EILEEN O’MARA: Hello and welcome. Welcome to the Enterprise Panel. So, at Stripe, we’ve been helping enterprises really to focus and drive impactful change, and really try and leverage the technology to modernize legacy infrastructure and launch entirely new businesses or transform existing businesses. I’m thrilled that we have an opportunity to share some of the stories from some great and amazing enterprise companies. So, over the next 30 minutes, we’ll hear their stories, some of the challenges and opportunities that they’ve faced, and how they’ve leveraged obviously technology, and Stripe, I hope, specifically, to tell and evolve their companies.

So, please join me in welcoming our panelists.

Excellent.

So, Doug Warner joins us as head of business innovation at AWS. I am delighted that Emily Haddrell has flown in from the UK, the digital product lead with River Island. Takao Chitose is the VP of business development of ANA Group and joins us from Tokyo. And then finally, Amit Sagiv has joined us from Tel Aviv as the co-head of payments from Wix.

So, welcome, everyone. Excellent. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for being with Stripe.

Why don’t we get started and just maybe hear from each of you, what you’re doing, what your organization is about. Obviously, Amazon, we all know, but Doug—

DOUG WARNER: Sure.

EILEEN O’MARA: Tell us about your role and what you’re doing at Amazon.

DOUG WARNER: Yeah. First, thanks for having us. So, my name’s Doug Warner and I lead Innovation Programs for AWS for all of our customers in the Western United States, bringing Amazon’s innovation offerings and mechanisms to help our customers do new things in interesting ways.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Sounds like a really cool job. Emily?

EMILY HADDRELL: So, I’m Emily Haddrell. I work for River Island. For those of you that don’t know, that’s a UK fashion retailer. We’ve been around for around 60 years, and we’re quite iconic in the British Highstreet. So, I’m a product manager at River Island, and I look after our payment strategy as well as our checkout strategy and also our app.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Takao?

TAKAO CHITOSE: Yeah. My name is Takao. Coming from All Nippon Airways Company. And I work for the business development outside of the ANA business.

EILEEN O’MARA: Finally, Amit.

AMIT SAGIV: Hi. Thank you very much for having us. It’s wonderful being here. I co-head payments in fintech at Wix. We’re a global company where anybody can build their online presence, bring their dream online, and basically create a bridge for people to interact in a digital way with whatever their dreams that they want to build, across multi-geographies and a lot of industries. And specifically, the company that I co-lead is removing all the friction in the financial management aspect of those businesses, from payments all the way to managing your funds.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Well, great to have you all here. So, one of the things we often hear is that it’s really easy to innovate and move very quickly when you’re a small company. Agility is like, it’s embedded into the DNA of the organization. Not so easy when you’re growing at scale and you’re a large enterprise. So, maybe, Doug, I’ll start with you. Any stories for us that you can share and like how you’ve done that successfully and what you’ve seen?

DOUG WARNER: Sure. So, we think of ourselves at Amazon as being a bit peculiar as a company in the sense that we’ve actually structured the company through AWS, through all the teams, for innovation. And we do that in a couple of different ways. We structure the culture for innovation, meaning we hire builders with a builder mentality, with a bias for action and ownership. So, we like people who are scrappy, willing, and able to try new things without asking permission. We give them mechanisms. Example I’ll give you in a second, we talk about two pizza teams. We say that a team is too large at Amazon if it can’t be fed by two pizzas. And essentially, we free up those teams with do-it-yourself tools to go at it and build new things. And we actually don’t use PowerPoint presentations and go through review processes with those at Amazon. We write documents, one of which we call a PRFAQ or a press release frequently asked questions where we ask people to imagine if this were available and someone who knew nothing about it were to read it, what would it say and what would it look like? And through those different mechanisms, we enable teams to do different things.

So, I’ll give you a couple of really specific examples, bring it to life, one with Amazon and one with AWS.

Back in the Amazon period, early days of AWS, folks were working on the Fire phone, which was not successful, and we didn’t punish the failure. Many of the learnings from that actually turned into the capabilities for Alexa today. And we took the learnings from that and we structured innovation programs to bring to customers, some of which we may touch on here later.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. While I think many of us, including Stripe, have taken some of the best mechanisms out of AWS and Amazon to scale our companies, Amit, Wix, you’ve been growing at scale. Like, how do you deal with that as you’ve grown, like, staying agile, staying innovative, but obviously being at an enterprise grade now?

AMIT SAGIV: I think one thing is at the core of all of our innovation and that is the customer. I think COVID, that we’ve all just been through in the last couple of years, has been a significant accelerator in innovation. The customer needs continuously adapted and changed because we were all in these uncertain times. And as an organization, you have to adapt that mindset where you go and test things, where you go and listen to your customers, deeply understand their problems, and how you can remove the friction that the environment is giving them.

So, if you imagine restaurants needing to do curbside pickups or events that moved online and we integrated with all the video platforms, because basically, the SMB did not stop evolving. They needed to adapt, and that is maybe the biggest catalyst for change and innovation, where you listen to a real problem and you care about it in a deep fashion. That way your team, your people that think with you, you’re all aligned towards the same place.

So, listening to the customer is kind of where we are when we look at innovation first.

EILEEN O’MARA: That’s great. It makes a lot of sense. I think both of your kind of answers talk to the culture within an organization and a company, so maybe, Emily, it would be great to hear from you because you’re growing at scale, and River Island is an amazing brand. If anybody doesn’t know it, you should go online and buy some of the stuff; it’s fabulous. But growing at scale, one of the things we think about a lot at Stripe is how do you keep that culture intact? What’s your experience in River Island, and what do you do about it?

EMILY HADDRELL: Yeah, that’s a really great question. So, River Island is actually a family-run organization, which I don’t think is kind of known to many. And that word, family, is really important to this. So, it’s something that we live and breathe from the moment you interact with us, whether you’re a partner or an employee. It’s something that you can kind of really feel exists within our DNA.

And how that kind of manifests in our teams is that we really encourage people to challenge, be curious, and raise new ideas. We think of ourselves as kind of innovators, and we like to surround ourselves with people who have a growth mindset.

We, we talk about it simply kind of every day, really regularly, even in our onboarding program. Our kind of team of chief executives join without fail, and they will talk directly to that, that we want people to kind of be curious and raise their ideas and challenge the status quo. So, yeah. It’s something we live and breathe on a daily basis.

EILEEN O’MARA: It resonates with us. One of our operating principles on how we expect people to show up in Stripe is curiously, so—and I think it’s actually probably on the operating principles of many companies.

Takao, how are you thinking about that? Obviously, you’re operating out of a different region as well. What are you doing in terms of scaling your culture and the company effectively?

TAKAO CHITOSE: As our culture thinking, workers—my company culture is kind of optimistic because they believe that the future is very bright. So, they are willing to change something or try something new. However, the social revenue of our business is mostly coming from air transportation, so customers expect us as the safety is the most important thing for us. So, the customer does not want to change things rapidly, quickly. So, we need to keep the balance that kind of, you know, motivation to change or drive something new but also answer to the customer expectation. That kind of, you know, difficult challenge for us.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Love that. Talent has been a topic, I think, of most—top of mind for a lot of companies for a long time. A war on talent, acquiring talent, but obviously also getting the most out of talent and keeping them. Amit, I might go back to you and just, I would love to understand, like, in a large enterprise, how do you maintain kind of that talent bar and keep people really engaged and motivated to do their best work ever? Of course, different economic climates have different challenges, but I am curious to hear what you’re doing with talent and how you’re thinking about that.

AMIT SAGIV: So, first of all, this is the most important thing that you do is hire and cultivate your talent, the most important thing. Maybe second to listening to your customer, but then you need the right people to follow up on it.

So, I am very privileged to work with the best team ever, we call it. This is how we speak to one another. And we understand that we want to hire top players that fit our culture. You basically add pieces to your puzzle that extend the boundaries of the puzzle you had before. So, it’s really important to not only have the right talent but to give them the stage to do what you wanted them and what you hired them to do. So, giving them decision responsibilities, giving them the understanding and the backing from all across their team that you trust them and that they have space to think for themselves. And sometimes it’s very easy to say and very hard to follow. But if you follow it in a religious kind of way as we do, and you understand that you bring the best players to the table and then you let them perform at the highest level, you’re always going to have ROI positive because the people that you have on your team are the best investment, better than any technology or any trend. You just invest into your people, and you will see tremendous ROI.

And it’s proven to be correct at every moment in time, and it’s hard because the market is changing and people are expecting different things, but everybody wants to be seen and heard for their professional skills, and if you give them that stage, everything else follows.

EILEEN O’MARA: What I’m hearing is though, you have to be very intentional about this. It’s just not going to happen, which I think is a great point.

Maybe to build on that, Doug, we spoke before, and we were talking about like when you think about talent and obviously really creating an environment for people to do great work, you also have to balance that with like what are the smart risk-taking decisions, and how do you encourage people to continue obviously to operate in that kind of environment and culture? That can be a little bit trickier when the economy might not be in a high-growth mode as we might have today. What are you doing in AWS about this, or how are you thinking about it?

DOUG WARNER: Sure. So, you know, everything at Amazon in general and at AWS really starts with the customer, and we work backwards from that. So, we call it being customer obsessed. It’s one of our leadership principles. And we, no matter what the economic situation or the market situation in terms of talent, we really start with the customer.

And so, we look for intelligent risk-taking and decision-making, sort of paraphrasing Jeff Bezos, our founder, once upon a time, if you’re not failing, you’re probably not trying hard enough. So, we generally don’t punish failure. We look for lessons learned and iterative improvement on those things to make a benefit for the customer overall. And we give our employees the latitude to drive what’s best for the customer in doing that and we get behind them and we enable them to do it.

So, for those who are looking for that kind of freedom, if you will, to focus on what matters, they tend to be attracted to our environment.

EILEEN O’MARA: And oftentimes, like, I admire Amazon and AWS so much, and I was like, god, was it built like that from day one? I assume not, and this has evolved as you’ve scaled into like this huge enterprise.

DOUG WARNER: Sure. It’s funny you say that because we have a term at Amazon called “day-one culture.” It’s in a lot of our material. Which essentially means we drive to behave and act every day as if every day is our first day. Meaning we focus on the things that really matter, we make decisions as quickly as we can, with 70% of the information, not 90% or 100%. And that gives us the latitude to actually make mistakes but move very quickly.

So, it has been there since the beginning, and by combining that with the idea I shared earlier of two-pizza team size, we still enable many, many small pockets to act as if they are relatively in startup fashion.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Okay. So, it’s like a living, breathing organism within the company that’s always improving.

DOUG WARNER: Exactly.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Okay. Okay. We’re going to have to talk about technology. Obviously, we’re very thankful that obviously you’re all users of Stripe, but of course, in terms of the payment landscape but maybe more broadly in terms of technology kind of trends, Emily, I will go to you, like, what are you interested in specifically now, and like where are you innovating both in payments, whether it’s BNPL, or like Tap to Pay? Just give us some insights on what you’re thinking about.

EMILY HADDRELL: Yeah, sure. I think, look, for me, buy now, pay later products are ubiquitous now. They’ve kind of—they’ve been around a good five years and we know—in fact, we did some research at River Island earlier in the year when we were building out our checkout strategy for this year, that they are the expectation of our users now.

So, we’ve seen that they’ve kind of proven themselves, they’ve got higher AOVs, lower return rates if you choose the right product, but interestingly, at River, we’re seeing that they also come with a higher frequency and loyalty and that results in affinity to the brand. So, I think that they’re a great product and, like I said, are table stakes now.

So, I guess what’s next, I’m really interested and exciting—excited to learn more about Apple Pay’s kind of entry into the buy now, pay later space. So, that’s something I’ll be following really closely. Earlier in the year, when we partnered with Stripe, we extended our Apple Pay offerings. Originally, we offered Apple Pay only on our app, but we kind of moved that into our web, we instantly saw that Apple Pay took a great share of checkout, and we instantly saw that it had kind of a plus-four-percentage-point increase in auth rate versus card.

So, for obvious reasons, I’m excited to see how well Apple Pay land and buy now, pay later over here in the US, and it will be something we consider for our roadmap for River if it proves successful.

EILEEN O’MARA: Excellent. Great. Thank you. Amit, like, Wix are operating globally. You have plenty of challenges and opportunities with, you know, new methods of payments and new technologies. What’s—how do you really focus, I suppose, and make prioritized decisions on how you leverage some of these new trends and technologies and payment methods in your business?

AMIT SAGIV: So, first of all, we don’t optimize for the technology. The technology is a tool to solve the big problems, and as technology evolves and we can harness more tools, we can solve more real-life problems. So, if you take Tap to Pay that you mentioned before, if you’d imagine the barrier today from going online then to the physical world, it’s a big undertaking for many small merchants. But at the same time, their intent and their use case is quite simple. But we have to put them through this entire ordeal of going to a portal and a POS and all these complexities. But giving them that ability to test the market, test their idea, go with something simple, and still hyper localized, that tailors to their users’ needs, is where the technology really serves you.

So, what we try to do and assess is really the use cases, the real problems that we’re coming to solve, and where did they originate from. So, when you understand that deeply, then you have a whole pallet of technologies you can apply.

Sometimes you follow the trend because it’s quite clear that as BNPL is entering the world, more people can afford more things and then pay as they go with their own kind of financial management in their life. But at the same time, you’re looking at new technologies all the time and you’re trying to understand maybe, I have big problems that usually it took me 10, 20 people to solve, and now I can automate or put some really smart technology piece into that flow that just removes the friction and allows a more organic use, especially when it comes to payments. It daunts people when you speak to the merchant. They just want to sell shoes. This is what they are specialized in. They love that area. And when you come to them and you explain to them that there is a KYC or chargebacks, and for them, it’s a space of knowledge that they have very little prior knowledge on and they really want to focus on what they do best, which is to sell the shoes.

So, this is where we take technology and help those merchants, small, big, it doesn’t really matter. They all want to avoid that friction. So, this is where we take that heavy lifting, remove a lot of those old-world barriers, and basically open up to all this revolution that we’re seeing of creators, of people pursuing their dreams, and then scaling those dreams into huge franchises. I think Stripe has many of them on the platform, and it’s a real joy to see it happen.

EILEEN O’MARA: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. So, very customer-centric, user-centric view and extract all the complexity for them, which makes total sense.

So, beyond payments, Takao, like AI is such a huge topic. I don’t think I can—like, everybody we speak to is either—has a plan or is devising a plan on how they can leverage AI to like benefit their business and their users. Can you share what— I know you’re doing some cool things. Can you share?

TAKAO CHITOSE: Yeah, because one of my businesses, which is called ANA Pocket, it’s a kind of mobile application service, similar to like real-world applications. So, even if people don’t travel with the airline, just having this application, they can deserve about 400 or 500 miles per month. On the other hand, we can get their—you know, they do their moving data.

So, we have approximately one million users at this point. So, we can acquire the millions of data, moving data every day into AWS. So, once we gather these huge data with AI, I think we can design a more, you know, good customer experience.

Actually, we are using the—we are segmenting these users into the 160 different categories of, you know, the types of behavior, right? So, we are giving each different tag into our users. So, we can offer each individual a more better experience. When they go to somewhere else, we can offer some, you know, the coupon or a recommendation, some sort of restaurant or shopping, that kind of thing. So, just gathering data, and with AI, using the AI power, we can design more better customer experience.

I think the AI really helps us to drive these kinds of new types of business.

EILEEN O’MARA: That’s great. Anybody else want to share what you’re doing in the world of AI? Emily, you guys are up to something interesting?

EMILY HADDRELL: I mean, we’re really excited. Obviously, it’s a hot topic at the moment with ChatGPT, and we’re curious folks. So, I mean, just from a cultural perspective, again, we’re having a play. We’ve got it writing product requirements and doing some research and writing product descriptions for our website.

We’re really focused on data also. We’re quite good, and we’re in the final throes of landing kind of a new data platform, and that’s going to enable that single view across platform, across channel for us. And we’re great at making decisions based on data in our organization, but it’s very prescriptive. So, we’ve got a vision that we will use, kind of AI to complement our platform and become more predictive.

Especially as we head into a really challenging economy this year, we think that that’s kind of going to be a game changer for us in helping us make the right decisions based on predictive analytics rather than prescriptive.

EILEEN O’MARA: That’s great. Speaking of like investment decisions, maybe over to you, Doug. Like AI and technology in general obviously, it’s generally an investment decision that you make—

DOUG WARNER: Sure.

EILEEN O’MARA: Inside a company. And like, how are you going to leverage that investment to scale the business? How do you do that in Amazon AWS? What’s your approach?

DOUG WARNER: Yeah. So, we use really two fundamental approaches for what I’ll call non-world–changing investment decisions. We build 90% of the things we build based on what we hear from customers directly. The other 10% are insights gleaned from working with customers.

For the really big decisions, we use a four-question approach that our CEO, Andy Jassy, shared in a recent annual shareholder letter. We ask these four questions: Is the market really big if we’re successful? Is it a need that is not being met for the customers out there? Do we have a differentiated approach we can bring to bear? And do we have capabilities and competency? If we don’t have competency, can we quickly acquire it?

If the answer to those four questions is yes, then we often make the decision to go ahead and invest, and that’s why you’ve seen Amazon move into many different kinds of areas previously it hasn’t been in before.

EILEEN O’MARA: Very interesting. I would say I’m not the only one that’s curious. It’s like, how big does a market segment need to be in order to make that decision? Or does that depend on a different set of criteria?

DOUG WARNER: I think that depends on the scale or the group asking the question and how broad it’s going. Obviously, the senior leadership team for something really large, and for the respective teams serving a customer base if it’s smaller.

EILEEN O’MARA: Interesting. In terms of like using technology to drive innovative change, like, we’ve all known those projects in large enterprises that have gone extremely well, but also that have like not. I think this is often, you know, one of the feedbacks we hear. It’s like, it’s hard to land an implementation and a change using technology in a larger organization.

Amit, I know you have some experience in this. Like, what’s worked really well when you’ve done that, or not, as the case might be?

AMIT SAGIV: So, I think from a long-term perspective, we took a very big decision within Wix to start our own payment solution and not just be a gate to others. This was started before I even joined Wix, and I was really lucky to have the right team to scale it. And it’s constant risk-taking and constant evaluation of can you really give better user experience? Can you really be the platform that gives the cohesive experience that brings something which is kind of a commodity, payments—everybody pays everybody. How can you make it any different? But when you—but when you take the risk on yourself, and then you take all the data points of all your users and you make your own assessments and you look at the picture as a whole, you can really differentiate the experience. And that is kind of the risk but also the reward that we were pursuing. Can we give a better user experience by leveraging everything that we know about a user? Can we be significantly different than regular payment institutions that they only know your financial interactions with them or maybe a few data points that they will ask you to provide?

For Wix, it’s very natural. We look at the user from the origination moment, from the very first intent where they look up the URL or the business line, and they add their first service or product or picture into the website. So, they are constantly building this dream that they have, and you see the dialogue as you track the log of the creation of the business. This really allows you to have a—both an in-depth but also a very wide peripheral vision of will they make it, how can I help them to succeed? And then you can tailor your experience to really facilitate their needs and not what you think they need. You know, that real following up the user to see how he hit walls and then removing those walls.

We have done that with Stripe recently in the US, which was a wonderful endeavor on both sides, reflecting really where the user is, and you look through the numbers, you look at the conversion, you look at the optimization that you want to do, and if you’re very honest with yourself and your partners, like Stripe, you can put your heads together and understand, okay, there is a barrier here, and this barrier is not technology—not only technology. It is mostly about the way we look at what our users should do or shouldn’t do and how comfortable we are with managing that risk.

So, the more you know about your user, and the more you are feeling free to assume risk and analyze it in an honest way, the more you can provide to your user something really seamless that allows them to scale where they want to be.

So, that is kind of a win and lose, constant battle, because you try something out and then you have a 10% drop and you are faced with that 10% drop and you understand that that’s a business killer. But at the same time, that’s an opportunity because you have a benchmark now and you know what you need to improve from.

EILEEN O’MARA: Yeah, interesting. We ran into time challenges because we had to squeeze to 30 minutes, so I will close us off. But I think it’s been so refreshing to hear different industries, different parts of the world. Certainly, one of the things that I’ve taken from this is your passion for customer-centric approaches and solving problems on behalf of users. Not that dissimilar from the startup conversations we have, right, the way up to huge companies like yourselves.

So, on behalf of myself, on Stripe, and of course, everybody who joined us, I want to extend a big thank you to you all, to Amit, Takao, Emily, and Doug. Thank you for joining us. And folks, I hope you have a great day with us here at Sessions. Thanks, all.