May 3, 2026. Every Sunday, I make sense of what happened in tech for the people running real businesses through the biggest platform shift in a generation.
A thing I keep coming back to.
The technology we are talking about is already ahead of where most businesses are at adopting it. The capabilities ship faster than the human institutions ship the changes to use them. That gap is uncomfortable. It is also where every opportunity lives.
The internet was here for fifteen years before most operators stopped treating it as a side channel. The companies that did the work to understand it during the gap built the next twenty years. AI is in the same position right now, except the gap is smaller and closing faster.
If this is your first time reading Week in Tech, here is the elevator pitch. I am Adem. I have been in the rug business for twenty two years and I run a multichannel home furnishings company called Well Woven. I am not pitching anything to you. I am not raising a fund. I am not selling a course. I am an operator who reads everything, builds with these tools every day inside a real business, and writes this every Sunday for the people doing the same.
I missed last Sunday. I was at High Point Market and the issue went out on Wednesday. This past Thursday I finished the rebuild of our storefront on a headless stack (running our front end separately from the platform that handles catalog and checkout, instead of using the platform’s built in theme), a project that has been the backdrop to most of these issues. The day after I shipped, the CEO of Stripe walked on stage at Moscone West and announced the exact framework I had spent six weekends building toward. That is the sound of a thesis getting confirmed in real time.
So this issue is going to spend most of its space on what Stripe did at Sessions 2026, because I think it is the most important commerce announcement of the year and I think most people are reading it wrong. The number that is getting all the press is 288 product launches. That is the wrong thing to focus on. The thing to focus on is the framework John Collison and Emily Sands laid out in their keynote, which they titled “Indexing the Economy.” That framework is the most useful piece of strategic thinking I have read this year.
I will also pull in a few things from Sequoia’s AI Ascent talks that hit YouTube this week, because Demis Hassabis, Greg Brockman, and Andrej Karpathy each said something operators should hear. And I will round out the rest of the week with Apple’s record quarter and the new CEO succession that comes with it.
The theme is this. The economy is starting to index itself. The pieces of commerce that used to live inside platforms are getting unbundled into protocols. Whoever owns the protocols owns the next decade. And the gap between what is now possible and what most operators are doing is the widest it has ever been. That is good news.
Let me walk you through it.
The macro picture before the framework
Before the five big ideas, John and Emily set the stage with five things that are commonly believed and probably wrong.
SaaS is still growing despite the AI panic sell off. Stripe’s own SaaS payment volumes are higher today than they were before the market shed roughly a trillion dollars of cap from software companies in late 2025. The narrative that AI is killing software is not showing up in the actual transaction data.
Profitability is back in fashion. The most profitable companies are getting the outsized valuations. The opposite of the dot com era. Markets are not rewarding growth at any cost. They are rewarding companies that can ship a product, charge for it, and run a business.
Tariff costs are still working their way through to consumers. Durable goods prices are bucking the usual deflation trend in 2025 and 2026. As somebody who imports for a living I do not need a chart to confirm that.
The K shaped economy (the theory that high earners are recovering while low earners are falling further behind) is overstated. Stripe’s data shows the spending gap between high and low income consumers is shrinking, not growing. That contradicts a lot of recent commentary and is worth holding onto.
AI job loss fears are premature. The hiring slowdown most people are blaming on AI looks more like the pandemic hiring hangover plus tight money. The wholesale displacement story is not yet showing up in the numbers.
One more number to anchor everything that comes next. Businesses on Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in 2025, equivalent to roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. At their current 34 percent growth rate they are on track to clear 2 percent this year. A private fifteen year old company is moving more money through its rails than most national economies generate. That is the company telling you how to read the next decade. Take it seriously.
Concept one. Structural explosion in business dynamism
The minimum viable size of a serious business is collapsing. Nearly five million US solopreneurs are now generating more than $100,000 in revenue. The 2026 Stripe Atlas cohort (Atlas is Stripe’s tool for incorporating a new company in minutes), the companies that incorporated this year, are tracking five times the revenue of last year’s cohort just months in. The top 100 AI startups on Stripe sell into 55 countries within their first year. New business formations are up 40 to 80 percent across advanced economies.
The new playbook for company building looks nothing like the old one. Launch globally day one. Keep headcount near zero. Automate aggressively. The infrastructure is finally there to do this without raising venture money.
Concept two. Commerce is becoming agentic, in five levels
Stripe laid out a five level framework for how AI is moving into commerce. Level one is the easy stuff. Software fills out forms for you. Meta’s in app checkout. Convenient, but the human is still the one shopping. Level two is AI shopping assistants that reason within constraints. ChatGPT shopping. Wayfair style search. The agent narrows down options, the human decides.
Levels three through five are where the real shift is. Agents that make and execute purchasing decisions autonomously. Software buying from software. They demoed it live. An agent got asked a research question, found a paid data source on Alpha Vantage, paid four cents in stablecoins (digital currencies pegged to the dollar) to access the data, generated the report, then turned around and listed the report for sale at its own price. One prompt, no human, four economic actions. The economy of one is a real architecture now, not a thought experiment.
The line from the keynote that you should write down is this. If your product or platform can possibly support machine to machine payments, build for it now. First mover advantage is real.
This is where it gets interesting for any operator with a complex product. When an agent starts shopping for a customer with a prompt like “I need an office chair, ergonomic, lumbar support, dark gray, under $400,” or “I need a dining rug for an open concept room, machine washable, neutral palette,” the moat is not ad spend. The moat is whether your product data is structured, whether your catalog is legible to machines, and whether your site can answer those constraints in real time.
Most catalogs today are still built for human eyes. Photo, headline, price, add to cart. That works for human shoppers. Agents are going to need attributes, ranges, constraints, and structured options. The boring data nobody filled in because nobody read it. The businesses that translate their catalog into machine readable specs in the next twelve to eighteen months will own the agent commerce shelf when it consolidates. The ones who wait will be invisible to the agents doing the buying.
Concept three. Coase theorem (why companies exist), applied to AI
This was the highbrow part of the keynote and it is the piece most worth holding onto.
Ronald Coase won a Nobel for the insight that firms exist because coordinating inside a company is cheaper than coordinating through markets. If you need a thing done and the transaction cost of finding someone, contracting with them, paying them, and trusting the result is high enough, you hire someone full time. If those transaction costs collapse, you stop hiring and start contracting through markets.
AI collapses those costs. Discovery, integration, contracting, and micropayments all get cheaper when agents can do them. So the equilibrium shifts. Fewer people per firm. More output per firm. More firms. More coordination through market mechanisms instead of through corporate hierarchies. The economy moves from big centrally planned organizations toward networks of lean, specialized operators trading with each other through software.
That last sentence describes what the next decade of business is going to look like. The fact that the CEO of Stripe is on stage articulating it as the central organizing thesis of his company means the rails are about to get built whether we are ready or not.
Concept four. When something gets cheap, its complements get more valuable
This is the contrarian piece of the framework and the most useful for any operator trying to figure out where to position.
Intelligence is getting cheaper. AI inference cost is falling roughly an order of magnitude a year. The natural question is what is the moat in a world where intelligence is free. The framework’s answer is that you stop looking for moats inside intelligence and you start looking for moats next to it. When something gets cheap, its complements get more valuable. Stripe pulled out five complements that are getting more valuable as AI gets cheap.
Energy infrastructure. Data center demand is on track to triple by 2028. Gas turbine makers are having their best decade ever. The bottleneck is no longer compute, it is power.
Proprietary data. Companies are shutting off free AI crawling. Reddit is now monetizing its data at roughly $35 million a quarter. Anyone who has a unique dataset is sitting on something that just got dramatically more valuable.
Network effects. Marketplace take rates are rising because AI is making the matching better. Platforms with two sided networks are stronger, not weaker, in the agentic era.
Real world operations moats. The John Deere example, and the one operators in any physical product business should chew on. John Deere has the AI to run autonomous farming equipment. The moat is not the AI. The moat is having tractors in 130 countries, decades of soil data, and physical service infrastructure. The AI commoditizes. The operations cannot.
The translation for any operator running a physical product business is direct. Anyone can spin up a Shopify store with AI generated photography and AI written descriptions tomorrow. Nobody is going to spin up the supplier relationships you have built over twenty years, the warehouse network you have invested in, the operational knowledge of running across multiple sales channels, or the trust your customers have built up with your brand. The AI is going to commoditize. The operations cannot.
Fraud and trust systems. Stripe Radar gets better because more data plus better models. Trust is going to be a meta layer that wraps everything in the agentic economy, and the companies that own it have a structural edge.
If I were going to give one piece of advice to a founder reading this, it would be this. Stop trying to compete on the intelligence layer. Compete on its complements. Energy. Proprietary data. Networks. Operations. Trust. Those are where the durable value is.
Concept five. Solow paradox (the lag between new tech and productivity gains). We are in the lag phase
The fifth concept is the one that is going to age best.
Edison lit up Manhattan in 1882. Productivity did not jump until the 1910s. Why. Because factories had to be redesigned from scratch. The first generation of electrified factories were just steam factories with electric motors bolted on. They got incremental gains. The second generation, which took thirty years to arrive, was redesigned around what electricity actually enabled. That is when productivity exploded.
Same pattern with computers. Robert Solow famously said in 1987 that you could see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics. The lag was real. The productivity boom did not arrive until the 1990s, after a generation of business processes had been re platformed.
We are in that lag right now with AI. The economic gauges look flat. Productivity numbers are not yet showing the change everyone keeps talking about. That is exactly what the lag phase looks like from inside it. It is not a sign that AI is overhyped. It is a sign that the re platforming has not finished happening yet.
Collison’s bet is that this lag will not take thirty years. I think he is right. The cost of re platforming is collapsing because the AI itself is doing most of the work. I rebuilt my company’s storefront on a headless stack in six weekends. That would have been an eighteen month project five years ago. Multiply that by every business that needs to re platform and you can see why the lag this time should be measured in years, not decades.
The thing I want you to take away is this. We are early, not late. Anyone who feels like they have already missed it is reading the chart wrong.
What Stripe shipped, and how to read it
Now back to the 288 launches. Five things matter, and the way to read them is not as features but as the rails for the framework above. Each maps to one of the five concepts.
The Agentic Commerce Suite expanded to Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. If you sell on Stripe, you can now upload your catalog and grant agent access from the dashboard, and your products become buyable inside Gemini, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta. Kate Spade, Best Buy, Coach, Quince, Fanatics, and JD Sports are already in. Wix, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce are coming. The point is no longer where you set up your store. The point is whether your catalog is legible to the agents that will increasingly do the buying.
Link agent wallets. Stripe’s consumer wallet has 250 million users, and starting this week those users can give their agents permission to pay on their behalf within rules. The friction between an AI deciding to do something and an AI actually being able to pay for it just collapsed.
Machine Payments Protocol. A new open protocol for agent to agent transactions. Software paying software, with a standard. The rails for the four cent stablecoin demo and for everything that follows in the agentic economy.
Headless implementations, explicit support. Buried in the announcements was a preview that US businesses can use Stripe Crypto Onramp to support headless implementations on web and mobile. They are also shipping Checkout Studio, which lets you build, analyze, and optimize checkout flows with native APIs. Stripe is making payments more programmable and less coupled to any particular front end.
Treasury, MCP, and stablecoins everywhere. Treasury now supports MCP (Model Context Protocol, Anthropic’s open standard for letting AI agents connect to external tools and data), which means you can build your own financial agents that talk to Stripe Treasury through the same protocol Anthropic shipped a year ago for everything else. Stablecoin payments now accepted in 32 additional markets. Stablecoin backed cards in 30 countries. Bridge’s Open Issuance lets you launch your own stablecoin. Stripe is making stablecoin rails as accessible as credit card rails.
The picture is coherent. Stripe is not just shipping payments features. They are building the actual infrastructure for the framework they laid out on stage.
Magento, Shopify, and what AI is doing to the storefront
I want to spend a minute on the headless story. Most operators are misreading it, and the clearest way to understand where this is going is through history.
Magento was the dominant e-commerce platform in the late 2000s. To run it you needed servers, you needed engineers, you needed to host and maintain your own infrastructure. It was powerful and it was a headache. Then Shopify came along and ate that market. Not by being more powerful. By being easier. Shopify said you do not need to run servers, you do not need to host anything, you do not need an engineering team. Pick a theme, plug in your products, sell. The trade was flexibility for simplicity, and the simplicity won. Hundreds of thousands of businesses got built on Shopify that would never have made it through a Magento install.
What is happening right now is that AI is doing to Shopify what Shopify did to Magento. You do not need to pick a theme. You do not need to build a theme. You do not need to wait for an app developer to ship the feature you wanted last quarter. You describe what you want and the model builds it. As models get more capable, the unit of work you have to buy from a platform keeps shrinking. Last year it was a theme. This year it is a feature. Next year it might be the front end itself.
Shopify is reading this clearly and is racing to absorb the agentic and AI features inside its own walls so the value stays on the platform. They will succeed at a lot of that. They are very good at what they do, and for most businesses staying on Shopify is going to remain the right call. But the ceiling on what you can build is now higher off the platform than on it, because the cost of going off has collapsed. You can take an open protocol, tell an AI what you want it to do, and have a working integration before the end of the day. That reduces the cognitive load on an operator trying to build a storefront in a way that did not exist twelve months ago.
The story right after this one is the part you should already be thinking about. The storefront is increasingly not where commerce happens at all. A growing share of buying is going to take place inside the agents people use every day. Inside ChatGPT. Inside Gemini and AI Mode. Inside Alexa, Siri, and whatever Apple ships next. Inside Meta’s apps. Your job as an operator is no longer just to make your own site good. It is to make your products findable and purchasable wherever the buyer happens to be. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite is the bet that they will be the rails for that. Whether they are right or not, the underlying point is correct. The storefront is unbundling from the platform, and the buying interface is unbundling from the storefront.
If you are running on Shopify or BigCommerce or any of the other platforms today, my honest read is that the platform is going to keep being a real option for a long time. It will get better. But the gap between what is possible if you go headless and what is possible if you stay on a platform is widening, and the things that were hard about going headless six months ago are getting solved one by one. The platforms used to be the product. They are starting to look like the scaffolding. And scaffolding gets cheaper.
Apple, a new CEO, and the capex picture
Apple delivered $111.2 billion in Q2 revenue this week, $57 billion of it from iPhone, and announced a $100 billion buyback. That is the third consecutive record quarter. The bigger news inside the company is that Tim Cook is stepping aside on September 1. John Ternus, the head of hardware engineering, takes over as CEO. Cook becomes executive chairman.
Ternus made his debut on the analyst call this week. He emphasized continuity. Deep thoughtfulness, deliberateness, and discipline. The market liked it. He also confirmed that AI is at the top of his priority list, which it has to be, because Apple is conspicuously behind on consumer AI and has been forced to partner with Google for Gemini integration in iOS.
What is interesting for an operator is what Ternus does on capex (capital expenditure, the money companies spend on long term physical assets like data centers, chips, and buildings). The rest of big tech is going all in. Hyperscaler (the giant cloud and AI infrastructure companies, primarily Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta) capex this year is on track to hit $725 billion combined, up 77 percent from last year. Amazon’s number alone is $200 billion in 2026. Their trailing twelve month free cash flow dropped 95 percent because capex consumed roughly 99 percent of their operating cash flow. Microsoft, Google, and Meta are spending at similar intensity. Apple has been the conservative one, returning cash to shareholders through buybacks rather than building data centers. Whether Ternus changes that posture is the question that will define the first chapter of his tenure.
This is concept four playing out at the largest scale. The complements to cheap intelligence, the data centers and chips and power that run it, are getting expensive even as the intelligence itself gets cheap. The smart money is moving toward the complements. SoftBank is reportedly spinning out a new AI and robotics company called Roze targeting a $100 billion valuation, focused on the physical buildout of AI infrastructure. That is not a coincidence either.
Quick hits from the dev tools side
A few things shipped this week that operators should know about even if they are not coding.
Cursor opened a TypeScript SDK with sandboxed cloud VMs and subagent support. You can now embed Cursor’s agent runtime into your own apps and have agents spin up isolated environments to do work. For anyone running an internal agent system this is a meaningful upgrade.
Warp open sourced its agentic IDE. Warp is the terminal that has been quietly turning into an agentic dev environment. Open sourcing it puts pressure on every closed source incumbent.
Sentry launched the Seer Agent, which lets you debug in plain English. Anyone who has spent a Sunday afternoon trying to figure out why a deploy is failing should have this on their radar.
OpenAI published a coding agent orchestration spec called Symphony. The protocol war for how agents coordinate is heating up. MCP, A2A, AAIF, ACP, UCP, MPP, and now Symphony. Most will not survive. The ones that do will define how the next decade of software gets built.
Anthropic opened Claude Security public beta on Opus 4.7, aimed at security teams. If you are running anything internet exposed, this is worth a look.
What Sequoia AI Ascent dropped this week
Sequoia held its annual AI Ascent in late April and the talks all hit YouTube this week. Three things from it that operators should hear.
Demis Hassabis said we are three quarters of the way to AGI (artificial general intelligence, AI that can match or exceed human capability across most cognitive tasks). He runs Google DeepMind. He has a Nobel for AlphaFold. When he says it the way he says it, the right reaction is to take it seriously. Three quarters of the way. He thinks the last quarter is the hardest. He also thinks it is closer than most people are pricing in. Whatever your timeline assumption is, shorten it.
Greg Brockman said human attention is the new bottleneck. OpenAI’s president, sitting next to Sequoia’s Alfred Lin. The argument is that the constraint on what AI can do for you used to be the model. It is now you. The model can do far more than you can direct it to do, supervise, and integrate into your workflow. The asymmetry is widening every quarter. The takeaway for anyone running a business is that the limiter is no longer the technology. It is operator capacity to wield it.
Andrej Karpathy gave the line of the week. Vibe coding raised the floor. Agentic engineering raises the ceiling. Translate that out of dev language. A year ago AI made it dramatically easier for non technical people to build software at all. This year AI is making it dramatically easier for technical people to build things that were not previously possible. Both shifts matter. The one that matters more if you are an operator is the first. You no longer need to wait for an engineering hire to ship internal tools.
The Sequoia thesis tying it all together is “this is AGI.” Long horizon agents are now functionally a form of general intelligence, and 2026 is the year that becomes obvious. Whether you accept that exact framing or not, the message converges with the Stripe framing above. The infrastructure shipped. The agents are real. The lag is closing. The opportunity is now.
What to do with all of this
Five concepts in one sentence each.
Business dynamism is exploding because the cost to start has collapsed. Commerce is going agentic in five levels and your catalog needs to be legible to machines. Coase is being rewritten so the economy is moving from hierarchies to networks. Intelligence is getting cheap so its complements get more valuable. We are in the Solow lag phase, which means we are early, not late.
Here is what I would actually do this week.
If you run a business, audit your catalog. Sit with three of your products and ask whether an AI agent could actually shop them. Could it answer a constrained query? Could it match your product to a complex use case? Could it complete a purchase without a human handoff? Most catalogs today fail this test. The ones that pass in the next twelve to eighteen months will own the agent commerce shelf when it consolidates.
Then audit how you think about technology more broadly. Not just the catalog. The whole operation. What pieces could an agent do today? What pieces could it not? Where is your real moat? The part AI commoditizes, versus the part it cannot. Be honest. The honest answer is the strategy.
If you work at a big company and you are watching this nervously because you are not sure what AI means for your job, I want to address you directly. The way to handle this is not to ignore it and hope it passes. It is also not to panic. It is to do what every operator who survived the rise of the internet had to do in the late 1990s. Get familiar. Use the tools yourself. Build something small and useless on a weekend. Understand what these systems can and cannot do, not from a content creator on YouTube but from your own hands. The capabilities are already here. The gap is between the capability and most people’s ability to use it. That gap is the opportunity. It is not an advantage someone else has over you. It is open to you, this Sunday afternoon, for free, if you choose.
If you have always wanted to start something, this is the moment. The Stripe Atlas data is not a curiosity. It is a leading indicator. Five times the revenue from this year’s incorporated cohort. New business formations up 40 to 80 percent. The minimum viable size of a serious business is collapsing in real time. Whether you sell to retailers, sell to consumers, sell wholesale, or have not picked yet, the rails are getting laid for you to start without venture money and without a team. The agents are going to do the work for you. They are on your side, not against you.
The optimism is not naive. It is correct. Every previous platform shift expanded the surface area for new businesses, new careers, and new wealth, and shrank the rents charged by incumbents. This one is going to do the same thing, just faster. Lean into that.
Build something this week. Even if it is small. Especially if it is small.
— Adem
Sources and what I read this week
- Stripe Sessions 2026 keynote, “Indexing the Economy” by John Collison and Emily Sands (YouTube)
- Stripe — Everything we announced at Sessions 2026
- Stripe Newsroom — 288 launches at Sessions 2026
- Stripe — 2025 Annual Letter and Tender Offer Update
- Stripe — Introducing the Agentic Commerce Suite
- Sequoia AI Ascent 2026 — playlist of all talks (YouTube)
- Demis Hassabis — Three Quarters of the Way to AGI (YouTube)
- Greg Brockman — Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck (YouTube)
- Apple Newsroom — Tim Cook to become Executive Chairman, John Ternus to become Apple CEO
- CNBC — Amazon Q1 2026 earnings, $200B capex commitment
- Tom Tunguz — The $112 Billion Quarter: Hyperscalers Bet the Farm on AI
Adem Ogunc is the founder and CEO of Well Woven Inc., a multichannel home furnishings company headquartered in Easton, PA, and the founder of FurniPulse, a B2B intelligence platform for the home furnishings industry. He writes Week in Tech every Sunday at ademogunc.com from the perspective of an operator shipping with these tools inside a real business.
Hey, I’ve Been Thinking… 
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