Stripe says we're living in the singularity, and therefore, regrettably, can't IPO.
In an investor letter obtained by Axios, the payments company calls the singularity "a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term," but says it "decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity." What Stripe means by that is "a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation)."
The company admits it doesn't know exactly what's coming, only that it will be "vast." "Nobody can know with specificity how AI will reshape our world," the letter reads, noting that "many predictions from wise individuals have already been abjectly falsified." Stripe says it wants to approach the uncertainty "with humility."
Stripe argues it's better positioned to navigate the singularity as a private company, able to fund acquisitions and investments without diluting shareholders. The company also says that "optimizing for developers, as Stripe has from the outset, is in many ways the same thing as optimizing for coding harnesses and for agents." Building economic infrastructure for the internet, Stripe writes, is "mostly the same thing as building the economic infrastructure for AI."
