(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)

>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon 2018, part of the CNCF Cloud Native Compute Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got two great guests here, we've got Liz Rice, the co-chair of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, kind of a dual naming because it's Kubernetes and it's Cloud Native and also technology evangelist at Aqua Security. She's co-chairing with Kelsey Hightower who will be on later today, and CUBE alumni as well, and Janet Kuo who is a software engineer at Google. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for inviting us. >> Super excited, we have a lot of energy even though we've got interviews all day and it's kind of, we're holding the line here. It's almost a celebration but also not a celebration because there's more work to do with Kubernetes. Just the growth of the CNCF continues to hit some interesting good performance KPIs on metrics. Growth's up on the membership, satisfaction is high, Kubernetes is being called a de facto standard. So by all kind of general qualitative metrics and quantitative, it's doing well. >> Lauren: It's doing great. >> But it's just the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. I talked yesterday a little bit in, in the keynote, about project updates, about how Kubernetes has graduated. That's a real signal of maturity. It's a signal to the end-user companies out there that you know, the risk, nothing is ever risk-free, but you know, Kubernetes is here to stay. It's stable, it's got stable governance model, you know, it's not going away. >> John: It's working. >> It's going to continue to evolve and improve. But it's really working, and we've got end users, you know, not only happy and using it, they're prepared to come to this conference and share their stories, share their learnings, it's brilliant. >> Yeah, and Janet also, you know, you talk about China, we have announcement that, I don't know if it's formally announced, but Shanghai, is it out there now? >> Lauren: It is. >> Okay, so Shanghai in, I think November 14th, let me get the dates here, 14th and 15th in Shanghai, China. >> Janet: Yeah. >> Where it's going to be presented in either English or in Chinese, so it's going to be fully translated. Give us the update. >> Yeah, it will be fully translated, and we'll have a CFP coming soon, and people will be submitting their talks in English but they can choose to present either in English or Chinese. >> Can you help us get a CUBE host that can translate theCUBE for us? We need some, if you're out there watching, we need some hosts in China. But in all seriousness, this is a global framework, and this is again the theme of Cloud Native, you know. Being my age, I've seen the lift and shift IT world go from awesome greatness to consolidation to VMwares. I've seen the waves. But this is a different phenomenon with Cloud Native. Take a minute to share your perspectives on the global phenomenon of Cloud Native. It's a global platform, it's not just IT, it's a global platform, the cloud, and what that brings to the table for end users. >> I think for end users, if we're talking about consumers, it actually is, well what it's doing is allowing businesses to develop applications more quickly, to respond to their market needs more quickly. And end users are seeing that in more responsive applications, more responsive services, improved delivery of tech. >> And the businesses, too, have engineers on the front lines now. >> Absolutely, and there's a lot of work going on here, I think, to basically, we were talking earlier about making technology boring, you know, this Kubernetes level is really an abstraction that most application developers don't really need to know about. And making their experience easier, they can just write their code and it runs. >> So if it's invisible to the application developer, that's the success. >> That's a really helpful thing. They shouldn't have to worry about where their code is running. >> John: That's DevOps. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I think the container in Kubernetes technology or this Cloud Native technology that brings developer the ability to, you know, move fast and give them the agility to react to the business needs very quickly. And also users benefit from that and operators also, you know, can manage their applications much more easily. >> Yeah, when you have that abstraction layer, when you have that infrastructure as code, or even this new abstraction layer which is not just infrastructure, it's services, micro-services, growth has been phenomenal. You're bringing the application developer into an efficiency productivity mode where they're dictating the business model through software of the companies. So it's not just, "Hey build me something "and let's go sell it." They're on the front lines, writing the business logic of businesses and their customers. So you're seeing it's super important for them to have that ability to either double down or abandon quickly. This is what agile is. Now it's going from software to business. This, to me, I think is the highlight for me on this show. You see the dots connecting where the developers are truly in charge of actually being a business impact because they now have more capability. As you guys put this together and do the co-chair, do you and Kelsey, what do you guys do in the room, the secret room, you like, "Well let's do this on the content." I mean, 'cause there's so much to do. Take us through the process. >> So, a little bit of insight into how that whole process works. So we had well over 1,000 submissions, which, you know, there's no, I think there's like 150 slots, something like that. So that's a pretty small percentage that we can actually accept. We had an amazing program committee, I think there were around 60 people who reviewed, every individual reviewer looked at a subset. We didn't ask them to look at all thousand, that would be crazy. They scored them, that gave us a kind of first pass, like a sort of an ability to say, "Well, anything that was below average, "we can only take the top 15%, "so anything that's below average "is not going to make the cut." And then we could start looking at trying to balance, say, for example, there's been a lot of talk about were there too many Istio talks? Well, there were a lot of Istio talks because there were a lot of Istio submissions. And that says to us that the community wants to talk about Istio. >> And then number of stars, that's the number one project on the new list. I mean, Kubeflow and Istio are super hot. >> Yeah, yeah, Kubeflow's another great example, there are lots of submissions around it. We can't take them all but we can use the ratings and the advice from the program committee to try and assemble, you know, the best talks to try and bring different voices in, you know, we want to have subject matter experts and new voices. We want to have the big name companies and start-ups, we wanted to try and get a mix, you know. A diversity of opinion, really. >> And you're a membership organization so you have to balance the membership needs with the content program so, challenging with given the growth. I mean, I can only imagine. >> Yeah, so as program co-chairs, we actually have a really free hand over the content, so it's one of the really, I think, nice things about this conference. You know, sponsors do get to stand on stage and deliver their message, but they don't get to influence the actual program. The program is put together for the community, and by doing things like looking at the number of submissions, using those signals that the community want to talk about, I hope we can carry on giving the attendees that format. >> I would just say from an outsider perspective, I think that's something you want to preserve because if you look at the success of the CNCF, one thing I'm impressed by is they've really allowed a commercial environment to be fostered and enabled. But they didn't compromise the technical. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And the content to me, content and technical tracks are super important because content, they all work together, right? So as long as there's no meddling, stay in your swim lane, whatever, whatever it is. Content is really important. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Because that's the learning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so what's on the cut list that you wish you could have put back on stage? Or is that too risque? You'll come back to that. >> Yeah. >> China, talk about China. Because obviously, we were super impressed last year when we went to go visit Alibaba just to the order of magnitude to the cultural mindset for their thinking around Cloud Native. And what I was most impressed with was Dr. Wong was talking about artistry. They just don't look at it as just technology, although they are nerdy and geeky like us in Silicon Valley. But they really were thinking about the artistry 'cause the app side of it has kind of a, not just design element to the user perspective. And they're very mobile-centric in China, so they're like, they were like, "This is what we want to do." So they were very advanced in my mind on this. Does that change the program in China vis a vis Seattle and here, is there any stark differences between Shanghai and Copenhagen and Seattle in terms of the program? Is there a certain focus? What's the insight into China? >> I think it's a little early to say 'cause we haven't yet opened the CFP. It'll be opening soon but I'm fully expecting that there will be, you know, some differences. I think the, you know, we're hoping to have speakers, a lot more speakers from China, from Asia, because it's local to them. So, like here, we tried to have a European flavor. You'll see a lot of innovators from Europe, like Spotify and the Financial Times, Monzo Bank. You know, they've all been able to share their stories with us. And I think we're hoping to get the same kind of thing in China, hear local stories as well. >> I mean that's a good call. I think conferences that do the rinse and repeat from North America and just slap it down in different regions aren't as effective as making it localized, in a way. >> Yeah. >> That's super important. >> I know that a lot of China companies, they are pretty invested pretty heavily into Kubernetes and Cloud Native technology and they are very innovative. So I actually joined a project in 2015 and I've been collaborating with a lot of Chinese contributors from China remotely on GitHub. For example, the contributors from Huawei and they've been invested a lot in this. >> And they have some contributors in the core. >> Yeah, so we are expecting to see submissions from those contributors and companies and users. >> Well, that's super exciting. We look forward to being there, and it should be excellent. We always have a fun time. The question that I want to ask you guys now, just to switch gears is, for the people watching who couldn't make it or might watch it on YouTube on Demand who didn't make the trip. What surprised you here? What's new, I'm asking, you have a view as the co-chair, you've seen it. But was there anything that surprised you, or did it go right? Nothing goes perfect. I mean, it's like my wedding, everything happens, didn't happen the way you planned it. There's always a surprise. Any wild cards, any x-factors, anything that stands out to you guys? >> So what I see from, so I attend, I think around five KubeCons. So from the first one it's only 550 people, only the small community, the contributors from Google and Red Hat and CoreOS and growing from now. We are growing from the inner circle to the outside circle, from the just contributors to also the users of it, like and also the ecosystem. Everyone that's building the technology around Cloud Native, and I see that growth and it's very surprising to me. We have a keynote yesterday from CERN and everyone is talking about their keynote, like they have I think 200 clusters, and that's amazing. And they said because of Kubernetes they can just focus on physics. >> Yeah, and that's a testimonial right there. >> Yeah. >> That was really good stories to hear, and I think maybe one of the things that surprises me, it sort of continues to surprise me is how collaborative, it's something about this kind of organization, this conference, this whole kind of movement, if you like. Where companies are coming in and sharing their learnings, and we've seen that, we've seen that a lot through the keynotes. And I think we see it on the conference floor, we see it in the hallway chat. And I think we see it in the way that the different SIGs and working groups and projects are all, kind of, collaborating on problem solving. And that's really exciting. >> That's why I was saying earlier in the beginning that there's a celebration amongst ourselves and the community. But also a realization that this is just the beginning, it's not a, it's kind of like when you get venture funding if you're a start-up. That's really when it begins, you don't celebrate, but you take a little bit of a pause. Now my personal take only to all of the hundreds of events we do a year is that I that think this community here has fought the hard DevOps battle. If you go back to 2008 timeframe, and '08, '09, '10, '11, '12, those years were, those were hyper scale years. Look at Google, Facebook, all the original DevOps engineers, they were eating glass and spitting nails. It was hard work. And it was really build your own, a lot of engineering, not just software development. So I think this, kind of like, camaraderie amongst the DevOps community saying, "Look, this is a really big "step up function with Kubernetes." Everyone's had some scar tissue. >> Yeah, I think a lot of people have learned from previous, you know, even other open source projects that they've worked on. And you see some of the amazing work that goes into the kind of, like, community governance side. The things that, you know, Paris Pittman does around contributor experience. It's so good to see people who are experts in helping developers engage, helping engineers engage, really getting to play that role. >> There's a lot of common experiences for people who have never met each other because there's people who have seen the hard work pay with scale and leverage and benefits. They see it, this is amazing. We had Sheryl from Google on saying, "When I left Google and I went out into the real world, "I was like, oh my God, "they don't actually use Borg," like, what? "What do they, how do they actually write software?" I mean, so she's a fish out of water and that, it's like, so again I think there's a lot of commonality, and it's a super great opportunity and a great community and you guys have done a great job, CNCF. And we hope to nurture that, the principles, and looking forward to China. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, we appreciate it. >> Yeah. >> Okay we're here at CNCF's KubeCon 2018, I'm John Furrier, more live coverage. Stay with us, day two of two days of CUBE coverage. Go to thecube.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. We'll be back, stay with us after this short break.