2025 wrapped
Notes from “self-review” submitted for calendar year 2025:
“Short version”: Pasted inline. “Long version”: Embedded pdf below.
Wins from 2025…
- Scaling EP – from a handful of folks at the start of the year to a credible and liked team by end of 2025, with decent relationships in Stripe and real ships under our belt.
- Helping land Stripe’s agentic commerce messaging (in person, and via scaled written guides for AEs).
- Representing Stripe IRL (with politicians, founders, and users).
- Hiring across Stripe, activating the talent we hire, retaining our best people, and “connecting people and ideas”.
Below: a list of main projects, loosely clustered by EP-related (focus: urgency), partnership-related (focus: collaboration) and other (focus: users and talent).
Or, see public list on go/moriarty-2025: a prettier list, with screenshots and more hyperlinks.
Move with urgency and focus
- I had an important role in the conception, kickoff of user-shareable-metrics with Grant, coordination with @eddie and @john, and last-minute debugging of previews and infra issues prior to launch.
- I helped shape the stripe-marketing-solutions project (before handover to Ezra).
- I took a product leadership role with paywall, which spun out of a fast micropayments exploration.
- I stewarded Log-in-with-Link efforts. At the start of 2026, many thought we should just delete the 2025 experiment code; I helped keep it alive, offering to do KTLO and improvements, and ultimately it has grown into a very important pillar for Link to own and grow (thanks to suhas, johnchapin, mattmueller and others).
- I built go/ttp-app
- Lightly: enthusiastic bug-basher and voice of the user for stripe-yoy and some product input for signals-api.
- I helped new hires get activated (even in week 1).
- [Craft and beauty] Bug-bash and help anyone on EP who wants help raising the bar.
Collaborate egolessly
- Agentic Commerce deserves a special mention because I devoted a fair chunk of my year to this topic. Before Sessions, I shared notes on open protocols; around sessions, I sprinted with @parinaz to gather user feedback on the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Throughout the year, GTM pulled me into user conversations, which were at times informative for their sake, and at times rich brainstorms that affected how we thought about our roadmap. For example, I led some important discussions with Feedonomics and NVIDIA that have influenced how we think about our product catalog strategy and a usage-based billing distribution strategy. Surrounded by competent engineers on EP, I spent less time writing code for the agentic work and a bit more time on relationship management, like with our partners in Coinbase, L402 founder, and many other founders.
- Within EP: I’m a happy co-writer on shared docs; I helped Joe, Miles, Grant develop the team’s written documents: innovation models, go/ep/operating-model, check-in doc with wg, go links, “EP project fit check”, “about us” information, etc. I try to stay aware of what everyone’s working on, offering 1:1s / office hours when folks appreciate guidance, and bug-bash everything.
- EP & partner teams collab: One of the advantages of having multi-year relationships across the organization is I’ve been helpful in helping articulate what experimental projects should do, particularly when there may be many related projects in flight across the org. For example, I worked with @eddie and @halvarsson to scope out what “Sign in with Stripe” might look like (I wrote go/siws), took these learnings to my warm relationship with @rami and was able to do a graceful hand off as they (Ecosystem) spun up their “Projects” effort. Similarly, the goal of my Tap to Pay app (go/ttp-app), which was a solo sprint, was not to make any other team look bad for not having shipped this already, but rather to supplement my warm relationship with the Terminal and Mobile teams to simply illustrate the art of the possible with a working demo. Claude and I quickly built an app that proves Apple entitlements and product support are more doable than others previously thought; this has dramatically brought forward 2026 plans for such a dedicated app.
- Internal communications: Since many in Stripe see me as a “cultural carrier”, internal comms often lean on me for tastemaking and messaging. I was also on the interview panel for a new hire.
- External communications: It’s not unusual for folks to ask the opinion of many around Stripe for topics such as the annual letter, talking points for important Patrick/John meetings (Jamie Dimon), etc. I helped with a few delicate topics this year, such as our proactive guide for taking advantage of Apple’s in-app payment changes, and our Link reactive comms when users weren’t happy with our subscription management announcement.
- Corporate Strategy: I transitioned off CorpStrat at the end of Q1 (see midyear notes from @mziegler). I’m most enthusiastic about continuing activities that bring benefit to experimental projects. For example, a lively discussion with John at the last Corporate Strategy onsite preceded Grant and I being prepared to jump into tackle the User Sharable Metrics project.
- CorpDev: I worked with almost everyone on CorpDev across different companies in 2025. Most lead to no investment, but I still consider positive impact if I can increase their confidence that they’re making the right decision.
- Policy: I helped strategize around topics such as JPM’s fees, GENIUS Act, and workarounds to paying yield on stablecoins. I spoke at a roundtable with ten members of the European Parliament, and joined a “Women in Leadership” event with SF Mayor Daniel Lurie, and joined @amyr in a four-person meeting with Congresswoman Amy Klobuchar (who may run for president)
- GTM: In 2025, I joined meetings where our most important (potential) users did not want a salesperson to pitch them on what Stripe had on the truck, but rather a strategic thought partner in creative consulting capacity (“what if?” type mode), to help them think through their business and the opportunities. In many other cases, there was no immediate benefit for the experimental projects team, and I’m grateful for Joe putting “good for Stripe” ahead of “moving EP’s SOKRs” in allowing me to attend. EBCs included Home Depot, Zoom, Apple, Thinkific, CrowdStrike, EventsAir, NVIDIA, Zoom, Axel Springer, and many others. I received gushing thanks from the users (“Users first”) and from the AEs. In 2025, I brought a few new users into discussions with Stripe, including spawn.co and Getty (intro to @conorm).
- Scaling Mark: As I’ve been increasingly asked to speak for Stripe, I have tried to scale this. I’ve written notes for LT at Davos. I worked with our EBC team to refine our best reusable talking points to be used across EBCs. My goal is to continue to be helpful in terms of tastemaking Stripe’s messaging, but not be required in the room in order to do so. I wrote the primary (“talk track”) guide for AEs to speak about agentic commerce at Sessions (esands: “high leverage!”).
Users first
- Meeting users and being a spokesperson for Stripe: 2025 saw me invited as a speaker to several events. I was a judge or presenter at several hackathons, a speaker at several meetups, Tour NYC, and a speaker many days where folks visited Stripe (founders, students, CXOs, etc). Sometimes two-way conversations benefit EP; other times this is a favor to Stripe at large. I have accumulated a unique blend of context across Stripe and am trusted to speak, off-script, to increasing larger audiences in higher stakes rooms (e.g., visiting MEPs, or to 50 CXOs in the Atrium).
Obsess over talent
- Speaker series: To curate a sense that Stripe is a little like an elite university, both Patrick and I have a speaker series where we invite inspirational, intellectual guests. My talks are nearly all recorded, visible on go/sbevents and cross-posted to strategy-bites. (“Stay curious!”)
- “Site team”: Happy, connected employees are more effective employees. I periodically question the relative ROI of my time on different activities, but based on how expensive it is to hire quality people and how important it is that we activate the talent we already have, I for now remain proud of the efforts I have done here, including Stripesgiving and Convergence.
- Besides retention, I take hiring seriously. I hired for four teams in 2025, namely Corporate Strategy (for @mziegler), Experimental Projects (for @joejoejoe), Global Partnerships (for @ehw/@parinaz), and Internal Communications (for @sophieodonoghue). (I’ve also proactively referred a few candidates into Stripe, not just taking interviews as they appear in my calendar.)
- Onboarding has proved to be particularly high ROI use of time, given that it takes approximately no prep and gives me root access to brainwash new hires into believing that they must move fast, act on their creative impulses, share ideas, join show-and-tell, and prepare to work in “the world’s fastest company”. It’s all well and good hiring smart people, but we must ACTIVATE the talent we hire. I typically give a 1-hour session to each start class, and join some lunch(es)/dinner(s)/happy-hour during their first week. I enjoy helping individuals feel “spun-up” quickly, both for EP folks (with quick wins in week 1, like fireside or demos) and non-EP folks. Selfishly, it’s an early opportunity to humanize, publicize and advocate for the Experimental Projects team.
Create with craft and beauty
- Other mini-quests: I’ve also checked my notes for a sampling of some of the smaller side quests, favors, quick wins. Some of the quick wins that come to mind include dashboard feedback with @yien, bug-bashing Stripe Assistant, seeing my Stripe Balance 2024 product suggestions land in the dashboard in 2025 (leading to millions of dollars of extra interest income), and various Link-related projects from consumer signals, to micropayments, to Link Assistant.
- Additional details and screenshots are included in the longer write-up of my year: go/moriarty-2025.