>> 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.