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Angelica Ang

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

/2026/08/28/bridge-founder-zach-abrams-stripe-stablecoins-asia-singapore-dollars/

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

/2026/08/24/apple-lays-off-staffers-ahead-of-ceo-change/

Anthropic to SpaceX: You ain’t bigger

/2026/08/21/anthropic-to-spacex-you-aint-bigger/

Amazon can’t quit Bezos’ drone dream

/2026/08/20/amazon-cant-quit-bezos-drone-dream/

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

Jessica Coacci

Meet the millennial Meta cofounder and ex-journalist wife giving away their $20 billion fortune

https://fortune.com/2025/11/10/meet-the-millennial-meta-cofounder-and-his-wife-who-are-giving-away-20-billion/?itm_source=parsely-api

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

Lily Mae Lazarus

The U.S. government wants allies to pick a side in the AI race

https://fortune.com/2026/08/17/the-us-government-wants-allies-to-pick-a-side-in-the-ai-race/?itm_source=parsely-api

Ryan Hogg

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

https://fortune.com/europe/article/stripes-billionaire-collison-brothers-remote-work-solves-two-body-problem-faced-working-couples/?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

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

Conferences

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's price soared to over $40K in January of 2021.

Bitcoin: Why this is the year you might consider investing

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[ MUSIC ] Welcome to BALANCING THE LEDGER, where tech and finance intersect. I'm Robert Hackett. And I'm Jen [ UNKNOWN ]. And today we're here with Clare Hughes Johnson, the chief operating officer of Stripe. Thanks for joining us, Clare. Thanks. Great to be here. So Stripe is the highest valued fin tech unicorn in the US. An earlier this year, it range the whole of money, it's valued at $ 22 and a half billion, what's going on of the company? How you using that money? how you growing? What's next for Stripe? Feels like we're just really at the beginning, I know everyone says this but we really are. Most of our energy right now, it's going to capilarries, one is Global expansion. I mean, were now getting to sort of the harder markets to open. We've got private betas going in like India, Mexico, Brazil, and a lot demand actually users. Some of them there, actually of a lot of them. Because the Latin America in financial structure is challenging and a lot of them from the US and Europe that wanna do business there. So that's exciting. We're also building out what we think of. As our core infrastructure for a payment platform. I think there's a misconception that Stripe is about just payment acceptance, but really we're about funds in, and funds out. So instant payouts, or forms. Of payment, like issuing virtual or actual credit cards to use for your marketplace business, and point of sale acceptance. So it's like building up a network, we think of it as like treasury capabilities in the network. And then the capabilities you need on top of that fraud control with our radar product. A lot of payment optimization, so authorization optimization, making sure you can reduce your declines, working on a lot of interesting things on the dispute side. And I think the goal is that you have this payments and Treasury network available in as many markets as we can get to around the world. Where we're just managing all of your commerce flows for you. And there's software on top of that that's protecting you from fraud. And then also adding billing and subscription products and B and B products. So, we're not sitting around, we are pretty busy building out the core infrastructure that any business, I hope will use to process payments and pay in and pay out. Can you give us a sense of how fast e- commerce is growing globally now and how fast Stripe is growing within that? Well, e- commerci I think of as a more narrow category of retail commerce, maybe that's just my definition of it. So e- commerce I think is growing 5 % globally, and Stripe is growing more quickly than that. But in terms of online commerce, right, any We were just looking at some statistics, I mean, there are just B to B transactions, like billions of transactions a day. And even just currency exchange period on a daily basis is over five trillion, right. So I think we are looking at a secular shift to what you are getting at and maybe anyone interested in Fintech who is watching, of All commerce moving online. And that's been primarily enabled by mobile devices, but I think people would be surprised, actually, at how much B2B is still really paper invoices, cheques, inefficient Ineffective manners of moving money and so that's where our billing products are gonna I think, start to have a real impact. One thing that stuck out to me and Jeff Bezos' annual letter to shareholders this year, he talked about how Amazon is still very small Which is kinda crazy to think about, but his point was that 90 % of retail transactions still occur off line rather than online. Right, now we often cite less than 5 % of commerce occurs online, and people say, but what about Amazon? [ LAUGH ] And Jeff finally did our work for us. [ LAUGH ] And explained, yeah, it's true, it's amazing how little of it happens today Online. So you've just made an acquisition in Europe, tell us a little bit about the strategy there. Yeah, we acquired a company called Touchtech, and I think we really came to the acquisition because of some work we've been doing to Prepare all of Stripe's users for SCA or Strong Customer Authentication regulations happening in Europe. There's a lot of work that many companies went through to comply with GDPR about a year ago. And there's a second part to that, which is the Strong Customer Authentication. Which is really meant to be a consumer protection and a fraud control. But effectively is when there is an Internet transaction, having the purchaser authenticate that it is, in fact, them buying, often with a phone, right? So a text message and verifying, yes, that was me. Which is understandably a good consumer protection but creating a lot of friction. That may slow things down for people. For folks who study consumer behavior and shoppping carts is very scary because it creates a lot of friction. It's also something very hard to comply with because it pauses your transaction and then you have to complete it. And you can't do so in real time, right? So there's an infrastructural element to it for payment implementation that's pretty rough. What our mission is is to take away that complexity and cover all the compliance and the infrastructure you need for payment acceptance and paying out. Touchtech works on the issuer side. They're gonna help, so if you think of it as a two- sided Transaction where we're working with a merchant to make sure that acceptance flow. The issuers also have to play a role. And this is a legitimate card. And as a person authenticates it. And we think that that's going to help reduce that friction that's being created by SCA. We're excited to integrate their technology with stripe. But we have a lot already done. As we need to because it's rolling out in September. Well, all of these different countries that you are going into, they all have their own unique financial infrastructure, their own idiosyncrasies. So what challenges do you face in bringing your product to all these different places. Yeah, well do you have another 40 minutes? [ LAUGH ] I think this is one of the biggest offer that Stripe provides for our users, which is you don't have to do all the work on the market entry front, but it is what we We do, but first of all we partnered with financial partners around the world, to make sure they were integrated in with their rails effectively as we need them. We directly increase them with the current networks put together the chance to roll things out more quickly, but there is still a lot of baking partnership. Then there is a regular [ UNKNOWN ] which is working with local governments in understanding. There are a quite governments in the world where. Their regulatory scheme hasn't contemplated online inasmuch detail as you would hope. And so some of what I hope we're doing for commerce generally, and growing it around the world, is partnering with governments, saying, okay, how do we apply this in a world that is changing pretty rapidly in terms of payments. And then, obviously, making sure we can take all the payment methods that are most in use in the country. And those payment methods all behave incredibly differently than, say, I think in the US we're pretty comfortable with credit cards, but there are a lot of markets around the world that have pretty unique and interesting payment methods. Whether it's [ UNKNOWN ] in Japan or [ UNKNOWN ] in Brazil, you know, you want that coverage if that's how consumers pay. How many currencies do you support now? For over 130 currencies almost is easier, actually, than payment methods. Why is that? With a currency you have foreign exchange, and you have the ability to say, okay, that was this many pesos, it's this many dollars. Whereas with a payment method you are actually under the hood in the banking infrastructure. Some of these payment methods are about Say, accessing the customer's bank account in some cases. Well, you've gotta have that connection to the banks, and there's permissions from the customer in cases where they behave, [ UNKNOWN ] in Brazil is an instalment payment method. So it's effectively a lending product that is a payment method. So there's a regulatory scheme around that, but there's really an infrastructure of, how does that money need to move? In order to satisfy the transaction. That is much more about engineering. You mentioned foreign transaction is relatively less complex than the payment methods, but I know you used to, for a little bit, accept Bitcoin, and then you moved away from that, because of some of the issues there. How are you thinking about cryptocurrency these days and why is that more complicated than you wanna do it? Yeah, and we were the first provider to accept that coin actually, and we also went out with RA pay, and witcher pay pretty early because we believe there is a lot of new ways people gonna pay, and we want to be on the forefront of that For anyone using Stripe. The challenge with BitCoin was really, well there wasn't any demand for it from our merchants first of all, and I think that the reasons are because it's not really acting like a currency. It's acting a little bit more like an asset, and how does that look? It looks like high transaction fees, like as high as $ 50. Earlier this year, really long close times for the transactions so maybe an hour, whereas visa does 24, 000 a circuit. And a kind of volatility in actually the value of that currency. And if you have a long close time and unchanging value you're not sure you're actually getting the payment Price that you ask for, and so we weren't getting demand, we weren't seeing it having very high usage, so we deprecated it. You know, if things change there we could bring it back and, as you know, we invested in Stellar. We're very interested in the space, but it's not where money's moving today. So I think I mentioned that there's ike $ 5 trillion dollars of currency exchange happening every day. In terms of BitCoin I think it's in the billions which sounds like a lot but it's not relative to where money's moving today. And as we also talked about so little money is online even. We gotta tackle that. We gotta build the technology infrastructure the fragility layer Online acceptance and payout before we get to maybe I hope, more modern methods but I think we've got a few steps to go. This is proving to be the year of the big tech IPL, we're seeing Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, we work just filed When can we expect Stripe to go out? We don't have any plans. We're not following that trend. It's exciting to see. Do you think you'd raise another round or go public first? I've no news on that, I'm afraid. Thanks so much for comming on the show, Claire. All right, thank you both. I'm Robert Habit. I'm Jane Viechmo. And for more about From the Ledger, go to ledger. com. See you next time. [ MUSIC ]

Balancing the Ledger: How Stripe is Building A Global Online Payments Infrastructure

Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson stops by to talk about the acquisition of Touchtech, going "under the hood" of international payment methods, and whether or not an IPO is in the near future.