 Welcome everybody to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. We're here in the main hall. Yes, this is a physical event. It's a hybrid event, probably the industry's most important hybrid event in the year. We're super excited to be here. Of course, last year, during the lockdown, re-invent was purely virtual this year. They go in hybrid, 20 plus thousand people. I hear their whisper numbers like 25, 27,000, hundreds of thousands of people online. theCUBE's here, two sets. We got two remote studios. We're super excited. I'd like to introduce my co-host, David Nicholson. He'll be here all week with us. John Furrier is also here. Lisa Martin for theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage. And we're so psyched to start off this session with Kenneth Chesnut, who's the head of technology partnerships at Stripe. Stripe's an amazing company. Ken, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Dave and David. I greatly appreciate it. How about this, right? Finally, live event. We've done a few. We've probably done four or five this year, but it's good to be back in person. It is, absolutely. So Stripe, I mean, wow, powering the new economy. Tell us a little bit more for those people who may not be familiar with Stripe. They probably use it without even knowing it when they sign it away. But tell us about the company. Well, Stripe was founded in 2010 by two brothers, Patrick and John Collison. And really it was from their first business and realizing how hard it was to actually charge for things online. You had to acquire a relationship with a gateway provider to accept payments. You had to acquire a relationship with an acquiring bank. And you had to do that for each and every country that you wanted to service. So the same way that AWS reduced the barrier in terms of not having to procure, spend millions of dollars on storage, computers, networking. Effectively what we've done at Stripe is reduce the barriers around economic infrastructure accepting payments online. So you've reduced that undifferentiated heavy lifting for payments. But so describe Ken what it was like kind of pre-Stripe. You would literally have to, what, install servers, get storage and put software on there, get a database. And then what, if you had any money left over, you could actually do some business. But describe the sort of what the experience is like with Stripe. Sure, so with Stripe, we literally talk about seven lines of code. So we allow any developer to provide a set of APIs for any developer to accept payments online. And we do the undifferentiated heavy lifting in terms of accepting payments, accepting those payments, processing them, revenue reporting and reconciliation, all ensuring compliance and security. So it's like you said, taking care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting around accepting payments online. And the enabler there is the cloud. I mean, 2009, 2010, you guys were founded. The cloud was only like three years old, right? And so you had to really sort of take a chance on leveraging the cloud or maybe early on you just installed it yourself and said, this isn't going to scale. So maybe tell us how you sort of leverage the cloud. Sure. So we're a long time AWS customer and user back in the early days of Stripe and the early days of AWS. And we've just grown with AWS and the ecosystem. And it's interesting because a lot of the companies that have been built on AWS and grown to be successful, they're also Stripe customers as well. So they use Stripe for their economic infrastructure. We use Stripe. We run our company on AWS and we use Stripe. It's true. The integration took like minutes. It was so simple. Now you test it and make sure it scales. But so what's the stack look like? Is there such thing as a payment stack? What's the technology stack look like? Sure. So we initially started with payments and being able to accept payments online. We've brought in out our Stripe product portfolio now to effectively provide economic infrastructure for the internet. So that could be accepting payments. It could be setting up marketplaces. So companies like Lyft and Deliveroo use Stripe to power their marketplaces with their drivers and delivers. We provide a product called Radar that prevents fraud around the globe based upon the data that we're seeing from our customers. We have issuing and treasury so that companies can provide their users or their merchants with banking services. So loans issuing credit cards. So we've really broadened out the product portfolio of Stripe to provide sort of economic infrastructure for the internet. So we talked about Stripe being in the cloud from an infrastructure perspective and how that enables certain things. But that in and of itself doesn't change the dynamics around sovereignty and governance from country to country. I imagine that the global nature of AWS sort of dovetails with your strategy. But how do you address that? It's one thing to tell me in Northern California you can process payments for me but now globally go across 150 countries. How do you make that work? Yeah, absolutely. So we establish relationships within each country that we operate in. We're in about 47 countries today and that's rapidly expanding so that companies can process or accept payments and do financial transactions within those countries. So we're in 47 countries today. We accept a multitude of different payment, different currencies, different payment types. So the US is very credit card focused but if you go to other parts of the globe it could be debit cards, it could be wallets, Google Pay, Alipay, others. So really it's providing sort of the payment methods that users prefer in the different countries and meeting those users where they are. Are you out of the box compliant? What integration is required to do that? What about things like data sovereignty? Is that taken care of by the cloud provider? Are you guys, where does AWS end and you guys pick up? Yeah, so we're PCI compliant. We leverage AWS as our infrastructure to grow and scale. So one of the things that we're proud of is throughout 2020 and 2021, we've had 11 nines or five nines of uptime even through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So AWS provides that infrastructure which we build on top of to provide five nines of uptime for our users. Can you describe in more detail, Ken, your ecosystem? I mean, you're responsible for tech partnerships. What is that ecosystem? I paint a picture of it for us. Sure, so a number of users want to be able to use Stripe with their other IT infrastructure and their business processes. So a customer may start with a salesperson may start with a quote or order in Salesforce, want to automate the invoicing and billing and payment of that with Stripe and then reconcile revenue in an ERP solution like SAP or Oracle or NetSuite or Intuit in the case of small, medium businesses. So really what we're focused on is building out that ecosystem to allow our customers to streamline their business processes and integrate Stripe into their existing IT infrastructure and business processes. I mean, you mentioned a lot of different services but broadly speaking, if I think about payments, correct me if we're wrong but you are one of the early sort of software companies if I can call you that, platforms, whatever but to really focus on usage-based pricing but how do I engage with you? What's the pricing model? Maybe you could describe that a little bit. Sure, so the pricing model is very, very transparent. It's on the website. So we take a percentage of each transaction so literally you can set up a Stripe account itself service. We take 2.9% plus 30 cents on every transaction. We don't, you don't start getting charged until you start accepting payments from your customers or from your users. Easy on. Can you give us a sense of the business scope, maybe any metrics you can share? Customers, whatever you're comfortable sharing. Sure, so there's a couple of things we can share publicly just in terms of the size of the business. I think since 2020, more than 2 million businesses have launched on Stripe. So 2 million in 2020. We've, in the past 12 months, we've processed over 173 billion API calls. We do, we process about hundreds of billions of payment volume every year. If you look at sort of the macros of the business, the business is growing faster than the broader e-commerce space. So the amount of payment volume that we did in this past year is more than the entire industry did when Patrick and John founded the company in 2010 just to give you an idea of the size of the business and sort of the pace of the business. So you're growing as e-commerce grows but you're also stealing share from other sort of traditional payment systems. Okay, so that's a nice flywheel effect. And of course, Stripe's a private company, they've raised well over a billion dollars of Peter Thiel was the original funders. So you know, that's, he's talking scale. I want to go back to something you said about radar. Sure. So there's tech in your stack, fraud detection, right? So some of that- Absolutely, AI and machine learning as well. So you guys, I mean, are you a technology company? Are you a FinTech company? What are you? We're a software company. We provide software and we provide technology for developers to make online businesses and make commerce more seamless and more frictionless. The cloud first, API first, I mean, maybe describe how that is different maybe than the technical debt that's been built up over decades with traditional payment systems. Yes, it's very similar to the earlier days of AWS where a lot of tech forward companies leverage Stripe to whether it be large enterprises to transform their businesses and move online or startups and developers that want to start a new business online and do that as quickly and seamlessly as possible. So it's quite the gamut from large enterprises that are digitally transforming themselves, companies like Marsk and NASDAQ and others, as well as startups and developers that have started their businesses and born on Stripe. So when you talk about a startup, how small of an entity makes sense? When you think of, if you look at it from an economic perspective, lowering the friction associated with transactions can lift up a large part of the world with sort of, with very, very small businesses. Is that something that this is all about? Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, two million businesses have launched on Stripe in the past year and those businesses vary, but it could be literally a developer or a small SMB that wants to be able to accept payments online and can just set up a Stripe account and start accepting payments. Yeah, so this is not a one-hit wonder. Lay out the vision for Stripe, right? I mean, you're a platform. You're becoming a fundamental ingredient of the digital economy. Pre-pandemic, that was all a bunch of buzzwords, but today we all know how important that is. But lay out the vision for us, Ken. Yeah, really, the mission of Stripe is to grow the GDP of the internet. And so what that means is more and more, our basic belief is more and more businesses will go online with the pandemic that was accelerated. But I think the general trend of businesses moving online will continue to accelerate and we want to provide economic infrastructure to support those businesses. Andreessen talked about sort of software, software eating the world. Well, our belief is fintech is eating software. So in the fullness of time, I think the opportunity is for any company to be a financial services company and we want to empower any company that wants to, or any user that wants to be a financial services company to provide the economic infrastructure for them to do so. And you know, I mean, your data company, in that sense, you're moving bits around, you know, I like to say data's eating software, because really, you got to have your data act together. Absolutely. And that's an evolving, I mean, you guys started in 2010, I would imagine your data strategy has evolved quite dramatically. Yeah, it's a great call out Dave. One of our other products is a product called Sigma. So Sigma allows merchants or our customers to query payment and transaction data. So they want to be able to understand who are their customers? What are the payment methods that those customers prefer in different countries, in different regions? So we're starting to have some interesting use cases working with AWS and other partners when you can start combining payment and transaction data in Stripe with other data to understand customer segmentation, customer 360, lifetime value of a customer, customer acquisition costs, being able to close the books faster in your ERP because you can apply that payment and transaction data to your general ledger to close the books faster at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter, at the end of the year. So yeah, as more and more companies are using Stripe, they want to be able to take advantage of that data and combine it with other sorts of data to drive business value. Yeah, you mentioned some of those key metrics that are so important to companies today. I'll give you the last word, reinvent. Look at this, the hall is packed. A little bit surprising, frankly, but exciting. What are you looking forward to this week? Yeah, I'm just looking forward to meeting people in person again. It's great to be here and, you know, we have a strong relationship with AWS. We have lots of partners in common here as well, both consulting partners and technology partners. So really looking forward to meeting with partners and customers and especially as we plan for next year and launching our partner program beginning of next year. There's a lot of groundwork and things to learn from here as we launch our partner business formally next year. I'll bet, looking forward to that. Ken, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much, appreciate the time. All right, and we want to thank our sponsors, AWS, of course, and also AMD, who's making the editorial segments that we bring you this week possible. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE at AWS Reinvent 2021. Keep it right there, right back.