 Back here live at the Stanford XL Symposium 17th annual. This is Silicon Angles Exclusive Coverage. This is our Cube, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, co-hosting with Jeff Kelly from Wikibon here. And our next guest is Bill Reddy, CEO of Braintree. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks. So tell us what you're doing here. Okay, and tell us a little about your company. And has Excel funded you? Absolutely. Okay, so give us a quick load down on Braintree. So Braintree is a payments platform for online and mobile commerce companies. So many of the best next generation e-commerce and mobile experiences run on Braintree. So companies like Uber, Airbnb, fab.com, Hotel Tonight, Halo Cab, Living Social, Open Table all run on Braintree. Largely because we've democratized access to next generation payments functionality and mobile functionality. So things like easy single click checkout, foreign currency, all these things, we've democratized access to those. So you guys build a back end platform, is it SaaS based? It's a back end platform, sort of. You can think about it as like payments in the cloud. We also, on the consumer side, we're enabling single click checkout for more than 40 million consumers. And so we also have a consumer side to our business called Benmo, which is one of the top apps in the app store that you can use to store all your payment information, pay other individuals, but you can also now use to pay inside of your favorite mobile apps. And so we make it so that if you've paid at one app in our network, you can now pay all the other apps in our network on that same device in a single touch without having to re-interpayment information or shipping information or re-interpassword. How much money did you guys raise from Excel? So we've raised a total of $70 million. Excel's lead investor, NEA, has also funded. So $70 million total raise. How many rounds? Two rounds. Excel led the first round, NEA led the second with Excel participating. That's some nice cash cushion there. You can't go out of business if you have cash in the bank as they always say. Well, and we've been profitable throughout. So we were profitable even before Excel invested. So we were expanding really rapidly. We're doing more than $8 billion in volume and doubling every six months or so and profitable. So that plus having lots on the balance sheet from Excel certainly helps fight a lot. Helps on the recruiting side and also customer confidence. Bill, I want to ask you about the consumerization trend, obviously mobile, big lift for you guys. But what I want you to do is talk about the preferred user experience. Because really what's happening in this world, and we've talked to this on theCUBE many times on SiliconANGLE, is that the user experience is changing and their expectations are changing. So obviously Jeff covers this. He wrote a post on wikibon.org, big data in retail just recently. And so yeah, big data's in there. There's a lot of stuff going on, really mobile has changed the expectation of consumers. Could you talk about this new transformation where people are expecting things differently and what are those things that they're looking for? Yeah, I think initially people thought about mobile as okay, I have a computer now with me as I'm out and about. But I think that was really just sort of the very first little bit of what mobile enables. I really think the next decade is going to be about context-driven experiences. So if you think about what does the mobile device do different than the laptop or desktop world, it's that the mobile device has context about you. So it knows where you are. It means mobile apps maintain statefulness about you. So what did you do the last time you were there? Much more information about those things. If you want to make a purchase, it's now expected that if I'm inside of a mobile app, it should be quite easy for me to go do that. I shouldn't have to re-enter payment information. All these things in the web world, the laptop desktop world, you sort of read information all the time. The mobile device, I think, gives both the capability for context-driven experiences, but also the consumer expectation that I shouldn't have to do data entry on this device. You should be able to know about me, what I'm interested in, where I am, how I want to pay. And so I really think that's the sort of key to the next decade of e-commerce, particularly as it relates to mobile. Well, providing that context, that in many ways is a big data problem and a looking problem. That's right. So how do you see that kind of playing out? Where's the intersection of the mobile world and the big data world in terms of applying that kind of context? I mean, I think there's huge overlap in those things. If you think about the problems that exist on mobile and what kind of context you want, it's not just that you have, you need payment information, for example. It's things like you have different merchandising problems than you had in the laptop desktop world, right? So laptop desktop world was intent-driven. I would land at your site or I'd go to Google and search for something, share my intent, and then I'd get to a site, shop and browse through that site. Versus in the mobile world, I think it's much more about knowing about me and who I am and what I'm interested in and to really glean it. That's a tough problem, right? And so I think there's a huge amount of big data that informs that. And you have social networks that can provide some of that. You have native apps that can store some of that. We, as an e-commerce provider across many thousands of sites, we see what 40 million plus consumers are buying across many thousands of sites. And so we think about how do you use that data to help the consumer and the merchant have the context they need? But that's very much a big data problem. Yeah, I mean, I think there's huge opportunity to use that kind of location-aware context as well as kind of past behavior, understanding what the consumer is interested in, to someday when you're walking by a store, you can get an offer for a certain item based on the fact that, well, obviously you're physically near the store, you've got a history that the analysis suggests you'd be interested in this product, that kind of thing. So actually, but actually doing it in a way that's not intrusive and actually delivers real value. So it's really something that nine 10s out of 10, the customer's going to want that in front of them at least. And consumers, I think, are demonstrating that already. There's been a lot of talk about the whole showrooming phenomenon that you have people in a physical retail location but using their mobile device to go see what else is available out there. So I think that's much more sort of people going to their mobile device after the fact or sort of in session sort of while they're in a physical showroom. But I think it's indicative of your point that people are going to want to have relevant things available to them in a context-aware environment as they're thinking about these things. So I think that showrooming phenomenon is sort of indicative of what the future may hold in terms of exactly what you described of, okay, I'm walking down the street or I just walked into Best Buy and of course it tells me, here's all the things you should be thinking, you know, last time you were at Best Buy, you bought an Xbox and so now here's a great new game that came out on Xbox that is exactly in the genre that you bought other games or things like that. And then of course you've got the security and the privacy implications and you're dealing with a lot of, you know, personal financial data, obviously. So how do you guys approach kind of securing all that data, making it accessible but secure? Yeah, so that's one of the things, you know, the premise we had was that, you know, the mobile device itself tells me far more about you as an individual than the magnetic stripe on a credit card. So there's been a lot of talk about mobile might enable easier transactions but oh, they can't be as safe. But in reality, what identifies you better the magnetic stripe on that card or all the data on that mobile device, the data on the mobile device by far, just if you do something with it. So we've actually proven out that mobile transactions can be much more secure than even physical world transactions. And so I think there's a really interesting opportunity to have both a better lower friction experience in mobile and more secure. And, you know, that's a nuanced issue because, you know, we're using data on the device but then we do things like all your sensitive financial information, your card information is never stored on the device. That's stored in the cloud, you know, that's tokenized, things like that. But we think about your device as a way to identify you and then the sense of information we store somewhere else, locked away in a very secure vault, you know, away from that mobile device and we actually have sort of the ability to do two-way communications. So if all of a sudden your device shows up in Romania and we're thinking, boy, why, you know, this is unusual, in the old world, they just have to shut the card down, right? And so you'd be declined and if you didn't, maybe you were really on vacation in Romania. Versus now we can do sort of two-way communications. So in session I can say, you know, 99.9% of the time I let you check out in a single click. Now you're in Romania, but instead of just declining you because I don't think you should be in Romania, I can say, give me one extra piece of information just so I know it's really you. And sort of do that context-specific. Again, better experience than the old world where your card was just gonna shut down by your bank until you called them. I can now, in session, ask you for some more information. Better experience for you, but also more secure because I know if it's really you or if it's some fraudster that has hijacked your phone in Romania. Bill, you were on the panel here at the Stanford Symposium on the post-PC era. Good title, but you know, still, you guys are doing a little bit more than that, but let's just talk about that. What was talked on the panel and what were some of the points that were made there that you can highlight for the folks out there that didn't see the livestream? Yeah, I think the thing, I think we had some really interesting debate around this and people coming from different angles on it. I think, you know, two or three years ago when Braintree was really betting big on mobile and I would tell people, hey, we're gonna really double down on mobile. It was one or 2% of e-commerce and they were saying, hey Bill, really like people are gonna buy things on mobile devices. Now you have 30 to 40% of e-commerce shopping sessions on mobile devices and that's growing at two to three X-year over a year. So in the next 12 to 18 months, mobile devices will be the primary computing device, particularly for things like e-commerce. And so if you think about, well, what does that mean? If in the next 12 months, the primary way I as a merchant am going to interact with a consumer is via a mobile device, there's a lot of things I need to change. I need to change the fact, I need to deal with the fact that they expect the context-driven experiences that they don't wanna do data entry. If you're a physical world retailer, you need to deal with the fact of this showrooming experience that if I walk into Best Buy.com, I may see something I'm interested in but if they don't make it very easy for me to buy on my mobile device, I'll just go to Amazon, right? So there's a lot of those kinds of things that I think are going to shape where this goes and I think it's sort of two categories of things to be dealt with. One is there's gonna be some really interesting wholly new commerce experiences. Hotel Tonight, Uber, Halo Cab, those are examples of experiences that you couldn't have had before the mobile device. But I think there's also sort of all the e-commerce 1.0 players and physical world players that are now gonna be thinking about how do they port their experiences to a world where people come to them via a mobile device. And I think much of that is about how they build applications. And then there's sort of all kinds of interesting nuance beneath that around what will be the platforms. And Apple's been the early winner, will Androids sort of overtake that and in many ways are signs that that is happening. So lots of interesting things will play out over the next five years. Final question, finally getting the hook here, but I wanna ask you one final question. I'll see you before we came out and talk about bitcoins. And you kind of roll as you're right. I didn't mark off as points out, you've been covering bitcoin for a long time. You didn't get car dealerships. You mentioned kind of the price fluctuations. Obviously that's an emerging thing. Square's been out there with the payments and their huge valuation. So payments is happening. That's kind of the genies out of the bottle there. What do you see for the future of payments? I'll see you mentioned some growth. That's cool. What else could you say? Shoot the arrow forward next couple of years. What do you see as the big vision of things that's going to happen that might not be obvious? Yeah, I think the thing that's going to change about payments is that if you look at the players in the payments world, it's mostly even players that gave access to merchants to connect to the payments network. I think the next five to 10 years of payments is going to be about making it very easy for consumers and merchants to connect with one another. So all these things we just talked about in terms of context-driven experiences, being able to go into a store and sort of have context about the user complete a purchase. I think that people will choose payment providers both as a merchant and as a consumer based on what providers can make it really easy for consumers and merchants to connect. So if you notice with Braintree, we started on the merchant side, but with our Venmo acquisition, we're now making it very easy for consumers to pay on their mobile devices for anything they want, largely because we believe in this premise of five years from now, it'll be the case that when you think about payments, you'll think about three or four companies that are making it really easy for consumers and merchants to connect with one another. Bill, ready? The CEO at Braintree, very profitable prior to the funding. A lot of cash in the bank, 70 million? 70 million? 70 million, 67 million, what's the 10 million here and there? Growing, that's great, obviously a hot area. Again, it's a slipstream as we were talking about earlier. Get in there and ride that current. Obviously a lot of growth. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations and look forward to falling up in the future. Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it. Okay, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect to see from those. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. We'll be right back with our next guest live exclusively on theCUBE's coverage the Stanford Excel Symposium here in Stanford University, Stanford, California. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back.