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