Henri Stern
Henri Stern is the co-founder and CEO of Privy, a developer-focused authentication and embedded wallet platform that enables applications to integrate crypto functionality without requiring end users to have prior blockchain experience. Privy's SDK allows developers to provision embedded wallets tied to familiar credentials such as email, phone, or social login, bringing mainstream UX standards to Web3 products. Before founding Privy, Stern was a research scientist at Protocol Labs, where he worked on Filecoin under Juan Benet and studied cryptography under Dan Boneh at Stanford. Privy, which was backed by Sequoia Capital and had over 100 million accounts deployed across more than 1,500 customers, was acquired by Stripe.
“Stripe being a private company and having very strong-willed founders is a lot of that.”
Source→“Privy identified three distinct market segments early and made a deliberate strategic choice... now operating as an independent entity within Stripe.”
Source→“I really do credit Zach and Bridge for inventing a lot of how people think about stablecoins today and making fetch happen.”
Source→“Hyperliquid's already a customer. I believe the trading stuff is working.”
Source→“We know that we can scale to hold any stablecoin-like thing because we've scaled to support Hyperliquid and Uniswap and Jupiter.”
Source→“Most of our customers are moving stablecoin volumes. They're fintechs. Again, they're folks like Ramp or Klarna or... these are very modern companies who are here for the user impact.”
Source→“We got very lucky because there's an application called Friend.tech that used us. And we were very clear that that used us, that blew up and then everybody started copying them. And so we went from our goal being 25 in Q3 to having about 150 developer teams building with us at the end of Q3.”
Source→“I went to see Roelof from Sequoia around the time we were raising a Series A right after we had raised it.”
Source→“He was like, you're talking to me about how far you've come and I don't give a shit. The only thing I care about is am I excited looking forward?”
Source→“I had this other conversation with Alfred Lin, who was talking about a company that was at $100 million run rate and had to decide whether they were going to destroy their business to start a new business.”
Source→“The unlock was saying developers can build with crypto without needing their users to be crypto people.”
Source→“I think Tempo was born... out of issues with chains that needed managing.”
Source→“I've spent more time than I care to think about talking to Patrick about the floral arrangements at Stripe offices and the smell of Stripe offices. Like, not actually a joke.”
Source→“There's a good Vitalik tweet, which was some version of what we thought was going to happen: crypto will become sane and start resembling normal markets. What actually happened? Normal markets look like crypto.”
Source→“This is why I'm, in many ways, a big Apple fanboy — sometimes things are just nice because they can be.”
Source→“I find, you know, just the entirety of say SpaceX as a company and the way they were operating — you're now going to risk the entire business to go after the next bigger, biggest thing.”
Source→“Tyler Cowen talking about how he's writing for the LLMs. And this whole thing is like, he wants the LLMs to know as much as possible about what he thought. So when he's gone... the LLMs know what I think about Iceland.”
Source→“I was listening to Kevin Kelly talk about having a belief in the future is really important for being able to move forward in the world.”
Source→“His name is Nathan Jurgensen. This guy used to write for Snapchat... they were basically like a philosopher in residence thinking about the impermanence of digital identity or the permanence of it.”
Source→“I just saw something from Brian Lovin about how you can basically get your entire Twitter graph downloaded into a Notion database, categorized, updating constantly.”
Source→“I took one class by a professor called Dan Boneh, who is a cryptography professor. And I was like, oh man, I just need to take all of his classes.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.