(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We're live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined here with John Furrier, John, so exciting, day three. >> Day three, cranking along, doing great, final day of KubeCon, it wraps up. This next segment's going to be great. It's about WebAssembly, the hottest trend here, at KubeCon that nobody knows about cause they just got some funding and it's got some great traction. Multiple players in here. People are really interested in this and they're really discovering it. They're digging into it. So, we're going to hear from one of the founders of the company that's involved. So, it'll be great. >> Yeah, I think we're right at the tip of the iceberg really. We started off the show with Scott from Docker talking about this, but we have a thought leader in this space. Please welcome Matt Butcher the CEO and co-founder of Fermyon Thank you for being here. Welcome. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Favorite thing to talk about is WebAssembly after that is coffee but WebAssembly first. >> Hey, it's the morning. We can talk about both those on the show. (all chuckles) >> It might get confusing, but I'm willing to try. >> If you can use coffee as a metaphor to teach everyone about WebAssembly throughout the rest of the show. >> All right. That would be awesome. >> All right I'll keep that in mind. >> So when we were talking before we got on here I thought it was really fun because I think the hype is just starting in the WebAssembly space. Very excited about it. Where do you think we're at, set the stage? >> Honestly, we were really excited to come here and see that kind of first wave of hype. We came here expecting to have to answer the question you know, what is WebAssembly and why is anybody looking at it in the cloud space, and instead people have been coming up to us and saying, you know this WebAssembly thing, we're hearing about it. What are the problems it's solving? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're really excited to hear about it. So, people literally have been stopping us in restaurants and walking down the street, hey, "You're at KubeCon, you're the WebAssembly people. Tell us more about what's going on." >> You're like awesome celeb. I love this. >> Yeah, and I, >> This is great >> You know the, the description I used was I expected to come here shouting into the void. Hey, you know anybody, somebody, let me tell you about WebAssembly. Instead it's been people coming to us and saying "We've heard about it. Get us excited about it," and I think that's a great place to be. >> You know, one of the things that's exciting too is that this kind of big trend with this whole extraction layer conversation, multicloud, it reminds me of the old app server days where, you know there was a separation between the back end and front end, and then we're kind of seeing that now with this WebAssembly Wasm trend where the developers just want to have the apps run everywhere and the coding to kind of fall in, take a minute to explain what this is, why it's important, why are people jazzed about there's other companies like Cosmonic is in there. There's a lot of open source movement behind it. You guys are out there, >> Savannah: Docker. >> 20 million in fresh funding. Why is this important? What is it and why is it relevant right now? Why are people talking about it? >> I mean, we can't... There is no penasia in the tech world much for the good of all of us, right? To keep us employed. But WebAssembly seems to be that technology that just sort of arose at the right time to solve a number of problems that were really feeling intractable not very long ago. You know, at the core of what is WebAssembly? Well it's a binary format, right? But there's, you know, built on the same, strain of development that Java was built on in the 90's and then the .net run time. But with a couple of little fundamental changes that are what have made it compelling today. So when we think about the cloud world, we think about, okay well security's a big deal to us. Virtual machines are a way for us to run other people's untrusted operating systems on our hardware. Containers come along, they're a... The virtual machine is really the heavyweight class. This is the big thing. The workhorse of the cloud. Then along come Containers, they're a little slimmer. They're kind of the middleweight class. They provide us this great way to sort of package up just the application, not the entire operating system just the application and the bits we care about and then be able to execute those in a trusted environment. Well you know, serverless was the buzzword a few years ago. But one thing that serverless really identified for us is that we didn't actually have the kind of cloud side architecture that was the compute layer that was going to be able to fulfill the promise of serverless. >> Yeah. >> And you know, at that time I was at Microsoft we got to see behind the curtain and see how Azure operates and see the frustration with going, okay how do we get this faster? How do we get this startup time down from seconds to hundreds of milliseconds, WebAssembly comes along and we're able to execute these things in sub one millisecond, which means there is almost no cost to starting up one of these. >> Sub one millisecond. I just want to let everyone rest on that for a second. We've talked a lot about velocity and scale on the show. I mean everyone here is trying to do things faster >> Yep >> Obviously, but that is a real linchpin that makes a very big difference when we're talking about deploying things. Yeah. >> Yeah, and I mean when you think about the ecological and the cost impact of what we're building with the cloud. When we leave a bunch of things running in idle we're consuming electricity if nothing else. The electricity bill keeps going up and we're paying for it via cloud service charges. If you can start something in sub one millisecond then there's no reason you have to leave it running when nobody's using it. >> Savannah: Doesn't need to be in the background. >> That's right. >> So the lightweight is awesome. So, this new class comes up. So, like Java was a great metaphor there. This is kind of like that for the modern era of apps. >> Yeah. >> Where is this going to apply most, do you think? Where's it going to impact most? >> Well, you know, I think there are really four big categories. I think there's the kind of thing I was just talking about I think serverless and edge computing and kind of the server class of problem space. I think IOT is going to benefit, Amazon, Disney Plus, >> Savannah: Yes, edge. >> And PBS, sorry BBC, they all use WebAssembly for the players because they need to run the same player on thousands of different devices. >> I didn't even think about that use case. What a good example. >> It's a brilliant way to apply it. IOT is a hard space period and to be able to have that kind of layer of abstraction. So, that's another good use case >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And then I think this kind of plugin model is another one. You see it was Envoy proxy using this as a way to extend the core features. And I think that one's going to be very, very promising as well. I'm forgetting one, but you know. (all chuckles) I think you end up with these kind of discreet compartments where you can easily fit WebAssembly in here and it's solving a problem that we didn't have the technology that was really adequately solving it before. >> No, I love that. One of the things I thought was interesting we were all at dinner, we were together on Tuesday. I was chatting with Paris who runs Deliveroo at Apple and I can't say I've heard this about too many tools but when we were talking about WebAssembly she said "This is good for everybody" And, it's really nice when technologies come along that will raise the water level across the board. And I love that you're leading this. Speaking of you just announced a huge series aid, 20 million dollars just a few days ago. What does that mean for you and the team? >> I mean there's a little bit of economic uncertainty and it's always nice, >> Savannah: Just a little bit. >> Little bit. >> Savannah: It's come up on the show a little bit this week >> Just smidge. and it's nice to know that we're at a critical time developing this kind of infrastructure layer developing this kind of developer experience where they can go from, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less. It would be a tragedy if that got forestalled merely because you can't achieve the velocity you need to carry it out. So, what's very exciting about being able to raise around like that at this critical time is that gives us the ability to grow strategically, be able to continue releasing products, building a community around WebAssembly as a whole and of course around our products at Fermyon is a little smaller circle in the bigger circle, and that's why we are so excited about having closed around, that's the perfect one to extend a runway like that. >> Well I'm super excited by this because one I love the concept. I think it's very relevant, like how you progress heavyweight, middleweight, maybe this is lightweight class. >> I know, I'm here for the analogy. No, it's great, its great. >> Maybe it's a lightweight class. >> And we're slimming, which not many of us can say in these times so that's awesome. >> Maybe it's more like the tractor trailer, the van, now you got the sports car. >> Matt: Yeah, I can go.. >> Now you're getting Detroit on us. >> I was trying for a coffee, when I just couldn't figure it out. (all chuckles) >> So, you got 20 million. I noticed the investors amplify very good technical VC and early stage firm. >> Amazing, yeah. >> Insight, they do early stage, big early stage like this. Also they're on the board of Docker. Docker was intent to put a tool out there. There's other competition out there. Cosmonic is out there. They're funded. So you got VC funded companies like yourselves and Cosmonic and others. What's that mean? Different tool chains, is it going to create fragmentation? Is there a common mission? How do you look at the competition as you get into the market >> When you see an ecosystem form. So, here we are at KubeCon, the cloud native ecosystem at this point I like to think of them as like concentric rings. You have the kind of core and then networking and storage and you build these rings out and the farther out you get then the easier it is to begin talking about competition and differentiation. But, when you're looking at that core piece everybody's got to be in there together working on the same stuff, because we want interoperability, we want standards based solutions. We want common ways of building things. More than anything, we want the developers and operators and users who come into the ecosystem to be able to like instantly feel like, okay I don't have to learn. Like you said, you know, 50 different tools for 50 different companies. "I see how this works", and they're doing this and they're doing this. >> Are you guys all contributing into the same open source? >> Yep, yeah, so... >> All the funding happens. >> Both CNCF and the ByteCode Alliance are organizations that are really kind of pushing forward that core technology. You know, you mentioned Cosmonic, Microsoft, SOSA, Red Hat, VMware, they're all in here too. All contributing and again, with all of us knowing this is that nascent stage where we got to execute it. >> How? >> Do it together. >> How are you guys differentiating? Because you know, open source is a great thing. Rising Tide floats all boats. This is a hot area. Is there a differentiation discussion or is it more let's see how it goes, kind of thing? >> Well for us, we came into it knowing very specifically what the problem was we wanted to solve. We wanted this serverless architecture that executed in sub one millisecond to solve, to really create a new wave of microservices. >> KubeCon loves performance. They want to run their stuff on the fastest platform possible. >> Yeah, and it shouldn't be a roadblock, you know, yeah. >> And you look at someone like SingleStore who's a database company and they're in it because they want to be able to run web assemblies close to the data. Instead of doing a sequel select and pulling it way out here and munging it and then pushing it back in. They move the code in there and it's executing in there. So everybody's kind of finding a neat little niche. You know, Cosmonic has really gone more for an enterprise play where they're able to provide a lot of high level security guarantees. Whereas we've been more interested in saying, "Hey, this your first foray into WebAssembly and you're interested in serverless we'll get you going in like a couple of minutes". >> I want to ask you because we had Scott Johnston on earlier opening keynote so we kind of chatted one-on-one and I went off form cause I really wanted to talk to him because Docker is one of the most important companies since their pivot, when they did their little reset after the first Docker kind of then they sold the enterprise off to Mirantis they've been doing really, really well. What's your relationship to Docker? He was very bullish with you guys. Insights, joint investor. Is there a relationship? You guys talk, what's going on there? >> I mean, I'm going to have to admit a little bit of hero worship on my part. I think Scott is brilliant. I just do, and having come from the Kubernetes world the Fermyon team, we've always kind of kept an eye on Docker communicated with a lot of them. We've known Justin Cormack for years. Chris Cornett. (indistinct) I mean yeah, and so it has been a very natural >> Probably have been accused of every Docker Con and we've did the last three years on the virtual side with them. So, we know them really well. >> You've always got your finger on the pulse for them. >> Do you have a relationship besides a formal relationship or is it more of pass shoot score together in the industry? >> Yeah. No, I think it is kind of the multi-level one. You come in knowing people. You've worked together before and you like working with each other and then it sort of naturally extends onto saying, "Hey, what can we do together?" And also how do we start building this ecosystem around us with Docker? They've done an excellent job of articulating why WebAssembly is a complimentary technology with Containers. Which is something I believe very wholeheartedly. You need all three of the heavyweight, middleweight, lightweight. You can't do all the with just one, and to have someone like that sort of with a voice profoundly be able to express, look we're going to start integrating it to show you how it works this way and prevent this sort of like needless drama where people are going, oh Dockers dead, now everything's WebAssembly, and that's been a great.. >> This fight that's been going on. I mean, Docker, Kubernetes, WebAssembly, Containers. >> Yeah. >> We've seen on the show and we both know this hybrid is the future. We're all going to be using a variety of different tools to achieve our goals and I think that you are obviously one of them. I'm curious because just as we were going on you mentioned that you have a PhD in philosophy. (Matt chuckles) >> Matt: Yeah. >> Which is a wild card. You're actually our second PhD in philosophy working in a very technical role on the show this week, which is kind of cool. So, how does that translate into the culture at Fermyon? What's it like on the team? >> Well, you know, a philosophy degree if nothing else teaches you to think in systems and both human systems and formal systems. So that helps and when you approach the process of building a company, you need to be thinking both in terms of how are we organizing this? How are we organizing the product? How do we organize the team? We have really learned that culture is a major deal and culture philosophy, >> Savannah: Why I'm bringing it up. >> We like that, you know, we've been very forward. We have our chip values, curiosity, humility inclusivity and passion, and those are kind of the four things that we feel like that each of us every day should strive to be exhibiting these kinds of things. Curiosity, because you can't push the envelope if you don't ask the hard questions. Humility, because you know, it's easy to get cocky and talk about things as if you knew all the answers. We know we don't and that means we can learn from Docker and Microsoft >> Savannah: That's why you're curious. >> And the person who stops by the booth that we've never met before and says, "hey" and inclusivity, of course, building a community if you don't execute on that well you can't build a good community. The diversity of the community is what makes it stronger than a singular.. >> You have to come in and be cohesive with the community. >> Matt: Yeah. >> The app focus is a really, I think, relevant right now. The timing of this is right online. I think Scott had a good answer I thought on the relationship and how he sees it. I think it's going to be a nice extension to not a extension that way, but like. >> It probably will be as well. >> Almost a pun there John, almost a pun. >> There actually might be an extension, but evolution what we're going to get to which I think is going to be pure application server, like. >> Yep, yep. Like performance for new class of developer. Then now the question comes up and we've been watching developer productivity. That is a big theme and our belief is that if you take digital transformation to its conclusion IT and developers aren't a department serving the business they are the business. That means the developer workflows will have to be radically rebuilt to handle the velocity and new tech for just coding. I call it architectural list. >> I like that. I might steal that. >> It's a pun, but it's also brings up the provocative question. You shouldn't have to need an architecture to code. I mean, Java was great for that reason in many ways. So, if that happens if the developers are running the business that means more apps. The apps is the business. You got to have tool chains and productivity. You can't have fragmentation. Some people are saying WebAssembly might, fork tool chains, might challenge the developer productivity. what's your answer to that? How would you address that objection? >> I mean the threat of forking is always lurking in the corner in open source. In a way it's probably a positive threat because it keeps us honest it keeps us wanting to be inclusive again and keep people involved. Honestly though, I'm not particularly worried about it. I know that the W-3 as a standards body, of course, one of the most respected standards bodies on the planet. They do html, they do cascading style sheets. WebAssembly is in that camp and those of us in the core are really very interested in saying, you know, come on in, let's build something that's going to be where the core is solid and you know what you got and then you can go into the resurgence of the application server. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with you on that, and we can only get there if we say, all right, here are the common paradigms that we're all going to agree to use, now let's go build stuff. >> And as we've been saying, developers are setting, I think are going to set the standards and they're going to vote with their code and their feet, if you will. >> Savannah: A hundred percent. >> They will decide if you're not aligning with what they want to do. okay. On how they want to self-serve and or work, you'll figure that out. >> Yep, yep. >> You'll get instant feedback. >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, again, I tell you a huge fan of Docker. One of the things that Docker understood at the very outset, is that they had an infrastructure tool and developers were the way to get adoption, and if you look at how fast they got adoption versus many, many other technologies that are profoundly impacted. >> Savannah: Wild. >> Yeah. >> Savannah: It's a cool story. >> It's because they got the developers to go, "This is amazing, hey infrastructure folks, here's an infrastructure tool that we like" and the infrastructure folks are used to code being tossed over the wall are going, "Are you for real?" I mean, and that was a brilliant way to do it and I think that what.. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> We want to replay in the WebAssembly world is making it developer friendly and you know the kind of infrastructure that we can actually operate. >> Well congratulations to the entire community. We're huge fans of the concept. I kind of see where it's going with connect the dots. You guys getting a lot of buzz. I have to ask you, my final question is the hype is beyond all recognition at this point. People are super pumped and enthusiastic about it and people are looking at it maybe some challenging it, but that's all good things. How do you get to the next level where people are confident that this is actually going to go the next step? Hype to confidence. We've seen great hype. Envoy was hyped up big time before it came in, then it became great. That was one of my favorite examples. Hype is okay, but now you got to put some meat on the bone. The sizzle on the stake so to speak. So what's going to be the stake for you guys as you see this going forward? What's the need? >> Yeah, you know, I talk about our first guiding story was, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes. That's what you need to win developers initially. So, what's the next story after that? It's got to be, Fermyon can run real world applications that solve real world problems. That's where hype often fails. If you can build something that's neat but nobody's quite sure what to do with it, to use it, maybe somebody will discover a good use. But, if you take that gambling asset, >> Savannah: It's that ending answer that makes the difference. >> Yeah, yeah. So we say, all right, what are developers trying to build with our platform and then relentlessly focus on making that easier and solving the real world problem that way. That's the crucial thing that's going to drive us out of that sort of early hype stage into a well adopted technology and I talk from Fermyon point of view but really that's for all of us in the WebAssembly. >> John: Absolutely. >> Very well stated Matt, just to wrap us up when we're interviewing you here on theCUBE next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say today? >> All this stuff about coffee we didn't cover today, but also.. (all chuckles) >> Savannah: Here for the coffee show. Only analogies, that's a great analogy. >> I want to walk here and say, you know last time we talked about being able to achieve density in servers that was, you know, 10 times Kubernetes. Next year I want to say no, we're actually thousands of times beyond Kubernetes that we're lowering people's electricity bill by making these servers more efficient and the developers love it. >> That your commitment to the environment is something I want to do an entirely different show on. We learned that 7-8% of all the world's powers actually used on data centers through the show this week which is jarring quite frankly. >> Yeah, yeah. Tragic would be a better way of saying that. >> Yeah, I'm holding back so that we don't go over time here quite frankly. But anyways, Matt Butcher thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you so much for having me it was pleasure.. >> You are worth the hype you are getting. I am grateful to have you as our WebAssembly thought leader. In addition to Scott today from Docker earlier in the show. John Furrier, thanks for being my co-host and thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE here, live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson and we'll be back with more soon. (ambient music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The Cube is live. I can't say that enough. We are alive at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa. >> Having a good day so far. >> So far, so good. >> We have an alumni back with us. We have about a hundred segments on the cube at AWS remit. We've got one of our original alumni back with us. Zaki Bajwa joins us the global head of partner solution engineers at Stripe. Zaki welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, Dave. Pleasure to be here. >> Lisa: Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Love it. Love it. Can't do a whiteboard virtually, you can, it's not the same. >> It's not the same and all those conversations I'm sure that you've had with partners and with customers the last couple of days that you just can't replicate that over zoom. >> Zaki: Exactly. >> So just for anyone who doesn't understand, AWS has a massive ecosystem of partners. So we'll get to talk about Stripe and AWS, but for anyone that doesn't know what Stripe is, give us the lowdown. You guys started 10 years ago. Talk to us about Stripe, the business strategy, what it's like today. >> Yeah, sure. So you guys know Stripe started 10 years ago by two brothers, John and Patrick Collison. And they've really focused on the developer and helping the developers accelerate digital commerce. Why? Cause the status quo at the time was one where a developer needed to, you know, build banking relationships with issuing banks, merchant banks, card networks, payment networks, tax liabilities, data compliance, and all of these manual processes that they had to deal with. So what Stripe aspires to do is build a complete commerce platform. Leveraging our integrated suite of products that is really allowing us to build what we call the global payments and treasury network. So if you think about the global payment and treasury network or what we call the G P T N it's meant to not only help abstract all of that complexity from a global payment infrastructure point of view, but also help move money in a simple and borderless and a programmable way just like we do in the internet. So that's the core essence of Stripe is to build this global payment treasury network to allow for money movement to happen in a simple and borderless manner. >> Simple and borderless two key things there. How has the business strategy evolved in the last 10 years and specifically in the last 20, 22 months? >> Yeah. Great question. So as you can imagine with COVID, you know, David you can order a cup of coffee or a brand new car, and that whole direct to consumer model has accelerated in COVID right. We've accelerated ourselves going to upwards of 6,000 employees. We've been able to answer or manage upwards of 170 billion API requests in the last 12 months alone. Right we deliver upwards of five nines from a availability performance point of view. That means 13 seconds of downtime or less a month. And we're doing this originally starting off for the developer David as you talked about allowing developers to deliver, you know, what I call process payments, accept payments and reconcile payments. But the evolution that you're talking about Lisa has really led to three key areas of focus that our users are requesting from us. And Stripe's first operating principle is really that user first mentality similar to the Amazons where we listen to our users and they're really asking for three key areas of focus. Number one is all around modernizing their digital commerce. So this is big enterprises coming to us and saying, whether I'm a uni lever or a Ford, how do you help me with a direct to consumer a e-commerce type platform? Number one. Secondly, is companies like Deliveroo and Lyft creating what we call marketplaces. Also think about Twitter and clubhouse, more solopreneurs entrepreneurs kind of marketplaces. Third is all around SaaS business models. So think about slack and Atlassian. That are customer vivers and accelerating the journey with us around digitizing digital commerce. So that's the first area of evolution. The second area is all around what we call embedded FinTech. So we know just like Amazon helped accelerate infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and function as a service. We're helping accelerate FinTech as a service. So we believe every company in every industry aspires to add more and more FinTech capabilities in their core services that they offer to their customers. So think about a Shopify or a Lyft they're adding more FinTech capabilities, leveraging Stripe APIs that they offer to their consumers. Likewise, when you think about a Monzo bank or a and 26, what we call Neo banks. They're creating more banking as a service component so a second area of evolution is all around FinTech as a service or embedded FinTech. And the third area of focus again, listen to our users is all around users are saying. Hey, Stripe, you have our financial data. How do you help us more with business operations and automating and optimizing our business operations? So this is revenue management, revenue reconciliation, financial reporting, all of the business processes, you and I know, code to cash, order to cash, pay to procure. Help us automate, optimize, and not just optimize, but help us create net new business models. So these are the three key areas of evolution that we've seen modernizing digital commerce, embedded FinTech, and then certainly last but not least business operations and automating that. >> And your target audience is the developers. Or are you having conversations now that are more, I mean, this is like transformative to industries and disruptive. Are you having conversations higher up in the chain? >> Great, great question. And this is the parallel with Amazon, just like Amazon started with developers, AWS. And then what up to the C-suite, if you will, we're seeing the same exact thing. Obviously our DNA is developer first making it intuitive, natural easy for developers to build on Stripe. But we're seeing more and more C-suite leaders come to us and saying, help us evolve our business model, help us modernize and digitize net new business models to get new revenue streams. So those parallel work streams are both developer mindset and C-suite led is certainly a big evolution for us. And we're looking to learn from our Amazon friends as to the success that they've had there. >> Do you have any examples of projects that developers have proposed that were at first glance, completely outlandish? Something that, you know, is there any sort of corner of the chart use case where Stripe didn't think of it, some developer came up with the idea, maybe it can't be done yet. If you have an example of that, that would be very interesting. >> Yeah, I'll give you two examples. So as I said, we're definitely a user first entity. That's our operating principle. We always think about the user. So let me go to developers and say, what are you struggling with? What are you thinking about? What are the next set of things you need from us? And a simple comment around tax started to come up and do you know in the U S there's 11,000 tax jurisdictions that you and you're selling something online have to abide to these different jurisdictions. So one of the things that we then evolved into is created a Stripe tax product, which initially users or developers were really struggling with and working on. So we created a Stripe tax product. We've done an acquisition called tax jar that helps us accelerate that journey for tax. The other one is this notion of low code that we see in the marketplace right now, where developers saying. Hey, give me more embeddables on top of the primitives that you've created on top of the APIs. So we went leveraging what our customers have already done, created things like a checkout capability, which is a simple redirect highly customized for conversion, which you can just integrate to one API. You have a full checkout capability. You can embed that into your platform, which didn't exist before and needed you to really integrate into different APIs. So all of these capabilities are what developers have really focused on and built that we've done leverage and Excel on. >> Yeah, I think between Lisa and myself, we've paid taxes in about 7,000 of those >> Lisa: Yeah, probably. >> Not 11,000 jurisdictions, but all the various sales taxes and everything else. So we're sort of familiar with it. >> I think so, so here we are, you know, on the floor at re-invent. Great, as we said to be back in person, the 10th annual, but with, as each year goes by AWS has a ecosystem of partners gets bigger and bigger. The flywheel gets, I don't know, I think faster and faster, the number of announcements that came out yesterday and today talk to us about some of the common traits that Stripe and AWS share. >> Yeah. So I've mentioned a few of them. One is certainly the user first mentality where we're listening to users. That tax example is a perfect one of how do we decide new features, new capability based on user first, Amazon does that better than anyone else. Second is that developer mindset focus on the developer. Those will be the core persona we target give you an example, Lyft, we all know Lyft. They wanted to create instant payouts for their drivers. So their developers came to us and say, our developers don't want to get paid. I'm sorry. Our drivers don't want to get paid in a week or two weeks. So we work with their developers who create a instant payout mechanism. Now in six months, over 40% of their drivers are using Stripe instant payout powered by Stripe. And that's a developer first mindset again, back to AWS. And then the third is really around the go to market. And the market opportunity is very similar. You talked about the developer persona and the C-suite very similar to Amazon. But also we're not just catering to enterprise and strategic big customers. We are just so much focused on startups, SMB, mid-market, digital native, just like Amazon is. And I would say the last parallel, which is probably the most important one is innovation. I come from enterprise software where we looked at monthly, quarterly, biannual, annual release cycles. Well, as Stripe, all of that goes out the door just like Amazon. We may have a hundred to a thousand APIs in motion at any time in alpha beta production. And just like Amazon we're iterating and releasing new innovations consistently. So I would say that's probably the most important one that we have with Amazon. >> So a lot of synergies there like deep integrated trusted partner synergies it sounds like. >> Agreed, definitely and then we're seeing this. I was going more as we are going more up market. We're seeing a demand for end to end solutions that require integrations with a CRM vendor for customer 360 with our accounting vendor for pivotal procure order to cash, billing accounting with a e-commerce company like Adobe Magento to do better econ. So more end to end solutions with these tech partners, we're working with our GSI to help deliver those end to end solutions. And certainly, but not least the dev agencies who are still sort of our core constituents that help us keep relevant with those developers. >> You mentioned this at the outset, but some things bear repeating. Can you go into a little more detail on the difference between me wanting to start up a business and take credit cards as payment 10 years ago? Let's say versus today, how much of the friction have you removed from that system? >> It is literally an hour to two hour process versus weeks and months before. >> But what are those steps? Like who would I, you mentioned this, again you mentioned this already, but the go through that, go through that again who would I have to reach out to, to make this happen? And we were talking, you know, relationships with banks, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah. So it starts at initiating and registering that company. So imagine you going and having to register a company today, you can do that with a Stripe Atlas product in a matter of hours, get your EIN number, get your tax jurisdictions on your registration as a Delaware entity within the U S you can be anywhere at globally and go do that within a matter of one hour. That's number one, you start there. From there, then it's a matter of embedding payment embeddables within your e-commerce platform, marketplace platform, et cetera. As you've heard us talk about seven lines of code to get payments going, you can quickly onboard accept payments, process payments, reconcile payments all within an hour. And that's just the start. But now you get into more complex use cases around marketplaces and multi-party connection. Multi-party payouts, different commission rates, different subscription models. Think about a flat tier model, a metered tier model, all of these different things that we've abstracted and allow you to just use one to three different integrations to help accelerate and use that in your digital commerce platform. So all of these different workflows have is what we've automated through our APIs. >> Dave: That's unbelievable. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It is unbelievable, the amount of automation and innovation that's gone on in such a short time period. What are some of the things as we kind of wrap up here that we can look forward to from stripe from a roadmap perspective, technology wise, partner wise? >> Yes. I mean, we have a slew of data you can imagine billions of billions of transactional data. And you guys know what we do with data is we're looking at fraud prevention. We're looking at, we have a product called radar that looks at fraud, we're doing acceptance, adaptive acceptance to do more AIML learned data and authorization. We're also looking at how do we feed a lot of this financial data into the right mechanisms to allow you to then create new business models on top of this, whether it's cross sell upsell to new user business capture. As well as you know, one of the things I did not talk about, which coming from a farming background is this notion of Stripe climate. Where we have upwards of 2000 companies across 37 countries that are leveraging our Stripe climate product to give back to tech advanced companies that are helping in carbon offset. And super exciting times there from an ESG environmental social governance point of view. So all of those combined is what excites us about the future at Stripe. >> Wow. The future seems unlimited. Lots going on. >> Super excited. Zaki, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what's going on with Stripe. All the innovation that's going on. The synergies with AWS and what's coming down the pipe. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, David. Appreciated All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube. The global leader in live tech coverage. (lighthearted piano music)

>>Welcome everybody to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 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, reinvent was purely virtual. This year. They go in hybrid 20 plus thousand people. I hear the whisper numbers like 25, 20 7,000 hundreds of thousands of people online. The cubes here, two sets, we've got two remote studios, super excited. I'd like to introduce my co-host David Nicholson. He'll be here all week with us. Uh, John furrier is also here, Lisa Martin for the cubes 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 probably done four or five this year, but >>It's good to be back in person. It is. Yeah, absolutely. It's >>A Stripe. I mean, wow. Can a 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 sign it away. Yeah. So tell us about the >>Well, uh, Stripe was founded in 2010 by two brothers, Patrick and John Colson. And really it was from their first business and realizing how hard it was to actually charge for things on online. Um, you had to acquire a relationship with, uh, with a gateway provider to accept payments. You had to acquire a relationship with a, with a acquiring bank. Um, and you had to do that for each and every country that you wanted to service. Uh, so the same way that AWS reduced the barrier in terms of not having to procure, spend millions of dollars on storage, computers, networking, uh, effectively, what we we've done at Stripe is reduce the barriers around economic infrastructure, accepting payments online, >>Use that undifferentiated heavy lifting for payments. So describe Ken, what it was like kind of pre Stripe. You would literally have to install servers, get storage and put, put software on there, get a database. And then what if you had any money left over, you can actually do some business, but, but describe the sort of what the experience is like with Stripe. >>Sure. So, uh, the R R with, with Stripe, we literally talk about seven lines of code. So we, we allow any developer to, um, uh, 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, um, all ensuring compliance and security. Um, so it's like you said, uh, taking care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting are around accepting payments online in the enabling >>The enabler. There is the cloud. I mean, it was 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 leverage the cloud. >>Sure. Um, so we're a long time, uh, AWS, uh, customer and user, um, uh, back in the early days of, of Stripe in the early days of, of AWS. And we've just grown, uh, with, with AWS and the ecosystem. And it's interesting because a lot of, uh, 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. >>We use Stripe, we run our company on AWS and we use Stripe. It it's true. The integration took like minutes. It was so simple. Hey it, test it, make sure it scales. But so what, what's the stack look like? What is there, is there such thing as a payment stack? What's the technology stuff? >>Sure. So we initially started with payments and being able to accept payments, uh, on online. Uh we've we brought in out our, our, our Stripe product portfolio now to effectively provide economic, uh, infrastructure for the internet. So that could be accepting payments. Uh, it could be setting up marketplaces. So companies like Lyft and Deliveroo, uh, use Stripe to power their marketplaces with their, with their drivers and, and, um, uh, delivers, um, uh, we provide, uh, a product called radar that, uh, that, um, prevents fraud, uh, around, around the globe. Um, based upon the data that we're seeing from our, from our customers, um, we have, uh, issuing and treasury so that companies can provide their users or their merchants with banking services. So loans, uh, 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 strike 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. Sure. Uh, 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? Yeah, >>Uh, absolutely. So we, we establish relationships, uh, within, within each company country that we operate in we're in about 47, uh, countries, uh, today, um, and that's rapidly expanding so that companies can, can process or accept payments and do, uh, financial transactions within, within, within those countries. So we're in 47 countries today. We, we accept a multitude of different payment, uh, different currencies, different payment types. So the U S is very, uh, credit card focused. But if you go to other, other parts of the globe, it could be a debit cards. It could be, um, uh, wallets, uh, uh, Google pay, Ali pay, uh, others. So really it's, uh, providing sort of the payment methods that users prefer in, in the different countries, uh, and meeting and meeting those users where, where they are. >>Are you out of the box compliant? What integration is required to do that? Uh, what about things like data sovereignty, is that taken care of by the cloud provider or you guys, and where, w w where does, where does AWS end and you guys pick up? Yes, >>We're, we're PCI compliant. Um, we, we leverage AWS as our, as our infrastructure, um, to grow, grow and scale. So, um, one of the things that we're, we're proud of is, uh, through, throughout 2020 and 2021, we've, we've had 11 nines of, uh, of, of, uh, or five nines of uptime, um, even through, um, uh, black Friday and cyber Monday. So providing AWS provides that, that infrastructure, which we built on top of to provide, uh, you know, five nines of uptime for our, for our users. >>You describe in more detail, Kenya, your ecosystem. I mean, you're responsible for tech partnerships. What does that ecosystem, how I paint a picture of it? >>Sure. So, um, uh, a number of users want to be able to use Stripe with, with their other, uh, it infrastructure and, and their business processes. So a customer may start, uh, with a salesperson may start with a quote or order, uh, in, in Salesforce, want to automate the invoicing and billing and payment of that with, with Stripe and then, uh, reconcile re revenue and an ERP solution like SAP or Oracle or NetSuite or into it, um, in the case of, of small, medium businesses. So really, um, what we're focused on is building out that, that ecosystem to allow, uh, um, our, our customers to streamline their business processes, um, and, and integrate Stripe into their existing it infrastructure and, and business processes. >>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, uh, sort of software companies, if I can call you that, um, platforms, whatever, but to really focus on a 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. >>Sure. So the pricing model is very, very transparent. Uh, it's on, it's on the website. So, uh, we, we take a, um, a percentage of each transaction. So literally you can, you can set up a, a Stripe account it's self-service, um, uh, we, we take a 2.9% plus 30 cents on every, uh, Tran transaction. Um, we don't, you don't start getting, um, uh, charged until, uh, you start accepting payments from your, from your customers or from your users. >>Um, can you give us a sense of the business scope, maybe any metrics you can share, customers, whatever. >>Sure. So there's a couple of things we can share publicly, just in terms of the size of the business. I think since, uh, since 2020, uh, more than 2 million businesses have launched on, on Stripe. Uh, so, uh, 2 million in, in, in, in 2020, um, we've, uh, uh, in the past 12 months, we've, uh, uh, uh, processed over 173 billion, uh, API calls. Uh, we do we process about, um, uh, hundreds of billions of, of, of, uh, payment volume, uh, every, every year. Um, 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. And in 2010, just to give you a, uh, an idea of the, the, the size of the business and sort of the pace of the business >>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 of Peter teal, and it wasn't original founders, so are funders. So, you know, that's, he's talking scale. I want to go back to something you said about radar. Sure. So there's tech in your stack fraud detection, right. So some of >>That in machine learning, right. >>So, and so you guys, I mean, are you a technology company, are you a F a FinTech company? What are you? >>We're a software company. We provide software and we provide technology for developers, uh, to make online businesses and make, uh, uh, commerce, uh, more seamless and more frictionless >>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. >>Yes, it's very similar to the early, earlier days of AWS where a lot of tech forward companies leveraged Stripe, um, to, um, whether it be large enterprises to transform their businesses and move online, or, or, uh, uh, startups and developers that want to, uh, start a new business online and, and do that, uh, as quickly and seamlessly as possible. So it's, it's quite the gamut from large enterprises that are digitally transforming themselves companies like Marske and, and NASDAQ and others, as well as, uh, um, startups and developers that have started their businesses and born on born on Stripe. So >>When you talk about a startup, how small of an entity makes sense, uh, when you think of, 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, w with very, very small businesses. Is that something that this is all about? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, you know, two, 2 million business have sub launched on, on, on Stripe, uh, in, in the past year. And, and those businesses vary, but it could be literally a, a developer or a, uh, uh, a small, uh, SMB that wants to be able to accept payments on online. And it can just set up a Stripe account and start accepting payments. >>Yeah. So this is not a one hit wonder, um, lay out the vision for Stripe, right? I mean, you're, you're a platform, uh, you're, 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 can, >>Yeah, it really are. The mission of Stripe is to grow the GDP of the internet. Um, and, and so what that means is, uh, more and more our, our, our basic belief is more and more and more businesses, uh, will, will, uh, go, go online, uh, with, uh, with the pandemic that that was, uh, accelerated. But I think that the general trend of businesses moving online, uh, will continue to accelerate, and we want to provide, uh, economic infrastructure to support those businesses. Um, you know, um, uh, uh, Andreessen talked about sort of software, software eating the world well fit. Our belief has FinTech is eating software. So in, in the fullness of time, I think the opportunity is for, uh, any, 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, to provide the economic infrastructure for them to do so. >>And, and, you know, I mean your data company in that sense, you're moving bits around, you know, and those datas, I like to say data's eating software, you know, cause really you gotta have your data act together. Absolutely. And that's an evolving, I mean, you guys started to, to 2010, I would imagine your data strategy has evolved quite dramatically. Yeah. >>It's a great, it's a great call out Dave. Uh, one of our other products is a product called Sigma. So Sigma allows, uh, merchants or our customers to query payment and transaction data. So they want to be able to understand who, who, who are their customers, what are the payment methods that those customers prefer in different countries, in different regions? Um, so we're, we're starting to have some interesting use cases, um, working with, 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, to close the books faster at the end of the month or at the end of the, at the end of the year. So, uh, yeah, we we're, um, uh, as, as more and more companies are using Stripe, um, they want to be able to take advantage of that data and combine it with other, other sources of data to drive business. >>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, um, a little bit surprising, frankly, you know, but, uh, but exciting. Uh, what are you looking forward to this? >>Yeah, I'm just looking forward to meeting people in person again, it's, uh, it's great to be here and, and, you know, uh, uh, we have a strong relationship with AWS. We have lots of partners in, in, in common here, uh, 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 and, uh, launching our, our, our partner program beginning of next year. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, uh, groundwork and things to learn from, from here. As we, as we, we, we, we launch our, our, our partner business formula next >>I'll bet. Looking forward to that, Ken, thanks so much for coming to the cure. You so much. It was great to have a chat at the time. All right. And we want to thank our sponsors, uh, 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 Volante. You're watching the cube at AWS reinvent 2021. Keep it right there, right back.