Stripe

Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, joins the pub to discuss building the future of agentic trust. She explains why compliance has a “vitamin vs painkiller” dynamic, the drama behind their famous 101-billboard campaign, and why she believes "market sizing is bullshit." They cover the tension between vibe coding and rigorous security, how Vanta is using agents to generate UI, and why the best founders are relentless truth-seekers. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gbVejU2W  Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gdBJAUyx Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/g8gsYmFP Full transcript on Substack: https://lnkd.in/gPXJF8Rc

We’re rolling out a preview of Stripe Projects. Provision your stack from the CLI and set up hosting, databases, auth, analytics, and monitoring. Sign up: https://projects.dev. 

We're powering a new way to buy on Facebook with the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Businesses can turn on selling with Meta ads from the Stripe Dashboard, letting buyers complete purchases in one click from businesses like Fanatics and Quince. https://lnkd.in/gSB9dU8C

“There’s driver-assist systems, and then there is full autonomy. I see it as fundamentally two different problems. I think it’s deceptive to think of them as incremental on one spectrum of complexity. The hardest parts of building a fully autonomous, rider-only system are very different from what you do for a driver-assist system. I don’t want to say you can’t make the jump, but it is a qualitative jump.” Waymo is now doing nearly 500,000 rides a week across 10 cities. Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov came to the pub to discuss how they moved from scientific research to massive global scaling. He gives a masterclass on the sensor stack (and why you still need Lidar), how they use "Simulation" and "Critic" models to train the AI, and why he believes cars that require human supervision will never naturally evolve into robotaxis. They also cover the new custom-built vehicle that feels like a living room, the economics of ride-hailing in rural Alaska, and the "Russian math nerd" diaspora that seems to run the UK tech scene. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gKJF5KmN Spotify: https://lnkd.in/g-RnGrh4 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gtfXAcEt Substack: https://lnkd.in/g6u9x5_U

Adaptive Pricing is now available for subscriptions, letting businesses automatically localize prices in over 150 countries while Stripe handles currency conversion. In an A/B test across 1.5 million subscription checkouts, businesses saw 4.7% higher conversion: https://lnkd.in/gye_63AD.

AI agents are not going to replace software engineers yet, at least not when building Stripe integrations. The critical gap between our AI reality today and production-ready reality: we sorely lack a stable and realistic validation layer, especially when it comes to financial infrastructure where we require 100% accuracy. So to measure how AI is progressing on that last mile of value, Kevin Ho and I built a set of robust, replicable software engineering environments to benchmark models on their ability to build complete Stripe integrations. They mirror realistic integration scenarios: huge codebases, data migrations, breaking version changes, server and client-side API integrations, and even browser use. The range of results were extremely surprising, and even more exciting is how we now have an experimentation test bed to demonstrably improve how models integrate with Stripe. We’ve open-sourced the full benchmark suite in our AI toolkit: https://lnkd.in/em-aEwMF. Read the blog post: https://lnkd.in/eXAVSHRq.

We’re launching the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard, internet-native way for agents to pay, alongside Tempo. With a few lines of code, businesses can now accept payments directly from agents in both stablecoins and fiat. https://lnkd.in/gB-mA3e2

"Well, the only thing we can do right now out of the entire range of possibilities is we got to sue the government. And at the beginning it was like, 'this is crazy.' And we went to the board, and the response was basically—it's an anti-pattern, it's a bad idea, but a lot of great companies are built by an anti-pattern." Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara are the co-founders of Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market in the US. They sit down with John Collison and Matt Huang to discuss growing their revenue 11x in six months, why they sued their own regulator to list election markets, and how they are building the "New York Stock Exchange of events." They cover why prediction markets are an antidote to social media polarization, the mechanics of market making for culture, and their vision for trading everything from GPU shipments to the Oscars and the weather. YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g4ivqaw3 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gjaes33U Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gbfYNCDp Full transcript on Substack: https://lnkd.in/g6u9x5_U

A future where we buy with AI agents feels inevitable. Making it actually work is harder. These lessons from the first wave of agentic commerce are meant to help sellers decide what to tackle, avoid common bottlenecks, and get ahead of what’s coming: https://lnkd.in/gVUt9jt5.