0:07
Okay, Patrick.
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0:07
Thanks so much for being here.
0:09
Welcome to Startup School. >> Great to be here.
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Harj and I first met 20 years ago and um uh he um we started a company together.
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I was going to give away the introduction.
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>> Yeah, I I thought this was my interview, but keep going. You're doing a good job.
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>> Well, we started a company together many many years ago and uh I learned a huge amount from Harj.
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So it's a it's really fun to do this.
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>> All right, let's um Well, actually I mean speaking of that.
0:36
So when I think when I first met you 20 something years ago at the time your most impressive achievement I would argue was Chroma, your dialect of Lisp.
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>> Any Lisp programmers here? Oh, wow.
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Okay, that was um I think I heard one whoop, which is more than I expected.
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Um but uh yeah, I I really liked Lisp when I was in high school.
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>> Yeah, so what I was going to ask is um a prolific 16-year-old today could presumably just like prompt Claude to write their their Lisp dialect.
1:05
Would you would you advise them to not do that and still still do it?
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Is there Is there any value in such things? >> I don't know. I wonder a lot.
1:11
Um Yeah, like I was saying on the one hand uh it used to be really fun to write all this assembly and machine code and to optimize your instructions and make layout in memory and everything and now we don't have to do that anymore. Compilers do it for us.
1:25
We don't mourn it too much.
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And so maybe in the same way we shouldn't mourn source code.
1:28
We should just transcend the plane of uh instructions to Claude at all, but um but emotionally I miss it.
1:39
>> Um How about I you think just like as I've been hanging out here um with these students like they're so like maybe the question behind it is many of them are just wondering what should they be learning at college?
1:50
Like what is sort of in this sort of AI world like how much how much should they be trying to learn and derive from first principles and how much should they just outsource to the to the AI? >> Right.
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Um, I mean, my model of this is, um, is cache.
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Um, you know, the c h not an s h, where Jeff Dean has this, uh, famous set of numbers that every programmer should know, uh, bandwidths and latencies and just kind of relevant constants you should have a reason about as you as you build systems.
2:23
And obviously, you know, thinking of building any system or distributed system or whatever, like, all lookups and all, you know, relevant bandwidths between different, um, components are are are very different, right?
2:34
Uh, and you know, retrieving something from L1 cache is very different from retrieving from RAM is very different from retrieving across the network or whatever.
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And I think it's like that with knowledge.
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Well, fine, yes, you can ask the agent or something to compute something for you or to look something up for you or whatever.
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That's a hell of a lot slower than knowing it in cognitive L1 cache.
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And you can have way more round trips in your brain than you can, you know, muttering through, you know, super whisper or typing it out or whatever.
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And so, I think, even granting the full capabilities of the of the models, I feel I still think there's a a pretty, like, I think for for a long time to come, uh, neuronal lookups will be will be much faster.
3:13
Um, and and then, you look if you look in revealed preference, uh, at what uh, companies themselves are doing, whether they're companies like Stripe or the labs or what have you, um, there still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability.
3:28
And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.
3:41
>> Um, I mean, are there are there specific things that maybe you personally, either personally or as uh, CEO of Stripe, um, you still you purposely choose to sort of do yourself and like retrieve from your own cache, um, even though like the agents would probably do a reasonably good job.
3:55
Um I still I still write myself.
3:59
Like I I um I I don't I I both philosophically but also uh specifically, substantively, uh dislike the writing of the models.
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I mean, it's very interesting, right?
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Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever.
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Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats.
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Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
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Now, maybe it's just very hard to like RL limit that domain because the you know, the utility function or something is kind of hard to define. Um but yeah.
4:40
Um I I think writing is a pretty I interpersonal communication and writing I think are so very fundamental and so being able to reason sensibly in the multi-dimensional space of reality.
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And in some kind of indescribable way, I feel like the model is still kind of deficient at that.
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And so I've never I've yet to send, you know, every tool is now trying to prompt me with, you know, pre-written uh suggestions, whether it's, you know, Gmail or uh apparently WhatsApp just rolled this out.
5:08
Um and I think I've still sent zero of those in my life. No.
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>> Um How about so if you talk talk about the Stripe story, uh the early days in particular a little bit, uh you were at MIT, then you left to start Stripe.
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How did you think about that decision?
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And obviously we're in a stadium full of college students.
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How should they think about it?
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How do you How do they know if it's the right decision for them to uh leave college early and go start a company versus stay?
5:37
>> Yeah, well, I I think I have the slightly unusual distinction of having dropped out of college twice to start a company.
5:43
So, um so maybe one thing to know is that it's not totally trapdoor.
5:47
Uh you can you can drop out and and in fact return.
5:50
So I dropped out after my freshman semester to start this company with with Harj. That was super fun.
5:57
And then after a couple years of that, went back, did another year at MIT and then dropped out again to to start Stripe.
6:06
Um and you know, I am when I went to college, probably like a lot of people here, I um I had this vision of my life and involving becoming an academic and I really like physics and I thought, you know, I'll do all this physics stuff. It's so cool.
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I'd read all the Feynman books, all of this.
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And I guess I am Well, growing up in Ireland, I hadn't realized I hadn't thought much about the possibility of startups.
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Hello to the [laughter] other Irish folks here.
6:39
And um And I mean, way back then in the sort of you know, pre-Cambrian era, startups were definitely much less you know, well-known even on campus and so forth.
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You know, when I was dropping dropping out, people thought it was super weird.
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Um I think um You know, overall um if you enjoy college, I I would actually you know, I I I think there's no harm in in finishing.
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I I I felt this real sense of urgency, which I think in hindsight was a bit unnecessary.
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Um if you but if you don't enjoy college, just you know, whatever, it's not your your thing.
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It's not what captivates you.
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You don't really want to learn all the physics things or whatever.
7:21
Uh there You know, I think a lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and impune your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth.
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And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared.
7:32
So I I both think you don't need to but also the cost of doing so are de minimis.
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What what was the urgency you were feeling? >> The urgency?
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>> Yeah, to to go out and do do something. >> I don't know. Life is short, right?
7:46
Um and I I I all I mean, it was a general kind of haste.
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Uh I think, you know, a lot a lot of us um I'm sure I'm sure many of the people here you you you you kind of get into this mode of speed running high school and then, you know, once you get to college it's like, obviously I want to speed run that as well and do all the things. So, a bit of that.
8:02
A bit of um Marc Andreessen also talks about a version of this.
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I thought that a bunch of the opportunities uh in startups in Silicon Valley and so forth were ephemeral and fleeting.
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And if we didn't build it then, but, you know, it wouldn't be possible to do it in three or four years.
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And maybe all the opportunities will be gone.
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You know, in hindsight, I think that um that was a a poor intuition.
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Uh it's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades in Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.
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Um yeah, I think it was mainly those two things.
8:33
>> think it's um I mean, this is a very common thing that we hear when we talk to students now is that they part of the reason they want to drop out en masse, it seems, at this point is they're worried that actually now is the moment that they're sort of I think the meme going around is that if you don't sort of uh drop out and start a company and make lots of money, you're going to be trapped in the permanent underclass.
8:50
So, is that um should everyone here be worried about being stuck in the permanent underclass? I guess is the question.
8:57
>> Um I think um humanity has always had um a an affinity for these millenarian sort of models of how uh everything is um you know, everything will soon come to an end uh and be this this sort of permanent transformation of society and so forth.
9:16
Actually, there's a great book, The Winged Gospel.
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People thought that after the the invention of aviation, that it was just like civilization was just entering humanity as a species were entering a new era and nothing is going to be the same.
9:30
I mean, obviously aviation was was a pretty big deal, but uh I I I don't think it was sort of quite the um the sociological rewriting that some of the you know excitable proponents at the time imagined.
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So I am you know it's it's hard to predict anything especially the future but I would I would take the under on this being the last couple of years to get a company going. >> Fair enough.
9:56
So going back to the Stripe story Stripe ostensibly seems like a good idea.
9:59
Like even on day one it's the internet's a big deal money's a big deal like combine those two things.
10:06
Presumably is that how it went when you went to tell people you wanted to start Stripe and everyone just say hey this is a great this is an obviously a good idea.
10:13
>> It was kind of funny it was um it was so so something we learned from YC uh was that the importance of focusing on very concrete easy to explain customer problems.
10:25
Like it's it's very easy to to hallucinate or to you know imagine some customer problem that's not actually something viscerally felt by a person who would pay money.
10:36
And so over the course of in part working on automatic together we have encountered this issue of it being really annoying to deal with movement of money or payments whatever on the internet.
10:44
Um and on the one hand it seemed like a an obviously good idea in the sense that nobody liked the existing ways of doing so and they were broadly extremely unpopular and kind of antiquated and legacy and you had to like fill out all this paperwork and go to the bank in person and the paperwork was in Latin and just like it was all bad.
11:03
and just like it was all bad. Um but then the flip side is it just seems kind of ridiculous that two kids would start a financial services business and fintech didn't exist as a sector at the time like the word literally didn't exist and so it's just kind of you know we felt like the proverbial squirrels you know in a trench coat trying to masquerade as a
11:28
real business or as you know serious adults but obviously knowing nothing coming in about the about the space and and certainly a lot of people we met and pitched or banks or partners or whatever that we talked to, I mean you didn't literally laugh us out of the room, but I you kind of see them looking for the button to like call security under the desk to have them haul us out cuz it just seemed so improbable. So,
11:48
So, anyway, I'd say it like it both seemed like an obviously good idea in that people really wanted this, but also a bad idea in that nobody took it seriously.
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Um but I I think that I think the fact that it was ultimately the fact that it was grounded in such a concrete actual real user problem saved us.
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>> Um you actually speaking of that, how did you you had to in order to actually build the product, you had to get banking partner and do things that a typical software company did not have to do.
12:14
As two young founders, like how did you manage to convince a bank to trust you in the end?
12:20
>> Yeah, um well, actually this is not an answer to your question.
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But um just a thing that strikes me as I sit here is the reason we decided to start Stripe is because so John and I were in college together.
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He was in his freshman year and we went to Startup School in 2009, which was held in Berkeley.
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And we we thought it was pretty cool.
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Um and so we went to we got sushi afterwards in Potrero and we were walking back from sushi and we're like, you know, we'd kind of been kicking around this idea for um a payment thing or like we've been thinking about the space.
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And it was walking back that evening after Startup School that we decided to start Stripe.
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I remember literally where we were in the road and I remember what we said to each other, which was, "Yeah, you know, we might as well because it probably won't be that hard." >> Okay.
13:12
So, moral of the story is go get sushi in Potrero tonight and you might start the next Stripe.
13:18
>> [laughter] >> Um and yes, be beware of sort of these these ultimate yak shaves.
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We thought we could do it on the side while in college, you know, take a couple months, and that was almost 17 years ago.
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>> Um at the time I remember you were also unusual in that you took sort of longer to do a big public launch.
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And especially within the YC world, the motto is very much sort of launch early, launch quickly, be out there and iterate.
13:43
Um could you maybe just talk us through a little bit about that?
13:45
So, why did you do it that way?
13:47
>> Yeah, so um we started working on Stripe um kind of seriously in the uh the well, we started working the week after that's our school, but um we're going to college wasn't full-time.
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We started working full-time the summer of 2010.
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We launched publicly September 2011.
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So, almost uh 2 years after like the first lines of code after the repo was started.
14:06
And yeah, waiting 2 years to launch seems I mean I you know, I've heard if we're going to YC meetings, you know, every every week, I think we'd have been, you know, bludgeoned on the head.
14:16
Um I think um I'm looking in many domains that probably is the wrong thing to do.
14:20
Um in our domain, to answer your last question, because we had to do so much stuff around security and partners and money movement and infrastructure and reliability and you know, all the things.
14:30
We just we didn't feel like we could scale a really good self-serve experience without getting a lot of the kind of the preconditions um and the infrastructure in place.
14:40
Um the I think the the thing that saved us um and meant that it wasn't a total walk in the wilderness is we had production users almost from the very beginning.
14:53
So, first lines of code um in uh fall of '09, we got our first live production user uh in um in January of 2010.
15:03
So, like 2 months into working on whatever. And it did very little.
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Like it was very larval and incomplete.
15:10
Uh and uh our first production customer was uh Ross Boucher at a company called uh Twilio North.
15:15
Um and all it could do was charge a card.
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Uh and so, you know, Ross would charge the card.
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Uh and you know, then he would ask some very reasonable question like, you know, how do I How can I look at all my charges?
15:26
And like, reasonable request.
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And so, you know, let's code up a little dashboard here.
15:32
And then he'd be like, well, I want to refund a payment.
15:33
And you know, we're like, all right, we'll build refund support.
15:35
And then, you know, after a couple of weeks, he was like, so you know, at some point, do I get my money?
15:41
And we're like, also a reasonable request.
15:42
So, let's let's build that functionality.
15:44
So, it was very kind of just-in-time development.
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Anyway, so we we had a production customer from very early, and then we did increase So, in private beta, we increased the number of customers every single month, you know, all the way to that public launch.
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And so, every, you know, every week, we had actual customer feedback, requests, new users coming in.
16:03
We're learning things from reality as opposed to our own kind of hypothesized or extrapolated conception of it.
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And I I think if you have, you know, a significant stream like that of of um of grounding, I think it's probably okay to not be like, launch launch.
16:22
When do you I mean, you're you're an expert YC partner. Do you agree?
16:24
[laughter] >> That's a good question.
16:25
Um Yeah, I mean, it is This is the the issue with advice in general is it's sort of so generalized.
16:31
And like, they especially in startups, the exception proves the rule, right?
16:35
So, I think those are Yeah, certainly certainly if um you know, your the cost of failure is high, um then it almost certainly you have to sort of take longer to like build.
16:48
Um You may be a very slight tangent, but something I'm curious about related to this, though, is you know, we we were talking like with with these coding agents, the ability to just like build and produce software cheaply and quickly, um I I wonder, should people be taking more of this path?
17:03
Like, should people be more ambitious in general with what the version one of the thing that they launch is?
17:07
Um Or you know, or is it still fundamentally good product design to start like narrow and focused and then expand out once you know what people want. >> Yeah.
17:16
Um Um It's a good question.
17:20
Um I think probably in the era of AI, I mean I I don't know.
17:32
And you know, to some extent YC will will be I think the expert here, but um you know, there's the whole kind of traditional lean startup doctrine of exactly what you say, like start out by buying the Google Ads or something and and uh identify this crevice or whatever and and and aggressively expand out from that.
17:49
I think you can certainly imagine that that becomes much more competitive and much more um you know, aggressively tilled and it's kind of hard to find those those little niches.
18:02
The internet's a much bigger place than it was 20 years ago when some of those ideas emerged, whereas taking these really divergent starting points where nobody else uh is uh is uh trying to um occupy that territory is is maybe a more like basically maybe you have to
18:21
more aggressively decorrelate uh in the era of AI, and I think it is interesting to think about, you know, many of the companies that were most successful over the last 10 years, so many of them are are very anti-lean startup, right? Uh
18:30
Uh whether it's, you know, the labs themselves or Anduril or um yeah, you you you you can go down the list.
18:38
A lot of them have this characteristic.
18:40
So, I um yeah, I think maybe maybe a better way of saying it is 20 20 years ago that whole lean startup thing was uh was almost the only thing to do because of capital available and you didn't have AI that made, I don't know, spinning up an organization with many different potentialities and capabilities so much easier, whereas now I think you can start these much more aggressive and ambitious things up front.
19:02
>> Um within sort of YC and probably startup world at this point, you're famous for the at least the program term schlepp blindness, this Stripe um uh at least on the surface was not like, you know, involved a lot of schleps, like things I presume you weren't like the um, intellectually most interesting things uh, to work on.
19:18
Um, and I always found that especially interesting for you because you just mentioned you you had academic interests in physics and um, you're just like clearly like, you know, a deep intellectual and have very many things that you're interested in.
19:29
As Stripe has sort of grown into this in this big company in what ways sort of, you know, in what ways um, are there sort of like intellectual um, rewards that you've you've given up and which ones have you gained?
19:44
>> Yeah, I am I mean, look, in any company there's a bunch of stuff that's um, not that rewarding or in and of itself all that interesting.
19:51
Like so setting up payroll, no one sort of starts a company so that uh, you can you can set up payroll.
19:56
Uh, and certainly building business financial services there's all sorts of, you know, more arcane and extensive uh, versions of that.
20:01
Um, I think that um, I actually feel extremely lucky with Stripe um, and in this respect.
20:08
And uh, I think this is something I don't know if you need to think about it that much up front, but I think once you think about it maybe before you raise a significant amount of money, um, you know, you always worry naturally about possibility of failure and you know, what will happen if you fail and how to mitigate and avoid failure and all those things.
20:30
I think you need to ask the uh, the sort of converse of that, uh, what if you succeed?
20:35
And you know, you raise money and you've customers and you've employees and a whole thing.
20:42
Like are you going to be are you going to enjoy that?
20:43
Are you going to want to work on that for 10 years, for 17 years, for 30 years?
20:48
Uh, I mean, Larry Ellison at Oracle is going for I mean, I I I guess it'll be a half century soon, right?
20:55
Um, so so, you know, what if you succeed?
20:57
And in the case of Stripe, I really love it because you know, we're working with the world's most interesting and innovative companies.
21:05
Uh like we're uh, uh 25% of all Delaware corporations are started with Stripe uh via Atlas.
21:14
And then we get to partner with them and work with them and hear from them and get their feedback and get their requests and everything, you know, through the entirety of the journey up to being the Shopifys and the OpenAIs and the, you know, all all the um uh the uh the standout successes.
21:27
Um oh and actually speaking of Atlas, uh we're giving free Atlas incorporation to everybody at Startup School.
21:34
So, um if you are at struck by the uh the urge to found something uh you know, over dinner this evening as we were, uh just email startupschool@stripe.
21:49
com and we will get you your link uh for free Atlas.
21:55
Um but uh but yeah, I I you know, I think PG latched onto something where yeah, there are all these kind of menial tasks, but but in the kind of totality of Stripe, I find it so interesting.
22:04
Like every business is a kind of applied theory on how some aspect of the world works or how some market works or how some you know, how if the new company with a new um the new model, it's kind of a contrarian thesis on some counterfactual.
22:20
But yeah, just like it's it's I've never met a Stripe customer and thought that's boring.
22:26
Um so so it's actually the business as a whole has been the opposite of uh of the Schlep Blindness um instinct.
22:32
>> And you have a particularly unique in um perspective on this cuz you work with the big model um providers, the big lab companies, and you work with all of the fast-growing AI startups on the ground.
22:43
Uh something that came up a lot here yesterday, uh honestly comes up within the batches, too, is people are just worried about um is my idea going to get sort of trampled by the the big uh lab providers?
22:51
And I'm giving your perspective, I'm just curious like how how should people think about that? >> Yeah.
22:58
Um Yeah, again, predictions are hard and certainly the labs are very competent, capable organizations.
23:07
Um And maybe you should separate a little bit.
23:12
Will rapidly improving AI capabilities do this or will the labs specifically themselves do this?
23:18
Um I think in general the track record of like no organization if we go back 20 years, you know, there's some of the sense with Google.
23:30
Like, you know, when we were doing automatic, the question was always for our company and every other company, you know, what if Google does this?
23:34
And Google seemed kind of omnipotent and had this immense number of incredibly talented people and essentially infinite access to capital and server and just all the things.
23:45
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth.
24:03
And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
24:13
So, I'd say that the kind of the track record of that is um is uh is checkered.
24:17
And in general, I think that fear has been overstated.
24:20
Now, I think there is a more specific thing of just like models themselves. Forget the labs.
24:24
Even even if the labs aren't specific particularly ambitious about expanding their scope, just like literally at length, uh will will obviate a bunch of or agentic capabilities will obviate a bunch of uh of you know, specific verticals or tasks or something.
24:38
You know, hard to say, obviously contingent on one's forecast of the model capabilities themselves, uh but, you know, in certain cases, I'm sure that will happen.
24:45
And you know, in certain domains, it has already happened.
24:49
Looking at the Stripe data, one thing I will say that I think is germane to people here, um there are many more businesses getting started now than there were a year ago, like as little as a year ago.
25:02
Um, way, way more than we're getting started, you know, 5 years ago.
25:06
Uh, and actually the relative change between last year and this year is pretty much the largest relative change we've seen in any given year.
25:12
So, for example, from 19 from 2019 to 2020, we saw a big jump, you know, understandable during COVID.
25:19
So, you know, um, February to April of 2020 or whatever.
25:24
Uh, you know, I I I think the growth rate inflected to maybe 50% or thereabouts, uh, year-over-year in terms of new businesses getting started.
25:31
Um, as I speak, the number of new businesses starting on Stripe is up around a bit under, but around 2x year-over-year, um, which again is the largest relative jump, uh, we've seen.
25:45
Um, and you might think, okay, fine, you know, there's way more vibe-coded, kind of lightweight slop, you know, whatever.
25:52
Like, maybe fine, there's more things, but like, are they actually succeeding?
25:57
Um, but actually the median business, uh, is doing better this year than a year ago.
26:04
Um, and so and then if we kind of, um, stratify and look at the probability that any given business will reach some revenue threshold, a million dollars, five million dollars, 10 million dollars, whatever, um, those all seem to be getting better.
26:18
Uh, business are uh, the time to revenue for new companies incorporated with Atlas is declining.
26:23
And so, by all the kind of objective metrics we can look at, uh, it seems to be a better time than ever to start a business.
26:32
Then again, things can change.
26:34
I don't know what the world's going to look like in 5 years, but, you know, speaking today on July 26th or whatever it is, uh, of of '26, um, I think it is the Stripe data would suggest it's there's never been a better time.
26:46
Um, I mean, we see the exact same thing in the YC batches.
26:49
Companies are just able to grow faster than ever.
26:50
Um, >> Certainly within the batch.
26:54
>> It used when you know, back in again the old days when Arge and I were first starting out, like getting to a million dollars of revenue like running revenue was a big deal.
27:02
Like people would know about that company.
27:03
They'd be like, you know, I heard that X company got to a million dollars of revenue.
27:06
And now, I mean I don't That's >> Yeah, that's actually you should be Well, your first month it feels like.
27:14
>> You should um that's an exaggeration for everyone here.
27:16
Um but I mean I certainly within sort of like sort of like the YC uh part of the life cycle like day zero to 90, it's really being driven by I would say enterprises willing to buy from startups, which is the new thing.
27:27
So, you can sign these new contracts um within like the batch.
27:31
Um you have the data as the companies keep growing.
27:33
I'm curious, are there other factors that are driving these sort of um uh inflected growth curves from like one to 10 and 10 to 100?
27:42
>> I I think it's really the dynamic you just mentioned, uh which is businesses uh businesses everywhere are more um spring-loaded uh to adapt and to try new things.
27:57
And they have a real terror of being left behind with archaic and antiquated ways of operating.
28:07
And so, in normal times, you're a new startup, you have you have some mechanism for doing whatever, and you pitch the CIO or the CTO or the whoever at some company, and they kind of don't want to talk to you because, you know, your thing is not validated.
28:23
Maybe you won't be around in 2 years.
28:24
You know, all all the kind of obvious objections.
28:25
But now, people know that, well, the risk of the status quo is actually extremely high.
28:30
And so, even if there's risk in doing all the new things, well, this path also looks pretty dangerous.
28:36
And so, I really think there's never been a better time for startups to to sell um and to have their products get adopted at, you know, pretty meaningful scale right out of the gate.
28:44
Uh a lot of YC companies in recent times have demonstrated this, but uh I think it's a it's a really pervasive dynamic.
28:50
it's a really pervasive dynamic. And there's a bit of it I think also, I mean Stripe is not a consumer company, obviously, but you know, I think there's some version of this on the consumer side where I think consumers, I mean, are also pretty, I mean,
29:01
consumers have complicated views on AI and maybe they don't want the data centers, but people are very intrigued by the products and I think there is a kind of they're kind of beguiled by them and there's a a predisposition and an openness to experimenting with the new. >> Um maybe just more broadly something I'm
29:18
>> Um maybe just more broadly something I'm curious about is again with with this the data you have at Stripe, um has anything you've seen in that data stream um changed a belief you have about AI broadly say over the like the last 12 months?
29:31
>> I mean, there's a fear uh that AI is going to be this um hegemonic, centralizing, totalizing force where a small number of companies gobble up a very large share of the economy.
29:45
And many companies at the forefront of AI um have done incredibly well and I think we'll continue to do incredibly well, for sure.
29:59
But based on what we can see at Stripe, the hunger and the intensity with which other companies are either getting started, taking advantage of these new capabilities, or existing companies are retooling, I don't worry about the centralization in the same way.
30:15
Uh I think there I think there are going to be many thousands of winners.
30:20
Um and again, we try not to offer any definitive prognostications cuz the future is not predetermined, but based on the the trend lines we can see, I think we are heading towards a um a more decentralized world and one with more broad-based prosperity. >> Yeah, cool.
30:41
All right, well, I think that is all we have time for today.
30:43
So thanks so much Patrick for me.
30:47
>> Thank you for having me and um It would be remiss of me not to say that Stripe would not exist without YC. >> All right, cool.
30:55
All right, see you so much.