I'm getting pulled into more Fortune 500 meetings than we can staff, and we can't train partners fast enough. Ramp just put an outside number on it: 34% of their businesses now pay for Anthropic, up from 9% a year ago, #1. The segment they don't capture looks the same.

It’s happening…

Boom! Scientists Discovered a Hidden Superhighway Inside You That Might Finally Explain Why Acupuncture Actually Works! How tattooed skin biopsies proved something over 4,000 years old. Buckle up…research just dropped a bombshell that is rewriting the human anatomy textbook and high fiving ancient healers at the same time! Deep inside your body lies an enormous, previously overlooked network called the interstitium. It is a vast, fluid filled web that acts like a secret third circulatory system alongside your blood vessels and lymphatics. It is not just empty space between tissues. It is a dynamic, interconnected superhighway made of collagen bundles suspended in a shimmering hyaluronic acid gel that soaks up water and lets fluids, cells, and molecules flow slowly but surely throughout your entire body, from skin to muscles to organs and back again. For over a century, scientists saw these spaces as isolated little pockets. But groundbreaking work starting in 2018 by pathologists revealed the jaw dropping truth: it is one giant, continuous network. When researchers examined tattooed skin biopsies, the ink particles had boldly marched from the skin deep into the fascia below, traveling through the interstitium in ways that made scientists say, That was not supposed to happen! Here is where it gets truly electrifying. This hidden highway might finally give Western medicine the biological proof it has been craving for acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. For 4000 years, TCM has described chi flowing along 12 specific meridians. Acupuncture needles target precise points along those lines. Skeptics have long asked for hard science. Now they have it. Studies, including tracer injections and dye experiments in living volunteers, show that when you inject dye into an acupuncture point, it does not just sit there or race through veins. It flows exactly along the traditional meridian pathways through the interstitial spaces between muscles, heading straight toward the heart. The dye follows the interstitium like a GPS guided river. Rebecca Wells, one of the lead scientists, sums it up perfectly: “I actually do think that the interstitium could be the link between Eastern and Western medicine”. The implications are massive and mind blowing. Cancer cells may hitch rides on this network to metastasize. It could explain autoimmune flare ups where gut particles travel to distant organs. It might even unlock better treatments for Type 2 diabetes by revealing how interstitial cells influence healthy fat production during weight gain. This is not just a cool anatomy fact. It is a paradigm shift that could reshape pain management, chronic disease treatment, and how we think about the body as a whole. Evolutionarily speaking, similar fluid systems appear in ancient creatures going back hundreds of millions of years. The interstitium is not new. It has been with us since the dawn of multicellular life. We are only now catching up. This discovery is pure science magic: ancient wisdom validated by cutting edge research, turning what looked like disconnected puzzle pieces into one breathtaking picture of how our bodies really work. When reading this, be sure to send condolences to the “debunkers” that stole this 4,000 year old empirical science from your health. They were wrong. Dive into the actual research papers: The groundbreaking discovery of the interstitium: nature.com/articles/s41598-0… The study on continuity of interstitial spaces across the body: nature.com/articles/s42003-0… Research visualizing fluorescent dye migration along acupuncture meridians: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article… Your body just got a whole lot more awesome. The future of medicine is flowing through the interstitium right now, and it is going to be legendary!

We just announced a large raft of improvements at @Stripe Sessions. My meta reflections: • It feels that the entire economy is replatforming right now. • Many charts at Stripe are inflecting in quite dramatic ways. What GitHub recently reported for commits we are seeing in economic activity (such as new company formations). • It is increasingly clear that agents will be responsible for most transactions in the not overly distant future. • Stripe was always developer-centric, but AI is making developer-centricity strategic in a new way: agents are even hungrier for good DX than developers themselves are. • Things that we’re launching are increasingly network products at heart. (Instant transfers between Stripe businesses, new kinds of fraud prevention with Stripe Radar, stablecoin payouts to anyone with Link.) "How can we turn Stripe's economies of scale into user benefits?" is increasingly the relevant question. • Between Privy, Bridge, Tempo, and Stripe’s core capabilities, we’re now doing a lot in stablecoins/crypto, and companies like DoorDash, Ramp, Meta, and Klarna are using our crypto stack to deploy meaningful new functionality in production. “But where’s the production use?” is rapidly becoming stale when applied to crypto. • After more than a decade of building, we seem to have hit some kind of critical mass of core platform capabilities such that building new things now feels easier and faster than before. (AI also helps.) We announced Stripe Treasury last year (originally called Financial Accounts); since then, we’ve added multi-currency support, global payouts, card issuance and rewards, and a bunch of other sophisticated functionality. By the end of this year, Treasury will support 15 more currencies and be available to businesses in 160 countries. On the launches themselves, a small selection that I thought were cool, though this is really just a subset: • The @Link AI wallet. Point your agent to github.com/stripe/link-cli and ask it to make purchases on your behalf with secure single-use tokens. (To test it, I asked Claude Code to buy a small gift for me yesterday. It purchased HTTPZine on Gumroad.) • New payment methods for Link, including Pix (largest payment method in Brazil) and UPI (largest payment method in India). We’re also adding stablecoin support to Link (which I think will be huge if we execute well). • We’re adding a lot of new Machine Payments Protocol functionality, including micropayment and recurring payment support. • We announced Checkout studio: a sophisticated dashboard for managing your checkout flow, including things like transaction replays and A/B tests. Today this tends to require a lot of fussy edits to production code. • Adaptive Pricing (which automatically localizes the price and currency that customers see) now supports subscriptions. We’ve seen pretty huge (4–5%) conversion rate improvements after enabling it — customers really like paying in their home currency. • New Stripe Terminal reader (the T600) with a customer-facing screen that can run native apps, plus support for 15 new international markets for Stripe Terminal. • General availability for Stripe Managed Payments, our merchant of record solution. (Natively handles tax, disputes, fraud.) Maybe sounds a bit arcane, but it’s one of those iykyk products. It saves a lot of schlep. • Fraud is a *much* bigger priority for customers than it was 2 years ago (AI makes fraud easier + unlike software, tokens can be resold), so we’ve been extending Stripe Radar to support things beyond payments fraud: free trial abuse, multi-account abuse, pay-as-you-go abuse. Early results are extremely positive. We also announced Stripe Signals — new scoring APIs for customers, businesses, and other objects, not just payments on and off Stripe. • Usage-based billing is also becoming the de facto business model of the AI era, and we launched a bunch of new pricing models in @getMetronome and features like low-balance alerts, automatic credit top-ups, and multidimensional pricing structures. • We showed streaming payments built on @Tempo and Metronome — track usage and get paid the instant value is delivered. Hard to predict, but I think this could be big. (Why wouldn’t you want to get paid as costs are incurred?) • We added automatic US tax filing in Stripe Tax. • We announced Stripe Database -- a hosted PostgreSQL database with all of your Stripe data, updated in real time. Read-only to start but we’ll make it read-write. • Stripe Workflows are now GA. • We showed Stripe Console, a full agentic execution environment built directly into the Stripe Dashboard. It’ll happily write code and use tools to answer your questions. • We previewed custom objects: model your business data directly in Stripe, with custom objects, typed fields, and relationships. • As mentioned above, Stripe Treasury accounts will support storage in 15 currencies by the end of the year. And instant/free(!) transfers between US Stripe businesses. • You can use a Stripe card with your Treasury balance and get 2% cash back on purchases. • We’re massively expanding our Global Payouts coverage -- soon 100 countries with fiat rails and 160 with stablecoins. • Atlas companies can now raise money directly within Stripe. • We launched the platform growth studio, which uses Stripe’s network data to generate specific recommendations for optimization/growth. • We announced the Stripe Managed Risk API — platforms can outsource risk handling to Stripe while maintaining full UI/UX control. • Connected accounts now benefit from networked onboarding, which hugely increases conversion rates. • We’re launching Treasury for Platforms. Connected accounts can get spend cards with just a few lines of code. (Plus cash rewards, cash acceptance, check acceptance, real-time payments…) • We announced Issuing for agents: easily create cards for agents. But that’s really just a subset of a subset. (See stripe.com/roadmap for more.) The Stripe team is cooking! And if you’re interested in building the economic infrastructure for this new world, we’re hiring.

Israeli settlers, alongside Israeli forces, uprooted more than 400 olive trees since this morning in the village of Turmus Ayya in the West Bank. The uprooting is still ongoing as of 4 a.m. local time in Palestine.

Introducing Claude Managed Agents: everything you need to build and deploy agents at scale. It pairs an agent harness tuned for performance with production infrastructure, so you can go from prototype to launch in days. Now in public beta on the Claude Platform.

‘A prolific and restless soul’: Limerick poet and writer Gabriel Rosenstock passes away aged 76 limerickleader.ie/news/death…

As of the last two weeks, 90% of pull requests at Intercom are authored by Claude Code. If this is interesting, next month I'm giving a couple of talks at AI Engineer Europe in London, and the DX Summit on this topic.

I quit using email about 18 months ago. Everyone thought it was crazy. Feels like everyone is now starting to realize that the future of email is simply an assistant managing everything. Messages me for input, signatures, and guidance. I never open Gmail. It looks like this:

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack