sense, I mean, 0:13:58.120 --> 0:14:01.360 especially in brutal jobs. Is that one and then the 0:14:01.440 --> 0:14:04.000 other thing? I mean, given that you do know so 0:14:04.120 --> 0:14:06.800 much about his business history and you know, just love 0:14:06.920 --> 0:14:09.280 looking at companies, but those eight am meetings where you're 0:14:09.320 --> 0:14:12.040 just talking to your different companies, like, you see so 0:14:12.200 --> 0:14:15.240 many different types of companies, which is interesting. 0:14:15.760 --> 0:14:17.840 Yeah, And it's definitely a pretty interesting time. I think 0:14:17.880 --> 0:14:21.280 the behavior we observe is that tech has been very 0:14:21.280 --> 0:14:23.720 well covered, and so I think everyone knows broadly kind 0:14:23.720 --> 0:14:25.640 of what's going on in the tech world. What we 0:14:25.680 --> 0:14:29.760 find interesting is the businesses that are the Sherwin Williams 0:14:29.760 --> 0:14:31.480 of the world, you know, the businesses that are ten, 0:14:31.520 --> 0:14:33.880 twenty fifty, one hundred and two hundred years old, and 0:14:33.920 --> 0:14:36.080 how they are adapting to the modern world. And generally, 0:14:36.160 --> 0:14:41.840 what we find is that COVID provided a useful long 0:14:41.920 --> 0:14:44.760 term change to those businesses because those kinds of businesses 0:14:44.840 --> 0:14:49.400 all employed a chief Digital Innovation officer prior to Covid, 0:14:49.440 --> 0:14:51.080 and that person had a team to ten people, and 0:14:51.120 --> 0:14:52.800 they produced all these slides and ideas, and the ideas 0:14:52.800 --> 0:14:54.720 were pretty good, and the company just ignored all them 0:14:54.760 --> 0:14:56.520 and just didn't do any of them. And so they 0:14:56.520 --> 0:14:58.520 had the kind of idea generation part and nothing happened. 0:14:58.880 --> 0:15:02.880 And then it happened, and it was this oh moment 0:15:03.360 --> 0:15:06.520 where people they were forced to adapt because you know, 0:15:06.520 --> 0:15:08.560 obviously the stories were locked down or we're not open, 0:15:08.760 --> 0:15:11.640 and so you maybe had gym companies moving to virtual 0:15:11.640 --> 0:15:15.040 training or something like that. But that created a mandate 0:15:15.040 --> 0:15:17.600 for actually getting serious about the digital stuff. And we 0:15:17.680 --> 0:15:22.000 see much higher quality digital execution coming out of that. 0:15:22.280 --> 0:15:24.680 And there's kind of a few common patterns in what 0:15:24.720 --> 0:15:30.160 everyone's trying to do. I think everyone is questioning their middlemen. 0:15:30.200 --> 0:15:32.320 I don't think middlemen are going away, but they're questioning 0:15:32.320 --> 0:15:35.600 the middlemen and do middlemen add value? And they are 0:15:35.640 --> 0:15:39.640 starting to do much more direct customer relationship stuff. Part 0:15:39.680 --> 0:15:42.400 of that is the product experience where you know, Hershey's 0:15:42.440 --> 0:15:46.320 using Stripe to sell candy directly online, and the customization 0:15:46.400 --> 0:15:50.040 and things like that, and then everyone's just trying to 0:15:50.240 --> 0:15:52.680 build some kind of recurring revenue. And so, you know, 0:15:52.720 --> 0:15:54.320 we think there's two kinds of business in the world. 0:15:54.400 --> 0:15:56.240 There's those who have recurring revenue and those who want 0:15:56.280 --> 0:15:59.160 recurring revenue. And people talk about the engine, you know, 0:15:59.200 --> 0:16:01.320 the airplane engineers with power by the hour. You know, 0:16:01.320 --> 0:16:03.680 you actually don't buy an engine, you buy you know, 0:16:04.080 --> 0:16:07.720 specially exactly. You might trust, you know, the by the minute. 0:16:07.840 --> 0:16:10.320 But that is actually was all companies are moving towards 0:16:10.360 --> 0:16:12.160 because it's kind of better on both sides of the equation. 0:16:12.400 --> 0:16:14.760 And obviously that's pretty complex from an implementation point of view. 0:16:14.760 --> 0:16:27.640 And so the intercomanent Stripe. 0:16:30.320 --> 0:16:32.840 I did like the Stripe fire side a while back, 0:16:32.880 --> 0:16:35.120 and You're like, what should we do? And I was like, 0:16:35.240 --> 0:16:36.880 you should fix paywalls. Have you done it? 0:16:37.880 --> 0:16:41.320 We're getting there because one of us hard. Why is 0:16:41.360 --> 0:16:43.880 it hard? Okay, it's hard for a few reasons. One, 0:16:44.880 --> 0:16:49.000 I think people confuse paywalls with micropayments, and I think 0:16:49.120 --> 0:16:54.560 more consumers want micropayments than publishers. For the publishers want macropayments. 0:16:54.640 --> 0:16:56.640 I think nobody wants micropayments and ever wants to talk 0:16:56.680 --> 0:16:57.760 about it wrong. 0:16:57.800 --> 0:16:59.520 Okay, yeah, yeah. So anyway, once we move past the 0:16:59.520 --> 0:17:06.440 micropayments thing, then it's hard because you ultimately need to 0:17:06.480 --> 0:17:10.160 smooth the onboarding friction and you probably need some cross 0:17:10.240 --> 0:17:13.240 publisher network and you know, publishers are not competing, they're 0:17:13.240 --> 0:17:16.480 maybe not inclined to work together, and then it's just 0:17:16.640 --> 0:17:18.359 a bunch of tech upgrades which are actually kind of 0:17:19.040 --> 0:17:21.479 somewhat prosaic long running projects, but you know, you need 0:17:21.480 --> 0:17:22.720 to be able to have the patients to work with 0:17:22.760 --> 0:17:24.760 the media company to spend a year or year and 0:17:24.800 --> 0:17:26.920 a half upgrade in their stack. The way we've ended 0:17:27.000 --> 0:17:29.159 up doing this is with our product link, which is 0:17:29.240 --> 0:17:31.119 very simple but is really starting to work. It just 0:17:31.160 --> 0:17:33.240 remember you guys, maybe run into it on the internet. 0:17:33.320 --> 0:17:36.360 It just remembers your credentials across websites, and so if 0:17:36.359 --> 0:17:38.879 you've bought on websites A with stripe and you have 0:17:38.960 --> 0:17:41.600 the box checked to remember your payment details, then you'll 0:17:41.640 --> 0:17:44.160 be able to buy on site B without entering your 0:17:44.200 --> 0:17:47.240 payment details again and you might think it will lead 0:17:47.240 --> 0:17:49.280 to a big increase in conversion if a lot of 0:17:49.520 --> 0:17:51.800 consumers have their payment credentials remembered so they don't have 0:17:51.840 --> 0:17:53.800 to type any extra data in they can just click buy. 0:17:54.000 --> 0:17:56.440 And turns out it does. And there's obviously a virtuous 0:17:56.440 --> 0:17:59.080 cycle here where you know, the more people sign up 0:17:59.080 --> 0:18:01.160 for it, but denser the network gets. So that's where 0:18:01.160 --> 0:18:02.720 it's starting to work. And so we have some media 0:18:02.720 --> 0:18:04.760 properties starting to use that. And so what it means 0:18:04.840 --> 0:18:07.159 is they get lots of people coming with credentials all 0:18:07.200 --> 0:18:09.040 pre filled and they just need to hit by and 0:18:09.160 --> 0:18:10.880 then the commercial proposition just needs to work. 0:18:11.000 --> 0:18:13.080 I just feel like the media payoll problem for me 0:18:13.200 --> 0:18:15.640 is not even the payment credentials. It's once you've paid 0:18:15.720 --> 0:18:19.119 for a payoll, keeping you logged in, you're on your 0:18:19.119 --> 0:18:24.280 phone to computers, you're like, you get something emailed to you. 0:18:24.320 --> 0:18:26.399 And just remember me. It's really frustrating. 0:18:26.600 --> 0:18:28.639 We should and may get to that as well. I agree, 0:18:28.680 --> 0:18:30.000 that's that's part two of it. To me. 0:18:30.040 --> 0:18:31.960 That's related to like online identity and the stuff that 0:18:31.960 --> 0:18:35.320