@mikemcalister There will indeed! We're working on it right now and planning to have something to ship soon. DM me if you're interested in more details.
Stripe Managed Payments is now generally available. Sell digital products in 195 markets with our merchant of record solution for tax, fraud, disputes, and support.
This is huge! JR is one of the highest calibre people I know when it comes to getting the right stuff done at scale. Some of the sharpest founder-mode instinct that exists.
Congrats man π
Big personal update.
My role @stripe is evolving, and I couldn't be more excited. π
Most of my career, Iβve been focused on helping founders get paid on the internet.
Now Iβm shifting to what happens after.
Iβm leading Financial Accounts at Stripe, and I'll be focused on how businesses store, move, and spend money.
Imagine being able to spend your Stripe balance immediately. No waiting a week for your funds to arrive in your bank account.
It just works the way you'd expect money to work.
Still early, with plenty to build. Exactly the kind of problem I love.
AGI has been achieved in Ireland.
Artificial Guinness Intelligence.
Engineer Matt Cortland built an AI voice agent named Rachel, gave her a Northern Irish accent, and pointed her at every pub in the country.
Over St. Paddy's weekend, she rang 3,000+ of them to ask one question: how much for a pint of Guinness?
How he built it: ElevenLabs for the voice, Twilio and an old Irish SIM to place the calls, Google Places API to map 5,200+ pubs across all 32 counties, and Claude to parse the transcripts for prices.
2,052 picked up. Barely any even realized she was AI. The whole operation ran him about β¬200.
The result is a live price index he's calling the Guinndex.
Ireland's statistics office used to track pint prices, but stopped in 2011.
An engineer with a weekend and a voice agent just picked up where they left off.
Is there something that has the agentic accessibility of markdown files combined with the cloud-based, human collaboration features of Google Docs? I feel like this needs to exist.
@UltraLinx Not really. They still use payment processors like Stripe underneath. They just orchestrate between multiple providers (Stripe, Adyen, etc).
OpenCodeβs rules for fighting slop:
- donβt ship features just because you can
- leave the code better than you found it
- fixing features & process > new features
so well reasoned
Today we're announcing Polyscope - the free agent orchestration tool of my dreams.
Run dozens of AI agents at the same time, blazing fast copy on write clones, a built-in preview browser you can use to visually prompt your agents, and much more.
https://t.co/CuvsjtFg2n
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
####
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.
first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if youβre outside the U.S. youβll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools weβre creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.
a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
to those of you leavingβ¦iβm grateful for you, and iβm sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.
to those stayingβ¦i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
jack