Bridge Founder on Their $1.1B Stripe Acquisition | Zach Abrams
Episode publishedPodcast: EmpireEmpire
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Yeah. Very excited to be here. Thank you for thank you for having me. Yeah.
You got the you got the champagne right next to you. You like so for context, folks, Zac just sold, the business. I I don't know if it's fully the acquisition's fully done yet, but, Bridge sold to Stripe, and we want to have Zach on. It's the first time that he's really gone on the podcast, talked about the acquisition. So we'll start this off talking about the acquisition, zoom out, talk about future of stablecoins, and the future of money on chain. So, Zach, I mean, let's just start with the big question on my mind and probably everyone's mind. Like, tell us the tell us how this acquisition
Oh, man. It's a good it's a good question. I mean, we, I I think probably, like, the the the truth is that it's, like, pretty boring and that, it started when we launched our APIs a couple months ago and spent or or 18 months ago. And, over that time, we just had a ton of folks build, like, core payments use cases, using Stablecoins. We had, you know, big global companies use Stablecoins to manage their treasury. We have Fintechs use Stablecoins to to to build neo banking experiences. We have, you know, businesses use Stablecoins to do cross border payments. And, through that, we kinda showed,
Let's talk about let I mean, I'm gonna push you to go deeper on this deal. So you so you you hit up Stripe, and, I mean, I'm assuming on your end, you're like, they're they're a dream client. So you start reaching out to them. Did you originally reach out about an acquisition? Did you originally reach out about a deal, a partnership?
I mean, we we started building a relationship with the with folks on the Stripe team, a while ago. I mean, Stripe has has sort of been making a a push into payments. They built their on ramp product. They built, and most recently, maybe, like, at the last Stripe Sessions, they launched the pay with crypto product. And so, you know, John Collison got on stage and talked a bit about the importance of that product for their, for their customers and and and the excitement that they had internally to launch that product. So there is increased effort for them to build using blockchains and, see what
what does that actually look like? This kind of okay. So the reason I'm gonna push you on a lot of these questions is because, I, you know, called some friends at Stripe and at Sequoia before before the podcast, and they said, Zach is it was the
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