 Hey everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live, I can't say that enough. We are live at AWS re-invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Hey Dave. Hey Lisa. Having a good day so far? So far so good. We have an alumni back with us. We have about 100 segments on theCUBE at AWS re-invent. We've got one of our original alumni back with us, Zaki Bajwa joins us. The global head of partners, solution engineers at Strait. Zaki, welcome back. Thank you Lisa. Thank you Dave. Pleasure to be here. Isn't it great to be back in person? Love it, love it. Can't do a whiteboard virtually. You can, it's not the same. It's not the same. And all those conversations I'm sure that you've had with partners and with customers the last couple of days that you just can't replicate that over Zoom. Exactly. So just for anyone who doesn't understand, AWS has a massive ecosystem of partners. So we're going to talk about Stripe at AWS. But for anyone that doesn't know what Stripe is, give us the love down. You guys started 10 years ago. Talk to us about Stripe, the business strategy, what it's like today. Yeah, sure. So as you guys know, Stripe started 10 years ago, by two brothers, John and Patrick Collison. And they really focused on the developer and helping the developers accelerate digital commerce. Why? Because the status quo at the time was one where a developer needed to build banking relationships with issuing banks, merchant banks, card networks, payment networks, tax liabilities, data compliance, and all of these manual processes that they had to deal with. So what Stripe aspires to do is build a complete commerce platform, leveraging our integrated suite of products that is really allowing us to build what we call the global payments and treasury network. So if you think about this global payment and treasury network or what we call the GPTN, it's meant to not only help abstract all of that complexity from a global payments infrastructure point of view, but also help move money in a simple and borderless and programmable way just like we do in the internet. So that's the core essence of Stripe is to build this global payment treasury network to allow for money movement to happen in a simple and borderless manner. Simple and borderless, two key things there. How has the business strategy evolved in the last 10 years and specifically in the last 20, 22 months? Yeah, great question. So as you can imagine with COVID, David, you can order a cup of coffee or a brand new car and that whole direct to consumer model has accelerated in COVID. We've accelerated ourselves going to upwards of 6,000 employees. We've been able to answer or manage upwards of 170 billion API requests in the last 12 months alone. We deliver upwards of five nines from a availability performance point of view. That means 13 seconds of downtime or less a month. And we're doing this originally starting off for the developer, David, as you talked about, allowing developers to deliver, you know, what I call process payments, accept payments and reconcile payments. But the evolution that you're talking about, Lisa, has really led to three key areas of focus that our users are requesting from us. And Stripe's first operating principle is really that user-first mentality, similar to Amazon's, where we listen to our users and they're really asking for three key areas of focus. Number one is all around modernizing their digital commerce. So this is big enterprises coming to us and saying, whether I'm a uni-lever or a Ford, how do you help me with a direct to consumer e-commerce type platform? Number one. Secondly, it's companies like Deliveroo and Lyft creating what we call marketplaces. Also think about Twitter and Clubhouse, more solopreneurs, entrepreneurs' kind of marketplaces. Third is all around SaaS business models. So think about Slack and Atlassian that are customer-vivors and accelerating the journey with us around digitizing digital commerce. So that's the first area of evolution. The second area is all around what we call embedded fintech. So we know, just like Amazon helped accelerate infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and function as a service, we're helping accelerate fintech as a service. So we believe every company and every industry aspires to add more and more fintech capabilities in their core services that they offer to their customers. So think about a Shopify or Lyft, they're adding more fintech capabilities, leveraging Stripe APIs that they offer to their consumers. Likewise, when you think about a Monzo bank or an N26, what we call NeoBanks, they're creating more banking as a service component. So the second area of evolution is all around fintech as a service or embedded fintech. And the third area of focus, again, listening to our users is all around, users are saying, hey, Stripe, you have our financial data. How do you help us more with business operations and automating and optimizing our business operations? So this is revenue management, revenue reconciliation, financial reporting, all of the business processes you and I know code to cash, order to cash, pay to procure, help us automate, optimize, and not just optimize, but help us create net new business models. So these are the three key areas of evolution that we've seen, modernizing digital commerce, embedded fintech, and then certainly last but not least, business operations and automating that. And your target audience is the developers? Are you having conversations now that are more, I mean, this is like transformative to industries and disruptive. Are you having conversations higher up in the chain? Great question, and this is a parallel with Amazon. Just like Amazon started with developers, AWS, and then went up to the C-suite, if you will, we're seeing the same exact thing. Obviously, our DNA is developer first, making it intuitive, natural, easy for developers to build on Stripe, but we're seeing more and more C-suite leaders come to us and saying, help us evolve our business model, help us modernize and digitize net new business models to get new revenue streams. So those parallel work streams are both developer mindset and C-suite led is certainly a big evolution for us. And we're looking to learn from our Amazon friends as to the success that they've had there. Do you have any examples of projects that developers have proposed that were, at first glance, completely outlandish? Is there any sort of corner of the chart use case where Stripe didn't think of it as some developer came up with the idea? Maybe it can't be done yet. If you have an example of that, that would be very interesting. I'll give you two examples. So as I said, we're definitely a user first entity. That's our operating principle. We always think about the user. So when we go to developers and say, what are you struggling with? What are you thinking about? What are the next set of things you need from us? And a simple comment around tax started to come up. And do you know in the U.S. there's 11,000 tax jurisdictions that you when you're selling something online have to abide to these different jurisdictions. So one of the things that we then evolved into is created a Stripe tax product which initially users or developers were really struggling with and working on. So we created a Stripe tax product. We've done an acquisition called TaxJard that helps us accelerate that journey for tax. The other one is this notion of low code that we see in the marketplace right now where developers saying, hey, give me more embeddables on top of the primitives that you've created on top of the APIs. So we went leveraging what our customers have already done, created things like a checkout capability which is a simple, redirect, highly customized for conversion which you can just integrate to one API. You have a full checkout capability. You can embed that into your platform which didn't exist before and needed you to really integrate into different APIs. So all of these capabilities are what developers have really focused on and built that we've done leverage and excel though. Yeah, I think between Lisa and myself, we've paid taxes in about 7,000 of those. Yeah, probably. Not 11,000 jurisdictions, but all the various sales taxes and everything else. So we're sort of familiar with it. I think so. So here we are on the floor at re-invent. Great, as we said to be back in person, the 10th annual, but as each year goes by, AWS's ecosystem of partners gets bigger and bigger. The flywheel gets, I don't know, I think faster and faster. The number of announcements that came out yesterday and today talk to us about some of the common traits that Stripe and AWS share. Yeah, so I mentioned a few of them. One is certainly the user-first mentality where we're listening to users. That tax example is a perfect one of how do we decide new features, new capabilities based on user-first. Amazon does that better than anyone else. Second is that developer mindset, focus on the developer. Those will be the core persona we target. Give you an example. Lyft, we all know Lyft. They wanted to create instant payouts for their drivers. So their developers came to us and say, our developers don't want to get paid, I'm sorry, our drivers don't want to get paid in a week or two weeks. So we work with their developers to create an instant payout mechanism. Now, in six months, over 40% of the drivers are using Stripe Instant Payout powered by Stripe. And that's a developer-first mindset, again, back to AWS. And then the third is really around the go-to market and the market opportunity is very similar. You talked about the developer persona and the C-suite, very similar to Amazon, but also we're not just catering to enterprise and strategic big customers. We are just as much focused on startups, SMB, mid-market, digital-native, just like Amazon is. And I would say the last parallel, which is probably the most important one, is innovation. I come from enterprise software where we looked at monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, annual release cycles. Well, at Stripe, all of that goes out the door just like Amazon. We may have 100 to 1,000 APIs in motion at any time in alpha, beta, production. And just like Amazon, we're iterating and releasing new innovations consistently. So I would say that's probably the most important one that we have with Amazon. It's a lot of synergies there, like deep integrated trusted partner synergies, it sounds like. Oh, great, definitely. And then we're seeing this. I was going more, as we are going more upmarket, we're seeing a demand for end-to-end solutions that require integrations with a CRM vendor for customer 360, with an accounting vendor for peer-to-procure order-to-cash, billing, accounting, with an e-commerce company like Adobe Magento to do better. So more end-to-end solutions with these tech partners, we're working with our GSIs to help deliver those end-to-end solutions. And certainly, but not least, the dev agencies who are still sort of our core constituents that help us keep relevant with those developers. You mentioned this at the outset, but some things bear repeating. Can you go into a little more detail on the difference between me wanting to start up a business and take credit cards as payment, 10 years ago, let's say, versus today? How much of the friction have you removed from that system? It is literally an hour to two hour process versus weeks and months before. But what are those steps? Like, who would I, you mentioned this, again, you mentioned this already, but go through that again. Who would I have to reach out to to make this happen? I mean, we're talking, you know, relationships with banks, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so it starts at initiating and registering that company. So imagine you going and having to register a company today. You can do that with a Stripe Atlas product in a matter of hours. Get your EIN number, get your tax restrictions done, your registration as a Delaware entity within the US. You can be anywhere globally and go do that within a matter of one hour. That's number one, you start there. From there, then it's a matter of embedding, payment embeddables within your e-commerce platform, marketplace platform, et cetera. As you've heard, I've talked about seven lines of code to get payments going. You can quickly onboard, accept payments, process payments, reconcile payments, all within an hour. And that's just to start. But now you get into more complex use cases around marketplaces, multi-party connection, multi-party payouts, different commission rates, different subscription models. Think about a flat tier model, a metered tier model, all of these different things that we've abstracted and allow you to just use one, two, three different integrations to help accelerate and use that in your digital commerce platform. So all of these different workflows is what we've automated through our APIs. That's unbelievable. It really is. It is unbelievable. The amount of automation and innovation that's gone on in such a short time period, what are some of the things as we kind of wrap up here that we can look forward to from a roadmap perspective, technology-wise, partner-wise? Yeah, so I mean, we have a slew of data, as you can imagine. Billions and billions of transactional data. And you guys know what we do with data is we're looking at fraud prevention. We're looking at, we have a product called Radar that looks at fraud. We're doing adaptive acceptance to do more AI, ML learned data and authorization. We're also looking at, how do we feed a lot of this financial data into the right mechanisms to allow you to then create new business models on top of this, whether it's cross-sell, to new user business capture. As well as, you know, one of the things I did not talk about which coming from a farming background is this notion of Stripe Climate, where we have upwards of 2,000 companies across 37 countries that are leveraging our Stripe Climate product to give back to tech advanced companies that are helping in carbon offset. And super exciting times there from an ESG environmental social governance point of view. So all of those combined is what excites us about the future at Stripe. Wow, the future seems unlimited. Lots going on. Salki, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what's going on with Stripe. All the innovation that's going on, the synergies with AWS and what's coming down the pike. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. All right, for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage.