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Sarita Singh

AI companies must watch out for freeloaders burning tokens for free—and wrecking margins one sign-up at a time

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Angelica Ang

Bridge founder Zach Abrams sees an opportunity for ‘tokenized local currencies’ across Asia

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Asia’s founders are going global faster, sometimes even before they’re sure what their business is, says Stripe’s SEA MD

/2026/08/24/asia-founders-going-global-faster-stripe/

Alexei Oreskovic

Apple lays off staffers ahead of CEO change

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Anthropic to SpaceX: You ain’t bigger

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Sharon Goldman

How a 23-year-old former OpenAI researcher turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsize influence from Silicon Valley to D.C.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/08/leopold-aschenbrenner-openai-ftx-1-5-billion-hedge-fund-situational-awareness/?itm_source=parsely-api

Leo Schwartz

Ben Weiss

Exclusive: Stripe-backed blockchain startup Tempo raises $500 million round led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital and Greenoaks

https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/10/17/stripe-paradigm-tempo-series-a-5-billion-thrive-capital-greenoaks-joshua-kushner/?itm_source=parsely-api

Ryan Hogg

Stripe’s billionaire Collison brothers say remote work solves the ‘two-body problem’ faced by working couples

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Camila Grigera Naón

Stripe, Visa and over 140 other businesses to launch stablecoin to rival Tether and Circle

https://fortune.com/2026/06/30/stripe-visa-stablecoin-rival-ousd-tether-circle/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jeremy Kahn

OpenAI rolls out 'instant' purchases directly from ChatGPT, in a radical shift to e-commerce and a direct challenge to Google

https://fortune.com/2025/09/29/openai-rolls-out-purchases-direct-from-chatgpt-in-a-radical-shift-to-e-commerce-and-direct-challenge-to-google/?itm_source=parsely-api

Anthropic to SpaceX: You ain't bigger

https://fortune.com/2026/08/21/anthropic-to-spacex-you-aint-bigger/?itm_source=parsely-api

Paolo Confino

Stripe hits a $91 billion valuation amid 'lumpy' payments growth that cofounder says can't be managed ‘on a supertight quarterly EPS basis’

https://fortune.com/2025/02/27/stripe-valuation-tech-venture-capital-silicon-valley/?itm_source=parsely-api

Venture capital has moved from a broad-based bet on innovation to an increasingly narrow one, with a handful of frontier AI companies now absorbing most global investment. Opportunities are emerging well beyond Silicon Valley, even as female and minority founders continue to be significantly underfunded despite evidence of stronger returns. This conversation takes a global view of where capital is flowing next, from who gets funded early to which regions and sectors are poised to define the next wave of growth

Terri Burns, Founder, Type Capital 
Meena Flynn, Chair, Global Private Wealth Management; Co-Head, One Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs 
Laela Sturdy, Managing Partner, CapitalG 
Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune 

The State of Venture

Conferences

fortune_most_powerful_women_summit

fortunemostpowerfulwomensummit

Hello everyone, how's it going? So thank you 3 for being here with me. I wanna start, uh, with, with one question about a question, um, which is what is the top question you are being asked the most right now, Nina from your clients, Terry and Leila from the CEOs and founders that you back, and let's start with you, Nina. Are we in a bubble right now? Are we in an investing bubble, whether that's the markets more broadly or whether that's AI specifically? Yep, makes sense, Terry. Um, I often get, uh, do you invest in traditional seed rounds or the 2026 version of a seed round? And what is the 2026 version of a seed round? Much, much larger, you know, we're seeing $100 million dollar seeds and preseeds, and so founders are wondering as they are trying to assess investors which type of seed do you do? Mm, OK. And Leila, I'd say the most common question I get from CEOs is how can we move faster. I think the thing that's changed the most in the growth tech landscape over the past year or two is the speed at which companies are moving. So the top decile companies, we have many that have scaled to 100 million in ARR in under a year, whereas in the fast generation that would take 5 or 6 years for the very best companies. So everyone is focused on speed and how they can build the technology faster, how they can hire faster. how they can get to market faster. Yeah, excellent, and I'm gonna stick with Mina's bubble question because I'm sure you all get asked it every day, as Mina said, but I do have to ask because so many people right now are warning that this first wave of overfunded AI companies is gonna disappoint. They're scared about this bubble. Leila, you sit in the seat. You're writing some of the biggest checks in AI. What is your take on this supposed AI bubble we're in? Is it real? Is it not? Well, I think I'll start with the numbers because I think the numbers are astonishing. The, the last data point I saw was that expectations for Capex spilled out in 2028 top $1.5 trillion. And so when you look at that as a percentage of GDP, it's, it's, I think it's around 2.8%, which is Higher 2 times what it was during the telecom build out and higher than the average during the railroads, so good reason to be asking questions. I think when you talk to the builders of the technology and again the companies themselves that are fueled by AI, the business results are quite compelling. So this revenue growth that we're seeing, um, early signs of, of ROI both. Enterprise use cases as well as you know, further afield things like robotics, life sciences, the, the efficacy of the products and the excitement around adoption is unlike anything we've seen. So we, we see really great, um, you know, reasons to invest in the companies that we've backed are making real business traction, but the scope of the investment is very considerable. And I wanna come back to some of those investments in a bit, but Mino, for the client side, when clients come to you being very scared about an AI crash, what are you saying to, to talk to them about this? Yeah, so I would say the first thing is when you look at the public markets. There is, uh, a lot of support from evaluation perspective when you actually look at the underlying earnings, especially in large cap. And so when you look at, you know, the top 10 names in the S&P, um, the, the revenue and earnings generation is, is spectacular to Leyla's point, like to the extent I mean Capex is significant and it's, it's. Almost more than 100% of cash flow, but to the extent that they needed to, they could turn that off. And so I actually don't think in large cap public markets that we're in a bubble. I think it's actually, um, you know, these valuations are attractive relative to the amount of revenues and earnings. Um, I think the one, you know, the, the thing that's important. As we work through this market cycle, this economic cycle, whether it's in public markets or in private markets, is really to think about not trying to time any one market environment or vintage or cycle. And so to put a finer point on that, actually for our clients for their private portfolios, we actually take 5 years to invest their money to get to a strategic asset allocation. And that's across a venture growth buyout private credit, etc. um, but when you really think about being really disciplined from that perspective, it gives you more confidence that you're gonna be able to withstand any one economic or vintage cycle volatility. Excellent. And Leila, one more for you before I come to you, Terry, which is I, I wanna talk about one of those investments that you've been making. Um, one of your big bets is. In isomorphic labs, which for those that don't know it's a Google DeepMind spin-off that uses AI to design new drugs, just raised $2.1 billion but the drugs are not yet, um, in, in human trials. So I'm wondering if you talk to us a bit about, you know, when will someone in this room take a medicine that AI designed and what makes you willing to bet on something before there's an actual product involved. Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question because I think, um, one of, uh, many of the most exciting applications of AI in my opinion are in these industries outside of just, um, enterprise workflows and certainly outside of asking a chatbot questions and health life sciences health are probably the application most of us as humans are, are, are most excited about. So there are many steps on the path to getting a drug, as many of you in the room know that work in biotech and pharma, um, and it's quite easy to actually see the efficacy of models that are purposely built for drug discovery, which is what the, you know, the isomorphic team has been working on for many, many years. The founding team got a Nobel Prize for the. Um, the science they did around, uh, protein folding model. So this is many, many years in the making, and, um, I don't know the exact timeline of when there are the, the reality of AI is there is discovery and there is the, um, the technology milestones that we meet with the with the technology itself and then there are many human milestones like clinical trials and regulatory, um, work that needs to be done, but I believe that we'll continue to see promising. Releases in terms of of um the progress that the models are making in areas like life sciences also other areas in the real world like robotics autonomy you know Waymo is another big investment of ours. I think we'll see the impact of this technology in cities in urban design in health and um that's where some of the most exciting applications lie. I, I would just agree with. About 100% in terms of our perspective is what's gonna help the the intersection of healthcare and AI especially with life sciences in terms of new drug discovery as well as um more use cases for existing drugs um really you know sets up for uh a healthier you know economic environment as well as a global population. But also, um, it's the one area actually health care in general where we see that there's gonna be more labor force needed versus other sectors and so a lot of people also are worried about what's gonna happen from a jobs perspective and just given the amount of innovation and the amount of opportunity it's also an area just from a jobs perspective as well as from an investment perspective where we think AI could have a significant. Benefit and we could do a whole other panel on that and then I want to later but Terry, I first do wanna come to you because this is a stat that I think has been thrown out today already, but studies are showing that female founded startups generate more revenue per dollar raised, yet teams made up of only women get, you know, around 1% of US venture dollars last year. So why is no one taking the easy money and talk to us about what, what the problem is and what you're kind of doing to fix it. Yeah, I think that you know when you look at at the broader market we are seeing a lot of concentrated dollars and that means a lot of dollars are going into very few companies, a lot of dollars are going into very few sectors, and we're seeing this across a number of different asset classes, but of course we think a lot about venture and we're seeing this in venture in particular, um, when you look at. The way that companies are ultimately underwritten, particularly in private markets, uh, there's always this bias towards repeat founders, folks who have done this before, folks who have preexisting networks, and frankly I think that that's a fairly logical way of, of underwriting. There's actually been a, a, a number of statistics that have shown outcomes from repeat founders versus, uh, versus first time founders. But we all know what history looks like, right? And so if we continue to double down on the way things have been done, even though there are some opportunities for some great economic outcomes, we obviously will see these downstream impacts for female founders and other demographics. That makes sense. Um, I, I wanna talk to you about. To Mina, because I, I think you know women are projected to control $34 trillion in US assets by 202,030. Does that close the gap, or do women investors end up backing the same founders that men do? And, and what are you seeing? I would say that there's, um, there's a lot of talk about women, our female clients wanting to back female investors, call it 5, 10 years ago. I don't think there was a number of managers out there as there are now and I think that there wasn't the conviction level, but I would say there's really in the last 1-2 years been a little bit of a uh a change that we've started to witness and I think it's gonna continue to propel going forward as it relates to investing in I would say areas that are specific to um females and so like for example health care. Female health care, um, women's health care is an area where there is a lot of women that are passionate about that and are looking for ways and are investing with, um, with, with female DC managers because they tend to understand it. Right, that makes sense. Now Leila, one question for you and then I'm gonna turn to the room. So if you have a question over here, just raise your hand and someone will bring a microphone over to you. Um, but companies are taking longer than ever to go public right now. It's, for example, Leila, you led Stripe Series D back in 2016. Uh, 10 years later it's still not public, but now it's worth $159 billion. What does this mean for the venture ecosystem? Why are we in this place? Yeah, um, it's one of the, uh, you know, most profound changes I think in the capital markets between public and private investments just how long these, uh, particularly blue chip private companies have stayed private, um, and look, I think, um, the reality is every single CEO Stripe is a great example, um, will face the choice of whether building his or her company in the private markets or the public's markets is more beneficial to executing the strategy. And I think Stripe is a good example of um a company that has repeatedly said hey we are getting access to everything we need huge capital in the in the in the private markets to the tune of billions of dollars that no one expected they would be able to erase maybe you look maybe 10-12 years ago that amount of capital just wasn't available for private um private companies um and the benefits of being able to do that arguably for a lot of CEOs is that they can be much more innovative in the private. Markets they can take longer term bets they're not answering to quarterly, uh, earnings calls on shareholders asking about their capital allocation. They've been able to make massive acquisitions. So Stripe just bought another one of our companies, Open Router, uh, a couple weeks ago, um, so you see the things that traditionally were associated with being the benefits of being a public company like, uh, deep capital markets for, um, to build. Your investor base and to do acquisitions are now available in the private markets so you're seeing a lot of founders making that choice. Um, we will see if that continues. I think there are also a lot of benefits of going public. We have a lot of amazing, you know, public companies in our capital G portfolio. There's a lot of advantages, particularly if you sell into the enterprise, but there's also some real limitations in terms of ability to execute your strategy, especially. and rapidly changing markets and platform shifts like we're in right now so it's a trend that has been building steadily over the last couple of years and um if the capital keeps showing up in the private markets I don't really see it going away. I, I will add though and I, I don't know if this is um the case in your example Leila, but I do think that this is an increasing challenge and maybe divergence of um. Uh, incentives for both founders and for investors, you know, throughout venture capital history, the vast majority of dollars that were returned to LPs were through IPOs and so having public exits was something that was really, really helpful for private industry. Now what we're seeing, I, I can't remember the stat off the top of my head, but in the last two years, the number of secondaries and the, the total amount that is. Traded in secondary to something like way beyond what it's been throughout all of secondary history and that's really challenging for founders and for CEOs, right, because now you have markets that are trading on a company that you have no say or control over and so I think it's really interesting to see how this is going to play out over time because there are are both benefits and downsides for both investors and CEOs and I, I think the other thing just to add to the alternative investment landscape whether it's. You know what, how long it takes to go public is, is one point, but what you're seeing is that we, we actually recommend our clients have 30% of their assets roughly into alternative investments. And the reason why is what Leyla was saying about is that there's so much value creation. There's so much access to capital. The average company is staying uh private 11 years now. That's like almost double what it was, you know, a. A decade ago and so you want to be able to take place in that value creation. There's also so many more private companies outstanding than there are public companies, so your investable universe is more substantial. And then the other, the other point is that there is on the emotional side of investing when you see a portfolio that goes like this every day and when you have an alternatives portfolio that doesn't mark to market on a daily basis. It puts that emotional side to the side and encourages clients to stay invested and so it's one of the things where you know to the extent that you have access to alternatives you size it right in your portfolio I think there's a tremendous amount of value creation that can happen there absolutely and and maybe one thing I would just add to bridge that because I completely agree and I think um we talk about some of the biggest and the best private companies that have generated uh uh substantial. amount of the returns over the past decade. There's also the hundreds maybe even thousands of companies that have raised a lot of capital and the public markets aren't really open to them. They're either too small, they're not growing fast enough, their financial profile is not attractive enough, and in the landscape that we're in right now, both public and private investors are very focused on scaled assets. They're they're trying to understand a lot of complexity. You have, you know, pub public analysts that used to cover software names that are deep covering semis and hard tech and so to get the attention of investors you really need to be growing at much higher rates than you, uh, used to. So some people say you have to be growing at 30% plus for example to be a software company going public and so the window is open for a few but not necessarily open for many. Which is another dynamic that we see um as to you know why there are so many private companies that have to access the secondary markets and other things now because we're sadly winding down to our last few minutes, Terry, I'm gonna come back to you because one of the things I find most fascinating about, especially because you talk to a lot of Gen Z founders, a lot of, a lot of first time founders, um, a lot are bragging, you know, with AI, I don't need the amount of people in my company. I can build a company with one person. I don't need 30 people. Um, if that's true, do the best young founders even need to, to raise capital anymore? And what's your pitch to the ones who are deciding not to raise and saying, you know, AI can do it all for me? It's a really good question. Um, we, we hear this a lot, and it's our job as investors to try and determine what, what is marketing versus what is really true. Um, to Leila's point, not only are so many scale-ups doing. So at a much faster rate than ever in history they are doing it with much smaller teams than before in history and so I do think that there is truth to this claim. Um, the challenge though is if you are building a fundamental app layer or dev tool AI company, uh, you need compute and so that is a huge cost for a lot of these early stage companies. So even though that they're, they're smaller teams. They still need just as much if not more capital. Um, what happens over time as we see costs go down I think will be really interesting, um, to, to sort of see what it looks like for really small teams to build big businesses and in particular the cost basis that's gonna be needed for that over time. That makes sense. Well, thank you three so much. Thank you all for listening, uh, I appreciate it.

Katie Dill, Head of Design, Stripe;
Janaki Kumar, Head of Design, Commercial Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co; 
In conversation with: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Redesigning Finance

when polled a few americans might say they love their bank. Traditional banks have had difficulties deploying new technology at scale and despite investments in mobile banking, some continue to lose clients to neo bank. As financial services undergo a digital transformation. What role should designers play? Design executives from two different financial firms are here to share how they are creating value added products and compelling customer experiences. Please welcome Jon AKI Kumar, head of design commercial bank Jpmorgan and Chase Katie Dill, head of design at stripe and joining them on stage is brainstorm design co chair Ryan. Mhm. Then alright as Kristin said, two very different kinds of financial companies. We're we're here to talk about redesigning finance. We have one of the biggest banks in the country and and a growing large fintech but coming coming up the same problem or the same challenge from different directions. I'll start with you johnny key when people think of like you know Chase or any kind of big you know, traditional banking company, they don't necessarily think of design or design culture. So and especially commercial banking, tell us how what the real story is on the inside. What is the challenge to build that culture. Thank you for that question. The fact that people don't think that there is design is the very reason we need design and more designed. Right? I think um the commercial banks of small businesses all the way to large businesses and different verticals and um it's really vital that they are the recipients of great design and what happens inside this organization as um the mission that are set for our team is a humanized financial services. So what we've observed in this, you know, very large and successful bank is that there are world class experts in different financial products, whether it's card or line of credit Treasury services, um and so many others. Right? But there there is a the role of design is to tell the story of the client and help us bring together the right products and services in service of the client. So that's essentially how we are trying to transform commercial bank. I think that such a common problem for big legacy companies that have developed so much expertise and develop product lines to satisfy all kinds of niche, you know, use cases and everything and there was no, it wasn't it wasn't not built at once. It was built piecemeal. So that problem of just asking questions probably is the beginning part of it, but like how do you, do you know, what's an example of how you can take uh design your your design team and go into one of those scenarios and make it more seamless, especially to the customer coming in to try to make sense of what you're offering them. Yeah, I think internally we start with storytelling right, we tell the stories of our clients, we put the products in context of what the client's needs are and what other, you know, conflicting priorities or other considerations they may have as they are trying to access the banking products and I think that just the storytelling helps people empathize with the clients and that's already a great start. And um yeah, and then you know, we try to really use language we have, you know, not just interaction designers, visual designers, we also have copywriters. So we try to make sure that we speak to the user in every way possible so that we can connect our financial products and services to their needs. How big is your team and how much has it grown and you know, how much, how much do you have to lobby? Uh you know Jamie Diamond to give you more resources? Yeah, so I know, I think to, to be, to be fair to jpmorgan is a huge organization and I'm only part of commercial bank, there is Consumer Bank Investment Bank and in fact those design organizations are larger than ours. Um commercial bank is small but mighty and growing. Um and I'm 60 at the moment and we are constantly growing. So you're if you were speaking to Jamie you'd say you need you need more people. I mean honestly everybody knows how hard it is to hire talent. So um I I just want to make sure that we, you know most of my job is setting up the environment where design can succeed, right? It's I don't really believe in just throwing resources without fully creating the consideration the environment for success. So one of the other aspects of the product experts that I spoke about earlier, they call themselves product managers or product owners, right? But we all know when we're creating digital products, that's, that's a whole another skill sets that's needed to be a product owner in that environment. So we are also kind of trying to create training curriculums for product owners so that they can be excellent stakeholders for us and also creating a platform mindset, going to Fin techs of the world where we don't have to build every single capability ourselves, right? We if we create a platform, we can also partner and leverage some of the skill sets that are around us. And at the end of the day it's all about the clients. So let's transition to Fintech, let's, we'll go to Katie. So um I mean I just want to start with you on the fact that you actually are relatively new at strike because you, you joined, I think you said last March and you've worked previously at Airbnb En left. So two very well known apps that probably everybody here has used their very consumer focused. So what was it like to go from those two incredible experiences to a company that's uh that's more enterprise focused, that's not a, you know, individual consumer focused company. Yeah, you know March last year and boy time moves very strangely these days. Uh so uh it has gone by in a blink, but I feel like a lot has changed at the same time moving into stripe, which for me was different from one, it was, you know, it's in the financial space to, it is mainly be to be focused of course, uh you know, it was definitely a bit of a learning curve. Uh I think some of the things that made it easier for me to move into was the fact that I had already been in these hyper growth technology based companies. So I'm used to a lot of change, I'm used to things growing pretty fast but what was very interesting and as we're moving into the B two B space of course is the role of sales uh in the way that our relationships with our users are at a whole nother level, you know, these are users are for the most part businesses, businesses of all sizes could be a startup of one person or it could be a fortune 50 like amazon and can we just pause this for people who probably have heard of stripe but don't really fully know how it works like what is the biggest source of revenue for you guys? Like how does you know what's the model, like how would you sum it up well where it all started with payments taking payments online, helping companies actually get their businesses going and take payments online. That was 10 years ago we now have, I think over 14 different products that have evolved and and and built off of that initial colonel. But the whole idea is that we're helping businesses start and grow their organization largely built on financial infrastructure and the businesses that we serve our of all different sizes, many of them are helping direct customers, but many of our businesses are also just helping other businesses like Shopify and these organizations are you know, looking to us to help them achieve their goals and their opinionated about it as they should be. These products that we build for them, you know, make or break, you know, their their business success. This could be their dream company that they always wanted to start. And so of course they have really strong conviction on what they're looking for and there, you know, informed and they have good reason to, you know, essentially have influence on what we build. So our in many ways that we interact with them through user research of course through support through sales through any number of means, including just directly emailing us and telling us what they think, which we crave. We love this uh really helps to inform the work we do. And that was different coming from the consumer company where yes, you might have millions using your product every day and you have, you know, maybe get support interactions or twitter interactions, but it's a very different relationship uh and I am seeing that now and I'm seeing the benefits of the fact that we have, you know, sales for example, helping inform the work that we do. It's like we have this like army of researchers kind of like googled us an army of researchers to help us build better products. Yeah, I just remind everybody raise your hands if you have questions, we have mix and we'll, we'll get to you. So you, you had some news today, you announced some Katie, some new product offerings. Do you want to tell us, give us the highlights of that? Yes, yes at noon Eastern Standard time today we had our event stripes sessions where we launched a lot of new things. The big thing that I'm very excited about is the stripe app marketplace. So now third parties, uh, you know, various businesses of all sizes can build apps into the stripe dashboard and really what we're doing there is we're basically joining forces with other organizations to improve the experiences of our various business users. So if you're running a business, let's say you are, you know, a plumber and you're, you know, doing various types of things. You don't want to go to seven different products to manage your business, one to do payments, one to do taxes, one to do revenue recognition, I want to do your support calls, whatever it might be, these are a lot of things that you're trying to manage and so what we're seeing is an opportunity to bring these things closer together kind of like as you talked about the importance of ecosystem and you know, recognizing where your expertise are, but also you know, creating moments of uh interlock between other organizations so that can be better for them. So for example, one of the apps that we launched or we'll be launching in the next couple of weeks uh is with Dropbox, so if you're running a business and you're doing various payments related work within stripe, but you want to file that away in a certain folder, for example, in your dropbox account. Now it's all linked up. You don't have to be like switching between various tabs or various apps. So it's really about just bringing, you know better user experiences, things that we all as humans expect, right? You can order and get your groceries on your doorstep in an hour. You know, these are people that are also running their businesses and want that same kind of access and instantaneous help with what they're doing Janicki you know, we were talking backstage about um you're you're mentioning the example of somebody coming to chase for alone and then realizing the opportunity there strikes me as from a, you know, from your own different point of view, similar kind of thinking about building blocks on top of the original, you know, services that you're providing and just being able to first of all recognize what clients might want and then deliver on that, but could you just kind of walk us through like you know what what this process was of realizing this opportunity and then how you address that, you know absolutely, you know, very similar lines of thinking, right? How do we serve the client more holistically? Um so in this, in this particular case that I was describing to you, it's a case of commercial real estate, you know, there are landlords who may have a small building or a large building and Chase or JPMorgan Chase traditionally gives loans to them to buy this building. Right? And when we spoke, we did ethnographic research and spoke to all the bankers who interact with these clients and ask them what do you do? And they are on the phone a lot with these clients who are asking them a whole host of questions. Should I buy this building, Do you think that you know the net operating income, is that going to be okay? Is that is that neighborhood? You know, doing well. Should you know, my water heater has broken, do you know a good contractor, I'm paying X amount for my insurance. Is that too much? You know, so they're asking all of these questions and also they need to know, you know, they need to collect rent And as we know the world is not all digital right? There are still people who are collecting checks and whatnot and they have to run behind their tenants and you know, there's, there's a lot of complexity in our small business owners hands and property owners tenants. So, what, what we did was we unpack that and we told the story of this property investor and we told them, okay, roughly how much of it. So you got a loan from Chase. So how much is that? How, how much percentage of that contributes to your success? And they said 5% Getting alone is 5% but the 95% means I have to buy the right building. I have to get the income from my tenants. I have to do all the other things that I have to do. And so that's how it we asked them, you know, and, and the client managers don't have the, um, don't have the time to give that level of dedicated support to all the clients. Right. So we are saying, how do we democratize that level of support to everyone? And we can use technology for good here. We can make every, every property investor successful because they have the right numbers, they are investing in the right buildings, they're setting the right rent and they're doing their business in a healthy way. And ultimately, you know, what, I was struck by joining Chase, is that how purpose driven, uh, the organization is, and we can make a direct correlation to the availability of affordable housing in urban areas by helping our property investors be successful, right? Because availability of affordable housing is a supply problem. There's plenty of demand. We just need to get the supply up and running and that's what we're all about. What portion of the business you're doing in the commercial bank now is like fully digitized. Do you know? It is, you know, so there are platforms of different legacy platforms and one of the it hasn't been built with that platform mindset that we we mentioned. So part of our journey is really bringing some of these technologies together, but we are investing in a whole new set of technologies to just make it modern and modular and ecosystem based and so on. Just you mentioned that um, I just wanted to bring this up also that, that uh the executives still get questions from Wall Street about why you're investing so much in technology, which I find hilarious in 2022 when uh, that's not a question you would ever get uh you know, why are you investing so much here in technology? But everybody wants to have seamless digital experience, you know, where are we gonna get that if we don't build it? Right. So, um, I wanted to ask you guys both about trust a little bit um, you know, the the giant bank that handles your money that you know, trust is imperative and and people forgive a little friction if they feel like they can trust it with stripe. You know, they want, as you mentioned, they want that instant, you know, service, but they also don't want to sacrifice on trust so and security of their transactions and just Katie, I'm just curious like um you know, coming in For you, working on designing these, these B2B experiences where it's a different trust obviously and what you were doing before it left paramount, but different experience now. So how do you build that into the design process? Oh yes, trust is critically important. I mean, I think the interesting thing about the work that we do is that one, it's a novel experience oftentimes right that people are not necessarily experts in managing their finances or you know, maybe even, you know, different stages in their business organization, they don't necessarily have the expertise and the type of work that we do, so it's new to them, secondly, it's extremely important and that thirdly it is, you know, frankly pretty personal as well, you know, a lot of the organizations that we work with might be startups as mentioned, but all the way up to larger organizations and so when we are designing that experience, we have to be also sensitive to all of that, right? Because you are talking to somebody who's maybe an expert in their field, but that doesn't mean they're an expert in finances and you want to make sure that you're communicating to them clearly, uh but also with the level of transparency that can help to earn and burn that urn and leverage that trust and then thirdly maintaining it. So, you know, I think probably we both in our work care a lot about the details and the excellence to craft, but it's a business imperative well beyond the things that you know, people in the past have taken, you know granted for because it's those little things also that helped to maintain that trust, like if we can't dial in that experience, then you you're gonna wonder what's happening under the hood for example, and I think when we're talking about, you know, kind of the meld of, you know, finance and technology, uh you know, we're seeing it both ways, right that there are aspects to uh finance that technology companies are bringing into their everyday, we, you know, are we refer to it as banking as a service. But for example, Shopify is you know, one of the users that we worked really closely with and for the last couple of months they've been offering Shopify balance, which is essentially banking as a service where they can provide for the merchants a you know, they can do loans, they can do, you know, issuing credit cards or cards such that these businesses can use the money where they're making it and really streamlining that whole experience. And so, you know, I think of, you know, the type of work that my team does is it's just these many degrees of separation within this larger ecosystem. We're trying to build the right thing for Shopify, who's building the right thing for their merchants, who are building the right thing for their users. And so this ripple effect, you know, has gotten to a whole nother level of complexity in trying to understand who your users are and designing something truly great such that it feels dialed in and earn their trust. Yeah, I have a different lens on the trust issue. I think people do trust, uh, chase or JPMorgan and that trust is not misplaced. The reason why I say that is as designers, when you work in a large financial institutions and some of you may know what I'm talking about. Their legal and compliance have an equal stake at the table when we're designing experiences and you know, as as a designer, it may feel like a burden. It may feel like, oh, there's one more person I have to check. I cannot just take a cloud product and integrated into my intimate, they have to go through a very rigorous process. Right? So what I have, our team has done is integrated legal and compliance Partners into our design process. So I have what we call the 5D design process and they have a seat at the table. So we share our early designs with them. We tell them the story of the user and why we need to do it this way. And I think this in a way my legal and compliance friends are very receptive, you know, so they want to be involved, they want to be engaged. And uh, so that, that one other dimension that, that differentiates right Working in Fintech causes a large bank. It may feel a little bit slower, but I think at the end of the day it's the price you pay, but also on behalf of the playing, thank you so much to both of you for sharing all the exciting stuff you're doing in the traditional world of banking and the world of Fintech join me in thanking him.

Patrick Collison, Co-founder, Arc Institute; Co-founder and CEO, Stripe  
Interviewer: Dr. Lloyd Minor, Stanford University School of Medicine

Brainstorm Health 2022 - A Life Sciences Revolution Could Be Silicon Valley’s Next Act

Brainstorm Health 2022 - Life Sciences Revolution 

Brainstorm Health 2022 - Is A Life Sciences Revolution Silicon Valley’s Next Act? 


we're entering a renaissance in the life sciences and innovation of the life sciences increasingly will be defined by the convergence of biology biomedicine with information science and technology but it's best said there are a lot of hurdles we have to overcome the fact that our biomedical workforce Is in their 40s typically before they start their careers. The grants oftentimes reward incremental work rather than truly transformative work that there are challenges of getting from fundamental discovery to translation to human benefit. Joining me is Patrick collison, the Ceo and co founder of stripe stripe is a technology company focused on economic platforms for internet based businesses. Patrick and his brother John Co founded Stripe in 2010. They co founded it because of the difficulties they saw in internet companies processing payments and carrying out their economic activities Stripes phenomenally successful. Last year it processed over $600 billion dollars in transactions. Patrick hasn't stopped with strikes though. In 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, patrick started fast grants a program that he and other philanthropists funded to get money quickly to scientists who wanted to pivot their research to doing transformative studies in covid. And then in 2021 december 20 to 21 Patrick along with Silvana kerman, assistant professor of biochemistry at stanford and Patrick shoe. Assistant professor of bioengineering at Berkeley founded the Ark Institute and we're gonna talk about that today. Patrick, thanks, thanks so much for joining us today to see you and you of course were interested in computer science early on growing up near limerick Ireland. Um and but but your interests are capacious and you now have focused on interest in life sciences. Can you describe your progression from computer science to life sciences and what you see the parallels are and what you're excited about in terms of the future. Sure. So, um you might wonder from that introduction, you know, what is the guy running a payments company doing up here? So when I was a teenager, he said growing up in Ireland my ambition was to be a scientist and I devoured all sorts of books about science and I was really interested in physics and mathematics and then I discovered computers and all the rest, but kind of my my teenage vision was to kind of go in that direction and then I discovered when I went to college that I am I I wasn't cut out for physics, I wasn't good enough, frankly. Um I I you know had the experience that I guess many of us have had in college and you know, meeting the people are just like so clearly, so much better than you, you start to kind of reconsider your life choices. Uh so and but you know I really loved programming computers and so fell into the internet sector and all the rest. However, a lot of, a lot of my uh you know people I knew from college and even those that I knew beforehand pursued a scientific career and I, you know, I I stayed close to many of them and I followed the science and all the rest and actually there was a particular um girl who I met Um in uh in 2005 at a science contest in Moscow. I was 16 or 17 um who who has the last week is now my wife uh and um I have to be careful at times to be confident. Yeah. Um and uh and that is that that woman is is Silvana who you just mentioned another co founder of Arc. And you know when we were literally 16 we were discussing you know all sorts of ways you could do science and projects and all the rest and um, and she unlike me continued with science and kind of threw her. I've come to understand a little bit of the possibilities of uh the the current point that we the precipice that we sit at in in biomedicine. And you know whether it's uh new genome engineering techniques or new you know the new microscopy and imaging uh new data sets that are now being assembled that sort of enabled correlations to be gleaned. You know even where the signal would have been traditionally hard to extract um machine, you know all the stuff that you've heard a lot about today. And so um you know the Um it's at this point perhaps a cliche but I think it's a cliche for a reason that that which software technology, the Internet was for the last 40 years. Um if you think about, you know what, across the landscape today has the same characteristics, you know, I think many people with a lot more knowledge than me are betting on biomedicine. Great, great. What what do you hope to that art will accomplish in the next five years and 10 years and the privilege of talking with you and Silvana from the early days when you had the vision for arc and it's it's been so inspiring to learn about your vision for it. But maybe you could describe what led to the founding of the institute and and also we should probably say that Arc is a medical research organization. So it's an independent five oh one C three with university affiliations, but very much um you're creating this from whole cloth. So where would you like it to be? Five years from now? Well, and so art comes from a whole bunch of things that that you just mentioned in your introduction. So, um, you know, part of him, Yeah. If you look at the history of, you know, research and biomedical research over the last 100 years, 150 years, you see that's taken all sorts of institutional forms. It's been funded in different ways, different kinds of institutions, entities, different places were kind of preeminent at different times and so on. Since um since the Second World War, kind of the, you know, the decades after, we've kind of standardized on this kind of basic research model here in the U. S. You know, substantially funded by the NIH and so on. And that's a you know, it's a very effective model. We've made all kinds of incredible discoveries and all sorts of uh you know amazing breakthroughs have ensued. Um But if you talk to scientists Uh and you just asked them kind of how effectively they're enabled um and what perhaps they wish they could do that they can't pursue. Um you don't hear that everything's great. And you mentioned fast grants. This grant program, we ran through the pandemic. So we set it up in April of 2022. Just hopefully with the aim of unlocking um you know, projects that perhaps you know, existing funding agencies wouldn't be able to get to, you know, as quickly as we might want. You know, during a global catastrophe. We ran a survey of the scientists we funded through fast grants um towards towards the end of it. These are people who weren't working on coronavirus is you know, before the pandemic. And we asked them if you could do anything you want uh with your current funding. So not if you have more money just that you could do anything you want with your current funding. Um how much would your research program changed? And we thought well you know, maybe maybe a third of scientists might be interested in doing something substantially different. Four of the five scientists told us that if they could spend the research funding with kind of full flexibility that their research program would change a lot, four out of five scientists. And so, you know, so much about the landscape in the US, again, with the likes of science and biomedicine is incredible. You know, the best people in the world want to come here, they're trained incredibly well, They go to these phenomenal universities and so on. Um, but there's kind of this, this kind of peculiar point of constriction where we don't then do a great job of enabling them to pursue that, which they and their own judgment, I think they're they're sort of best uh suited to uh, to to investigate. So Arc is basically an effort to work backwards from the needs of scientists and just kind of um, you know, with with stripe rolls, encouraging people to focus on the user. You know, we work backwards from a small little startup. Getting started, we try to figure out what do they need to grow their business? Are kids doing the same thing from the standpoint of the scientists and so, you know, what do they need? Well, they would like the flexibility to pursue whatever. Um they would they would like to do, they would like, you know, particular kinds of platforms and equipment and, You know, technologies and so forth and, you know, and so in short for mark is an effort to assemble those, that's what we hope to achieve in five or 10 years. Um you know, I think it's, I think it's dangerous to be too prescriptive with, with basic research, you know, the whole point, you don't know where you're going to go. Um and the scientists will themselves set the goals, I guess Our goal for for 10 years is that the scientists tell us themselves that they think this is the place in the world where they can be best enabled and where they have the greatest prospect of doing, but, you know, they think could be the best work in their careers and and just one last point I'll say, because it shouldn't go unmentioned is, you know, I think there's a big, you guys might have noticed that in sort of Silicon Valley, there's a bit of a, you know, a strain of, you know, well, and we can do it all ourselves and we know better than everyone else and, you know, it's it's rarely accused of excessive humility. Um and um, you know, Arc is, As you mentioned, and kind of 501 C3 MRO, but it's done in partnership with stanford and Berkeley and UCSF and you were very, it wouldn't work if not for that. And just I think it's as I describe it, I don't want to make it sound like it's sort of a repudiation of dash, which already exists. Our goal is for it to be sort of a complimentary configuration that you know, builds with and on top of you know, so much of the jewel of civilization that american universities represent and we're honored to be a partner with you and Silvana and Patrick. And one of the concepts in art is is the formation of cores. And you've spoken when we've talked a lot about bilingual people and rather than having, you know, the data scientists over here and the scientists over here that the the two groups are multiple groups are actually interlinked and collaborating and truly thinking in parallel and convergent ways. How do you envision that coming out and and given your background in technology, what do you see the core technological infrastructure to be at art? Yeah. So one of the, sorry I mentioned, you know, one of the backs with arc or one of the kind of founding hypotheses is the importance of scientific freedom and of enabling people to pursue curiosity and research. The 2nd 1 is um you know, the the kind of contemporary model of a research lab, it's you know, an investigator and they set the research agenda. There's some grad students and postdocs and all the rest of everything that folks here are familiar with. Um uh you know, that is an effective model for many kinds of discoveries. But those increasingly biomedicine requires um what we've discovered all these amazing techniques, you know, cryo am or or you know, CRISPR screens or who knows what and and it's pretty tough for any individual lab to integrate a whole bunch of these different technologies and techniques because they require a lot of specialization and you know, domain knowledge and and so forth. And so maybe it's a lab you can specialize in one or maybe you're, you know, if you're awesome, maybe even two of these these techniques, but if you have an idea for a research program that might integrate and synthesize four or five of those, it's very difficult to do. And so with art we're gonna have these internal technology platforms that are focused on advancing, I mean they don't have a research agenda per se, they're focused on advancing the state of the art in some domain imaging or or in uh genome engineering and screens and so forth. So things like that. And the biggest opportunity we see that we see there is actually in software engineering, in that. The one thing that I was really surprised about, as I got to know, you know more about this landscape is there are very few software engineers working in in kind of basic um research labs and universities and that that could be for two reasons. One is, well maybe they're just not that useful, right? Um uh or the second would be just some kind of inefficiency there and as we kind of dug more into it, you know, I think there's part just like a kind of a bit of a cultural gap kind of like what you said for, you know, the two sides don't really understand each other perhaps as as much as would be desirable. I think part of it is also you know kind of uh you know prosaic but it's about things like you know how the pay scales work and you know how you know the technology industry booms, it's kind of pulling in a lot of the software engineers who you know might otherwise be able to um to contribute meaningfully to science. So anyway part of our goal with arc is to you know, build a really effective software engineering platforms. So that inasmuch as there are programs and projects that could benefit from augmentation with um sophisticated data analysis or you know, novel tools or ai and ml and everything else that you know, we can really kind of turbocharge the work with that compliment. Great others also who have been successful in technology, that chan Zuckerberg bio hub, for example, we're seeing a lot of interest in life sciences from people who got their start in technology. You you indicated some of the reasons why you thought that might be the case, but could you expand a little bit more on that? And but there does seem a natural attraction for people who have been highly successful in internet based technology now gravitating towards life sciences and and human health. Well, Silvana always tells me that she's surprised that people do anything else. It's like, what could be more interesting than, you know, biology research. Um uh you know, I think um I think actually, what's strange is we went through a period where this wasn't happening uh like, you know, between 18 61 and 18 91 9 of the current top 20 US universities were founded. So like a 40 year period where, you know, we're just big into founding universities that, you know, turned out to to become quite incredible. And if you look at, you know, who funded them and kind of where that came from and in each case, you know, it required sort of visionary founder, such president and you know, all that like it takes a village. Um, but you know, caltech was the um, throop University founded by Amos Troop. It was a Chicago businessman. And you know, johns Hopkins was well, you know, johns Hopkins and uh, and you know, Rockefeller was uh, was behind the University of Chicago and so forth. And so for reasons I don't really understand, say for the subsequent century, there wasn't a lot of founding of, you know, these kinds of entities and, you know, I don't think there was none. You obviously some some great things happening at the Salt and Hope and the broad Institute more recently, etcetera. Um, but for whatever reason, it kind of dissipated. And so I see arc, if it works and you know, look at, as you mentioned, started in december of last year. So I don't sound like we're, you know, claiming any success. But you know, if it works, I think it's more trying to get back to that, which the US has been really good at. And I know, I guess there was a, from my standpoint at least civic mindedness and a desire to faster, you know, society wide progress that motivated some of these people. And that seems to me like a good thing to do. Absolutely well in closing, you're a voracious reader, I've seen the table in your living room, which is packed high with books. Um, what one or two books would you recommend related to what we've been talking about this afternoon that you found particularly inspiring or informing. Um got a whole bunch of the science biographies are are really good. I mean folks here know that, but I just read Eugene Brown Walls and or rather the book about them, you know, the sort of discoverer of a surprisingly large fraction of sort of modern cardiology. Um, and actually the books about the founding of and actually I just read um, last week and this is a bit more sort of bio tenke but billion dollar molecule, the history of vertex. I thought that was a really terrific book and the vertex story is pretty remarkable. And, but the other genre that I really recommend that was a lot more entertaining and fascinating than I expected. There's a whole set of books about the founding of of of those 19th century universities. And so um there's a there's a pretty good one about Uchicago. There's a good one at caltech. There's a whole set of them about M. I. T. Um johns Hopkins etcetera. Um uh you know kevin stars written much about about stanford. Um Clark Kerr wrote a whole bunch of books about the U. C. System. Uh And uh you know I think I suppose to us and certainly you know to me when I was growing up you know these universities feel like omnipresent ancient pillars of society right? It's like was there ever a time without a stanford? You know? Um And and you know and yet as you dig into the particulars of the stories, it was people who we're motivated and inspired by sort of some of the you know early instances of uh of discovery and uh um and invention who thought that the U. S. Could be a far better country and a far more prosperous place than it then was. And you know this is the U. S. Was a much more kind of agrarian uh and uh you know obviously far less advanced place back then. But you know somehow they're really motivated by this kind of captivating prospect. And so that the those histories I found in almost every single case surprisingly inspiring. That's wonderful. Patrick, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Mhm.

 ROBERT HACKETT: 2020 was a huge year for Bitcoin because you had a lot of big names get involved. And as a result, the price is going up way more. You have big hedge funders like Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones. And you've got big corporations like Square converting their Treasury into Bitcoin; companies like PayPal that are allowing people to buy and sell Bitcoin. During the last Bitcoin bubble, in December 2017, Bitcoin hit what was then an all-time high price of around $20,000. Now, a few years later, it's gotten up above $40,000. During times of crises, people like to seek out alternative investments. Frequently they go for gold. They view this as a safe haven asset. As a result of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve has been effectively printing money. The government has felt like they had no choice. They need to issue stimulus packages. They need to give people money. They need to give businesses loans so that there aren't mass bankruptcies and the economy doesn't tank. But what are going to be the after effects of that? Potentially, inflation. And that is why people are now getting interested in Bitcoin as an alternative to gold. They're calling it digital gold. Unlike gold, it is weightless, and you can carry as much of it as you want wherever in the world you're going to be. Bitcoin can be used as a payment system. Right now, it's very clunky. It doesn't work very well. It's expensive to use. It's slow. But people are expecting that because it's software, it's technology, it's going to improve over time. So if you're wondering whether you want to buy Bitcoin now, you should keep in mind that Bitcoin has done this before. It's blasted off on a rocket ship upward, but it has come back down. It's fallen back down to earth. Yet, every time this happens, it tends to level out at a price that's higher than the previous era. Analysts at big investment banks like JP JPMorgan Chase think that Bitcoin could get above $140,000 in the long-term. So if you're buying it now at $40,000, and you're not planning to cash out anytime soon, maybe that is a good way to go. What a lot of people say that you should do is to dollar cost average. Just put in a little bit over periods of time consistently, repeatedly. That way, you're sort of smoothing out and averaging the peaks and valleys of this thing, and you're just riding a kind of gradual increase. Of course, you have to believe that the price is going to increase, if that's going to work out. There is a lot of action in ETFs right now. It's become one of the most popular ways to buy stocks. You buy big baskets of stocks, and you can trade them all around, and you can put them in your retirement savings account. When you do that, you get tax advantages. You get perks for storing it in this way. But unfortunately, there is no Bitcoin ETF right now. Regulators are not interested in green lighting one at this point. There have been applications for Bitcoin ETF, but regulators have turned them down. There are some indications that actually a Bitcoin ETF might come about in the near future. President Joe Biden has selected Gary Gensler, former chairman of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, who has a lot of crypto savviness. He's well-respected in the community. And a lot of people think that by him being put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission, that that might actually signal that a Bitcoin ETF is sooner than anyone might think. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Why this is the year you might consider investing in Bitcoin

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Bitcoin: Why this is the year you might consider investing

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