brustkern.eth 🏴

We are at the intersection of traditional finance, fintech, DeFi and AI. What an incredible time to be a builder.

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

Because of its roots, aspens have a nutrient pipeline allowing them to thrive even in scorched earth. How will you survive the wildfires and the blight? https://t.co/fT9VcWXHhX

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

Consumed by the need to justify the outlandish risks of company-building, I created a new mission: to create freedom for myself and my family. https://t.co/hUMYL3fayT

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@trevorjonesart @ViolettaPJones Doing my best to fast today, but failing already.

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

Just got my on-chain fortune from @KintoXYZ! ⛩️

"Deep roots anchor the might of mountains, skies clear as you tread"

Phase IV is open until May 16th.

https://t.co/duJnfRCehr

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@trevorjonesart pick me! 🌼 pick me! 🌼

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@frogmonkee 🐸

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

Curious to learn about crypto rails for financial apps? https://t.co/k3RC0YYw3c @0xProject

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@christedrick @LexSokolin Agree. I like that there are now a couple emerging models that seem to have worked.

[Lex Sokolin | Generative Ventures @LexSokolin]

These 2 college kids made a $50B company from their dorm room.

Stripe is Silicon Valley’s most valuable Fintech with quarterly sales of ~$1B.

They started it all with just 7 lines of code.

Here are the top 8 takeaways for every entrepreneur 👇

1. Keep Product Simple 📱

Stripe aims to be the "economic infrastructure for the internet".

Before they entered the game, integrating payments was a BIG coding challenge.

Their API is extremely easy to integrate with websites.

Its integration takes a max of ~1-3 months and supports:

- 135+ currencies
- 47 countries

Their core offering is the "Payments" business. What's that?

Basically, an API to accept online payments.

But, they went one step ahead. Launched "Stripe Checkout".

A prebuilt checkout page to ingest this information is hosted on Stripe’s servers & works for both desktop and mobile.

It gives the business a prebuilt checkout page that:

• Works on desktop & mobile in 30+ languages
• Automatically avoids common checkout flow errors
• Is extremely customizable with custom colors & fonts

Here is the page👇

2. Design Strategy from User Feedback 💁🏻‍♂️

In an interview, one of their employees said that building products at Stripe was easy.

Why?

"Because users always told them what they wanted to see next"

From the very beginning, Stripe has been built with close communication with their customers.

Now, one thing that works in Stripe’s favor is their customers are often technical engineers building companies or managing payment systems.

Such an audience is very well-suited to provide pointed feedback.

This is encouraged by great leadership.

Patrick consistently responds to user requests himself, asking genuine questions on how to help them.

Look how Patrick responded👇

3. Be 100% Transparent ✅

In Stripe’s early days, every employee was blind copied on every SINGLE mail📧

"This meant that every employee could see what Patrick said to John and inversely, Patrick could see what a customer sales rep sent to a customer."

This form of painful transparency not only maintained pristine standards of work but also made them open to A LOT of feedback.

Employees would correct each other’s grammar, delivery, and even their spelling.

They follow the same rules for their pricing.

Stripe charges a uniform fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction with no monthly fees or service charges.

Paypal also charges the same amount but it has a complex fee structure (including service charges, cross-border fees, etc) which makes it much more expensive.

On top of that, there are no additional charges for failed transactions. *rare in the industry*

Such transparency keeps things simple to understand for the consumer and makes the onboarding process as smooth as butter.

The fewer questions a customer has to ask, the better.

4. Smartly Acquire & Expand 🤝

They have been smart in acquiring companies to improve their offerings.

"Stripe has acquired ~14 companies and used funding strategically"

- OpenChannel: Helped launch Stripe App Marketplace
- PayStack & Touchtech: Helped expand global reach
- BBPOS: Improved point-of-sale hardware

They have been AGGRESSIVE acquirers.

Here is how they integrated the acquisitions👇

And not just acquisitions, Stripe has partnered with many large, industry defining businesses.

It is now used by companies like

• Amazon
• Shopify
• Zoom
• Slack & many more...

5. Have a LARGER Vision 🌍

Stripe’s dream is much bigger than just themselves.

Their vision: “To increase the GDP of the internet".

A company with this industry role needs a leader as strong as its ambition.

Patrick, before founding Stripe, already had $5M on his hands from selling his company “Automatic”.

He had great connections from Y Combinator and even knew Paul Graham. In fact, the very first funding came from Y Combinator.

Before the worldwide success, Elon Musk was ready to invest in Stripe in 2011.

This does not happen no matter what company you run.

It's a matter of HOW you run it.

Patrick’s view on the company's mission?

“Stripe is not just a capitalist enterprise, but an endeavor to drive humanity forward.”

The intent behind what you do matters!

If someone was in it to make a quick buck then they would have exited the market as soon as they got $5M on their hands.

This need for Patrick to constantly innovate is what keeps the made them Number 1 in the business.

He still interacts with users on social media, responding to support issues with invitations for customers to email him directly.

Ultimately, this “no job too small” mentality is what makes a difference between a dead startup and a successful one.

6. Innovative GTM 📈

Stripe didn't have traditional outbound sales.

In the starting, they didn't sell to companies. Instead, they were selling to *developers*.

They knew the problem and they knew who was facing the problem. It was the tech guys.

Interestingly, it worked for them because purchasing decisions, just like picking a payment provider, were increasingly made by developers.

One founder puts it like this:

“Stripe offered an alternative to PayPal and Authorize that was so much easier to implement that developers around the world were naturally inclined to use it.”

7. Adding more Services 🛠️

They also went on to add multiple services.

They wanted to add on everything related to financial infrastructure to increase market dominance.

Stripe had launched 2 products in its first 5 years; it has launched way more in the last 5!

"Once customers purchase Stripe payments, Stripe’s other services make sure that the customer never has to go to anybody else for their payments again"

They have so far launched a total of 20 solutions *as per their website*

8. Prioritizing Data Security 🔐

Stripe understood the MASSIVE need for fraud detection, card issuing, financing, and more...

They eventually started introducing ways that solved all these problems.

What did they do?

i) Used the highest level of encryption for all transactions to prevent hijacking

Ensured browsers & web apps interacting with Stripe's website or products used an HTTPS connection to prevent breaches.

ii) Stored transaction data so companies don’t have to worry about data security

They allowed the users to control their own data by:

• Requiring explicit consent before data sharing
• Letting them view and delete their data

iii) Encrypted sensitive data both in transit & at rest

Stripe’s infra for storing, decrypting, and transmitting sensitive data is completely separate!

They don't share any credentials with the rest of their services. That's how they've been dealing with the security of massive payment data...

When you bring together this alchemy of fintech entrepreneurship, $100B is just the start.

[griptape @griptapeai]

Take your Python skills to new heights! 🛹 Who said snakes couldn't skate in the clouds? 🌥️ Apply for Early Access to our Griptape Cloud, if you want to deploy, manage, and scale 🐍 AI apps that connect securely to your data stores and APIs.
Click the link below to apply!
https://t.co/1Zxp687R8x

[griptape @griptapeai]

Another feature our new update supports is Anthropic Claude 2.1 in the #AnthropicPromptDriver (for models hosted by Anthropic) and #BedrockClaudePromptModelDriver (for models hosted by Amazon Bedrock). Specify claude-2.1 in the model field to use this version of the model:

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

that's a sick deck.
nice work @colliematt

[Matt Collie @colliematt]

How cool is this?!?! I was gifted a custom skateboard deck from the team at @griptapeai as a thank you for my contributions to their open-source Python library for building applications and agents on top of large language models. Thank you @kyleroche for this thoughtful acknowledgement!
#artificialintelligence #llm #python #ai #opensource

[Lex Sokolin | Generative Ventures @LexSokolin]

These 2 guys became Estonia’s first-ever billionaires.

Kristo & Taavet founded WISE to make international fund transfers cheap and easy.

In 12 years, WISE has/is:

- 10M+ users with $1.1B revenue
- London's biggest tech IPO

The Breakdown of how they did it 🧵

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

I spoke with an industry expert today who said that middleware like what @griptapeai is building is a massive and crucial need right now.

Kudos to the team for pushing the framework forward.

[griptape @griptapeai]

Hey Griptapers! We’re super excited to share the latest update of Griptape, version v0.21.0! This update packs a punch with new features, significant improvements, and some important changes.

This release includes the introduction of Image Generation Drivers (OpenAI DALL-E, Azure @OpenAI DALL-E, @leonardoai , @awscloud Bedrock Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Bedrock Titan Generator), @huggingface Hub Embedding Driver, streaming functionality, and prompt Inspection capabilities.

Check out our latest blog post!
https://t.co/fWaGdyPhkM

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

I just wrote my first note on Substack
https://t.co/46cnXuWXvt

[Peter Renton @peterrenton]

The proposed rules from the CFPB dropped about an hour ago. Join us for a Twitter Spaces with a group of experts at 4pm ET today.

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@peterrenton Here’s where we message our audience.

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@frogmonkee mixing in some silence.

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

@StockJabber Phenomenal advice. Really appreciate the playbook! Will do our best to repay you in kind when we learn our own hacks, tricks and optimizations.

[brustkern.eth 🏴 @brustkern]

Support innovation through the future of financial services infrastructure: blockchain, crypto & web3. Your voice matters. Join now.

https://t.co/ne7Sb0TxMw