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Dear reader, Please find below our weekly commentary for the 16th of August.

We've just shared our annual letter, including how we engineer for reliability as we deploy new code in our core API services ~400 times daily at trillion dollar scale: - Once a change is code-complete, it's evaluated by ~1.4 million tests. (Stripe uses half a million CPU cores to execute <6 billion test runs daily!) - Changes first go to pre-production (a mock production environment with synthetic API traffic designed to mimic realistic integration patterns). - The change then rolls out to a single production machine with a small sliver of traffic, before gradually advancing to small percentages of actual production traffic. Each deploy is inspected against 55,000 different metrics. If at any moment the system detects something is wrong—traffic is redirected to an older, known-good version of Stripe. Read more in the letter: https://lnkd.in/g-Zn9GtZ.

Once a year Stripe releases its annual letter. This represents the best opportunity to get a glimpse into how the company is performing, how our users are adopting the technology and what we are working on for the future. A few key takeaways: ⭐ Stripe surpassed the $1 trillion mark in payment volume, up 25% from the previous year, and nearly 1% of the total GDP. ⭐ Stripe was robustly cash flow positive in 2023 and expects to be again in 2024. ⭐ Stripe is growing rapidly beyond payments. Our Revenue and Finance Automation suite's annual revenue run rate is expected to pass $500M in the next year. ⭐ Our enterprise segment continues to grow rapidly, with more than 100 companies now processing more than $1 billion per year with Stripe. Companies including Zara, Hertz, AirBnB & Uber. ⭐ Stripe engineers for reliability. During Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2023 (BFCM), the highest-load part of any year, Stripe maintained uptime in excess of 99.999% while processing more than 300 million transactions. Total BFCM volume was $18.6 billion—our largest four-day period to date—and more than 31,000 businesses had their best day ever on Stripe. Read more about Stripe's annual letter here: https://lnkd.in/eRZUf6HT

It's an immense pleasure to be part of the team driving engineering rigor at Stripe. The systems and processes we have constructed allow new grads to confidently change how money flows for 1% of the world's GDP, reassured by our automation capabilities to detect, prevent, and mitigate user impact. This confidence has impact reaching far outside of Stripe. The reliability of our systems fosters rapid innovation and empowers our customers to concentrate on their core businesses, thereby accelerating growth. For instance: - Slack experienced a conversion uplift of over 3% just by upgrading to Stripe's optimized payment UIs. - The 100-year-old Tokyu Corporation saw a 20% boost in conversion rates when adopting Stripe on TsugiTsugi, a flat-rate accommodation service designed to help hotels and resorts fill vacancies during off-peak periods. - Eventbrite and Alaska Airlines also selected Stripe to implement Tap to Pay on iPhone. Conventionally, Eventbrite hosts didn't own point-of-sale hardware; thanks to our partnership with Eventbrite, they now just need an iPhone to set up a ticket office. The annual letter below delves deeper into how businesses can benefit from Stripe. It also provides a glimpse into the high engineering rigor underpinning and enabling innovation at Stripe.

A few highlights from our annual letter 👇 🌍 Businesses on Stripe processed $1trn last year, ~ 1% of global GDP. 📈 We're cash flow positive this year, and expect to be in 2024, which allows us to invest for the long term. 🚀 Startups on Stripe are laser focussed on profitable growth: they are monetising / hitting $1m in revenue 60% faster than before. 🤖 Twice as many AI companies went live on Stripe compared to 2022, and aggregate revenue from AI companies grew nearly 250%. 🏭 More than 100 companies processed more than $1bn on Stripe last year. These large established companies come to Stripe to launch new models that help them get closer to customers, and eliminate tech debt. 💳 We continue to obsess over removing barriers to internet commerce, and do things that only make sense at Stripe's scale. We've now added 100 optimisations to our optimised checkout suite, and we went from supporting 50 to 100 payment methods last year. 💻 Beyond payments, our financial automation tools (billing, tax, etc) are now used by hundreds of thousands businesses and we expect to hit $500m ARR next year.

A few highlights from our annual letter 👇 🌍 Businesses on Stripe processed $1trn last year, ~ 1% of global GDP. 📈 We're cash flow positive this year, and expect to be in 2024, which allows us to invest for the long term. 🚀 Startups on Stripe are laser focused on profitable growth: they are monetizing / hitting $1m in revenue 60% faster than before. 🤖 Twice as many AI companies went live on Stripe compared to 2022, and aggregate revenue from AI companies grew nearly 250%. 🏭 More than 100 companies processed more than $1bn each on Stripe last year. These large, established companies come to Stripe to launch new models that help them get closer to customers, and eliminate tech debt. 💳 We continue to obsess over removing barriers to internet commerce, and do things that only make sense at Stripe's scale. We've now added 100 optimisations to our optimised checkout suite, and we went from supporting 50 to 100 payment methods last year. 💻 Beyond payments, our financial automation tools (billing, tax, etc) are now used by hundreds of thousands businesses and we expect to hit $500m ARR next year.

Favorite thing about working at Stripe: Being continuously intellectually challenged by our leaders. Check out our latest Annual Letter from Patrick and John, packed with goodness about Stripe and our progress (now processing more than $1 trillion in payments volume annually!), but also the latest in robotics and... farming! It's quite the read.

This is an extraordinary read from start to finish. Rich, well-written and entertaining, and my favorite part may be the shoutout of one performance improvement as an example of how important it is to constantly focus on optimization ("This year, we shaved 300ms off the Payment Links render time"). That should inspire engineers everywhere to always keep latency front-of-mind! Of all the payment providers I've integrated with (and there have been a bunch!), Stripe is far and away the best. My only gripe with them is the near impossibility of getting in touch with a human for support, but their documentation, stability, ease of use and breadth of service offerings make them the gold standard among third-party vendors.

"Our enterprise segment continues to grow rapidly, with more than 100 companies now processing more than $1 billion per year with Stripe". "Our view is that Stripe should be the most reliable part of a business’s stack. During Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2023 (BFCM), the highest-load part of any year, Stripe maintained uptime in excess of 99.999% while processing more than 300 million transactions". Some really great insights in here, particularly how we engineer for reliability. #payments #reliability #enterprise