Latest / The Stable Pulse / How Privy Is Fixing Crypto’s Onboarding Problem

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How Privy Is Fixing Crypto’s Onboarding Problem · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Intro: The passage of the stablecoin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act, because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things.
• 0:08
  Intro: Stablecoin is your debut right here at the NASDAQ.
• 0:13
  Bam Azizi: Welcome to CEO Beat from Stable Pulse.
• 0:15
  Bam Azizi: This is Bam Azizi.
• 0:16
  Bam Azizi: Today we are joined by Henry Stern, co-founder of Previe.
• 0:21
  Bam Azizi: Henry, welcome to the show.
• 0:23
  Bam Azizi: Thank you.
• 0:24
  Bam Azizi: Thank you for having me.
• 0:25
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 0:25
  Bam Azizi: Henry and I, we go way back and uh we uh worked together uh uh like uh like for for many many years and excited to uh learn more and share some of those learning with the with the founders and audience that are listening today to the today's show.
• 0:47
  Bam Azizi: Uh but um uh let's go back a little bit to your childhood.
• 0:52
  Bam Azizi: I would love to uh hear your background and and the founder journey, if you don't mind, share some of the uh early achievements in your life, and then how did you end up in the US and uh doing what you're doing now?
• 1:06
  Henri Stern: Yeah, I uh I can try.
• 1:09
  Henri Stern: Um so I I grew up in France um for for the most part until I was uh uh in the in middle school and uh and basically moved to the US then.
• 1:17
  Henri Stern: I think my parents uh were both lucky enough to work jobs that um enabled them to work from the US, and I think you know, very rightfully so.
• 1:25
  Henri Stern: They were like, man, uh these children need to speak English if they're gonna have a shot at building careers in uh in the global workspace and the global workforce.
• 1:34
  Henri Stern: Uh and so I think actually, oddly enough, I kind of lucked into many successions of being lucky with timing.
• 1:41
  Henri Stern: In this case, my my parents were very lucky in bringing us to the US when I was a teenager.
• 1:46
  Henri Stern: And so basically I went through end of middle school, high school, and then college uh in the US.
• 1:52
  Henri Stern: And so even though uh my uh whole extended family is in France, and that's where I grew up, that's where I feel, you know, in many ways most at home uh professionally, I became very American.
• 2:02
  Henri Stern: And likewise, I think through college, uh, you know, I had these very exciting dreams growing up of becoming a lawyer or banker or all of these things that like kids typically don't say this is what I want to be.
• 2:14
  Henri Stern: And um and I think through college, I uh I started just seeing more and more on computers.
• 2:23
  Henri Stern: I think I saw uh this is very geeky, and I don't know that I've shared this, but like I saw the social network, which had an impact of me on like, man, I software will eat the world, in fact.
• 2:34
  Henri Stern: And no matter what I want to do, if I don't know how to speak to computers, then I will not be able to sort of be as highly leveraged as I'd like as a professional, regardless of profession.
• 2:46
  Henri Stern: So I think that was the second lucky break, is I I started my my college at Stanford.
• 2:50
  Henri Stern: I transferred to Columbia and it was a smaller computer science department where uh I really felt like I could build a lot of connections with professors and with um folks in the department.
• 3:00
  Henri Stern: And so I ended up doing computer science, which is very lucky.
• 3:03
  Henri Stern: And I remember at the time uh what I liked most about computers was determinism, which is to say, if you're doing something and the compiler doesn't compile, then you know it's your fault.
• 3:14
  Henri Stern: You haven't understood the rules of the game.
• 3:16
  Henri Stern: And uh, and unfortunately, we've moved to an era of non-determinism.
• 3:19
  Henri Stern: So I'm I I guess my entire life plan has been foiled by AI now, where uh we're now in a non-deterministic computing computation era.
• 3:27
  Henri Stern: But that's uh that's initially how I I got into computers.
• 3:30
  Henri Stern: Started a company out of college with a really good friend of mine, went through YC.
• 3:35
  Henri Stern: It didn't work, and then I went back to grad school and then I ended up studying uh cryptography and computer security, and that's how I got into crypto, which which led me here.
• 3:44
  Bam Azizi: Nice.
• 3:44
  Bam Azizi: That's great.
• 3:45
  Bam Azizi: Um, so the fact that you didn't drop out of college, that's that's your French part.
• 3:50
  Bam Azizi: That's the immigrant mindset.
• 3:51
  Bam Azizi: You either needed a PhD or a doctor or lawyer.
• 3:54
  Bam Azizi: I'm sure your mom is proud of you now that you didn't drop out.
• 3:59
  Henri Stern: Well, she she still doesn't understand what crypto is, so I I had to go and build privy because of it.
• 4:03
  Henri Stern: But otherwise, um I I think you're right.
• 4:05
  Henri Stern: I'm very very conformist in that in that standpoint.
• 4:08
  Bam Azizi: So did you feel like you're always entrepreneurial?
• 4:12
  Bam Azizi: Um, like you you mentioned social network.
• 4:14
  Bam Azizi: When I watched that movie, it was like it was a dilemma for me.
• 4:18
  Bam Azizi: Should I be a scientist or should I go and run a business?
• 4:21
  Bam Azizi: Both are as exciting.
• 4:23
  Bam Azizi: Um, but did you feel like you're more on the entrepreneurial side and you want to build a business, or you were more of a nerd that you want to get a break codes and things, build things in the in the academia award?
• 4:34
  Henri Stern: I think very much the latter.
• 4:36
  Henri Stern: I I would say two things happened, which is one, I followed this friend of mine, and this friend of mine has since gone on to build uh a company called Row, which is a direct-to-consumer healthcare company that's very successful.
• 4:47
  Henri Stern: And he was extraordinarily entrepreneurial minded.
• 4:50
  Henri Stern: And we just wanted to work together.
• 4:52
  Henri Stern: And so I think coming out of undergrad, I kind of stumbled into it and followed him.
• 4:55
  Henri Stern: I remember we we we went to uh Columbia at office hours with YC partners, and we had office hours with Sam Altman, who was a YC partner at the time.
• 5:04
  Henri Stern: And he was like, You guys are great, your idea sucks, but you should come and visit.
• 5:08
  Henri Stern: And uh, and I was like, this is awesome.
• 5:10
  Henri Stern: Like, what the hell is Y Combinator?
• 5:11
  Henri Stern: Like, is there office Midtown or downtown New York?
• 5:14
  Henri Stern: Like, where are we going?
• 5:14
  Henri Stern: And then we ended up on the flight that same night to go to SF to pitch, you know, Paul Graham and the entire partnership.
• 5:20
  Henri Stern: Um, but I really stumbled into that part of the world that that wasn't at all something that was in my in my sort of reference field of things that someone could do.
• 5:29
  Henri Stern: And then I think starting that first company, which was called Shout, um I was kind of blown away by the fact that investors gave us money, by the fact that people took us seriously.
• 5:41
  Henri Stern: I mean, we worked our asses off and we made so many mistakes.
• 5:44
  Henri Stern: Uh, the company ended up, you know, shutting down after you, you know, we find product, we found product market fit for for a few months right there, and and then we never got it back and and we lived in in in in in hard search of that that feeling again.
• 5:57
  Henri Stern: But um, but I think the fact that people took us so seriously and the fact that it felt like we were doing something that wouldn't happen without us ended up being the thing that really drove me to continuing to try to do this, which is uh I want to wake up and know that if I weren't doing what I'm doing, it wouldn't happen.
• 6:14
  Henri Stern: And uh and that's kind of you know the the things that have driven me.
• 6:17
  Henri Stern: And then obviously I think there's a lot of value we can build to into the world via digital assets, stable coins, crypto.
• 6:24
  Bam Azizi: Would you think you would be able to do the same thing in France or any other part of the US if you were not in Silicon Valley?
• 6:31
  Henri Stern: I mean, I live in New York, so ostensibly, yes.
• 6:34
  Henri Stern: I don't know what what how many other cities there are, but um I think Silicon Valley is really special.
• 6:39
  Henri Stern: And whenever I go out west, there's kind of a sense of the pioneer spirit.
• 6:43
  Henri Stern: You know, you you stand in the presidio and you look over, and I think you can kind of imagine people coming in during the gold rush.
• 6:49
  Henri Stern: In fact, some of my mom, some of my mom's family uh uh came.
• 6:52
  Henri Stern: My my my grandpa's grandpa was born in San Francisco during the gold rush because his family came over at that point.
• 6:58
  Henri Stern: And so there's something I think really special to this idea of we can invent the future that I don't think exists anywhere else.
• 7:06
  Henri Stern: And there's a ton I adore about France, but venture capital in France is called risk capital.
• 7:12
  Henri Stern: Like the idea of failing is just very different.
• 7:15
  Henri Stern: Um, and so I think there is something special here to the US and to this part of the US in particular that uniquely enables uh the sort of work that I'm doing, at least.
• 7:25
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, there there is a willingness to take more risk here in the US than compared to other parts of the world.
• 7:30
  Henri Stern: Um sometimes to fault, right?
• 7:31
  Henri Stern: We we linize failure, we say keep at it, even if you're completely grinding your head against a wall.
• 7:36
  Henri Stern: So like that there's pros and cons to everything, but it it's certainly very special.
• 7:40
  Bam Azizi: That's that's true.
• 7:41
  Bam Azizi: Um as as they say, success is going from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm, right?
• 7:48
  Bam Azizi: So I think that's that's the mantra for US.
• 7:51
  Bam Azizi: Like they they keep betting and maybe they have like eight failures, but two out of ten becomes like the next meta, the next, next opening eye.
• 7:59
  Bam Azizi: That's um I really stumble upon on your your background, your story, because it's very, very similar to what I did.
• 8:07
  Bam Azizi: So like sim like like you, I have a PhD in computer science.
• 8:11
  Bam Azizi: I applied to I don't.
• 8:12
  Henri Stern: I I did in fact not put your PhD out.
• 8:14
  Henri Stern: So you're you're much you're much farther along than I have.
• 8:17
  Bam Azizi: But but but uh you applied for Vice C.
• 8:20
  Bam Azizi: I did uh Sam Alfman interviewed me.
• 8:22
  Bam Azizi: I didn't get in, you got in, so that's good.
• 8:24
  Bam Azizi: And then uh my first company was an identity with no password.
• 8:28
  Bam Azizi: So that's where I got connected to um PKI, public key infrastructure and cryptography, and then Bitcoin like around 2016, 17.
• 8:38
  Bam Azizi: It was a bullish year, and then everybody was talking about Bitcoin.
• 8:42
  Bam Azizi: And uh it was exciting for a lot of people for from investment perspective.
• 8:46
  Bam Azizi: And then I've heard blockchain and I started digging deeper, try to break it.
• 8:51
  Bam Azizi: I got very, very excited about like how this decentralized technology works.
• 8:55
  Bam Azizi: I was more into the technology than the the Bitcoin as an investment asset.
• 8:59
  Bam Azizi: And then that's how I got connected, and then I started Mesh.
• 9:03
  Bam Azizi: It seems like you you went through this similar journey, and then how did you end up building Previe?
• 9:10
  Bam Azizi: Like what what was the goal from day one?
• 9:14
  Henri Stern: I think I came out, so I ended up after my my my master's um was going to join a PhD program and ended up thinking, man, these are very these are years where I want to be building things.
• 9:27
  Henri Stern: And so let let me try and do research somewhere, but in industry.
• 9:31
  Henri Stern: And I ended up joining an awesome company called Protocol Labs, where I worked on a layer one blockchain called Filecoin for a number of years.
• 9:38
  Henri Stern: And I came out of that thinking these rails are so powerful.
• 9:42
  Henri Stern: We have built a system through which disparate economic entities can reason about state and reason about the world together without having to coordinate ahead of time.
• 9:51
  Henri Stern: So this is really ownership rails for the web.
• 9:54
  Henri Stern: Unfortunately, the developer experience is like horrible.
• 9:57
  Henri Stern: And it is so hard to build anything on these chains, and more or less, there's an assumption that like your user has to be religiously convicted about crypto if they're ever going to touch your product because your product is so goddamn bad.
• 10:08
  Henri Stern: Uh and and I was like, this is part of why you kind of get this real draw to only certain use cases, uh, typically very highly speculative use cases.
• 10:21
  Henri Stern: And I think there's nothing wrong with that at all.
• 10:23
  Henri Stern: But it is only a subset of what you can build on these rails.
• 10:25
  Henri Stern: And the reason why they have been the most popular is I think because the UX was so poor that you needed a real carrot to convince people to go through the experience of you know setting up a wallet, getting a mnemonic, like you will make a lot of money if you get through this absolute pain.
• 10:40
  Henri Stern: And unfortunately, I think like there's a wide range of products that if we can lower the friction, we can then widen the aperture of what can find product market fit.
• 10:50
  Henri Stern: And so I think that was the core idea was uh, I don't want to work in this space anymore.
• 10:55
  Henri Stern: The products are too bad and people aren't building for users enough.
• 10:58
  Henri Stern: And then kind of coming back to it of wait, what if we could make it easier for folks to do this?
• 11:03
  Henri Stern: What if we could associate real people to wallets in a way that enables developers to focus on the users rather than get stuck in the in the public key cryptography of it all?
• 11:12
  Henri Stern: And so can we take basically the infrastructure that allows anyone to get a wallet, no matter how conversant they are or not in crypto?
• 11:20
  Henri Stern: And can we enable developers to build on top of crypto directly in their products without needing to be experts up front?
• 11:27
  Henri Stern: And so that's kind of how we got started on the path to privy.
• 11:30
  Henri Stern: I met my co-founder Asta through a mutual friend, and we immediately decided we should be working together.
• 11:35
  Henri Stern: This is this is too exciting meeting broadly.
• 11:38
  Henri Stern: Uh, and so we should do this together, and then uh and then you know, years of pain followed.
• 11:44
  Bam Azizi: Is there is there any um did you pivot at all?
• 11:48
  Bam Azizi: Or it was just from the get-go that like what you have and preview was on your mind, or you went through iterations and evolving through the years?
• 11:57
  Henri Stern: No, we we evolved and we and we pivoted.
• 12:00
  Henri Stern: Um we started so we started at the very end of 2021.
• 12:03
  Henri Stern: And at the time, the the sort of idea maze was the same.
• 12:06
  Henri Stern: And so we've been working in the same pace space the entire time.
• 12:09
  Henri Stern: But the idea was um how do we associate real users to wallets in order to enable better experiences?
• 12:15
  Henri Stern: And so the first version of Privy was a like privacy-preserving data store, kind of a Redis of sorts that encrypted user data so you could associate it to wallets without taking on that user's data.
• 12:25
  Henri Stern: And basically what we saw was this was not a successful product.
• 12:29
  Henri Stern: It was horribly hard to sell.
• 12:31
  Henri Stern: It was like pulling teeth, and so we're like, well, fuck, like people really don't want to use this.
• 12:35
  Henri Stern: Uh, but also the few people who did, just out of the kindness of their hearts, were using it to build some version of like poor man's account abstraction.
• 12:43
  Henri Stern: They were basically using Privy V1 in a sense to store private keys associated to wallets so they could automate certain transactions and certain behaviors on behalf of users.
• 12:54
  Henri Stern: So we had half of our you know, tiny user base at the time using it to associate email and phone numbers.
• 12:59
  Henri Stern: And I think this was solving the issue of how do we authenticate and how do we identify uh users connecting and transacting on our app.
• 13:06
  Henri Stern: And the other half were like storing private keys in order to try and like make some of the work transacting on-chain simpler.
• 13:14
  Henri Stern: So that kind of gave us the roadmap for what ended up being our V2.
• 13:17
  Henri Stern: So about, you know, we we we launched a product in January of 2022 or so.
• 13:22
  Henri Stern: By July, it was very, very clear we needed to change something.
• 13:26
  Henri Stern: And we relaunched it in September of 22 uh as uh at first uh an authentication.
• 13:32
  Henri Stern: Sorry?
• 13:33
  Bam Azizi: Best timing.
• 13:35
  Henri Stern: Yeah, great timing.
• 13:36
  Henri Stern: I mean, and and I actually think it was so so to your point, you know, somewhere in the middle there, the market completely blew up with FTX and with everything else.
• 13:43
  Henri Stern: And so there was a real come to Jesus moment of like, you know, do we want to be here?
• 13:46
  Henri Stern: Like, is this what we should be doing?
• 13:48
  Henri Stern: Uh my my co-founder Asta is is much more uh uh talented and uh and employable than I am and was coming from from self-driving cars and AI.
• 13:57
  Henri Stern: And so it was much harder for her, I'm sure, being like, what the fuck am I doing with this deadbeat?
• 14:01
  Henri Stern: Uh, trying to work in crypto.
• 14:02
  Henri Stern: But we both had a lot of conviction of if we can make these products easier to build, the amounts of things that you can build with digital assets.
• 14:10
  Henri Stern: We didn't have words for stable coins at the time for crypto, um, is really, really expansive.
• 14:16
  Henri Stern: And I think we got lucky in that basically we were very, very small at the time.
• 14:20
  Henri Stern: And so we got to grow with the market as it rebirthed rather than being a really big player who got then hit by the FTX blowup.
• 14:28
  Henri Stern: So I think a lot of the incumbents prior to us basically just had to deal with having really high valuations, running complex businesses in a market where the bottom fell out from under you.
• 14:38
  Henri Stern: And instead, we got to be there, you know, like spring children coming of age with this market and growing with this market.
• 14:45
  Henri Stern: Um, and so in that sense, uh, even though we didn't know it at the time, the the the timing was very good.
• 14:49
  Henri Stern: I agreed.
• 14:51
  Bam Azizi: Uh you you mentioned that you built this because your mom doesn't know anything about crypto.
• 14:55
  Bam Azizi: So where where the friction is uh usually come from?
• 14:59
  Bam Azizi: Is it is it the wallet, is it the identity, is the is the seat phrase, is the user experience or all the above?
• 15:05
  Bam Azizi: Like what what's what's the answer?
• 15:08
  Henri Stern: Yeah, I think I think there's a few things.
• 15:10
  Henri Stern: And and this is where, to be honest, um there's a there's a there's a piece of writing that I really, really love called um on market annealing.
• 15:19
  Henri Stern: And I might misspeak, but I think it was written by Martin Casado at A16Z about like getting to call it 10 million ARR in very early stage markets.
• 15:27
  Henri Stern: And uh it speaks to the fact that like product market fit in a nascent emergent market is a bad term because there's no market to fit the product to.
• 15:35
  Henri Stern: The best you can try and do, and a very powerful thing you can try and do, is anneal the market and the product, meaning you heat them at the same temperature so you can evolve the market with your product.
• 15:44
  Henri Stern: And I think that is kind of what we saw, which is um when we started, the idea of logging into DAP with an email was insane.
• 15:53
  Henri Stern: The idea that anybody outside of crypto would want to use crypto rails was insane.
• 15:57
  Henri Stern: And so it was very hard to convince people of that.
• 16:00
  Henri Stern: But the friction was twofold.
• 16:01
  Henri Stern: It was, or it was threefold.
• 16:03
  Henri Stern: It was one, the act of downloading an app, a third-party extension, um, having to basically have a multi-product experience.
• 16:13
  Henri Stern: So at each of the most important steps of the user experience, the developer building uh on crypto rails had to basically kick their users out and say, uh please go elsewhere to do this really important thing.
• 16:24
  Henri Stern: I'll see you later, maybe.
• 16:26
  Henri Stern: Um, and so that just completely crushed conversion and user flows.
• 16:29
  Henri Stern: And so dApps were, as a result, often very poor and extremely financial in nature because you didn't have long-lived states.
• 16:35
  Henri Stern: The second point of friction was the actual act of uh setting up the wallet.
• 16:41
  Henri Stern: You know, you had to store it in mnemonic, you had to go through all sorts of things, set a password.
• 16:45
  Henri Stern: Typically, you tried to, you know, tap through it really, really quickly, and then the wallet became valuable and you'd forgotten everything that you'd store.
• 16:50
  Henri Stern: You obviously hadn't saved your seat phrase and so on and so forth.
• 16:53
  Henri Stern: Um, and then I think the third was you kept getting reminded that you were in this weird product state everywhere in the product experience.
• 17:03
  Henri Stern: So every transaction is yet another distraction taking you away from the app experience, kind of like being in a really good movie and your neighbor in the theater keeps coughing or something at all the best parts.
• 17:13
  Henri Stern: Uh and so I I think beneath all of this was was sort of the core friction, which was this belief that in order to use crypto, you had to want to use crypto, as opposed to treating it like an extremely powerful rail, an extremely sort of, I think, morally valent rail, but one that can exist in the fabric of the products that serve it rather than being the main show itself.
• 17:36
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 17:36
  Bam Azizi: Um and what was the initial use case and how this use case evolved?
• 17:41
  Bam Azizi: Like what type of companies are using previe in the V1 and now like who are using Preview now?
• 17:48
  Henri Stern: Yeah, actually, we have an old strategy doc.
• 17:51
  Henri Stern: We worked with uh with this this really talented person called Ben Beige who had helped us think through this.
• 17:57
  Henri Stern: And the the the the the the goal at the time was to say there's probably like three markets in crypto.
• 18:02
  Henri Stern: There's the this is you know, College Circuit 2022, there's the hardcore crypto natives who will never use a third-party platform for for these things and and basically uh for whom the market is currently built.
• 18:18
  Henri Stern: There is a small but growing, we believe, category of crypto developers who want to widen their TAM and address a currently non-existent market, which is people who are excited about experiences to be built on crypto rails, even if they're not already using crypto.
• 18:35
  Henri Stern: And then I think the third was, and there will increasingly be folks who have nothing to do with crypto who want to leverage the Rails because the Rails are really good at certain things.
• 18:44
  Henri Stern: And like at the time we're like, that market you know doesn't exist.
• 18:47
  Henri Stern: It's it's a dream.
• 18:48
  Henri Stern: And so like we'll we'll come back to it.
• 18:50
  Henri Stern: But clearly the only place where we have something really concrete and valuable to deliver is in the second market.
• 18:56
  Henri Stern: Who are the crypto developers who want to appeal to a non-crypto audience?
• 18:59
  Henri Stern: So that was our initial market.
• 19:01
  Henri Stern: It was basically people who wanted to build better games, who wanted to build better social looks uh apps, who wanted to build so on.
• 19:08
  Henri Stern: And we got very lucky.
• 19:09
  Henri Stern: We served a customer called FriendTech somewhat early on that completely blew up and so scaled our product massively.
• 19:16
  Henri Stern: Um, our product was well built, and so it managed to scale with this app.
• 19:20
  Henri Stern: And basically, very quickly, we saw, oh, we can we can grow here and then we can grow into DeFi and then increasingly we can grow into stable coins.
• 19:28
  Henri Stern: And what has materialized over time is that today our audience is really split between, on the one side, very crypto native audiences.
• 19:35
  Henri Stern: So, you know, we serve the folks uh uh from Hyperliquid, folks like Jupyter or Uniswap or a lot of these applications that are you know very crypto native but are building some of the fundamental infrastructure in the space.
• 19:47
  Henri Stern: And likewise, we serve uh really amazing customers like Ramp or like Deal or like uh you know Klarna.
• 19:55
  Henri Stern: And these are apps that benefit from crypto as in other Rails, but aren't fundamentally crypto apps per se.
• 20:01
  Henri Stern: And uh and I think today that's what we found very, very powerful is serving both sides of the market so we can deliver better abstractions for people who aren't here to think about the RPC methods, the gas and so on and so forth, and at the same time deliver extremely powerful low-level infrastructure for the folks who know exactly what they're doing and how they want to do it.
• 20:19
  Henri Stern: And we think there's a a really virtuous loop basically serving both customer segments.
• 20:23
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 20:24
  Bam Azizi: Do you think stable coins, the market trend on that end, plus the regulatory clarity, uh like the Genius Act, uh opened a flat gate for uh crypto in general and preview?
• 20:40
  Bam Azizi: Did you see any changes in terms of like uh value being stored?
• 20:45
  Bam Azizi: Was mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum and Dogecoin now is more USDC, USD.
• 20:50
  Bam Azizi: Do you see those type of trends in inside Preview?
• 20:54
  Henri Stern: We do.
• 20:54
  Henri Stern: I mean, I think we've been very lucky.
• 20:56
  Henri Stern: And I'm curious, I'm curious.
• 20:57
  Henri Stern: I'll flip the question on you after, so get ready.
• 20:59
  Henri Stern: But I'm I'm I'm very curious about what you're seeing.
• 21:01
  Henri Stern: I think we are seeing basically a broad acceleration of the market that we serve and a diversification of the market that we serve.
• 21:08
  Henri Stern: I think concentration risk was always something that we thought a lot about with the users we were we were working with.
• 21:13
  Henri Stern: And I think increasingly, like to your point, the share of stable coins held uh on infrastructure is just much higher than it used to be.
• 21:22
  Henri Stern: It used to be mostly non-stable assets, investment, trading, social, gaming, uh, NFTs.
• 21:27
  Henri Stern: And now there's an increasing segment of uh stable coins and other tokenized assets related to real world markets and so on and so forth.
• 21:36
  Henri Stern: So uh we're seeing a much broader diversification.
• 21:39
  Henri Stern: We're seeing much bigger companies, enterprises come into the market with repeatable use cases.
• 21:44
  Henri Stern: Um, and then I think we're seeing uh uh development of a richer ecosystem to serve these customers.
• 21:51
  Henri Stern: So a lot more integration surface for us to build for.
• 21:54
  Henri Stern: How about you?
• 21:56
  Henri Stern: How have you seen things evolve with Mash?
• 21:58
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, similar similar to what you said.
• 21:59
  Bam Azizi: Like there I think there are two metrics or two main reasons for that.
• 22:04
  Bam Azizi: Like when we started 75%, 80% of the assets we were touching or we were like facilitating to the transfer, it was more on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana.
• 22:18
  Bam Azizi: Now it's more than 75-80% is on the stablecoin side.
• 22:22
  Bam Azizi: So that trend happened around the same time both of us started the company.
• 22:36
  Bam Azizi: Clarity Act will open the door for a lot of other types of crypto assets.
• 23:00
  Bam Azizi: But I think that was kind of another impact that um or another reason uh that we are seeing more stablecoin than non-stablecoin assets.
• 23:08
  Bam Azizi: But the similar pattern.
• 23:11
  Henri Stern: And what are the biggest blockers that you're still seeing today?
• 23:14
  Henri Stern: The biggest like you know, two or three unlocks that if this happened, then the market on your side would be that much more extended.
• 23:20
  Henri Stern: Also, I didn't I didn't I don't think you knew that you were you were coming on my podcast today.
• 23:25
  Bam Azizi: No, happy to answer.
• 23:26
  Bam Azizi: Um so I think the the biggest uh the biggest block right now is um still there is a lack of clarity.
• 23:34
  Bam Azizi: So we are all waiting on the Clarity Act, um, the situation that we have with the banking set sector.
• 23:40
  Bam Azizi: But let's not forget that's that's only US, right?
• 23:43
  Bam Azizi: So the biggest block here is we have different jurisdiction, different countries are passing different types of laws, being compli as it like crypto is a global phenomenon, so still so as a stablecoin.
• 23:57
  Bam Azizi: So uh dealing with all these fragmented uh regulatory framework is is going to be um uh very, very painful and challenging for a lot of businesses like like Mesh, like Prevy, like Stripe, um, because we're global companies.
• 24:12
  Bam Azizi: Uh and I think we would like to see some sort of an um uh like similar to what happened to internet, right?
• 24:19
  Bam Azizi: Some sort of a standard, some sort of acceptable best practices and protocols globally for these companies to um to grow faster.
• 24:29
  Henri Stern: That makes a lot of sense.
• 24:30
  Henri Stern: Um super cool.
• 24:33
  Bam Azizi: So let's let's move on to your vision.
• 24:38
  Bam Azizi: So you said what was your vision day one?
• 24:41
  Bam Azizi: Uh now you're part of a bigger company.
• 24:43
  Bam Azizi: Um I don't know like how much detail you can share or you want to share, but like as a founder, it's it's very interesting for law founders to be in the position to somebody else buy the entire company.
• 24:57
  Bam Azizi: Was there any dilemma for you?
• 24:59
  Bam Azizi: Like, was a stripe uh and be like in the hindsight do you think that was the right move?
• 25:04
  Bam Azizi: Uh and and then I will get into the vision post-acquisition, but whatever you can share that would be super valuable for law founders to learn from you.
• 25:13
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 25:17
  Henri Stern: So I think I think we were uh the short answer is is is I I'm I'm very uh grateful and excited uh that we've made the decisions we've made.
• 25:25
  Henri Stern: I think it's been a uh, you know, we're we're we're about nine months into into into being a part of Stripe and Privy being a wholly owned subsidiary.
• 25:32
  Henri Stern: Um and I think it's it's it's I'm I'm really happy with with where things are and the ways in which it's it's accelerated us.
• 25:38
  Henri Stern: And so I think there's probably like you know, three things that stand out.
• 25:41
  Henri Stern: But the first is uh the amount to which Privy as a company, as a product has been accelerated, both in terms of product capacity, in terms of uh team capabilities and the things that we get to do on the ground, you know, engineering leverage, tooling, uh, infrastructure.
• 25:57
  Henri Stern: There's just a lot that we uh we're already shaping ourselves to be like Stripe and now get to do so in a much more direct way, which is super exciting.
• 26:05
  Henri Stern: So uh that's turned out to be great.
• 26:07
  Henri Stern: The second is I think in terms of um, you know, impact, we we get to serve customers that um we think we can really just change the world with.
• 26:16
  Henri Stern: And this might sound a little bit like, you know, uh goody two shoes, but but but but part of it is like, man, we we had 10-year roadmaps that that are going to turn into two-year roadmaps in ways that are really uniquely exciting, I think, and enabled by this.
• 26:28
  Henri Stern: Um and then I think the third is the opportunity to hopefully help transform Stripe itself.
• 26:33
  Henri Stern: And so coming into the conversation, you know, the the folks at Stripe came to us, um, they'd already bought a company called Bridge that does stablecoin orchestration and um and issuance, and they were like, you know, we we realize that wallets are an extremely important part of the stack and one that we want to be investing in and building with.
• 26:50
  Henri Stern: And I was like, uh, you know, great, we can sell you some wallets.
• 26:53
  Henri Stern: And they were like, no, no, but we'd like to consider, you know, uh, I think the way the way it was framed at the time was very nice.
• 26:58
  Henri Stern: It was like, you know, would you consider merging our two companies?
• 27:00
  Henri Stern: And I was like, that's a super nice way to put whatever would be happening.
• 27:03
  Henri Stern: Uh but uh but at the time, um, we were already doing a lot of work with Rich, who we knew from just serving joint customers.
• 27:11
  Henri Stern: And so I think that went a long way to reassuring us that you know Stripe was very serious about this.
• 27:15
  Henri Stern: And then um just going into the early conversations, most of them, frankly, were about product and were about where the internet ought to go.
• 27:27
  Henri Stern: And so it was it was very much a vision-driven, here is what we could do as part of Stripe and working much more closely with Stripe.
• 27:37
  Henri Stern: And I think that kind of set the tone and the foundation for how we do this.
• 27:40
  Henri Stern: And I would say Stripe's broader mission in the space is is twofold.
• 27:44
  Henri Stern: One, serve users in whatever ways are most efficient and best suited for them.
• 27:49
  Henri Stern: And so, like, we want to be able to serve users across any rail, whether that's Pix, SEPA, or USDC or whatever, right?
• 27:57
  Henri Stern: The point is if there's a rail that is a good fit for what the user needs, we Stripe should be there and should be able to uh be the best tool to enable that.
• 28:06
  Henri Stern: And then I think the second is to actually build the core primitives that enable new businesses to get off the ground, building, you know, to grow the GDP of the internet might be the Stripe meme.
• 28:17
  Henri Stern: And I think you kind of see it in a few places here, both with like across, you know, merchants, developers, fintechs, but increasingly with agents and things like that.
• 28:24
  Henri Stern: And so I think like, you know, Stripe's view is uh these rails should be married so tightly together that we can inherit all of the things that are amazing and incredible about crypto, but we can also bring to them the things that work so well in the systems that we've built to date.
• 28:39
  Henri Stern: Uh and I think Privy's worldview was how do we make it that you can build incredible new experiences without having to think about the underlying rails?
• 28:47
  Henri Stern: So the two really meshed up extremely well.
• 28:50
  Henri Stern: And from that standpoint, it's been uh it's been a lot of fun.
• 28:53
  Bam Azizi: That's that's awesome.
• 28:54
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, it I I agree, it meshed up.
• 28:57
  Bam Azizi: Pon intended.
• 28:58
  Bam Azizi: Um But um it's it's it's funny that you mentioned uh increasing the GDP of internet.
• 29:05
  Bam Azizi: When you're opening a lot of these websites, uh especially on the crypto infra, they're they like everyone is talking about the same thing.
• 29:14
  Bam Azizi: Like if you open Bridge website or Previe or NOAA or BVNK, uh they're all like they they all want to set money free.
• 29:22
  Bam Azizi: I think you're the only one that is like a little bit different that you want to you're like focused more on the user experience.
• 29:28
  Bam Azizi: Uh and also you want to enable uh, in a sense, for the work to come and chain without like abstracting all the complexity, without like owning the risk, owning the complexity, owning the technical challenges.
• 29:42
  Bam Azizi: Um so it's it's it's very, very unique.
• 29:45
  Bam Azizi: And then I think about it it's very, very similar to what Stripe did for credit card processing, right?
• 29:50
  Bam Azizi: So it was very, very tough to process a payment.
• 29:54
  Bam Azizi: Uh you had to manage tokens, you had to manage authentications, you had to have a like secure server, you need to be compliant, you have to have licenses.
• 30:02
  Bam Azizi: They abstracted all of that complexity and gave you one line of code, and then you could boom, you could accept credit card.
• 30:07
  Bam Azizi: Um and in a sense, it it it sounds like a very, very nice match.
• 30:12
  Bam Azizi: And uh considering that Stripe is also a tech company, you're not like just joining another financial institution, it's just another tech company.
• 30:19
  Bam Azizi: Uh, that would be a that would be an interesting match.
• 30:22
  Bam Azizi: Um, I could see that.
• 30:24
  Bam Azizi: Uh what would what would what what was the change after?
• 30:27
  Bam Azizi: I know that you're a wholly owned subsidiary, you still run pre-V, but was there any change from vision from product perspective, or you you're just have the freedom to do whatever you want to do?
• 30:39
  Henri Stern: No, it's a good question.
• 30:40
  Henri Stern: I uh maybe I'll add one last thing.
• 30:42
  Henri Stern: There's a there's a the you know the the the the the name Y combinator I think speaks to some version of a recursive function that accelerates like the the the slope of acceleration of a curve.
• 30:51
  Henri Stern: I'm I'm kind of butchering it, but the idea is broadly that.
• 30:54
  Henri Stern: And this is what I like about you know building developer tooling.
• 30:58
  Henri Stern: We we we get to build the underlying foundations that enable people to do their own thing.
• 31:03
  Henri Stern: And so there's this there's this dual layer, and actually Stripe has this much more than PRV, which is uh actually building the Rails, building, uh the products building, you know, uh the the the the account system and so on that enable folks to run on Stripe, but then giving them direct access to the underlying tooling so that they can build it themselves.
• 31:19
  Henri Stern: And I find that to be really, really exciting.
• 31:21
  Henri Stern: Um to answer your question, um the you know, the preview roadmap is really is really set by us.
• 31:30
  Henri Stern: And so in that sense, one of the things that was very important to us coming in was we we kind of had a few conditions.
• 31:36
  Henri Stern: One of them was we need to be able to, you know, obviously work together towards a better stack that Stripe can use that meshes, again, it uh really well.
• 31:46
  Henri Stern: Um, but we should be able to work with whoever is best for our user.
• 31:51
  Henri Stern: And so if that's a bridge competitor, if that's a Stripe competitor, today you might say if that's a tempo competitor, it doesn't matter.
• 31:57
  Henri Stern: Uh, whatever our customer needs needs to work really, really well with Privy, or frankly, with any other part of the stack, so that each piece can be valuable on a standalone basis and can be the best tool for the customer, uh, no matter what else they want to use.
• 32:09
  Henri Stern: And so I think that was a very early part of the like, you know, contract and agreement that we had in how we do this.
• 32:15
  Henri Stern: And so we have a lot of um of freedom to uh run our roadmap.
• 32:19
  Henri Stern: In fact, we we set it entirely and it's completely based on what our customers are asking us.
• 32:22
  Henri Stern: That's been one way in which we have just continuously worked with Privy.
• 32:25
  Henri Stern: We we don't do much by way of partnerships, really just answer customer demands.
• 32:30
  Henri Stern: Um, maybe what working within Stripe has given me, though, is a lot more appreciation for probably two things, which is one the importance of like being bimodal, the places in which Fiat has good things to bring to the stack and we're actually being able to play both instruments is is really, really valuable and really, really important.
• 32:56
  Henri Stern: Um and two is uh the importance of considering the well, these are both very vague in a sense, which which maybe speaks to the lack of constraints that we've had.
• 33:08
  Henri Stern: But two would be um the ability to really build across like different layers of abstraction.
• 33:13
  Henri Stern: So all the way from here are UIs that you can use when you want to build a transaction with Privy, here is a full like kit that gives you just a React component that you can build with, all the way to this is the underlying raw API request and so on, and just the uh importance of the flexibility of the underlying rail as you go from building for a certain type of customer to you know the enterprise user to now like tooling builders and so on.
• 33:37
  Henri Stern: That's something that Stripe has so much experience with that that we've learned a lot from.
• 33:41
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 33:42
  Bam Azizi: Um let's talk a little bit more about the space.
• 33:46
  Bam Azizi: Now we're hearing that a lot of companies are building new banks on top of blockchain, Erebor, Dakota, and many, many other companies that they're building.
• 33:57
  Bam Azizi: Um I I've heard um Ethena is another one.
• 34:01
  Bam Azizi: Like we we also have a lot of credit card, like crypto card, crypto back card companies like Cost, Rita Pay.
• 34:08
  Bam Azizi: Uh seems like there is a big competition heating up on the consumer side.
• 34:13
  Bam Azizi: Uh, do you think uh that would impact how um the cons the crypto works for the consumer?
• 34:21
  Bam Azizi: Do you think uh naturally this competition will make things easier?
• 34:26
  Bam Azizi: Because now we have many different stable coins, many different tokens, different networks.
• 34:30
  Bam Azizi: How would you see that uh user experience evolve uh as we're seeing this competition heating up?
• 34:38
  Henri Stern: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 34:40
  Henri Stern: I am well I'm very happy that you named the a number of Purbi customers as part of that that wind up.
• 34:45
  Henri Stern: So we're very excited to see all the work that's happening there.
• 34:48
  Henri Stern: And frankly, I think uh we're headed towards very, very bright future for the end user and for the consumer for having so much option.
• 34:54
  Henri Stern: I think what's happening is uh the competition in the space is going to give rise to uh both incredible like fintech super apps that are able to do what hasn't been seen in the West all that much in really exciting ways, and like pretty incredible specialization, especially as you know, you can kind of get software on tap these days with AI.
• 35:14
  Henri Stern: Uh now, I I think there's a lot of caveats here around the security of the systems that you're building and so on.
• 35:19
  Henri Stern: But the point is um it'll mean that you can get really the right product for you in a way that wouldn't have been possible before.
• 35:25
  Henri Stern: So a lot easier to build really good fintech experiences on secure Rails if as we move forward.
• 35:31
  Henri Stern: Um you're right that there's increased fragmentation, but I actually think that what we're seeing is a move towards a lot of these traditionally non-crypto companies to pick a stack and kind of stick to it.
• 35:43
  Henri Stern: And so what I think we're gonna see is an evolution of the underlying infrastructure to marry and kind of bridge these uh these different infrastructure choices together.
• 35:53
  Henri Stern: So, for example, I'm friends with uh uh Sam Broner, who started the new money company.
• 35:57
  Henri Stern: They're building a stablecoin uh clearinghouse.
• 35:59
  Henri Stern: And I think you'll start to see the emergence of, you know, this is what Bridge does in many ways with orchestration.
• 36:04
  Henri Stern: Um, this is what you guys do with with payments acceptance as does as does Stripe.
• 36:08
  Henri Stern: And and this is part of the point of preview with wallets and being able to do it cross-chain.
• 36:11
  Henri Stern: We'll see infrastructure that basically allows uh the stack and the fragmentation to get married and whittled down so it doesn't impact the end user, and the user will kind of see actually the disappearance of all of these knobs and settings, even though the developer has access to them.
• 36:26
  Bam Azizi: You think wallet would disappear, like in the sense that we know wallets?
• 36:31
  Henri Stern: Uh yes and no.
• 36:32
  Henri Stern: I think I think wallet in the sense that, well, actually.
• 36:35
  Henri Stern: Yes, no, and no.
• 36:38
  Henri Stern: I'll give you three responses.
• 36:39
  Henri Stern: I think wallets in I I think that I think wallets in the MetaMask Phantom Rainbow sense of the word uh is a really unique product shape that's uniquely well suited to a number of extremely important customers.
• 36:54
  Henri Stern: And I don't think that's going away anytime.
• 36:56
  Henri Stern: Uh, and so I think that'll remain.
• 36:58
  Henri Stern: However, I think we'll see massive expansion of the market through wallets that live within products.
• 37:03
  Henri Stern: And obviously, I have a stake in this game, but I uh I I think embedded wallets basically are going to continue to grow.
• 37:08
  Henri Stern: And in that sense, I think more people, and we're already seeing this, will use stable coins than they know.
• 37:16
  Henri Stern: And um they'll be able to uh uh use it as part of this wallet construct that goes far beyond a typical crypto wallet without um without having to know about it.
• 37:32
  Henri Stern: So I think I think basically actually there will be more things that kind of look like what we see crypto wallets as out in the world, but they won't look like the crypto wallets of today.
• 37:40
  Henri Stern: Well, at sessions last week, uh we unveiled um this thing called digital asset accounts.
• 37:45
  Henri Stern: And basically, digital asset accounts is something that we've been building for a while at Privy, and this is a higher level abstraction on top of wallets where you can have wallets that are multi-chain, that have multiple custody types, so they can be self-custodial and they can have a custodian under hood across the different chains that you're operating on, that can plug directly into orchestration rails, that can plug directly into bridging and swapping and earn and yield and so on and so forth.
• 38:08
  Henri Stern: And so, like all of these things will be packaged together so that this wallet becomes much more powerful than it used to be, but it remains a modular piece of infrastructure where you can plug the components that you want into it.
• 38:20
  Bam Azizi: That's awesome.
• 38:21
  Bam Azizi: Um super excited to put my hands on it and test it and and use it as part of the mesh stack.
• 38:29
  Bam Azizi: Um so um on the on the on the founding journey side, you're just kind of wrapping up the conversation.
• 38:37
  Bam Azizi: I would like to know, like, is there anything that you wish you knew when you started preview that you would tell your the younger version of yourself?
• 38:46
  Henri Stern: I don't know.
• 38:47
  Henri Stern: I uh I think the journey, the journey is is is is a lot of it.
• 38:50
  Henri Stern: I I I think maybe I have three things, which is this is probably more applicable to my my 22-year-old self and the first time I I started something, and that is like get very good at triaging the areas you need to improve versus the areas you need to just find people who are better than you.
• 39:12
  Henri Stern: I think earlier on in my career, I was really trying to push myself to be better at all the things I was really bad at, and there were many.
• 39:20
  Henri Stern: And I kind of just got to the conclusion, man, this is a complete waste of time.
• 39:24
  Henri Stern: Like I will never be as good as you know, BAM on this specific thing.
• 39:27
  Henri Stern: And so I just need to work with BAM rather than trying to like get there.
• 39:31
  Henri Stern: And I think I got a lot more comfortable with these are my deficiencies, and I can know them and I can buttress them and I can build a team, hopefully, that will enable us to win together rather than treating like you know a startup kind of like a prolonged like therapy session where I'm trying to be a better version of myself, which isn't the point at all.
• 39:48
  Henri Stern: Um, so that's probably one uh that that that I think you know it took me a decade to internalize, but I've gotten better at.
• 39:54
  Henri Stern: Um easier said than done for sure.
• 39:58
  Henri Stern: And then I think the second is some version of um we treated privy like life or death at all times.
• 40:09
  Henri Stern: And I don't regret doing that.
• 40:11
  Henri Stern: I think we have been, you know, really working like the entire company depends on it.
• 40:17
  Henri Stern: And that's because it does.
• 40:19
  Henri Stern: If we're not here to create value and impact every minute of every day, then there are much easier jobs that we could have and much easier ways to do things.
• 40:27
  Henri Stern: And um, I think that intensity that that Asta and I and and the team brought uh has been such a defining part of how we work and the way in which we do.
• 40:37
  Henri Stern: And so I'm I'm really happy that this is how we do things.
• 40:40
  Henri Stern: And I think there have been moments where uh I've heard that it was not sustainable and not how we should be doing things, and I uh I respectfully disagree.
• 40:49
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, makes sense.
• 40:50
  Bam Azizi: But these are these are great things that I'm sure a lot of uh younger founders and first time founders would would learn a lot from.
• 40:57
  Bam Azizi: So thanks for sharing that.
• 40:59
  Bam Azizi: As a as a closing question, uh I have two questions.
• 41:03
  Bam Azizi: Uh one is like bigger question, one is a smaller question.
• 41:06
  Bam Azizi: The bigger question is um what where the industry is headed, what's your per prediction, what's your contrarian view of the market?
• 41:15
  Bam Azizi: What's something that you you're the only one saying it's going to be true, that everybody else is saying it's not going to be true?
• 41:22
  Bam Azizi: Um yeah, any anything that comes to mind from prediction perspective?
• 41:27
  Henri Stern: So the big I have two.
• 41:28
  Henri Stern: I have two hot takes.
• 41:29
  Henri Stern: Um the big debate I think I think I think crypto is going to usher in a world of global companies in a way that we haven't seen before.
• 41:39
  Henri Stern: I think uh it'll it'll end up marrying with everything that's happening on the agentic side, though.
• 41:44
  Henri Stern: That may take longer than people think.
• 41:46
  Henri Stern: Um but the two contrary intakes, one might be I believe crypto rails will start to peak, meaning uh not not peak P E A K, but P-E-E-K.
• 41:57
  Henri Stern: They will start to show through the interfaces a bit more.
• 42:00
  Henri Stern: As we get comfortable with the medium, there are parts where you will start to see the underlying sort of rails.
• 42:06
  Henri Stern: Like I went to uh Kenya last last um um December and uh I saw uh the tether logo, the USDT, on a on an airport billboard.
• 42:16
  Henri Stern: And I just think there will start to be not just consumer uh recognition for certain stable coins, but actually uh there are parts of, you know, you don't think about TCP IP when you're using the internet, but the word buffer is kind of part of the vernacular.
• 42:31
  Henri Stern: And so I actually think we'll start to see some of the underlying uh technicals peek through in a way that's that's natural to users because the Rails make a lot of sense.
• 42:39
  Henri Stern: Um so that's my my first contrarian take.
• 42:41
  Henri Stern: It's a debate I have very often with people at Stripe.
• 42:44
  Henri Stern: Um and then I think uh the the second is that I I I hold out hope that uh Web3 uh will rise again and that there are uh non-financial applications for crypto, even though um it'll take a very long time for them to develop.
• 43:00
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, I I totally understand.
• 43:02
  Bam Azizi: My my second question is uh AI.
• 43:05
  Bam Azizi: Um how does how did AI change preview?
• 43:08
  Bam Azizi: How did AI change you?
• 43:11
  Henri Stern: It's a great question.
• 43:12
  Henri Stern: I mean, we're extremely careful with our uptake of AI in a way that we should probably be embarrassed about, but the reality is we build security software.
• 43:20
  Henri Stern: And so uh we've been very early and hungry adopters of uh AI defensive software, you know, integrated, always on pen testing, uh a number of suites that we integrate into our CI CD uh pipeline and so on and so forth.
• 43:39
  Henri Stern: But we've been a bit slower maybe than we ought to uh in developing basically uh AI code generation because of uh the way in which our stack works and is meant to work.
• 43:52
  Henri Stern: Um but it has certainly changed, I think, some of the development practices at Privy and the way in which we interact with our own product.
• 43:59
  Henri Stern: It's changed.
• 43:59
  Henri Stern: Changed a product itself.
• 44:01
  Henri Stern: Like at this point, we monitor every piece of documentation, every product surface to make sure that it's agent-friendly, that it can be consumed in the way that developers tomorrow and today are building, which is to say, not reading the docs, but feeding them through uh another intelligent uh being and asking it to whip something up.
• 44:18
  Henri Stern: Um, so it's changed our product expectations and our product sense and our product milestones really meaningfully.
• 44:24
  Henri Stern: Um and then I think it's forced us to think about testing differently.
• 44:28
  Henri Stern: Like the reality is subcent transactions become really important in an agentic world.
• 44:33
  Henri Stern: Uh, you know, uh hundreds of thousands, millions uh of transactions a minute become something viable if you're imagining some version of streaming payments on uh machine-to-machine world.
• 44:43
  Henri Stern: And so we've actually been very hungry adopters of the early tooling, like you know, MPP and X402 and so on, because we think it can really push our product to be much better, very much in the same way as you know, the very crypto native parts of the industry help us scale the product for everyone else.
• 45:01
  Henri Stern: Um so that's been a a huge change for us, and and I'm excited to see uh it keep happening.
• 45:07
  Henri Stern: In fact, I think at this point, something like 35% of new signups for Privy as developers are people building agentic wallets.
• 45:13
  Henri Stern: So we're we're just seeing a a lot uh of acceleration there.
• 45:17
  Bam Azizi: That's huge.
• 45:17
  Bam Azizi: Um so uh some quick random questions.
• 45:22
  Bam Azizi: Actually, one.
• 45:23
  Bam Azizi: What is a good restaurant that you're a big fan of in Paris and in New York?
• 45:28
  Henri Stern: Oh man.
• 45:29
  Bam Azizi: It better be vegetarian because I want to try it.
• 45:33
  Henri Stern: Tough.
• 45:33
  Henri Stern: Um actually I do have good ones.
• 45:39
  Henri Stern: Uh they're they're they're uh man, this is they're both extremely bougie uh references, so I'm I'm so sorry in advance.
• 45:44
  Henri Stern: Um there's a very good restaurant in Paris.
• 45:47
  Henri Stern: Uh at the corner, I I forget which uh which street, but I think it's Rite Verneille and something else called uh L'Arpège, A-R-P-E-G-E.
• 45:56
  Henri Stern: It's uh I think three Michelin star restaurant, which is what I said.
• 45:58
  Bam Azizi: I went there, I tried that.
• 46:00
  Henri Stern: I confirmed it's very good.
• 46:01
  Henri Stern: Amazing.
• 46:02
  Henri Stern: And the chef Alain Passar will come out and kind of like greet all the tables, and he's this extremely like charismatic guy uh who who tends to hit on the ladies at the table, and so like a very fun experience uh of just like being around this this this long life.
• 46:16
  Bam Azizi: They're vegetarian, right?
• 46:17
  Bam Azizi: Or pescatarian type of restaurant, they do fish.
• 46:19
  Henri Stern: They they do fish, and now they've reintroduced meat, but for a long time they were only vegetarian.
• 46:24
  Henri Stern: Um and then in New York, um I actually think ABCV uh on 19th and Broadway or so is a very good vegan restaurant.
• 46:35
  Henri Stern: Um that that that that makes some some some very good food.
• 46:38
  Bam Azizi: That's great.
• 46:38
  Bam Azizi: Uh for a French person, you know a lot of vegan restaurants, so that's very good.
• 46:42
  Bam Azizi: I I I I I you know don't twist my arm.
• 46:46
  Bam Azizi: Henry, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
• 46:50
  Bam Azizi: I know you're very, very busy uh to our audience.
• 46:54
  Bam Azizi: Please remember to follow the show and whatever platform you're listening on and stay tuned for more episodes of COBIT.
• 47:00
  Bam Azizi: Thank you very much.
• 47:01
  Bam Azizi: Thanks so much.