Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing: • Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many. • It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest. • The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take. • Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions. • AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider. • Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested. • There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants. 🇮🇳🇺🇸 (Congrats, @paraga!)

Great to be back in Tel Aviv. I missed this run.

"Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money." —@natfriedman

I recently drove a @Tesla for the first time (yes, late to the party), and it is truly an amazing car. So many details are *years* ahead of everyone else. Genuinely inspiring to see how much improvement can be conjured by a small group of dedicated outsiders.

I asked Tony Fadell about the iPod timeline for my fast project page. Summary: 😯.

Mario Draghi's new report on EU competitiveness doesn't mince words. "Across different metrics, a wide gap in GDP has opened up between the EU and the US, driven mainly by a more pronounced slowdown in productivity growth in Europe. Europe’s households have paid the price in foregone living standards. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US as in the EU since 2000." "First – and most importantly – Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure with few new companies rising up to disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines. In fact, there is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six US companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period. This lack of dynamism is self-fulfilling." "There are not enough academic institutions achieving top levels of excellence and the pipeline from innovation into commercialisation is weak. [...] However, while the EU boasts a strong university system on average, not enough universities and research institutions are at the top. Using volume of publications in top academic science journals as an indicative metric, the EU has only three research institutions ranked among the top 50 globally, whereas the US has 21 and China 15." "Regulatory barriers to scaling up are particularly onerous in the tech sector, especially for young companies. Regulatory barriers constrain growth in several ways. First, complex and costly procedures across fragmented national systems discourage inventors from filing Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), hindering young companies from leveraging the Single Market. Second, the EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation: the EU now has around 100 tech-focused laws and over 270 regulators active in digital networks across all Member States. Many EU laws take a precautionary approach, dictating specific business practices ex ante to avert potential risks ex post. For example, the AI Act imposes additional regulatory requirements on general purpose AI models that exceed a pre-defined threshold of computational power – a threshold which some state-of-the-art models already exceed. Third, digital companies are deterred from doing business across the EU via subsidiaries, as they face heterogeneous requirements, a proliferation of regulatory agencies and “gold plating” of EU legislation by national authorities. Fourth, limitations on data storing and processing create high compliance costs and hinder the creation of large, integrated data sets for training AI models. This fragmentation puts EU companies at a disadvantage relative to the US, which relies on the private sector to build vast data sets, and China, which can leverage its central institutions for data aggregation. This problem is compounded by EU competition enforcement possibly inhibiting intra-industry cooperation. Finally, multiple different national rules in public procurement generate high ongoing costs for cloud providers. The net effect of this burden of regulation is that only larger companies – which are often non-EU based – have the financial capacity and incentive to bear the costs of complying. Young innovative tech companies may choose not to operate in the EU at all." More: commission.europa.eu/documen….

In Q1 2019, 39% of Stripe's hiring was outside Bay Area and Seattle. Last quarter, it was 74%. I think the rate at which tech industry is going global is still under-appreciated, and that this will be a big tailwind for the world over the next decade.

I was walking to the office in New York this morning and noticed an arrestingly beautiful high-rise above me. Turns out it was the Woolworth building, which I'm a bit embarrassed to say I'd never noticed or heard of before. It was the tallest building in the world for 16 years (until 1929). Construction took 20 months. The architect was apparently inspired by European cathedrals; one clergyman called it "the cathedral of commerce". It contained its own power plant. It's adorned with the full Gothic package: gargoyles, spandrels, mullions, pilasters, corbels. It contained the world's fastest elevators when it opened. The world is a museum of passion projects.

As a US business (and tech) community, I think we should be significantly clearer about our horror at, and opposition to, the atrocities being committed by the Chinese government against its own people. apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1…

This week, a math professor at MIT told me that incoming students are, on average, noticeably worse at math than they used to be. Harvard, of course, just added a remedial math class, Math MA5, "aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students".

Some day, AI will get so advanced that Google Docs will *automatically* switch to the account has access to the document.

WTA braver than NBA.

So my working theory is that if you assemble enough enterprise software ads, an airport spontaneously forms around them.

Reading books/accounts from the 1920s and thereabouts, otherwise high-functioning people regularly seem to have had nervous breakdowns that necessitated months of recuperation in a restful sanatorium. What happened to that? Better treatment? Less stress?

While @elonmusk is in the headlines for many reasons these days, this particular chart probably doesn’t get enough attention. 10 years after founding, SpaceX had ~0% market share. 16 years: >50%.

This morning, Nature published two papers on bridge editing, the new genome engineering technology from @ArcInstitute: nature.com/articles/s41586-0…, nature.com/articles/s41586-0…. I'm quite excited about its potential! Since the whole thing is pretty arcane, I fed the blog post (arcinstitute.org/news/blog/b…) to Claude 3.5, and asked it to write an introduction. Below is the rather impressive (unedited) result. Genome Design: The Bridge to Our Biological Future I. Imagine you're trying to edit a document, but instead of a cursor, you have a pair of scissors. You can cut out words you don't like, maybe paste in a few new ones, but precise editing? Forget about it. Now imagine someone hands you a pen. Suddenly, you can write whatever you want, wherever you want. This is the kind of leap we're seeing in the world of genome editing. For the past few decades, we've been snipping away at genomes with tools like CRISPR, making impressive progress but always constrained by the fundamental nature of our tools: they cut DNA. But what if we could write directly into the genome, inserting whatever we want, wherever we want, without ever making a single cut? This isn't just a "wouldn't it be nice" daydream anymore. Researchers at the Arc Institute have discovered a new system that does exactly that. They're calling it "bridge recombination," and it might just be the biggest revolution in genetic engineering since CRISPR. II. To understand why this is such a big deal, we need to take a quick tour through the history of genetic manipulation. In the late 1990s, we discovered RNA interference (RNAi). This was our first real taste of programmable biology. We could use short RNA sequences to target and shut down specific genes. It was like having a universal remote control for gene expression. Cool, right? Then came CRISPR in the early 2010s. Suddenly, we could not just turn genes off, but edit them directly. It was like upgrading from a remote control to a basic text editor. We could cut out bad genes and paste in good ones. But there was always a catch: CRISPR works by cutting DNA, and cells don't always repair those cuts exactly the way we want them to. Both of these systems were revolutionary, but they shared a common limitation: they were destructive. They worked by breaking things – either the RNA transcripts of genes (in the case of RNAi) or the DNA itself (in the case of CRISPR). III. Enter the bridge recombination system. The researchers at Arc Institute, led by Dr. Patrick Hsu, were poking around in the genomes of bacteria, looking at transposable elements. These are sometimes called "jumping genes" because they can cut themselves out of one part of a genome and paste themselves into another. They were particularly interested in a group called IS110 elements. These are about as minimalist as you can get while still being functional – just a gene for the enzyme that does the cutting and pasting, plus some mysterious flanking DNA segments. What they found was surprising. When an IS110 element cuts itself out of a genome, those mysterious flanking segments join up to form an RNA molecule. This RNA folds into two loops, one that binds to the IS110 element itself, and another that binds to the target DNA where the element will insert itself. This RNA – which they've dubbed "bridge RNA" – is the key to the whole system. It's like a set of instructions, telling the enzyme exactly where to insert the DNA and what DNA to insert. IV. Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, that's neat, but how is this different from CRISPR?" The key is in how the insertion happens. CRISPR works by making a cut in the DNA and then relying on the cell's repair mechanisms to insert the new DNA. It's effective, but it's also a bit like performing surgery with a chainsaw. Sometimes you get exactly what you want, but often you end up with small errors or unwanted insertions or deletions. The bridge recombination system, on the other hand, doesn't cut the DNA at all. It unzips a small section, inserts the new DNA, and zips it back up again. No broken DNA strands, no relying on error-prone repair mechanisms. It's precise in a way that CRISPR can only dream of. But the real magic is in the programmability. Remember those two loops in the bridge RNA? They can be programmed to recognize any DNA sequence. This means you can tell the system to insert any piece of DNA into any location in the genome. It's like having a word processor for DNA. V. The implications of this are staggering. Here are just a few possibilities: • Gene Therapy 2.0: Current gene therapy approaches often rely on somewhat random insertion of therapeutic genes. With bridge recombination, we could insert corrective genes exactly where they need to go, without risking disruption of other important genes. • Synthetic Biology: Want to give an organism a completely new capability? Just design the gene and insert it precisely where you want it. • Evolutionary Biology: We could insert reporter genes at specific locations across the genome, allowing us to watch evolution happen in real time. • Agricultural Improvements: We could insert beneficial genes into crops with unprecedented precision, potentially revolutionizing our ability to create drought-resistant or nutrient-enhanced plants. • Bioengineering: Imagine being able to design and build entire genetic circuits, inserting each component exactly where it needs to be for optimal function. VI. In the grand scheme of things, the discovery of bridge recombination feels like a pivotal moment. It's as if we've been trying to write the book of life with a typewriter, and someone just handed us a word processor. The researchers at Arc Institute have opened a door to a new era of genome design. As with any breakthrough of this magnitude, it's hard to predict exactly where it will lead. But one thing is certain: the future of biology just got a lot more interesting. As we stand on the brink of this new frontier, I'm reminded of a quote from Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." With bridge recombination, we're not just editing the genome anymore. We're writing it. And that, my friends, is pretty close to magic.

I couldn’t be more delighted that @Paystack will be joining us at @Stripe. The African tech ecosystem is expanding very rapidly. We and the Paystack team are eager to invest in a big way over the years to come. stripe.com/newsroom/news/pay…

I've long been interested in new ways to organize science and enable curiosity-driven discovery. Today, in partnership with @Stanford, @UCBerkeley, and @UCSF, we're excited to announce Arc Institute, a new undertaking in this vein: arcinstitute.org.

Stripe launched 10 years ago today! Still jump out of the bed as enthusiastically as I did at the outset. (Actually somewhat more so -- wasn't really a morning person back then.)

“The beginnings of all things are small.”

Hit our engagement metrics this weekend! 💍

Stripe, live: bfcm.stripe.dev.

Before the pandemic, Pfizer was making 200M doses per year across all vaccines. In 2021, they manufactured 3 billion doses of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine -- 15x scale-up, in 1 year, for a new platform, during pandemic itself. Still think the extent of the achievement is underrated.

Stripe, 2011. I decided to assign a custom ringtone to PagerDuty. Chose the iPhone's duck sound. Many (many) problems and pages followed. Years later, walking through park, I heard a soft quack. Shivered involuntarily, pulse quickened. And that's how I ruined ducks for myself.

Having now spent about half my life in each (and loving both), herewith the pros and cons of Europe and the US in everyday life: Better in Europe • Bike lanes and bike infrastructure. London, Paris, and Amsterdam are all excellent these days. (As are many other European cities.) Made even better by easy-to-rent e-bikes—now almost always the fastest way to get around. • The urban walking experience generally. Partly for density reasons, and partly because of... • Late-night cafe, brasserie culture. Is there an economic reason for this or is it just climate and contingent zoning? • Architecture. Around 1920, we forgot how to make nice buildings. European cities tend to have more construction from before the Great Forgetting, and it makes the built environment much more pleasant. • Pedestrianized streets. Often with cobblestones. • In general, European cities are just more pleasant. Given how hard it is to build a good city (or indeed to retrofit one), this feels like a big deal. • Cured and pickled food. • Bread. Obviously varies by country, but it’s generally true. • Voltage. What are Americans doing waiting so long to boil kettles? • Beauty in the mundane. I find that you’re more likely to find tasteful touches in prosaic places in Europe. • Motorway design and signage. Standardized, clear, and easy-to-use. The US is a mess by comparison. • Bathroom doors. That is, in Europe, they’re proper doors. Why does America make us see others’ feet? • The clangor of church bells on Sunday. • Trains. Enough said. • Pharmacies. I'd love to understand why they're so much nicer in Europe. • Cheese. Again, lots of cross-country variation, but true in general. • I'm not sure why, but European regulation on many everyday items seems better. Sunscreens in Europe are better, as are bike helmets. • Wine. • Languor, joie de vivre, hygge, gemütlichkeit, craic. I think Europeans are better at unwinding. Drawing contrast with what he found in the US, De Tocqueville observed that in Europe "idleness is still held in honor". This difference remains apparent. • Road density. Europe generally has many more roads per square mile, which makes it easier to find nice places to run, walk, and cycle. Better in the US • Air conditioning. Consistently bad in Europe. (Partly for silly degrowth-related reasons?) • Coffee. Opinions will differ, naturally, but third wave coffee has seen much more enthusiastic adoption in the US. • Cookie banners. That is, the lack of them. (Well, there are some, but it’s not as bad as the fusillade one is subjected to in Europe.) • Internet speeds. European wifi often reminds me of my dialup youth. • Capital markets. If you need money (as a consumer, a small business, or a startup), it’s much easier to get it in the US. • Being able to buy groceries on Sunday. Inexplicably challenging on the continent. • Showers. Like the tepid air conditioning, daily ablutions in Europe are conducted beneath parsimonious trickles. • Urban air quality. Maybe surprisingly, it is, on average, better in the US. The unpleasant whiffs of diesel exhaust is part of the reminder that one is back in Europe. • Government efficiency. In general, things happen faster in the US. • Labor laws. As covered in Stripe's annual letter this year, people are more likely to work in high productivity sectors in the US (and thus to earn more). Rigid rules impede this reallocation in Europe. • Culture of general aviation with many thousands of small airports. There are around 700,000 pilots in the US—far more than there are in Europe. • Hospitals. A controversial claim, perhaps, but I find that those who have received care in Europe and the US prefer the US. • Beer. The microbrewery revolution of the US means that it’s clearly the better place for it.

Every morning, I get up and am excited for many things (another day on the planet and all that jazz), but the very best part of a new day, at least in the immediate term, is the chance to drink more coffee. ☕️🥰

The aggregate revenue of businesses built on Stripe is now around 1% of global GDP.

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy" is a surprisingly profound quote. When I ask people who've pulled off remarkable things, it's interesting how many confirm that they wouldn't have started if they'd know how long and difficult the road would be.

Sleep masks are probably still my favorite cheap item that improves quality of life, but I just discovered electric insect bite treatment devices, and they're surely a contender. Maybe everyone else already knows about them, but a short (3 sec) application of heat with one of these things appears to immediately cure the irritation of mosquito bites. (~100% success rate for me.) I'm not sure how well understood the mechanism is, but I guess it denatures the proteins that cause the irritation..? One study: "Mosquito bite-induced itch was reduced by 57% within the first minute and by 81% 5–10 min after treatment, and the overall reduction in itch and pain was more pronounced than in the control group." ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article… Example product: amazon.com/Beurer-BR60-Chemi…

Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, powered by @stripe.

We have three cool announcements today: (1) @OpenAI is launching commerce in ChatGPT. Their new Instant Checkout is powered by @stripe. (2) We're releasing the Agentic Commerce Protocol, codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI. (3) @stripe is launching an API for agentic payments, called Shared Payment Tokens. It's clear that internet purchasing modalities are going to change a lot, and we're excited to start to lay some of the foundations. Links below!

My conversation with Jony Ive yesterday at @stripe sessions.

We got these phone booths (a K6 from the 1930s, and a KX100 from the 1990s) for the @stripe lobby, as a reminder that there are always two paths in everything we make: something that elevates and makes you smile, or, well, whatever the thing on the right is.

I want an AI product that inhabits my AirPods and continually mutters interesting things about the world around me, like an indefatigably burbling tour guide. "The San Mateo Bridge was built in about a year. When it opened on 2 March 1929, it stretched 7.1 miles, making it longer than any other bridge on Earth at the time." I've driven over the bridge many times, but never thought to look into its origins until today.

Tesla now manufactures slightly more than 1 car every minute and SpaceX launched 2/3 of all tonnage launched to space in the first quarter of 2021.

I was shocked at the refusal to condemn calls for genocide during yesterday's Congressional testimony from the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn. I ended up watching a few hours of the hearing, and the answers were shamefully evasive and equivocal throughout. As an alum (albeit fleeting) of the first of those institutions, it appears that something is very broken. nitter.app/i/status/1732179… (More from the White House, @AlbertBourla, and @tylercowen: • nbcnews.com/politics/white-h… • nitter.app/AlbertBourla/sta… • marginalrevolution.com/margi….)

We launched Stripe 9 years ago today. Thanks to everyone who bet on us since then!

Why are personal injury attorneys the marginal bidder for roadside billboards in so many parts of the US? Is the sector really so large? A priori, I would never have predicted this. Quick investigation: "Costs and compensation paid in the U.S. tort system reached over $529 billion in 2022, or over $4,200 per U.S. household." 2% of US GDP! Also appears to have compounded meaningfully faster than GDP over the past decade.

@RTE By the way, John and I will personally donate €100,000 to the appeal, too.

Becoming the preeminent locus of agglomeration for the world's plucky up-and-comers has been one of the US's greatest achievements and most potent advantages.

I very much hope that India receives surplus vaccines and vaccine supplies from the US. Current situation seems catastrophic. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Despite being a paragon of modernism, it's interesting that Apple always seems to choose traditional architecture when available.

Not only mistaken about Limerick but the idea of "overcoming" anything is crazy. We are who we are *because* we grew up where we did.

Are M1 Macs yielding a brief and golden window of highly-responsive UIs, where frameworks and libraries haven't yet had enough time to compensate with additional overhead?

I saw someone towing a house while crossing the San Francisco Bay today. Where do I go to learn more? Is this the next trend?

“When the boy cried wolf, the village committed Type I and Type II errors, in that order” remains the best hypothesis testing mnemonic.

Current photographs of Stripe are also early photographs.

Observing some people close to me with chronic health conditions, it's striking how useful Reddit frequently ends up being. I think a core reason is because trials aren’t run for a lot of things, and Reddit provides a kind of emergent intelligence that sits between that which any single physician can marshal and the full rigor of clinical trials. Why aren’t trials run for a lot of things? Well, they’re of course slow and expensive (median cost of $19M for a pivotal trial in 2015[1]; after adjusting for inflation and other phases, maybe that corresponds to a total of $40M today?). But they’re also hard to fund when the intervention in question lacks IP protection since the ensuing knowledge can’t be monetized. As such, trials for diet, over-the-counter supplements, and lifestyle interventions are under-pursued. To give one prosaic example, lots of people think that magnesium improves sleep, but, as far as I know, no trial has ever been run assessing its ability to improve sleep in non-elderly adults without sleep disorders. So, Reddit — in a pretty unstructured way — makes a limited kind of “compounding knowledge” possible. Best practices can be noticed and can imperfectly start to accumulate. For people with chronic health problems, this is a big deal, and I’ve heard lots of stories between “I found something that made my condition much more manageable” all the way to “I found a permanent cure in a weird comment buried deep in a thread”. (Of course, one also sees this outside of medical conditions. I’ve enjoyed the recommended routine in the BodyWeightFitness subreddit, as a comparable kind of distilled practical wisdom[2].) An interesting and somewhat more formalized example of this approach was recently used for long COVID and published earlier this year[3]. After surveying 3,900 individuals, the paper analyzes patient-reported outcomes for 150 different treatments, yielding the figure reproduced below. There are evidently no silver bullets, but it is striking that, say, about half of people find that antihistamines are helpful. I know a number of people who found the learnings from this study to be impactful in improving their daily quality-of-life. Seeing this paper and the Reddit experience makes me wonder whether the approach could somehow be scaled: is there a kind of observational, self-reported clinical trial that could sit between Reddit and these manual approaches? Should there be a platform that covers all major chronic conditions, administers ongoing surveys, and tracks longitudinal outcomes? I don’t really know what the best way to go about this would be, but it feels to me that there could be something important here. There’s a lot of latent data in patients’ subjective experiences that is not today being properly gathered or analyzed.

We just raised a new round of financing to help support our international expansion and efforts to enable the global startup ecosystem. I’m particularly proud that it’s co-led by NTMA, the Irish sovereign wealth fund. Some new stats in article below too. stripe.com/newsroom/news/str…

More businesses launched on Stripe since the start of 2020 than did in the rest of Stripe's history before then. Overall rate of migration to the internet economy is hard to overstate.

Excited about The Merge! One of the coolest examples of sustained, ambitious, technically difficult open source development. Congratulations and good luck to @VitalikButerin and to the Ethereum community.

It would be nice if color pickers somehow indicated which colors have already been used in a document/file. "Which green did I use earlier? Right, third from the bottom."

Opinion polling for the next election: UK: Reform leading by 7pp France: RN leading by 10pp Germany: AfD leading by 2pp Italy: FdI leading by 7pp Netherlands: PVV leading by 1pp Switzerland: SVP leading by 12pp Austria: FPÖ leading by 13pp (Most data from Wikipedia.) The degree to which the non-traditional right is ascendant across the western world is very striking. Which are the best pieces that attempt to explain this in international rather than merely domestic terms?

Am always surprised that wind and solar aren't more popular on the right. Maybe they could be rebranded as "atmospheric gas" and "far-field nuclear".

While long hours can't be a goal, I worry that it's easy to mislead. As a descriptive matter, creating Stripe required obsessive intensity. Maybe better founders could have worked "smarter", but I do know that long hours were needed for *us* to build something great.

marginalrevolution.com/margi… UCSD report: "At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school[!] standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades."

Stablecoins are room-temperature superconductors for financial services. Thanks to stablecoins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years. Stripe is going to build the world’s best stablecoin infrastructure, and, to that end, we are delighted to welcome @stablecoin to @stripe.

Deep Research has written 6 reports so far today. It is indeed excellent. Congrats to the folks behind it.

There used to be a fountain at the center of the Civic Center Plaza in SF. It was removed in 2003 because: > It's become an intolerable situation, and we don't have additional resources to continually clean it," said Alex Mamak, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works. Department crews clean out human filth and hypodermic needles every morning, only to find a new mess the next morning, Mamak said. This makes me want a new ranking of cities: ornamental fountains per capita. That is, those with the affinity for beauty to construct them, and with the social trust and dignity to sustain them.

I'd pay a *lot* more for books if I could see the highlights, annotations, and marginalia of friends or people I follow. If books really do matter in the world, feels like we'd benefit from a lot more reading technology. Getting books onto the screen was a good *first* step.

We’ve decided that Stripe’s fifth engineering hub will be Remote: stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

AI is getting pretty good.

Someone on HN (which is often quite crypto-skeptical) asked why exactly businesses are finding crypto and stablecoins useful. It's a very reasonable question. My response:

This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain. Reflections: • Four of these are more than 800 pages long. The Magic Mountain and Portrait of a Lady, while shorter, are not short. Of the ten, 5 are British, 2 are Russian, and there was one from each of France, Germany, and the US. • For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There's something memorably compelling in Eliot's affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite. Bleak House is a close second. Life and Fate is quite different to the others: it’s not exactly entertaining (or even notably well-written), but it is true and profound. (Most works designated “important” are not, but Life and Fate surely merits that as well.) If kindness is one of the core adjurations of Life and Fate, Eliot is the author that most embodies it. • I'd underestimated Dickens's lyricism. I had thought of him as a master of the plot (contra Nabokov), but he is just as accomplished in prose itself. “Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though something dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them.” • Three of these four were written by authors in their 50s (Eliot, Tolstoy, and Grossman). Dickens was a mere 41 -- and this shows. The plot is very entertaining, and immensely intricate, but the characters are somehow flatter. So, maybe one lesson from the set is simply that wisdom is real, and that skill in the domain of fiction compounds for quite some time. • Russian literature puzzles me. Why did it suddenly become so good in the 19th century, and why did it decline so much in the 20th? I don't think the latter answer can just be a story of oppression, since we got many great works during Stalin’s reign. But what's the best Russian novel since Master and Margarita? On the issue of the rise, I often encounter explanations claiming that it was related to Russian intellectuals being excluded from political influence and consequently retreating to the artistic domain -- but this feels obviously inadequate. Again, how does this explain the post-Bulgakov decline? And where are the great, say, Saudi works of the past 50 years? • Whatever happened to the novel around the turn of the century (Conrad, Woolf, Mann in my reading) was not obviously salutary. All three are interesting works, and there is something very distinctly modern in Woolf's in particular, but they simply don't compel -- at least for this reader -- the way their predecessors do: maybe it's just the particular selection, but I was generally looking forward to finishing the early 20th century works, and a bit disappointed when completing those dating from before 1900. The dislocation that Blom describes in Vertigo Years is clearly manifest. Woolf's “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” essay, and her claim that “human character changed” in 1910, is consistent with the turn in the novels. She was speaking of different works, but her assessment rings true in a broader way: “Yet what odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.” • I should note that some of Woolf’s descriptions are great, even if her brooding interiority leaves me ultimately unenthralled. “The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.” “He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.” • Tom Wolfe attributes modern architecture and the international style to a post-1917 sympathy for the proletariat and a desire to strip indulgent bourgeois ornament from our construction, and, yes, Schoenberg explicitly motivated atonality in egalitarian ideals, but this set of novels makes me doubt the political explanations. You can clearly see the embrace of some kind of disharmony in the books, and I don’t think Conrad was trying to make any Marxist point. I still struggle to explain what happened, but I think I would reverse some of the standard causality, and it seems to me that the coopting of communist ideals is probably itself downstream of the broader social unease that also gave rise to these artistic tides. Blom’s description of the rise of various mental disorders -- neurasthenia and the like -- seems relevant. (All of this does make me want to better understand 1848.) • The railway, and its attendant social upheaval, features repeatedly, and maybe most memorably in one chapter of Middlemarch. I hadn't appreciated just how significantly disruptive a force it was perceived as being even at the time. (Given the scale of the construction that was entailed, maybe this shouldn't be surprising.) More broadly, there is some sense of a society in transition through most of these works: these aren't neat and timeless tales. You have the rise of the bourgeois and broader urbanization in Bovary, the emerging social consciousness in Bleak House, the exposure of the shabbiness of Victorianism and its gender expectations in Lighthouse, and the postwar shell shock of Magic Mountain. • The works written before 1900 are primarily about romance (Bleak House the exception, with romance only a subplot), and those written afterwards (Conrad, Mann, Grossman, Woolf) are emphatically not. I don’t know what to make of this. Perhaps just an accident of the selection. • Ruxandra Teslo points out that there’s a moral gravity in the 19th century works that seems foreign today: people treat their own characters as important constructions in their own right. In a similar vein, I was struck by Grossman’s conception of freedom: he perceives it more as the right to self-define than a more typical liberty of action. Perhaps because actions were so circumscribed in Victorian societies (for women) and Soviet societies (for everyone), the seriousness of being weighed heavily. * Money and its mechanics get extensive treatment in the pre-1900 novels. The details of Bovary’s debt were made famous by Piketty, but Eliot also spends time on Lydgate’s financial struggles, and Tolstoy on Levin’s agricultural economics. Pecuniary considerations are absent in the later works. Again, maybe just happenstance stemming from the particular selection, but I don’t get the feeling that it’s just that: I think something about authors’ attitudes to the topic changed. • Today’s scientific papers are far harder to read, and jargon-replete, than those of 1960. However, the novels of the 19th century use significantly more sophisticated construction (and vocabulary) than those of today. What should we make of the countervailing trends? To me, both seem suboptimal. • Pleasure aside, should one read these books? Does one derive moral betterment from doing so? I'm not sure. Probably not in any narrow sense. Ethicists are supposedly no more ethical than regular people -- if deliberate study doesn't help, what hope does mere fiction have? And, anecdotally, I don't consider the humanities majors to be the moral betters of the STEM students. I do think they've helped with my understanding of history, though. This year, I reflected on how the major historical moments that I've lived through -- the weeks after 9/11, the aftermath of Trump's 2016 election victory, March of 2020 -- cannot really be understood in terms of particular events, and must instead be apprehended through the vibes that prevailed. Rather than trying to assemble a logical causal chain, I think it's more helpfully explanatory to see many happenings as simply arising from a mood. History books struggle to capture such sentiments, and understandably so: the historian usually wasn't there; even if they were, vibes are ethereal things, and they feel out-of-place in a work that aspires to footnoted rigor and exactitude. As such, complements are required, and these novels have definitely helped me. This view also makes biography and autobiography seem of greater importance in developing such comprehension. The small details -- that Herbert Hoover's parents used to attend lectures and debates in a nearby town since that was the only entertainment available, that both died before age 35, or that Hoover himself once walked 80 miles in 3 days to join a geology class trip -- say a lot about a period, and are rarely captured in the grand sweep of events. I feel like I gained much more understanding of historical Vienna and of the emotions around WWI from reading Zweig's memoir than from any direct history of the period. • Another argument made for reading these works is to simply better understand humanity and the human experience. There is almost certainly some extent to which this argument is valid, though I always wonder: do they help you better understand humanity, or better understand the kind of people who write books like these? Is Isabel Archer actually reflective of someone in that kind of position, or merely of the kind of hyper-intellectual James family? Karenina is ultimately a kind of demented obsessive (as was Tolstoy) – in learning about her, do we learn about love and its travails, or simply about unusually unstable personalities? • There’s clearly some value in reading them for somewhat tautological reasons: they're worth reading because they are the books that we’ve decided are worth reading. They form part of our cultural context, and other works probably make somewhat more sense and are more memorable when interpreted through their lens. They are intellectual capital cities: you sorta have to go to Paris and New York in order to understand the rest of the world, and whether you “enjoy” them isn’t really the operative question. • Ultimately, a utilitarian case for better understanding history or even humanity would not be my primary argument for why one might choose to read them, though. With self-consciousness about the platitude, they are simply some of the finest intellectual achievements of humanity, and worthy of engagement for that reason alone: a deeper appreciation for excellence is itself a valuable thing.

If you’d like to hire any of the wonderful former Stripe employees who are leaving, email alumni-hiring@stripe.com. We’ll let you know as soon as the directory is ready.

I wish digital maps had a setting to increase label density by a factor of 10+, for a perspective like the road atlases of yore. We manufacture these amazing high-resolution displays but then render maps in crayon.

Just noticed that @Sequoia invested in the Series A of 3 of the 4 largest companies in the world.

Solar deployment is now happening at a roughly $500B annualized rate. Which technology deployments were larger than this? The US's aircraft production during WWII seems to have peaked at maybe $400B (inflation-adjusted). Global datacenter construction appears to be maybe $200B/year.

Around 500 people 65+ are dying per day in California. (~75% of all deaths.) In total, 6 million people in CA are 65+. CA currently has 2 million unused vaccine doses. Thousands of avoidable deaths. This is a failure of managerial competence and should be a bigger scandal.

Can't think of a better time to proudly announce that we're hiring in Baltimore.

Browsers really need File > Save Page as PNG. How are we still exporting PDFs with page breaks and print stylesheets like twentieth century troglodytes?

Maybe a very prosaic observation, but I've been reflecting on just how much the pandemic changed the world in ways that are completely unrelated to the pandemic itself. I think I've underestimated it 'till now. In a recent interview, I was struck by the comment that so many of the shops that we associate with the best of France—the poissonneries and the fromageries—closed during the pandemic, to be replaced by take-out pizza shops and the like. College professors almost uniformly describe big changes in student behavior: lecture attendance and willingness of students to complete reading assignments are both way down. A UK government official recently told me that British economic statistics have become much less reliable since the pandemic: data on trade, employment, and population is suspect. (The true GDP per capita figures are probably worse than what is indicated by the published data, since the 2021 census is believed to be an undercount.) In the West, there are far fewer bustling workplaces than there used to be. In recent conversation with a well-traveled friend, he bemoaned how so many cities—places like Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Bali—have lost so much of their erstwhile vibrant nightlife. Immigration accelerated enormously across many countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. In China, I hear descriptions of how fear, caution, and conservatism have persisted since the COVID lockdowns. (And Western travel to China remains massively depressed.) Lots of the changes are neutral, or even good. Retail participation in the US stock market almost doubled overnight, say, and has persisted at that elevated rate. Firm creation in the US increased by around 50%, which is probably a very good thing. Overall, the number of time series (either literal or figurative) that jumped discontinuously during COVID and then didn’t return to baseline is just very striking. Which are the best historical analogs? Are there any apart from major wars? I want to read this book!

Increasingly believe that the "good, cheap, fast—choose two" maxim is devious misinformation spread by the slow. In my experience, "slow" and "expensive" usually go together. I was in a meeting yesterday where lopping a year off a project schedule also ended up reducing the cost substantially. Fundamentally, it takes time to spend, and adding the temporal constraint tends to make things simpler and more efficient.

Reviewing @Stripe's roadmap for 2021 and, even compressed, it is *11 pages* of phenomenal material. (By a significant margin our most ambitious to date.) What are your top requests?

Perhaps heretical, but I'm very much looking forward to AI making books elastically compressible while preserving writing style and quality. There are so many topics about which I'll happily read 100, but not 700, pages. (Of course, it's also good that the foundational 700 page version exists -- you sometimes do want the full plunge.)

Congratulations to the Stripe infrastructure teams! With record scale, Black Friday and Cyber Monday passed uneventfully. >20,000 peak RPS and >99.9999% API success rate.

Congratulations to @mcannonbrookes, who just received government approval to build the world's largest renewable and storage project. Sun Cable is a preposterously large (24GW+) solar and wind farm plus an improbably long electricity cord. reneweconomy.com.au/sun-cabl…

.@deewhock, creator of Visa, died this week at 93. A very underrated innovator and someone who inspired me and @collision. David Stearns, author of the definitive book about Visa, works at Stripe and shared the below. RIP.

Every other week, we have a customer join for the first 30 minutes of our management team meeting: they share their candid feedback, and ~40 leaders from across Stripe listen. Even though we already have a lot of customer feedback mechanisms, it somehow always spurs new thoughts and investigations.

Fun fact: the US decided to build "the world's first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses" in 1953 and it went live in 1957. That is, it took less time to invent nuclear power stations in the 50s than it takes to replicate them today.

Congratulations to @boomsupersonic!

My new card just arrived! 😍

Businesses launched on @Stripe since lockdowns began in March have -- somewhat incredibly -- already generated more than $1 billion in aggregate revenue. We're very glad to be able to play our part in helping them sell, adapt, and grow.

@RTE The @Stripe team just 5x'd the capacity for the RTE Toy Show Appeal. We aren't seeing any issues right now.

Calvin and Hobbes, December 30 1989.

As far as I can tell, one of the biggest changes across organizations over the past few years is simply the rise of distraction. The default often appears to be a kind of continuous partial attention. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad. Maybe people were suboptimally stuck before, and perhaps there are gains to being able to allocate attention more flexibly? Or maybe it's bad because meetings become even less efficient and our ability to focus (already under assault!) withers further. Either way, it's a striking new normal.

We started with 7 lines of code but integrating Stripe now requires 0 lines of code:

How did YouTube make all the top-ranked comments wholesome and funny? And are those techniques generalizable?

An interesting trend we're noticing at Stripe: US startups are pulling ahead of their peers elsewhere. These charts show averaged revenue growth for software startups in each location. US startups typically grow somewhat faster than those elsewhere. However, since mid-2023, US companies have accelerated a lot. Interestingly, this is not just because of AI startups: if we strip those out, there's still a big divergence. Our leading hypothesis is that US startups (even those that aren't AI companies as such) are adopting new technologies (AI, stablecoins, etc.) faster than companies elsewhere. (This pattern of faster adoption among US companies was also seen with the internet itself.) Whatever the cause, the pattern is striking. [Methodological note: this pattern appears to hold beyond Europe as well.]

Everyone has noticed ⌘-⇧-A in Chrome, right? (Maybe I'm very late to the party here.)

My letter to the editor in response to economist.com/briefing/2021/….

Buenos Aires water pumping station (built 1894) and Melbourne water pumping station (built 1897). What was in the air -- or, I suppose, the water -- back then?

Love the new Airbnb icons!

Fast Grants for COVID-19: fastgrants.org.

Stripe is partnering with Apple to enable Tap to Pay on iPhone: apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/a…. (You can sign up to be notified when it's available over at stripe.com/terminal/tap-to-p….)

Introducing @Tempo. At Stripe, we care about high-throughput, low-latency payments use cases. As the use of stablecoins (and crypto more broadly) grows across Stripe, Bridge, and Privy, we found that existing blockchains are not optimized for them. For example, it's valuable for real-world financial applications that fees be denominated in a fiat currency that makes sense to the user, but existing blockchains denominate their fees in blockchain-specific tokens. Batch transfers are very useful in payments, but much less important in trading. Bitcoin does ~5 TPS; Ethereum does ~20 TPS, some (like Base and Solana) get to ~1k TPS, but Stripe peaks at >10k TPS. And so on. As such, we decided to incubate Tempo, a new blockchain, in partnership with Paradigm. We think of Tempo as the payments-oriented L1, optimized for high-scale, real-world financial services applications. Tempo is an independent company, with Stripe and Paradigm as the first investors. To ensure that Tempo serves a broad array of needs, we're excited to be working with Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa as initial design partners. We will start with an independent and diverse validator set, and plan to move towards permissionless validation. Tempo will have a built-in stablecoin AMM to enable platform neutrality with respect to different stablecoins, and Stripe itself will of course continue to work with many chains as first-class partners. We hope that Tempo makes it easier for things like payment acceptance, global payouts, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, agentic payments, and more, to move onchain. The Tempo team is 15 people today, led by the terrific @matthuang. If you're interested in building Tempo, get in touch! And if you're interested in partnering, reach out to partners@tempo.xyz.

Someone I know has had some quite useful COVID-related posts removed from Medium, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor—they've been deemed "COVID misinformation". (It's not what the WHO endorses!)

What a morning for science and technology! More excellent Moderna vaccine news and DeepMind makes a giant leap in single domain protein structure prediction. Humans are awesome! ⚗️🖥📈